Happy 13th Anniversary, Greyfox!
You’re still the scariest thing that ever happened to me.
The question of whether we will drive to Anchorage tonight for the Halloween NA Dance is still up in the air. Greyfox and I both have a cold (yeah, one cold between us, that’s family togetherness and sharing–we even share it with Doug, too) and he has been coughing a lot. My share of it is farther along in recovery and not so severe. I’m leaning toward going, but in addition to the physical malaise I have several tasks around here I feel must be completed before I’m free to go off to a halloween party for my anniversary. For one thing, I’ve not yet carved the traditional anniversary pumpkin. For another, as soon as Greyfox gets out of the bed I need to drag all the pill bottles out, line them up in boxes on the bed, both little empties and the full big ”stock” bottles, and set up another supply of supplements for him. He ran out, and the formula I take has some things he doesn’t need and lacks others that he needs.
A year ago, I posted pics of the flats of vitamin bottles I was setting up with my amino acid supplements. I have the same task to complete today, but this time it is for his supplements, not mine. At first we were taking these pills twice a day. Now I’m down to once or twice a week and he only takes them about three or four times a week. For me, they eased the withdrawal from sugar, wheat and other food allergy/addictions. In his case, they have helped relieve the addictive cravings for alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, various pills, and sugar, since his abstinence began about five months ago. It works, and there are easier ways to obtain the necessary combinations of nutrients, but they are much costlier. Doing it on the cheap is more work… isn’t that the way it always is?
I’ve been thinking about a year’s retrospective of my healing journey, complete with before-and-after pics. Going from a size 20 down to a size 10 is the most visible sign of the improvements in my health, but my improved functioning, greater energy levels, etc., are what I FEEL most. Balancing my brain chemistry has made life a lot easier for me. For my scary Halloween hubby, it has made even more dramatic improvements. It’s all just too good not to share. But that’s a task for another time. Right now, there’s that big funny-looking pear-shaped pumpkin waiting for the knife….
We had been planning this for months. For my son Doug’s birthday around the end of July, I took him to an AA meeting. Okay, it was more than that. It was the regular monthly “Saturday Night Live” inter-group potluck dinner and speaker’s meeting, but still basically a 12-step meeting. I didn’t try to pretend that I was doing anything special for Doug. I had volunteered to supervise setting up tables, etc., because it was our group’s turn to host the event. I asked him if he would be willing to go along and help out, in exchange for a free meal. He went for it. The meal, he said, wasn’t the attraction. He just wanted to get out of the house.
Except for our trips every week or so to the spring to fill water buckets and jugs, and occasionally on one of those trips a mile or so further to the general store to pick out a video to rent, Doug’s trips away from home are infrequent. He goes out and walks around alone sometimes; sometimes he takes the dog. Once in a while in summer, he rides his bike the mile to his dad’s cabin for a visit. When it is freezing cold, or in summer when there is no rain to fill the pans under the eaves that collect water for the feral cats, he takes water every day to the cats and checks their food supply at the old place across the highway where we lived for most of his life, since he was two years old. 
It wouldn’t be completely correct to say that Doug is anti-social, but most of his friends are online buddies. I guess he’s somewhat of a loner. My perspective on this is not quite objective because I’m also somewhat of a loner and so is my husband Greyfox. Although all three of us love people, most people’s social lives seem to us to be so busy as to leave little time for the solitary pursuits we enjoy. 
He stayed here all summer while I made those trips up and down the valley staying over a night or two each time at Greyfox’s cabin. He kept the animals fed and cared for. When it became cold enough to need a fire, he kept one going. I cannot overstate how comforting it is to pull into the driveway after one of those drives, and see smoke coming out that stovepipe up top that he helped me install last fall.
I suppose I’d love the kid anyway, just because I’m his mother, but he has many admirable qualities and I do admire and respect him, as well. So, when he expressed some restlessness this summer I asked him if he’d like for us to go on a special outing sometime after Greyfox shut down his stand for the winter and moved back in here so that he could keep the fire burning, be the cats’ doorman and keep Koji company while we were gone. Naturally, he agreed. We started then discussing what we would do and watching the papers for suitable events.
Both of us have always enjoyed museums and have visited many on our two long road trips across the U.S. The Anchorage Museum of History and Art is a local favorite that we have been back to several times. When we learned that it is hosting a traveling exhibit of Sue, the South Dakota Tyrannosaurus Rex, we decided to take our outing during this time period. A few weeks ago on one of my drives to town I heard a radio ad for the Moscow State Circus, and that narrowed down our time window for the Anchorage trip. I bought tickets earlier this month and yesterday we went to the big city.
After a gas stop in Wasilla where he got an ice cream bar (and reminded me that it’s not on my diet), we stopped in Eagle River at Garcia’s of Scottsdale for lunch. My kid has grown up eating Tex-Mex: chili, tacos, burritos, quesadillas, New-Mexico-style enchiladas and other simple items in my repertoire of Mexican cuisine, but hadn’t tried fundidos before. He loved them, and I enjoyed the first half of my enchilada trio (cheese, beef and chicken). The rest of my meal is in the fridge right now, waiting for me to warm it up later for lunch.
The museum turned out to be between 6th and 7th Avenues, instead of between 5th and 6th as I’d misremembered it. There were also fewer parking meters along those streets, their having been replaced by signs saying, “tour buses only.” Then I pulled into a Park-and-Lock lot, and learned when I went to pay at the self-service post that during weekdays it is for long-term reserved parking only, and open to the public only in evenings and on weekends. Finally, we found a metered space on a side street and walked two blocks to the museum.
After we took our time going through the three galleries devoted to Sue, a lot of interpretive displays about her (or him or it) and the bones’ discovery, and to some displays of Alaskan fossils (first three photos at top here), I headed immediately to the Artists of Alaska gallery, which houses part of the museum’s permanent collection, and photographed some of my old favorites such as the Fred Machetanz canvas of the sleeping polar bear, the huge Sydney Lawrence painting of Denali, and the fanciful blue and red moose by an artist whose name I don’t recall (#4, 5 & 6, above). I also shot some smaller Lawrence’s, but I guess this blog has enough illustrations as it is.
Doug took his time looking over all the historical displays, while I focused my camera on some of the familiar favorites (such as the early 19th century wedding dress made to a traditional Russian pattern from Chinese fabrics and pearls for some classy lady in Russian America. [that's what Alaska was before Seward bought it, y'know?]), and checked out several new exhibits I hadn’t seen before. The oil-stained suit of insulated coveralls to the left below the lady’s silk dress is part of a new display commemorating the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
We could have spent more time in the museum if we had had more change to put into the parking meter beforehand, but when the meter ran out we decided to head on out of the downtown area toward the Sullivan Arena where the circus was to be. It is just as well that we did leave a bit early (like an hour or so), because my initial uncertainty about the parking lot entrance, coupled with Chester Creek which runs through that part of Anchorage and makes for a lot of dead-end streets between the sparse bridges, caused me to do a long and circuitous detour around midtown and come up on the sports complex from the backside. That got us into the arena in time to get refreshments and enjoy watching the crowd assemble and the performers prepare for the show.
Maybe I have been spoiled by the lavish video presentations of Cirque du Soleil, but it seems to me that the Moscow State Circus sorta exemplifies the hard times that Russia has been having. The skills displayed by the performers were top-notch, and the recorded tekno-rock music added to the drama of the action, but there were more than a few seedy signs of economic pinch. The entire troupe and crew was quite small, with performers doing double and triple duty helping to set up equipment and doing sideshow things such as face painting, selling toys, and photographing audience members with their big Burmese python (at $10.00 a pop, or $15 if there was more than one person in the pic) during set-up and at intermission.
We saw classic circus acts such as trapeze duos, clowns, and the Chinese man spinning plates, above. Billed in the advance ads as “Taiwanese Acrobats,” the Diamond Troupe at left was ballyhooed by the ringmaster as coming from “Imperial China.” They were excellent. In addition to the set I caught here, they also did the big finale with, at one point, all six young men bouncing and spinning on bungees at the same time, around that narrow bar over their heads in this pic. The shots I took of that act only show blurs, they were moving so fast. I do need a camcorder, I guess. Just before intermission, my camera ran out of memory. I did manage to delete a bunch of substandard images during the intermission so I could catch the finale.
One of the most impressive acts occurred while I was out of memory, but that act I didn’t get to capture was one that only video would have done justice to, anyway. They were a pair of illusionists/quick-change artists. When they came on I noticed that the woman looked a bit thick around the waist, in contrast to all the other lithe beauties in the company. By the time she was done dazzling us with her instantaneous costume changes, though, she looked quite a bit slimmer.
After several unsuccessful attempts to lift the weight, he did some strutting and dancing around, gesturing to the crowd, encouraging us to applaud. With every cheer his floppy costume inflated a bit more, until it was revealed as a gigantic muscular “body” suit. Then his act really became impressive. He could barely bend over in the inflated suit, but he jumped and tumbled about in it to delighted laughter from everyone and some stunned gasps from those of us who realized the difficulty of the feats.
Greyfox says the guys at Lobo looked at my pulleys, said basically what the ones at G-Force had said about “unnecessary redundancy” (when they declined to replace the belts before and again when they assured me that the single old belt would be enough) and declined to even try to wrestle that rear belt onto its pulleys. So much for testosterone, muscles, heated garages and professional tools. 
Greyfox’s verdict when he brought the car back: we’ll have to take it back to “the crazy man.” This is the Subaru expert who first told us the belts needed replacing. We had declined to have him do it mainly because we had felt such a swelling of relief verging on a sense of liberation when he had finally handed over the bill and let us escape the first time he had Streak in his garage. 
