My powers of observation are weakening, it took me until reading
Ish's post to notice the Petro Sign in its digital glory. I didn't have any particular reaction to that one way or another at the time, but after a few drives through, I'm realizing it doesn't look like Kodiak on that block anymore.
It is as if someone grabbed a section of Anchorage and dropped it off at the end of Mill Bay.
(An aside, while rescuing a lost cruise ship passenger they asked "why the heck do you have an upper and lower Mill Bay?" Someone once told me the roads were all moved after the tsunami, but I'm guessing that road and where it meets both Rezanof and Mill Bay have been there forever, named for their ultimate destination: one block from Mill Bay. Other than that all I could do was shrug.) Anyway, with signage and pretty buildings and landscaping and franchises, by bringing someone back from the past and just standing there, I doubt they'd be able to guess where they were. Well, as long as your back was to Fir Terrace—that still looks roughly the same. All we need is a digital billboard right there on the corner where all the sandwich boards are for, we'll have Times Square K-town style.
The thought both makes me lament the passage of time, and the banes of technology. How interesting that conversation would be with the aformentioned time traveler though. After we reminisced that that area was all trees and swampland not too long ago, he'd ask me how my day was. I'd have to say "Hold on, I have to go AFK". He'd ask, "Is that a one or a two?". Then I'd go on to tell him I've been getting flamed with spam all day, and got hit with a Trojan. He'd ask, "Is that from Monty Python?". Then I'd rattle off a bunch of jargonic acronyms that the teens use for texting. "Texting? is that like putting your finger in the typewriter?".
Sweet progress.
Click to enlarge the graph and you can see the high and low temperature and the amount of precipitation from 1980-2008. There does seem to be a slight pattern to it lately, every third year since 97 has been warm with no rain, and since the hottest crab Crab Fest since 1980 was in 2006 add three more years, statistically we're due for some sun at least. The precipitation and temps are averaged the span of the festival, so it doesn't account for rainy parade day and then the rest of it sunny. Interesting to see it was mild and slightly rainy through most of the 80s, and hit some sweet spikes in '93, '97, the year 2000 and '02.
