More about my house

I mentioned that walking to and from the house to the car was a long trek yesterday, or did I, I can't really remember.....oh well. Anyway it is a long walk and I will show you although for some reason I don't have a picture of all the stairs from the house to the trail.

Here is a picture of the trail starting from the top of the stairs though..

About halfway down that picture this is what we start to see.....the top of the garage.

At the top of the hill you see in the picture above this is what you see...then we walk around the garage and there is our cars and obviously in reverse to get back to the house. Its probably pretty close to a 1/4 mile walk to the car so you really don't want to forget something when your leaving the house, especially if your in a hurry!

The path is lit at night.....if we remember to turn the lights on so we aren't walking all this way in in the dark. Which is good because one of my well known secrets is that I'm afraid of the dark and walking with the kids and being scared doesn't help their morale much either! Oh and yes Pamela comented about the bear or bare issue from my comment about Kelly mooning the tourists and yes there are bears in the woods but they don't really come around as long as you keep food items where they can't smell them and think they can get an easy meal! We have all kinds of wildlife around and this area actually has a lot of black bears but right now a lot of them are gathered around the fish hatcheries and rivers to catch the salmon since it is really plentyful right now with all the salmon spawning. We have seen a few bears a little farther out but none and no signs of any near our house so we are okay and they really don't like people much anyway.... they haven't had a bear attack here in forever pretty much people for the most part know how to keep them away from their houses. My cats aren't very happy though right now because they used to be outside cats but I really dont want to feed them to the eagles so they are inside now. Although if Milo doesn't stop with the load meowing at night I might just take the chance to shut him up! Hopefully he can hide from them well.

Okay enough about that and more about the house. For anyone who doesn't know much about Southeast Alaska our area at least is part of the Tongass National Forest which is a temperate rain forest which basically means its it cool in the summer and always rains. It doesn't get as cold though as other parts of Alaska and there is not supposed to be as much snow in the winter. Of course the 12.5 feet of rain a year average is quite a lot. Many parts of western Oregon are considered temperate rainforests also although they are not on the scale of the Tongass. Anyway my point was to mention the fact that here in Ketchikan it rains so much that if you live outside of town you are not on a city water supply, you have your own and it comes from your roof when it rains. In the picture below you can see the gutter part that leads from our roof to the container in the next picture

This is a very large tank that collects all of the water from the rain that falls on our house. It then runs through a pump and 2 filters to our faucets in the house to supply our water.

I was a little worried about the water at first tasting funny but actually its really good. I don't know if it is the running through the 2 filters but it tastes a lot fresher then anything I drank in Portland and I couldn't taste any chemicals like the chlorine you can taste in our old city water. It's also very clear.

Also the air here is just so much fresher. I could tell when we got here and when Kelly flew into Portland he could see the the smog in the city as well. There really is none of that here, just fresh air and the ocean. If any one remembers I am a big fan of the ocean so that is even better for me. I will even get over the frustrations of town for it. yeah town I've had a few frustrations with things people wise, nothing major but yes frustrations that I can only contribute to small town/Island life. It's all okay though I will take it for my view and the fresh air!