moose blog

Mileage: 10.2

total June Mileage: 92.3

Started my day early compared to the rest of this week. I was out of the house by 9:00am, shopping at Target with my little sister.

Steve and I went to Costco (my favorite store) Monday after he got off work. As he walked through the snack aisle, he grabbed everything that looked good to him and threw it in the cart. "I'm sick of fast food and spending money on buying lunch. I'm going to start packing my lunch." He said as he grabbed another box, this time a 24 pack of sour patch kids. "Okay..." I replied as I watched in a daze as he threw more stuff in the cart. After just ten minutes of shopping, there was already the sour patch kids, a box of Hershey's bars, fruit crisps, fruit leathers, and Ritz/cheese packs (all Costco size, of course).

We continued walking and I continued to monitor what he put in the cart: sliced turkey, yogurt, avocados, onions, cherry tomatoes, snap peas...he went to throw a huge pack of asparagus in the cart and I couldn't handle it anymore. "You cannot get the asparagus! You won't eat all of this fresh stuff before it goes bad and then the food and our money will be wasted." I reached out and stopped him from grabbing them. "But steamed asparagus are soo good!" He replied. "No." I was holding my ground. "Ok..." He replied with a huge grin on his face. Then he moved on the the bakery area. In went oatmeal raisin cookies and a pineapple upside down cake. As I saw him reach for the Sunny Delights, I had to step in again. "Those are all sugar! You cannot get those." He whined back, "But they have 100% vitamin C!" I just rolled my eyes and showed him the label. High Fructose Corn Syrup was the second ingredient. "See?" I said, eyebrows raised. He just made a face and went back to prowling. It was a harrying trip, as you can imagine.

So today at Target my task was to get him a "man-size" lunch box, some cold packs and sandwich size Tupperware. After that was accomplished, Beka dropped me back off at home and headed for work. I putted around the house for about an hour, ate lunch, then headed out on my MTB for some therapy. I found myself back at the Airport Dog park, and I was loving being there on my super-V rather than my roadie, as had been the case yesterday. I hadn't brought my camera, because I doubted I would see anything worth taking a picture of. I was wrong, of course. About 3/4 of the way down the trail, I saw a month-old calf in the middle of the trail. Since I couldn't see her mamma, I stopped and took my earphones out. I did not want to get near that calf without knowing where her extremely protective cow was.

(I did manage to snap a few pictures with my iphone. They are really bad and make it seem like the calf is a mile away when she was really like 20 ft away, max)
The calf meandered around eating, looking up at me every once in a while, but didn't really move out of the way. I'd been waiting for about 20 minutes and had walked all around trying out different vantage point to try and locate the cow. Finally I yelled, "Please move baby! I'm just trying to bike by, I'm not going to hurt you!!!!" Nothing. So I kept talking to her, begging her to move. I yelled "PLEASE MOVE!" one more time and I heard some movement in the brush near the calf. Suddenly there was a very large cow standing there next to her calf, and yet another calf followed behind her. She glanced at me, snorted and ran past into the meadow, her twins running behind as fast as they could on their gangly legs. I just stood there, eyebrows raised in surprise and watched them run out of sight. Man was I glad that I didn't try biking past! With all my moose encounters and pictures, you'd think that this was turning into a moose-sighting blog, but it's not, I promise. Although I do love getting pictures of them. And because of that I'm just going to bring my point and shoot everywhere from now on. You never know what you're going to see while biking around Anchorage and Alaska in general...