J.D. Megchelsen tucks in his giant pumpkin between 8:30 and 9 most evenings.

Using a beige blanket, he covers the bulbous, pale mass to conserve warmth. The pumpkin — estimated to weigh more than 1,300 pounds — is pale; sickly almost. Lacking the vivid orange hue of its smaller Halloween peers, it hardly looks like a pumpkin at all.

But it’s not about growing the prettiest one or the biggest one, Megchelsen said. It’s about growing the heaviest pumpkin in the state — and maybe some day, the world.

The arm of a large crane being hauled by a tractor trailer snagged some overarching wires near the intersection of the Kenai Spur Highway and Redoubt Avenue Tuesday evening.

According to Kenai Police Department Sgt. Kelly George, the crane’s boom caught the line as the tractor trailer passed under it, exerting such force that the attached wooden power pole splintered at the point of connection.

As of Friday, Alaska State Troopers and the Kenai and Soldotna police departments will be participating in a nationwide, three-week-long "intensive crackdown" on impaired driving.

According to KPD Investigator Jay Sjogren, this means Kenai and Soldotna police will be out patrolling beyond their normal bounds, such as up toward Nikiski or closer to Sterling. This "multi-jurisdictional approach" includes more overtime for officers, and consequently more cop cars out on the roads.

Taz Tally made the switch from analog to digital photography at the very beginning, in 1984 with the advent of the first Apple Macintosh personal computer.

A clunky beige cube that sold for around $2,500 upon its release, the Mac had 128 kilobytes of RAM, a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, and a 9-inch black-and-white screen. Tally embraced and thrived in the medium of black-and-white photography — his influences include Ansel Adams and Edward Weston — and has since written dozens of books on creative digital photography.