Dyan as made it over Eagle with the aurora to light her way, as it has been active the last few days. Matt is waiting out the mandatory 8-hour stop at Chena Hot Springs.

Everyone else has found Fairbanks and can get a shower, hot food, clean clothes, and sleep without wood smoke.

Update at 5:30pm CST: Matt is just under 25 miles to the finish, while Dyan is crawling up Rosebud. There is daylight to make the ascent, so she should be fine, although there is deep snow, and most people end up having to lead their team over.

Matt Failor has been wearing glasses since Dawson. In Dawson he put his contact lenses in a glass of water on the bedside stand, and … yep, he got thirsty during the night, so he had to wear his glasses.

BTW, glasses are a real pain in cold weather. When it gets really cold the lenses can crack because of the contraction differential between the lens and the frame. They also cause problems when you put on the ruffed hood as your breath will condense on them until they warm up.

The Standings at 9:30PM CST (6:30PM AKST):

At Fairbanks/Finish
1 Allen Moore (11)
2 Hugh Neff (4)
3 Brent Sass (18)
4 Jake Berkowitz (20)
5 Scott Smith (23)^R
6 Markus Ingebretsen (2)^R
7 Normand Casavant (7)
8 Abbie West (17)
9 Dan Kaduce (15)
10 Susan Rogan (10)^R
11 Ed Hopkins (25)
12 David Dalton (21)
13 Crispin Studer (26)
14 Denis Tremblay (13)^R
15 Cody Strathe (5)^R
16 Darrin Lee (24)^R
17 Brian Wilmshurst (1)
18 Rob Cooke (3)^R
19 Matthew Failor (14)^R
At Chena Hot Springs/Two Rivers
20 Dyan Bergen (19)^RΦ

These are the official standings. That means they are official, not that they are correct. Things jump around a lot as people decide to update the standings. This problem is especially bad in the back of the pack, as no one bothers to update those standings when the lead is changing.

The Mushers in bold are former winners of the Yukon Quest, the numbers in parentheses are their Bib numbers, and the small “R” indicates a rookie.

Note: This post will be updated during the day, and the map changed on all posts to reflect the current situation.

All posts on the Yukon Quest can be seen by selecting “Yukon Quest” from the Category box on the right sidebar.

Why are you being hustled by street vendors to buy sad and drooping former roses, vegetative matter that missed the cut for bouquets, or were too late to the hospital? [Note: Never buy flowers from roadside vendors near cemeteries.]

Blame Esther A. Howland (1828 – 1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her guilt is writ large by the Greeting Card Association’s Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary. She imported the concept to the US from Britain to bolster her father’s stationery store in 1847.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the stationers had infiltrated school boards and imposed the now mandatory exchange in the classroom to push the low end product of Asian children and prisoners. [Another reason to reduce class sizes.]

Seeing the success of the card merchants, the confectioners jumped on board to fill the lull between Christmas and Easter with the benefit that the bulk of purchases would be made by desperate men with less sense of taste than a golden retriever. If the box was red, heart-shaped, and said chocolate, a man would buy it. [Keeping in mind that spelling is not ‘a guy thing’.]

There were at least three Saint Valentines and all were martyrs, as they should have been for the trouble they’ve caused. None are the reason for the “holiday”, only the excuse. They lived at a time when life and men were short and brutal, so the romantic aura of the holiday is pure piffle. At least one was reportedly part of a draft dodging scheme during the Roman Empire, marrying people so that men with “other priorities” could avoid being deployed to foreign wars, bachelors being preferred for catapult fodder.

It is to be hoped that the individual who first wrote: “Roses are red, violets are blue” was eaten by rabid wolverines, or had hemorrhoids. [Violets aren’t blue, they are violet. Get a clue…]