Stolen Images

I guess there is still some hope that the recent swirly red aurora pic from the front page of the Anchorage Daily News will show up in their photo gallery.  I went back today to see if it had been posted, and one new image had been added, but not THAT one.  While I was there, I browsed and found a few more worth sharing, a couple of which had been ones I had thought about posting at the time I first saw them.  All photos here credit ADN.com.  This is NOT my work, and I’m duly envious.

Halloween in the north.

Trick Pic?

A question from wixer in comments to my latest water-run blog asked if this shot is sunrise or sunset.  Would you believe high noon?  Although the clock was reading noon while we were at the spring, due to politics it’s really an hour or two off solar noon, but close enough.  I was facing just a bit east of due south when I took this.  It is typical mid-day windwinter sun angle at this latitude. 

After having grown up in temperate zones where the sun rose in the east and set in the west with only minor north/south seasonal variations, it has always fascinated me to watch how here its course is east/west at the equinoxes and then quickly moves until it is rising and setting in the north at summer solstice and in the south at winter solstice.  In Barrow, it set (in the south) in November and won’t rise again until late January.  Likewise, next summer it won’t set at all for a few months, but just dip toward the northern horizon every evening.  Ain’t celestial mechanix fascinatin’?

Also, after seeing all those pics of my son Doug in his new red hat, spinksy wanted to know how old he is.  He’s twenty-two in physical chronology, this lifetime.  In his mind and soul he seems ageless:  never in a hurry to grow up (as I always was), he has memories that include ancient Egypt and prehistoric Asia.  The first time I looked into his eyes this lifetime, I recognized the old soul in there.  It’s been to his benefit as well as mine that I did, because it has let me understand and accept his quirky personality, and enabled me to explain to him and help him understand those otherwise troubling and inexplicable dreams and memories he has.  Each of us has a big measure of warrior karma and knowing that has helped us gain a rational perspective on our atypical reactions to such things as the sounds of artillery fire (chills) and the sight of blood (basically no reaction, which in itself is atypical).  More than you wanted to know, eh?

There has been more snow falling here, but not on the magnitude of the East Coast storm this weekend.  It is just the normal winter white stuff for us, and Greyfox, as usual, has been bitching about how much of it has to be shoveled twice.  It comes off the cars and then has to be cleared out of the driveway, or off the roof and then out of the path to the outhouse.  Both guys have been spending a lot of time and energy both here and at our old place across the highway, keeping roofs from caving in.  According to Greyfox’s survey this morning, the job is about two-thirds done.

It’s warm in here now, 61° F, since I just finished baking a batch of muffins and the outdoor temp is up significantly, to about 28° above zero.  The warmth is the result of warm moist air moving in from the south, so of course it’s snowing, making Greyfox’s estimate of the snow shoveling job still ahead of them grow by the minute.

This weekend there was a great picture of the aurora on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News.  It showed a long swirling streamer of light.  I waited too long to go to ADN.com and copy it to post here.  When I went today to search it out, I couldn’t find it.  That site has links to just about every section of the previous week’s papers except the front page.  Looking through the galleries, however, I did find this one taken in November in Girdwood–pretty good aurora, but lacking that distinct swirl pattern.

(photo by Daryl Pederson) 

Warmer Weather

I could say that since the weather warmed up we decided to do a water run.  That would be a lie… not the water run part, the decision thing.  The water run was done because we were running out of water, which is always the reason for doing them.  It is also a true fact that the weather has warmed up, but not enough to make us look forward with keen anticipation to getting out in it and we would  have been out there today regardless of the weather unless it was so cold the car wouldn’t run.  A day or two ago, it was twenty-some below zero (Fahrenheit) and today it is a hair above zero, warmer yes–but warm, no.
Above is a shot facing southward from the spring where we and many of our neighbors get our water.  As Doug filled jugs and I snapped pics he reminded me unnecessarily to mention that these pretty pink “sunrise” shots were taken about noon.

If the illustrations for todays blog are not positioned as harmoniously as usual in relation to the text, that’s because I’m doing things a bit differently this time.  Usually I have the pics and write the text around them.  Right now the camera is sitting here wired to the computer, disgorging its gorgeous pixels as I write.  Time is short.  Greyfox and I are all dressed for town and will leave in an hour or so.  This morning when we noticed the water shortage, Greyfox went out and plugged in the engine block heater on Streak, my car, the one we do water runs in, and we let him warm up for an hour or two.  As soon as Doug and I pulled out of the driveway to go to the spring, Greyfox went out and plugged in Roger Dodge, his car, the one we’ll be taking to town.

Few of the fancy recent modifications to the area around the waterhole show under the snow.   The platform on which Doug is crouched to fill a jug was unusually icy, with a thick layer of spilled water.  The reason for that became clear later, on our drive home from town, when Greyfox asked me about conditions at the spring.  He had read a notice on the bulletin board at the general store, to “the person with the leaky pump” that has been spewing water all over and creating the icy hazard, to “please be considerate” and get it fixed or quit using it at our spring.   A second note nearby said, “I can fix leaky pumps.” with someone’s first name and a phone number.

Doug is feeling under the weather, weak and feverish.  Dammit, I’d rather be sick than have one of my kids get sick, y’know?  Oh, that reminds me… the kid thing… I’ve had another unexpected family reunion.  My granddaughter Veronica sent me a letter last week and then we had a long friendly phone conversation.  I’ve never seen her in the flesh.  She’s just a few months older than Doug.  When my daughter Dorrie called to tell me her second child was a girl, I broke the news to her that I was pregnant.

I traveled to Kansas in 1979 for a reunion with Dorrie (“Marie”), who had left me when she was three and was eventually adopted by the woman who took her (it’s all in the memoirs if you want details).  Marie was then nineteen and had a toddler, her first son.  The last time I saw her, about half a year before she died, she had left her husband or he had taken the kids and left (her stories varied and I don’t have a reliable source) and then he and the kids were out of my reach for over fifteen years, until I got internet access and traced his parents, their other set of grandparents.  The grandparents turned my letter over to Veronica, who held onto it a while before giving it to her older brother, the only one of the three that I’d ever seen or touched. 

Doug likes his new red hat so much he wears it all the time except in bed.  Right now he’s standing leaning on the woodstove reading a book, wearing the hat.  Even when he’s cocooned in blankets in Couch Potato Heaven on the PS2, he’s got that hat on.  He says it’s comfortable, and it has enough brim to keep snowfall off his glasses.  Lucky find, that.  I wouldn’t have bought it if I’d seen it in a thrift shop, because the style would have suggested it’s a woman’s hat and it’s not my color.  I was coming out of a thrift shop one windy day last fall in Wasilla, and found it on the roof rack of my car in the parking lot.  It is two layers of polar fleece… very nice, warm and comfy.  Greyfox says it reminds him of Devo… reminds me of a flowerpot.

D.J. had given me the impression that it had been his grandparents who held onto my letter for over a year, but Veronica says she’s the one.  Now the sequence of events begins to make sense.  I had finally heard from D.J. soon after I’d sent a second letter to the grandparents.  I suppose when they got the second one they asked Veronica if she’d contacted me after they gave her the first one, and then she turned the letter over to her brother.  D.J. and I have a pleasant, friendly/familial email relationship now.

Veronica  says it was fear that kept her from contacting me, and it’s her fiance who gave her the courage and talked her into writing to me.  I talked to him on the phone, and liked him immediately.  I guess I can understand Veronica’s fearing me, from what D.J. says about the way their father and his family denigrated Marie (Dorrie, her mother) and me.  I’m grateful to my future grandson-in-law for motivating her to set in motion this reunion.

We will be meeting in a few months.  Her fiance works on a fishing boat out of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians.  In February or March, when the boat he’s on has caught its fill three times and his season is done, he’ll be stopping in Anchorage and Veronica and Caroline, my great granddaughter, will join him there and our little family here will go into Anchorage for the rendezvous.

Wee digression there…  Time to get back to the water run.  Meanwhile all the pics have been saved so now I bop out of this page and into the photo program to resize and such…. 

e…l…l…i…p…s…i…s….

That was yesterday (Friday).  I realized after I had finished preparing the photos that I wouldn’t have time to upload pics and finish the blog, so I quit and hit the road around noon on Thursday.

…e…l…l…i…p…s…i…s, again, …and revision… and reconstruction….

I had uploaded six pics and written the captions yesterday, Friday, morning.  I clicked the “pic” link to upload the next pic and got a “runtime error” message.  Same result on second try, so I tried restarting Windows, which sometimes makes error messages go away.  That time, I got a “cannot find server” message, so maybe Xanga was down, I dunno.  I quit for the day and played Disgaea.  Now I’m rebuilding what I lost then. 

In this closeup of the waterhole itself, my mitten got in the way.  In the three winters I’ve been using that digital camera, I’ve deleted countless mitten shots.  That’s only one of the hazards of winter photography.  Pressing the shutter button while hanging onto the camera and keeping it steady… it all becomes more challenging when you’re wearing several layers of insulation on your hands.

The drive to town was uneventful and the regular meeting was lackluster.  When I had told the rehab residents the trip to the meeting would be longer than usual because I had to stay over for the business meeting afterwards, there was some grumbling, and one man briefly considered staying at the ranch instead of going to the meeting, but the ranch hand in charge reminded him that his counselor had signed him up for it.  I had always gotten the impression that attendance at meetings was voluntary.  Silly me.

Beyond that skinny line of trees is the big muskeg across the highway from the spring.  Beyond the muskeg, toward the west, is the mile-wide course of the Susitna River.  In this direction, the next paved road is somewhere in Siberia.

In the van on the way to the meeting, the conversation centered around the various kinds of psychotropic and antidepressant meds the residents are on to ease their withdrawal from alcohol and illicit drugs.  For some reason, it impelled me to burst spontaneously into a chorus from White Rabbit:  “…and the one that mother gives you don’t do anything at all.”  There was no more complaining about having to stay over for the “group conscience” meeting, which was brief and without conflict, providing everyone present a few gentle laughs at the NA bureaucracy on the Area and Regional levels.  When viewed from outside, life that’s constrained within the bounds of by-laws and governed by committees can be funny.

Here, Doug is struggling to remove a lid that is frozen to the bucket.  That task is often easier than getting the threaded caps off the jugs when they’re stuck on with ice in the threads.  Holding them under the water in the spring is sometimes the only way to loosen them, and that often leads to wet gloves and cold hands.

There is now, on Saturday, an ironic twist to the “Warmer Weather” title I thought up two days ago.  It’s back to about ten below zero outside today.  When I got up this morning the indoor temp was slightly below that of the average fridge:  36°F.  The woodstove had been stoked with a couple of thick rounds when I went to bed around 2 AM, so the fire would last.  When I got up I poked and raked what was left in there and added as many small splits as I could pack in, to ignite quickly and burn fast and warm it up in here.  Success!  Last time I checked, it was up to 38°.  [Update:  reading over my shoulder, Greyfox said that last time he checked it was up to 41°.  We are now officially out of refrigerator range.]

Two of the things I don’t like about the scenery around here are power poles and transmission lines.  Sometimes, to get the shot I want I have to include those unsightly signs of civilization.  When possible, as in the shot at right, I resort to camouflage.

When some of the rehab residents were commenting on the ride back from the meeting, about the fact that we drive sixty miles each way for those meetings and so that I can drive their van to haul them to one every two weeks, I had a happy thought.  I expressed it thusly:  “Yeah, and when I get home tonight, I won’t have to go anywhere for two weeks! …if I’m lucky.”

Unless I’m facing an immanent appointment somewhere, I tend to forget what day it is.  The sound I heard as I was awakening today told me immediately that it’s the weekend:  snowmachines.  *whine, zziiip, zoom, vroom* …and now there are tracks and trails all over the pretty white muskeg.  [temp update:  48° F and climbing]

As I rolled to a stop in the parking area at the spring on Thursday, some motion high in the sky caught my eye.  I leaned forward over the steering wheel and said, mostly to myself, “mmm… is that a raven or a raptor?”

Doug asked where and I pointed, and we watched the bird fly closer, until it was possible to identify her, a big golden eagle.  The males of her species don’t get that big.

As we got out of the car to unload the jugs and buckets, Doug said, “Y’know, I hate the snow and I hate the mosquitoes, but I love living here.”  Then he paused, and said, “I’d probably like living in Arizona, too.”  Yeah, me too, in winter.  Too bad they don’t have cactus-powered air-conditioning for summers down there.  I cannot stand the heat.  Doug has only been there between December and April, and has no conception of what hot weather is like.  When it gets above 70° F here, he bitches and moans and lies half-naked in the shade, fanning himself.

Funny Alaskans

Book review:  On the Road to Tok

I cannot cite any hard statistics on this, and have no idea how one would go about trying to document it, but I’m firmly convinced that Alaska has more funny people per capita than any other geographical area of similar magnitude, except possibly Antarctica.

(Rhonda Flamingo:  “Peas, sweet potatoes, gravy and stuffing under the cushion?!!”
Ursa:  “Everybody knows bears will cache their uneaten food for later.   
Now back away slowly…”)

In my opinion, we have some of the best cartoonists on the planet, but admittedly they have a rich fund of weird information and humorous situations from which to draw.  Peter Dunlap Scholl, who does Muskeg Heights, above, has a more… shall we say “conventional” sense of humor than does Chad Carpenter, whose Tundra cartoons have been published in several collections.  Chad, whom I met (Socially, Alaska is like a very spread-out small town where everyone knows everybody else if they’ve been here long.) when we both had booths at the State Fair, is often more over-the-top than Gary Larson of Far Side fame.

Not all Alaskans are intentionally funny.  Politics up here in Seward’s Icebox seems to pull the zaniest bushrats out of the woods and down to Juneau, or to Washington D.C., if they’re really lucky.  As horrendous as Washington traffic and social life might be (I’ve heard rumors to that effect.), Juneau’s weather has them beat.  Our state capital, as few Outsiders know, has no land access.  No roads lead to Juneau.  It sits like an obscene growth on the Inside Passage, accessible only by choppy and uncertain water (notably the state ferry system, the Alaska Marine Highway, a joke in itself) and by even less navigable air (White Knuckle Airlines only–no strip long enough for the big carriers).  It takes a firm commitment to “public service” or the pork barrel, or just being ripe for commitment to an asylum, to run for one of those offices.

One of the most unintentionally funny people in Alaska is Theresa Obermeyer.  Here is what someone in Utah had to say about her and in general about one recent particularly laughable year of state poltics:

Alaska’s Ted Stevens has served in the U.S. Senate nearly 30 years. As the state’s senior representative in Washington, D.C., and its most powerful politician, his race was almost a non-event. Credible Democrat candidates spurned the contest, and the primary winner was Theresa Obermeyer, a recalled member of the Anchorage School Board who claimed that a Jewish conspiracy, in which Stevens and other politicians participated, had denied her husband success in the Alaska bar exam—at last count, he had failed the exam 22 times. She pursued Stevens throughout the campaign season, and ultimately spent 29 days at a federal penitentiary outside Alaska on a stalking charge. Stevens won his seat with 74 percent of the vote, and Obermeyer took third place, behind the Green Party candidate. Don Young won a comfortable victory in the U.S. House race over Democrat challenger, state Senator Georgiana Lincoln.

That paragraph is so rife with Alaskan in-jokes that I feel I should apologize to all Outsiders.  You really have to be here to really get all of it.

And speaking of Juneau’s weather (I did mention that.  Did you miss it?) brings me to the subject of this book review, a collection of edgy postcards from the edge of the back of beyond, whose authors include another Alaskan I’ve schmoozed with.  Mr. Whitekeys and I met at the local PBS station when my Mensa chapter was answering phones for a pledge drive and he was there to give his own hilarious endorsement of the station.  The man makes what appears to be a comfortable living poking fun at Alaska in his musical comedy Duct Tape Revue at an Anchorage night club.  But, back to the weather… that’s a Juneau street scene, above, and too true, ‘way too true.

Also too close to the truth for comfort is this postcard Doug picked as his favorite when I sought his help in narrowing down the field.  I wanted to scan and post the entire book, but out of deference to the intellectual property rights of  Tom, Jeff, Jimmie and Whitekeys, I decided to keep it down to just three.  It was ‘way hard, dood, to pick any favorites at all because they’re all my favorites.  This last one, below, though, still warms my heart and makes me giggle each time I look at it, after several months and many perusings of the book—

This one appears, to my educated eye, to bear the distinctive stamp of Whitekeys’s warped mind, but if one of those other lunatics is responsible for it, I apologize.

To conform to the spirit of the copyright laws, let’s add a sentence or two to make this a true review, eh?

Although there is not much to read here, I did enjoy reading the captions.  Some of the pictures wouldn’t have made any sense at all without them, and others still made no sense with captions, but made me laugh all the same.

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Discipline

I was trying to discipline myself to write about self-discipline, but I got distracted by this comment:

Fybromylgia is communicable via mycoplasma? 

Whoa … most heinous.  <—- to be said in very serious surfer dude voice.  I shall tell Joe straight away, and he will immediately say, “SEE! I told you I wasn’t feeling well!”

Posted 12/1/2003 at 8:45 AM by oOMisfitOo

I did say, in that blog, that there is no expert consensus on what causes M.E.  The stuff is widespread enough that I suppose there were other ways Greyfox could have got it besides from contact with me.  He seems to be convinced that he caught it from me, though.  I suspect that could just be more of his NPD way of blaming me for everything.  He did have what I think are signs and symptoms of fibro before he met me, but he won’t own up to them.

It’s all anecdotal, Sarah:  the communicability, the signs and symptoms Greyfox has now or had over fifteen years ago following his Xerox machine neck injury, and even, some people claim, the existence of mycoplasma… in fact, there are still some physicians who don’t believe in the existence of the disorder.  The deeper I investigate into all this the less I think I know.

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This day might have passed for me without notice had I not had that passing fancy to blog about discipline.  I was discontentedly sitting in Couch Potato Heaven, puzzling out the geo-panel problems in Disgaea, unaware of the date and not even thinking about getting on the computer.  Then I had that blog-thought on a trip to the bathroom.  Since Doug had just gone to bed after a night spent on washing dishes, and splitting and carrying firewood, with some roof-shoveling after daybreak, and Greyfox was over at our old place across the highway raking snow off his little travel trailer so it may last another year, the computer was not being used.

Thus I noted the date.  December first is notable to me for only one reason.  I guess there have been a few years in the past fifty-two of them in which the day slipped by unnoticed and I didn’t recall 1951 and the the day I killed my father.  There haven’t been many of them, though, and on whatever day in December I’d realize what month it was, then I’d remember.

The “holiday season” was one of mourning for my mother for all of the 35 years she survived after he died, and was troublesome to me for many years before I had the therapy that helped me deal with it.  I still had that flash of memory today when I realized what the date is, and I still miss him, though it’s unlikely he could still be around, given that 2-to-3-pack-a-day Camel habit, because he would now be 98.

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Okay, time to drag myself back to the topic of self-discipline.  Now, nearing the end of my sixth decade of life this time around, I have begun to learn a little bit of discipline.  It has not come easy, isn’t natural to me.  The image I have of myself in childhood is of running full-tilt, tripping and skinning nose and knees, or climbing as high in the tree as I could, until the branch broke and down I went, with scrapes and bruises to show for my triumph.

As anyone who has browsed those memoirs linked in my left module knows, I was a sickie all my life.  Remission and relapse is the name of my theme song.  Every time I’d start feeling well enough to move around, I’d move too much, go to far, “over-do it” in my mother’s words.  It never required discipline to just lie there during the times when lying there was all I could manage to do.  It is damned hard, however, to just sit or lie still when I can get up and about, and when there is so damned much to be done–stuff that has gone undone while I’ve been incapacitated.

I always used to suspect that the relapses would have come anyway, even if I didn’t overdo.  Experience has shown me that relapses do seem to just happen, whether I’m “taking care of myself,” or not.  I have also learned that I can make them come sooner and be more severe if and when I don’t take care of myself, so I do tend more and more toward taking it easy, especially in times like this when I’m beginning to get back on my feet again after a really bad relapse.  That takes discipline.

It also takes discipline to write about this, or talk about it.  I never wanted anyone to know how less-than-able I was.  If I could get the kids in school to believe that I’d been playing hooky, that would have been better, but it never happened.  Friends would stop by on their way home to drop off my homework, and find me on the bed or couch, surrounded by books, puzzles and such.  How much better it is now, with interactive games on the PS2.   I always read both fiction and non-fiction, and preferred crosswords and logic puzzles over simple reading most of the time.  Now my mind is challenged with complex strategic problems at the same time I’m amused and entertained by the story line.  (Disgaea is the first game NOT published by Squaresoft that I’ve found so enjoyable)

See how quickly I glossed right over my trying to keep my chronic illness a secret?  Of course, I never mentioned on any application for a job that I had a chronic illness.  Then when I’d call in sick I wouldn’t be specific, either.  I’d just hang onto each of those jobs until the management decided they had to replace me with someone who could be there to do the job, and kept neglecting to reveal the illness until my employment record was so bad that no one would risk hiring me.  Now I’m free of all that, but still trying to get through life with the appearance of healthy normalcy.

This week’s discipline has this shape:  today I am not going to town for my favorite meeting at the rehab center, and tomorrow I’m not going in for the regular Tuesday night Space Cadets’ meeting, so that Thursday night I’ll be able to go drive the van to take the rehab residents to the other weekly meeting and stay afterward for the monthly business meeting… which reminds me I still haven’t typed last month’s minutes yet, and don’t at this moment know where I put my notes.  But I have a couple of days before I have to have that little job done. 

Can’t let myself become too fanatical or compulsive about this discipline stuff, can I?  This morning I already put away the baskets of clean laundry that we washed a few weeks ago.  Funny thing about that discipline business:  it took discipline to do that little bit of work, just as it takes discipline to stop there and not clean the whole damned house, hang that shelf that’s still sitting on the bathroom countertop, etc.  Back when I ran wild and thought of myself  as a free soul, I had no idea how complex self-discipline is.

OH!… and Riott, no, I wasn’t consciously sending you any psychic messages, but I do stuff like that unconsciously, and in my dreams.  Sarah knows….