J. Jason Lazarus Blog

Just found out that this month’s new bill came out for electricity and I’m pretty happy with the results.  Given the grotesque amount of cold weather and peircing wind we’ve at in the Golden Heart of Alaska lately, it’s surprising that my bill is so low.  Of coarse, most of my heating is from oil but with my water heating (only partially) and my cars needing to be plugged in more lately, it’s not as good as a decrease as it could be.  That being said, it’s still worth noting that I’m a bit over half the national average - still - in the middle of winter.  Well, lets not hope that it’s still the middle of winter!  Either way, at less than 500kwh/month right now, I think we can easily say that during this summer I can best even my lowest reading from last summer.

As a side note, GVEA has lowered the fuel adjustment again due to lowering fuel costs - another four cents per kwh off - which manages to equate to an almost $20 cheaper bill this time around - w00t!

Speaking of power saving methods, Daylight’s Savings Time has me all kinds of screwed up.  We’re now up to 12 hours of usable sunlight in Fairbanks and with it being so early in the year, there’s no way that light should be lasting until 8pm already.  7pm is easily dealt with - not 8.  With the excessive snow on the ground (we’ve gotten over a foot in the last month) and the weather hovering between 5 above and -30, it’s damned depressing.

Spring, get here soon.  My sanity is slipping away.

We couldn’t let the day slip away without celebrating a bit - we totally intend to have the real party this weekend with friends and family but we couldn’t resist having Aidan practice faceplanting into cake before his debut on Saturday.  It took him a good 15 minutes to get past anything but the frosting - being the neat little eater he is, it took his mother smashing apart the cupcake to really get him to stuff his face!  Got some great shots of him with my new(ish) 5D full-frame Digital that I bought off of a co-worker last month and I’ve got to say the purchase has breathed new life into some of my old lenses.  Anyways - Aidan had a blast, Deanna’s parents were on-hand via iChat for the mini-celebration (my parents will be at the real one this weekend) and we all had a great time.  FYI - Cupcakes are the perfect size for this and truly do minimize what potential mess he can make!

I can’t believe how fast this year has gone - and yes, I do know exactly how cliche this all sounds - every parent does say that.  In some ways, it’s still a trip to think that I am, indeed, a parent and that I’ve got such a wonderful boy to prove that.  Right now Aidan’s slowly learning to walk - mastering about 7-9 steps at a time before he ends up on the ground.  Last night as we were practicing walking, he’d walk away from me, plop down after several steps and crawl back as fast as he could, turn around and let me grab him up for yet another run - this kid really does want to walk!  I think it helps that a slightly younger little girl that he’s in day care with has beat him to the punch with walking - he’s just got to catch up with her!  Additionally, yesterday he said his first half-word - or whatever you want to call that - “nana” rather than “banana” - while pointing at bananas.  He started clapping on his own last week and waved “bye” to his grandparents tonight.  For a while there, everything seemed to be progressing slow - after they crawl it’s a while till they walk/talk/interact but man - it’s been a whirlwind yet again in the past few days!

Of coarse, I managed to shoot over 50 pictures of his glorious cake mashing and have several to share with you on the gallery <link>.  Enjoy!

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During my failed attempt at getting some photography done this weekend, after running into “No Trespassing” signs everywhere we went, I gave up and went downtown and sought inspiration from the building I tend to send a lot of people to when they’re completely out of ideas. Everyone’s seen this eyesore (I say that endearingly) on Noble Street but a relative few have taken pictures of it - I think, in at least a small way, it’s worthwhile to capture its unique character - especially seeing how telling it is of Fairbanks in general. Enjoy - really, I got nothing else.