February 11, 2003

• First, a few responses to comments:  another_button asked if I will be there to photograph the Idiatrod start or restart.  The ceremonial start is in Anchorage, which is a CITY,
  bad enough all by itself, but also a hundred miles away and crowded on
  Iditarod day.  Not me!  All I know up to now about the
  restart location is that it will be north of the Alaska Range
  somewhere.  I’ll be watching on TV.

  Several of you were as puzzled or bemused as we were at the potatoes
  we found scattered at the waterhole.  I have no
  explanation–sorry.  In this neighborhood some things are hard to
  figure… go figure.

  I moved in here at the computer early this morning when Doug got up
  for something, and forced him to content himself with the PS2. 
  Greyfox was asleep, or he’d probably be pestering me to let him sit
  down here.  Until very recently, he didn’t like this machine
  much.  He blogged a bit, read a few sites, checked his email and
  sent a few fan letters to his favorite authors.  That didn’t take
  up much time and Doug and I were duly grateful.

  Now the old fart has discovered totse, the Temple of the Screaming
  Electron.  He posts on jillions of threads at a number of
  boards.  He has apparently found his own little niche in
  cyberspace.  Now I am the one who spends the least time on the
  computer here.  That sucks, but I need to sleep sometime.  I
  hope that Greyfox’s “temple” begins to pall soon and the old
  guy gets back to his crossword puzzles and trashy novels.

  This morning I got around to a few places on my SIR list, and spent
  some more time at the Iditarod website.  I had been hoping
  for some word on where the race will start.  What I found was the mushers’ biography page. 
  Wow… learn something new every day.  I learned that I know more
  of the mushers than I thought I did.  A number of the photos there
  are familiar faces, people I’ve seen at the lodge or at the spring,
  maybe knew their first names but didn’t realize they were mushers, or
  that they were going to be running the Iditarod this
  year.

  One of this year’s rookie mushers, Lance Barve, is a guy I got to
  know when his father, who did all the printing for my mailorder
  business before I lived on the power grid and could do my own printing,
  was out running the Iditarod.  That left Lance and his wife and
  his mom to run the print shop.  On one of those visits to their
  shop, Lance’s dad Lavon was missing.  He’d gone off the
  trail out there somewhere and everyone was gathered around the CB
  radio, hoping for news.  He was okay, but that delay ruined one of
  his best chances ever at a money finish.  Lance grew up on sleds,
  and has been in the Jr. Iditarod several times.  He’s a nice guy,
  too.

  I will not, however, be rooting for him, unless I just end up
  rooting for all of them.   I don’t know who’s my favorite
  this year.  I always like old Charlie Boulding because he’s such a
  maverick, the irascible old coot.  Then there is Dee Dee,
  the sentimental favorite.  No one ever expects a rookie to win the
  race, but if one could it would probably be Cali King.  Her
  father, Jeff, has won it a few times, and Cali has done well in Jr.
  Iditarod.

  Ah, well, in a month or so, this year’s race will be history, and it’s going into the history books with an asterisk, fershure.

  

  • 5:01 pm
  • 11 Comments