Mays' Missive: Broken nose and parents visiting

This is going to be a short one not because there's not much to tell, but because time is at a premium lately! My parents arrived a little more than a week ago and things promptly got crazy (to put it mildly). On Monday night Andrei was playing volleyball with the community group and one of the girls on his team went for the ball at the same time Andrei did. Her elbow? (or something) connected with his nose and this is the result:

I promptly sent this picture to my brother and sister-in-law (it's handy to have doctors in the family) to see if it needed treatment now or if it could wait until we returned home in a couple of weeks. They were rather adamant that it be handled NOW! He'll get it put back in place this coming Wednesday. This was taken the day after the break. It is actually getting some pretty color now!

So far, much of my parent's visit has consisted of driving to doctor appointments in Wasilla. I think we've now made 3 visits to doctors in just over one week. We did squeeze in a trip to the Iditarod headquarters today. That was more store than museum, but it was still interesting. We also got to spend a day with my cousin in Palmer seeing his farm. That was fun! He's always got interesting experiments going on! We got to see some Bald Eagles at the farm and some of the penned moose and caribou. We've also seen sheep (or maybe goats) on the hills between here and the school almost every time we've gone to the school for one thing or the other. They'd been here a week before they saw their first wild moose on the church driveway! My mom was thrilled! Us, not so much. We see them so often it has become old hat, but I do remember that same feeling - wanting to see a real, live moose.

Oh, one side note on moose. Remember that lovely little moose we put in the freezer? Well, I can't eat it. I'd eaten it a couple of times and it just didn't agree with me. Then we had it at Nate and Maggie's house and I mentioned having some bad experiences with it. Katie asked me if I was allergic to aspirin. I am, but I couldn't see how that had anything to do with moose. Katie explained that moose eat a lot of willow in the winter and get a lot of salicylates built up in their systems. Who would have thunk it! Much as I love the taste of that delicious young moose, I don't much care for the suffering it produces in my gut over the next 24 hours!

Back to the parents. We did get to go out for a tour of the Matanuska glacier! We had a beautiful day to do it and Matt Sherrer from camp was an awesome guide! He's so funny and so knowledgeable about the glacier that it made it quite a trip! The glacier was BEAUTIFUL! I've been waiting for the right time to make a trip out there and this was perfect! Hope you enjoy the pictures! This is the color of the ice through the rocks it has carved out of the hills: