Time to Add FAQs to the Website

I feel the time has come to add FAQs—”Frequently Asked Questions”—to the Zeiger Family Homestead Website. We get a lot of questions from people on a variety of topics, which I try to answer here on the blog, but I’ve never taken the trouble to organize them in order to make it easier for a first time visitor to get up to speed on what we’re doing here, other than the “Homestead Primer” on the right hand side of the page.

I’ve got some ideas of what to add to it, but I’m asking for your help. In the “comments” section below, please post any questions you might have, or think would be helpful to have answered in a site FAQ. I’ll use them to help build a new page for the site.

To make it worth your while, I intend to randomly give away free copies of my short story collection, Shy Ghosts Dancing: Dark Tales from Southeast Alaska. I won’t say how many, as I want to make the odds of winning good, and proportional. In other words, if we get 10 responses, then participants should have a 1 in 10 chance of winning. If we get hundreds, then I’d like to choose randomly from sets of 20 or so, that sort of thing. Be sure to include a valid email address where the comments form asks for it (addresses won’t be posted on line) so that I can contact you for a mailing address if I draw your name.

 

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A Minke Whale Returns to Upper Lynn Canal

Yesterday morning, Aly commented that she saw a porpoise out in Lynn Canal. A while later I glanced up and saw the same thing, but recognized right away that something was different. An animal with a sickle shaped dorsal fin surfaced momentarily, but the exposed body was far too long for our little harbor porpoises. I grabbed a pair of binoculars and went out to investigate. I patiently waited, watching the patch of water where I’d last seen it. Eventually, the animal reappeared. There can be little doubt: it’s a minke whale.

Minkes are fairly rare around here, and very hard to see. They’re a small baleen whale, about the size of an adult killer whale. They don’t create much of a vapor plume when they blow, and they generally don’t arch their backs or show their tails when they dive. Continue reading →

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