When I opened my daily folder, a beautiful picture of an Aurora Over Alaska graced the front page of APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day).  Just another reason to love Alaska.

On my way back from the Homer airport this morning (five minute drive from my house) after dropping off a pair of packages at Fedex (yes – Fedex is here – at the airport – but you’ve got to drop off by 10:30 for next day delivery) I saw a sign that caught my eye.

Local.  Organic.  Wi-Fi.

The sign was outside the Sourdough Express Bakery, one of Homer’s local restaurant institutions (it’s been around since 1982 and is on the “must eat there once every summer” list.)

I’ve noticed Wi-Fi signs on most of the Homer restaurants, coffee shops, and stores this summer. Almost all of it is free. There’s even Wi-Fi available on the Homer Spit that’s free for an hour at a time.  After being gone for two years, Wi-Fi appears to be almost ubiquitous up here.

Not surprisingly, there is no AT&T 3G here.  We’ve got excellent AT&T Edge service and the AT&T phone service is spectacular (thanks to ACS) but no 3G.  So my iPhone is extremely slow up here, except on Wi-Fi.  Which I can get almost everywhere.

I’m kind of intrigued by the marketing around Wi-Fi.  I get local, especially in a place like Homer (hippy town, lots of local farms, almost all local fish, cost of transportation for stuff to here – the end of the road – is high).  I also get organic (as organic is the super trendy extra hippy movement of the day). However, Wi-Fi surprised me a little, but when I think about it, it makes perfect sense as this is a heavy tourist town in the summer.  ”Stop here, check your email on your laptop using free Wi-Fi, and eat some halibut while you are at it.”

When I’m in Homer, I pay a lot of attention to the local small town patterns that exist.  Most of the places outside Boulder that I spend time in are large cities (New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles) so I feel like I’ve got the big city rhythm in the US figured out.  But I definitely struggle to understand “the small town” as I’m hesitant to use Boulder as a reference point.  While Homer is also a pretty unique place, it’s probably a good proxy for tourist spots in the US that are under 10,000 permanent residents that is no where near a big city (the largest – Anchorage – is 222 miles away.)  If nothing else, the tempo of the place is radically different than the other places I spend time in during the year.

I expect I’ll have plenty of other missives from (and about) Homer this month.  If you want pictures, Amy’s got plenty of them building up over on her site Thoughts in Random Patterns.

If you follow me on twitter, you know I’ve been whining about the lack of sun in Homer this year.  We’ve been here for a week and didn’t really see the sun until today.  A few days ago I promised "the sun" (via twitter) that I’d blog about it and put up a picture if it ever decided to show up here.

We still have plenty of clouds obscuring the mountains across Kachemak Bay (which makes the sun reflect in strange and unusually ways), but when I returned home from my run Amy was jumping up and down shouting "the sun is out, the sun it out" confirming that it had finally made an appearance.

It wasn’t very cloudy last night when I took this picture at midnight, but the sun was hiding near the horizon.  Amy was asleep so she missed this.  Note all the lights on the Homer Spit and the snow on the mountains in the background.  Pretty. 

When people find out that I’ve spent a lot of time in Alaska, they often ask me what it’s like.  After struggling to describe it in a simple way that anyone in the lower 48 can relate to, I finally came up with something several weeks ago.

Alaska is an order of magnitude larger than Colorado and has an order of magnitude less people.  Plus it has an ocean.

As snowstorm #2 in Boulder the last week starts to diminish, I thought I’d offer up a picture of what it looks like in Homer, Alaska right now (at 10:30am Homer time.)

That dark stuff on the bottom 10% of the picture is land.  That lighter dark stuff at in the middle of the picture is the ocean.  The top half of the picture is probably dark, fog, and clouds.  That little dark stretch of land going to the left across the bottom of the picture is the Homer Spit.

Dark.

I went for a 5 mile run on the Boulder Creek Path this morning at 7:30am.  No one was out, the snow was coming down hard, and there was plenty of "cushion" (e.g. snow) on the ground.  It was stunning.  And light.

The snow is finally sticking in Homer – what a beautiful day.  I’m looking at my web cam in Homer, AK from Keystone, CO where it’s also been snowing.

Winter (and ski season) is here.

Having seen a few bears up front and personal (think “20 yards away”), I know how incredibly intense they are.  Chris Wand send me this link from a set of photos of Alaskan bears that one of his friends took recently.  My favorites are Chocolate Eating and Brothers with Fish.  As a special bonus for the nerds in the crowd, it shows off Google’s Picasaweb.

A Boulder reader forwarded me an interesting article in eWeek titled The Doctor on the Digital Tundra that talks about how the issue of net neutrality could impact rural Alaska, using a doctor who lives and works in Homer, Alaska as the launching off point for the story.

Amy grew up in Anchor Point, Alaska until she was 8 years old.  We still own the land and make an annual pilgrimage when we are out here.  Following is the view (of Mount Redoubt) from what used to be her living room window.

It’s 18 miles from our house in Homer.  I know because it’s my run on Friday.

I grew up with tornados (I lived in Dallas) so I never experienced many earthquakes.  My first one was in the middle of the night in Walnut Creek, CA while sleeping in a hotel in the late 1980’s (Ramada Renaissance, I think).  I’d taken a late night flight from Boston to California and was sound asleep in preparation for an early morning meeting at one of my California clients (Contra Costa Endocrine Associates.)  I woke up, noticed the ceiling moving in the opposite direction of the bed, then noticed it going the other way, then noticed it going the other way, and thought I was having a heart attack or an aneurysm.  About 15 seconds later it stopped and I laid in bed for a minute or so trying to figure out what was going.  “Earthquake?” popped into my head, I called down to the front desk, and got a busy signal.  Yup.  “Hmmm – what do I do?”  I didn’t know, so I went back to sleep.  The next morning I read in the paper that it was a 6–something and one person died when they got disoriented and jumped out a window.

Amy – on the other hand – grew up with earthquakes.  So – tonight as we were both reading as she was finishing her tea – in advance of a trip to Anchor Point – she looked up and said “Earthquake!”  It took me a few seconds to figure out what she meant.  We went downstairs to our computers, went to the Alaska Earth Information Center site, and didn’t see anything.  A few minutes later, an earthquake (3.97 – let’s call it a 4) was reported at 7:39 PM AKDT 52 miles from Homer.  It was short (only a second or two) – but it was definitely an earthquake.