layla | (no subject)

Temptation beckoned, and I answered -- we stopped by Sam's Club on the way home from work so that I could pick up a 500 Gb hard drive for external storage and backup. Those 500-meg iTunes files clutter up a hard drive dang fast! And it's nice to have somewhere off the main drive to make a copy of all of my art files without feeling like I have to burn a new DVD every time I change something on a Kismet page.

Two days into National Novel Writing Month, I have ... lesse *checks* ... 4681 words. Not too bad! But the month is young, very young.

In other news, a wolf pack killed and ate a dog in North Pole a couple of days ago. (For the non-Alaskans reading this, North Pole is kind of a suburb of Fairbanks, about 20 miles from where we live, on the far side of town.) Um ... eek? Orion keeps trying to convince me that I ought to be more concerned about wolves when I go out hiking with the dogs. My stock response is that wolves don't attack healthy human beings. Then, just to make a liar out of me, last year a wolf attacked and bit a hiker up on the Dalton Highway. Oh, and did I mention the pack of, literally, RABID wolves that killed some sled dogs elsewhere in Alaska this past week? Suddenly I'm not feeling all that safe.

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Is this the sort of situation in which Alaska-based murder mysteries imply that "everyone" in the wilderness carries a gun at all times?

And now you know WHY! *g*

Seriously - a pack of rabid wolves? Um. Gulp? (We don't have rabies in Sweden *crosses fingers*, even if we do have wolves... not where I live, obviously, but it happens that one of them takes it into their fuzzy heads to wander through the city!)

I would still think that wolves wouldn't choose to attack a whole little pack of healthy human + dogs, but... still. It doesn't sound very safe - for example, how far away does the dog have to be from its human to be seen as a walking meal? That's one of those things you just don't want to find out!

Do you own a gun? Or are there other wolf-repelling objects you could bring on your walks?

I used to be concerned that wolves would become extinct soon. Not anymore.

Man, I just have to worry about the deer on my morning walk (I guess it is rutting season, so mildly dangerous). But then there is an animal out in the center of the county that has been killing dogs and cats (Beast of Bolivia:http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20071031/NEWS/710310422/1004/news04).
Most likely a coyote, but it brings up the mythical Carolina Panther question (supposed native black panther that has not been seen in over 100 years).

Wouldn't the rabies ultimately do in the wolves though? At the very least I'd imagine they'd turn on each other...

So what measures do you have to protect yourself against this sort of thing?

Be safe up there... -_-;;

We do have guns, but carrying a gun with me just to go for a half-mile walk makes me feel like I'm turning into a stereotypical crazy woods person. *g*

I still really doubt if I would be attacked by wolves just out walking around. Going for long hikes after dark might not be the best idea, but I don't really do that anyway...

Not up here, anyway!

I love stories of weird and freaky beasts lurking in the edges of technological civilization. I know that usually, they're just stray dogs and such, but it still gives me that happy little, "here there be dragons" shiver -- the suggestion that maybe, even with so many things explained by science and technology, there might still be a few things out there we don't know about.

Still haven't been eaten by anything ...

We do have guns, but I hate to carry a gun just for a half-mile walk; it makes me feel like a gun-toting backwoods crazy person! I'm far enough down that road already!

I really like the Carolina Panther story. I work at a power plant and people are called in/leave at all hours. Being rural, they see a lot of wild life. Deer are common, Bobcats are rare but seen atleast once a year. A sys admin before me saw a black panther once. So I have hope for the animals living in the fringes. I fear for them now since we have a huge building boom due to swamps suddenly perking due to the drought. Lots of habitat is disappearing.