In the past when I thought about autumn, or fall, I’d think about how the leaves started to change bring about all the beautiful colors. The vivid reds, oranges, and golds.
Or how about the weather and temperature changes. In the lower 48, the temps have changed a whole lot yet, but they are starting to make their decent downward as we make our way towards winter. The mountain peaks, if you live by them, have started to show snow on the tops. It’s a beautiful site to behind. As we drive out of our subdivision here in Alaska, the mountains are simply breathtaking with the snow covering the tops.
I think one of the biggest things I begin to notice is the change in the amount of daylight. Here in Alaska, it becomes even more obvious.
When we arrived in Anchorage back on Memorial Day, May 27, there really wasn’t ever any darkness. You may not have seen the actual sun but the light that it gave off never went away in the middle of the night. At 2am there was still light out side, like a dusky you’d see right after the sun itself went down but it was still light outside. It took a little bit to get used to. Quite frankly, once we got moved into our new place, we’d easily lose track of time and not even realize it was two in the morning. All the kids around us were out at time that would normally be considered ridiculous at ten or eleven at night. With the sun literally still up at that time you don’t even realize that it’s that late.
So, now that we are officially at the beginning of fall, we have hit the mark where we were exactly at 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of nighttime. As each day continues to march it’s way toward the official start of winter, December 21 and also the longest night of the year, we will continue to lose more and more light to where we have more and more darkness. If having almost no darkness was hard to get used to I wonder how it will be with the almost total darkness.
For Keith, my husband, and I, we might not notice that much only because we are more homebodies than anything else. We really don’t go out that much. We like to be home and watch TV or be on our computers and things like that. I’ll have to update you all in a couple of months to let you know how it’s all going, but in the meantime, I hope everyone is enjoying the color changes of the leaves.
Photo credit: clarencetey from morguefile.com
I enjoyed your entry. 🙂 holley4734.wordpress.com
Thank you Holley.
Hi Kristena! Thanks for sharing, I will definitely have to check back to see how it’s going in Alaska! We had our first snow flurries of the year today here in Metro Detroit – I am so not ready for winter!
Hi Kathleen, great to meet you. 🙂 I hope you do stop back by. Alaska is a beautiful place to live. However, right now we are losing more and more daylight but when it’s summer almost have almost all daylight so you get both sides. It’s strange to get used to. As for flurries, we had a little bit a couple of weeks ago but they’ve all gone. I guess we are having an abnormally hi temperatures for this time of year. We’re in the low 40s for hi’s and about mid 30s for low’s. It will be an interesting winter I think for our first one here. My hubby is from the Chicago here and I lived there with him for about 13 years. We’ve been told that the winters here are as severe as in the Midwest. It’s a dry cold here I guess. I’ll have to report in to say how it’s going.