Windfall from Felony Flats

The Matanuska-Susitna Valley has been having a severe windstorm. 
This is the third day of winds, but they peaked yesterday.  The
Steese Highway has been closed today because of 50 MPH winds, blowing
and drifted snow.  The village of Nulato lost its electricity and
the town hall burned down over the weekend.  Blowing snow and
downed power lines have been causing havoc over a wide area of Alaska.

For weeks I had been looking for someone to sell me some
firewood.  Greyfox called one day with a phone number he found on
a bulletin board in town, and I called Tim and arranged to have a cord
delivered yesterday.  Tim called in the afternoon and asked if we
could wait until Tuesday or Wednesday.  He’d been out there
cutting and the wind was blowing the tops out of some trees.  I
assured him we wouldn’t freeze and he could stay indoors until the
weather calmed down.

Throughout Sunday there were many widespread power outages.  Here,
there were numerous brief outages and one that lasted for two and a
half hours in the late afternoon.  Greyfox had a series of shorter
outages at his cabin in Wasilla later in the evening.  Weekend
cell minutes are free all day for him, so although we usually
communicate through Xanga-grams or wait until 9 PM on weekdays for our
phone calls, on Saturday and Sunday we call each other whenever there’s
something to say.  He gave me several progress reports on wind
damage at Felony Flats, the strip of cabins, trailers, huts and hovels
where he lives on the edge of town.

One of the summer denizens last year was a guy who moved in next door
to Greyfox after his marriage broke up.  Several times while the
weather was still warm he set up tables in his front yard and sold a
lot of videos, tools, china, glassware, bric-a-brac, and stuff. 
He had a lot of incense, too.  He had tried unsuccessfully to make
his living making incense.  I remember having passed his place on
a back road in a suburban residential area up in the hills behind
Felony Flats.  I remembered the signs when I saw them again in
front of his cabin beside Greyfox’s.

I don’t know how much stuff he managed to sell, but there was still a
lot left when he moved out.  He cleared out the cabin, loaded his
truck, and left heaps, bags, boxes and stacks of stuff in a white
Easy-Up shelter tucked in beside the cabin.  Greyfox reported that
he had told Mike the landlord that he would be back for his stuff.

Even before the wind over the weekend destroyed his Easy-Up, the snow
load had collapsed one corner of it.  Last night after relating to
me the shelter’s several stages of disintegration, Greyfox went into
the office and told Mike that the Easy-Up was shredded.  Mike gave
him a license to salvage:  “Help yourself.”

Through the dusk and into darkness, through a couple of power outages,
Greyfox called with occasional reports about what he had found. 
He carried a lot of stuff into his cabin to sort and examine, then
finally just loaded a bunch of boxes and bags into his car unsorted and
unexamined, to bring up here today.

I was pleased when he decided to bring it up here.  Before that, I
had been planning to make a trip to town tomorrow (Tuesday) to take him
a shipment of literature for our NA group that had been delivered here,
and to pick up the goat milk he had forgotten and left in his fridge
when he made his most recent grocery run out here last week.  I
thought that his coming up here would be a break for me, a respite.

See how wrong I can be.  I’m exhausted.  Last night, Greyfox
asked if I could cook some beans.  I said I’d soak them overnight
and have them cooked by the time he got here.  Of course, I forgot
about soaking the beans until I’d gone to bed, so I got back up and put
them to soak.  It was 1:30 AM when I finally went to bed.  I
was up twice in the night to feed the woodstove and by 6:30 I gave up
on sleeping and got dressed.

Greyfox came in this afternoon with a whole ham (Easter sale, BIG
bargain in more ways than one) and I cut enough of it off the bone to
flavor those beans.  While I did that, Doug and Greyfox brought in
the stuff from the shredded Easy-Up.  I shifted bags and boxes
around, took a big fancy electronic “Santa’s Carousel Park” holiday
display out of its box, plugged it in and tested it (works, plays
carols, goes around and around, with a lot of humorous animated
critters doing various things).  I helped Doug and Greyfox sort a
big box of toys.

We paused long enough to eat beans.  Greyfox dug up some of his
jewelry and clothing to take back to town with him.  Doug kept
sorting and gloating over action figures and Lego parts.  By the
time we had dealt with everything that Greyfox wanted sorted so he
could take the potential merchandise back with him, and I’d packed a
couple of yogurt tubs full of beans and ham for him to take home, and
cut the rest of the ham off the bone and got it into my fridge, I’d
been on my feet more than I usually am on the days I go to town. 
I still haven’t taped the Santa’s Carousel Park box back together and
it is on my bed so that has to be done before I can get horizontal.

One
of the bags Greyfox salvaged from the storm last night contained a
package of gripper socks and a pair of hand-crocheted house
slippers.  In the lull that followed the passage of Hurricane
Greyfox, Doug put on the slippers and stretched out in Couch Potato
Heaven to unwind with the PS2.  He finally decided they were too
tight for comfort, which is unfortunate because they go so well with
his flowerpot hat.

Now
he’s wearing one of the two pairs of powder blue gripper socks, after
having handed over the second pair to me.  I suspect I shall end
up with both pairs, because I’ve been watching the stretchy
socks creep down over the back of his heel as I write this.

The weather guessers have cancelled the high wind warning now. 
They replace that with a winter storm watch.  They are saying we
could have a foot or two of new snow in the next day or two.  I
hope Tim gets enough of a break between storms to bring us some
wood.  We have been conserving fuel by keeping the fire as low as
possible, just one stick at a time into the woodstove.  The goal
is mainly to keep that big cast iron piece of furniture from being the
coldest object in the room. 

The indoor thermometer has been registering temps from the high forties
to the mid-sixties, depending on the amount of solar energy we’re
getting at the time.  A few weeks ago, such low indoor temps would
have felt a lot colder than they do now.  That’s an effect of the
gradient:  both the difference between indoor and outdoor temps
and that between the temp at floor level and up where the thermometer
is.  When it is sub-zero outside, the temp showing at eye level on
the thermometer is deceptive.  Walls and floors are cold, even
when the air up head high is warm and we have the fan going to stir it
up.

The wind this weekend was sucking the heat out of the house, making us
glad it wasn’t really cold outside, and happy that Tim is on his way
with more wood.  I haven’t told Doug about the winter storm warning
yet.  He’s the one who shovels the snow.  I’ll just let him
enjoy the beginning of spring for as long as it lasts.

Probably the

Last Iditarod Update

this Year

 Sixty-two mushers have made it into Nome.  Sixteen
scratched along the trail.  One more man is out there.  The
most likely contender for this year’s Red Lantern Award, rookie Phil
Morgan of Anchorage in bib #9, is out of White Mountain with 8
dogs,  Phil is 44 years old and works for Alaska Airlines as a
captain on the 737-200 aircraft.  He was a volunteer pilot in the
Iditarod Air Force, ferrying dropped dogs and whatever else needed an
airlift, for ten years before attempting the mush to Nome.  Go
Phil!

Last night at the Musher’s Awards Banquet in Nome, these were the winners:

• The Pen Air Spirit of Alaska Award, which was awarded to the first
musher to reach McGrath, was presented to Norwegian Musher Robert

Sorlie.

• The GCI Dorothy G. Page Halfway Award was presented to Robert Sorlie
for being the first musher to arrive in Iditarod. Sorlie was presented with
$3,000 in gold.

• Millennium Hotel Anchorage Alaskan First to the Yukon Award was
presented to Paul Gebhardt. Gebhardt was the first to arrive in Anvik.
He received a seven course meal in Anvik, and tonight he was presented
with $3,500.

• Wells Fargo Bank Alaska Gold Coast Award was presented to Robert

Sorlie for being the first musher to reach the Coastal Town of
Unalakleet. Sorlie was presented with $2,500 in gold, along with the
Gold Coast Trophy.

• Nome Kennel Club Fastest Time from Safety to Nome Award was
presented to Ken Anderson. Anderson made the 22 mile trek in 2 hours
and 22 minutes.

• The Global Information Technologies Most Improved Musher Award was
presented to Harmony Barron. She went from 68th position last year to
29th position this year.

• The Jerry and Clara Austin Rookie of the Year Award was presented to
Bjornar Andersen. Andersen finished 4th in this year’s race.

• The Fred Meyer Sportsmanship Award, which includes $1,000 in Fred
Meyer Gift Cards, was presented to Martin Buser.

• The Chevron/Texaco Most Inspirational Award was presented to Martin

Buser. Buser received $1,000 in Chevron/Texaco Gas.

• The Golden Clipboard Award was awarded to Shaktoolik Checkpoint for
excellence in providing support to mushers.

• The Golden Stethoscope Award for excellence in veterinary medical care
on the Iditarod Trail was awarded to Ingrid Wilk Haugbjorg.

• The Alaska Airlines Leonhard Seppala Humanitarian Award for excellence

in canine care was presented to Aliy Zirkle.

• The Lolly Medley Golden Harness Award presented to Whitestock. This

six year old male leader belonged to Robert Sorlie’s team. Whitestock
was given to Sorlie by a Norwegian musher named Bjornar Ostegaard.

The finishing mushers shared in a record $750,000 in prize money.

Something to add:

For anyone who didn’t get enough of the legally blind
musher, Beth Bragg wrote about her in today’s Anchorage Daily News:
Scdoris wasn’t the only musher who inspired us.

Something to answer:

No, Ren I can’t “think” my way out of the “worst” of this damned disease.  The worst of it is the part I can’t
think myself out of.  I deal with the pain without drugs.  I
use shamanic techniques to get around the sleep disorder.  Nothing
I’ve found does anything for the sensorimotor deficits (the stumbling
and fumbling) or for the chronic fatigue.  For them, I just
stumble, fumble, pick myself up, clean up the messes I make, and rest
three to five days to recover from every one day of activity.

Something to suggest:

Yesterday Marj mentioned that she doesn’t recall her dreams. 
She’s not the first person who has mentioned that when I write about my
dreams.  I meant to say something about this earlier.  The
brain is an electrochemical machine.  Memory is an electrochemical
process.  It can fail when either the electricity is out of phase
or the chemistry is out of balance.

Over the past few years, I’ve become sensitive to my
neurochemistry.  My sensitivity to and control of my brainwave
frequencies has been developing over about a decade and a half. 
Checklist self-tests on websites such as moodcure  and
dietcure  can reveal the nature of any chemical imbalances that might be
affecting dreaming and/or recall.  The brainwave state around the
alpha/theta crossover point, the same frequency as the planet’s
Schumann Resonance, is conducive to memory.  Even just slowing
your brainwaves slightly out of normal waking beta consciousness into
alpha can make it easier to recall dreams and/or creative ideas. 
Many types of biofeedback training devices exist to assist anyone in
learning to control brainwaves.

Out There
in the world –

George F. Kennan, the author of the Cold War “containment policy,” died
last week.  He had a good, long, influential life, but perhaps not
influential enough.  He always regretted that our government chose
military containment over diplomatic containment, and he called himself
a “pestiferous insect” buzzing around those in power and occasionally
getting in a stinging bite.

The World Peace Herald used this occasion to look at Kennan and his opponents:

World Peace Herald:  The passing Thursday of retired U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan at the age of 101…

Meanwhile, the investigation into the death of a 14-year-old prodigy is continuing in Nebraska.  Brandenn Bremmer  was found shot in the head last week, an apparent suicide.

Our prez shrub is reportedly scurrying back to Washington so he won’t
miss out on any of the current domestic spotlight being cast on the
capital by the doings on Capitol Hill where Congress has decided to intervene in a family squabble.  Reading this week’s celestial weather  from Rich Humbert, I was struck by the relevance of tomorrow’s daily forecast:

Mercury stationary retrograde today at 14 degrees Aries, and Saturn
stationary direct on Tuesday at 20 degrees Cancer, can herald
frustrations and confusion for the whole planet, especially for people
whose natal charts are heavily aspected from those positions.

---

In Here
in my world –

The Mercury station is conjunct my fourth house cusp, the Nadir. 
That puts the spotlight on my inner life, as indicated in yesterday’s
dream and the trend of my recent thoughts.

Saturn  is stationary on my eighth house cusp conjuct my
North Lunar Node.   Sex, death, money and karmic/dharmic
issues are coming to a head for me.   All those themes have been in my dreams.

Restrictions,
ambiguities and compromise have always been problematic for me. 
Now I’m being forced to face them.  I gotta do it but I don’t have
to like it.

Doug captured this picture a couple of days ago when all four of our
household critters had joined me on the bed.  I spend a lot of
time there.  Most of the pictures of me taken by Doug or Greyfox
in recent years have been there.  I don’t display them a lot,
don’t look at them much.

I’d rather see myself out in the woods or down at the spring.  I’d
rather BE there, too, but every one of those trips is a strain and a
drain, and in the main my life is spent in this room.  Here I
relax, I droop.  Out there I wear my public face, stand up
straight, try to walk without limping, and it exhausts me.

I got some sobering insight into how I’m handling the damned disease on
Thursday when the car trouble kept me from keeping my volunteer
commitment in Wasilla.  I had mixed feelings of relief and regret
at first, and then the next day I got an unpleasant surprise.  The
“payback”, the fatigue and debility was almost as severe as when I
actually go to town. 

All I had done was fill the shower bag, hang it up, clean up, dress up,
and make half a dozen or so trips out to the car trying to start it,
phone around for the mechanic, convey my regrets to the ranch because I
couldn’t show…  It wore me out, and all along I’d been thinking
that it was going to town that was getting me down.

I have known all along that I’m sicker than I want anyone else to
know.  It’s becoming apparent that I’ve been denying to myself how
sick I am, too.  Now I’m trying to decide if it’s a delusion worth
hanging onto.  Much of my optimism and hope for the future hinges
on what I can do with the life I have left.  Time to reevaluate
and rethink, I think.

I wish!
Updated, completed,
with the dream interpreted


That was my initial reaction when I read Cinnamongirl78‘s
comment declaring me a “truly free spirit.”  I chafe at my fetters
all the time, but I suppose that from many people’s points of view I
might seem free.  It is helpful to me to get someone else’s
perspective sometimes.  One thing this spirit of mine is truly not
free of is perfectionism.  I see how not free I am, notice many
little bonds and snags.  I can only imagine what would happen were
I to totally liberate my soul.

That imagination is informed by traditions that include the concept of
“translation”, the conversion of the physical body into pure energy
when the individual spirit reaches perfection of attunement and
atonement with Spirit.  It is with a fearful fascination that I
view that idea of translation.  My mind tends to equate it with
spontaneous human combustion.  I truly don’t know how free I want
to be.

I had a dream last night.  I’m hoping that by writing it out I
will get more perspective on it.  Although in the dream I was
sorta in bed with two sexy and buff specimens of masculinity, it
wouldn’t be accurate to call it an erotic dream.  If it were a
play it would have been a farce.



I had sex with both of the men (alternately, not both at once), and it
was hot, sweet and satisfying even though all the orgasms were in my
dream, not in my body.  Perhaps the best part of it was that
neither of them seemed uncomfortable or hostile in the presence of the
other.  That has been the opposite of my experience in all the
real-life threesomes in my life.  “Triangle” in human relations
terms is a word at best uncomfortable.



But sex wasn’t the theme of the dream.  It was at most a
subplot.  The “bed” was a converted sofa stretched out into the
traffic pattern in a living room where people were continually coming
and going, around the foot of our bed, in and out an exterior door
nearby and up and down stairs to the next floor. 



A party was going on, celebrating some criminal triumph.  My
lovers were wiseguys, made men, and I use the term “lovers” in the full
sense of the word.  They sweet-talked me, lavished on me flowers,
candy and jewels as well as foreplay.  I cuddled and cooed with
one for a while, then the other one crawled into the bed and I snuggled
with him while the first one joined the rest of the party.  One or
the other one was there pleasing, amusing and diverting me the whole
time.



I suppose I should mention that one of the “lover” roles was played by
Sylvester Stallone and the other one was Nicolas Cage.  In real
life, Nic Cage is perhaps my favorite actor and Sly Stallone is a
posturing idiot who can’t act at all.  In the dream that didn’t
seem to make any difference to me.



Then the cops raided the party and the farcical nature of the dream
kicked up a big notch.  Suffice it to say there was widespread
general consternation.  I was ordered out of the bed and had a
moment of discomfort at the thought that I was naked, then I looked
down and discovered that I was fully clothed.  The old switcheroo.

The interpretation:

It’s seldom wise to try and
interpret someone else’s dream.  The symbolic language of dreams is an
individual matter.  A snake, for example may mean fear or evil to one
person and represent wisdom or stealth to another.  I’ve written about
many dreams here, but I have interpreted only a few of them.  The ones
I interpret are those about which someone asks if I know what it means
or those that someone tries to interpret for me.  I don’t routinely
parse every dream I blog for the same reasons I don’t routinely walk
around naked in public or carry around my FBI file and show it to all
and sundry.  Here is what I get from this one:

First, everyone in the dream is me.  The me in the folded-out
improvised temporary bed with the two men is my primary awareness, my
everyday consciousness.  Sly Stallone plays the role of my shadow
side, the aggressive, blind, stupid, hot-tempered part of me I’m not
comfortable with.  I wasn’t really comfortable with him in that
bed either, not as comfortable as I was with the Nic Cage
character.  But I couldn’t deny him and he did have a lot of
seductive power over me, besides offering me a lot of tempting but not
good for me goodies such as candy, and flowers to which I’m allergic.

The other one is the part of my masculine side that serves me well and
pleases me, as well as some masculine traits I wish I were better at
expressing.  He’s my strength and assertiveness, rationality (such
as it is) and also my quest for more self-sufficiency.  The way I
was relating to him in the dream and the way he kept wandering away
makes this apparent.  He’s the one who brought me the jewels, and
he was less demonstrative, less verbally seductive than the other
guy.  I was always pleased to see him come back around, more so
than with the other guy.   And that’s how it is with
me.  I more or less accept that I’m sometimes an aggessive asshole
or oblivious to my surroundings, but I’m not proud of it.

Sometimes they were both there with me, but usually it was one or the
other of them with me and the other one off circulating with everyone
else.  We had some interactions with others at the party, were
generally aware of what was going on around us.  We seemed to be
much more aware of the others than they were of us.  Mostly they
just wandered by and barely noticed us, hardly cared that we were there
or what we were doing.  The exceptions were when someone needed
information or help.  Otherwise, we were ignored.  That, too,
is life.  Most of the time around here it is just me, myself, and
I, until I get drawn out for some reason.  Usually, I’m contented
with that.

Then the cops showed up.  Everyone in the dream is me.  The
cops are my internal censor, my parental programming, cultural
“shoulds” and “musts” and “have tos”.  The party disintegrated
into chaos.  We’d been having a good time until conventional shit
intruded.  Everyone was screaming and scurrying around.  My
two guys just disappeared.  All that was left was “me”, the usual
self I live with and know best, the persona in which I feel most
comfortable.  But that’s not ME, not all there is to me. 
It’s just the socially acceptable mask.

And that’s what that switcheroo at the end was all about.  I’ve
had many dreams throughout my life in which everything was going along
normally until I looked down and realized I was naked.  In those
dreams my reactions to my public nudity ranged over time from
embarrassed attempts to cover up into eventual nonchalance and
comfort.  Eventually there was one in which I was nude and at ease
among a fully-dressed crowd, and
I was the only one who realized I was naked.  This time, I thought
I was naked, but when I checked I was all covered up.  This tells
me I need to pay more attention to all that unconscious
culturally-programmed bullshit and make a greater effort to express my
whole self.

---

Ooops, almost forgot the Iditarod
update.  Fifty-one mushers have now finished, the latest of them
being Dallas Seavey, the 18-year-old who ran both Jr. Iditarod and
Iditarod this year, setting three records as first ever to run both in
the same year and youngest person ever to enter and finish the Iditarod.

Thirteen mushers remain on the trail, with Perry Solmonson in last place out of Koyuk.

Today’s AK program on public radio focused on Iditarod trail food,
focusing on Brown’s Cafe where the elite meet to eat in
Unalakleet.  Libby Riddles mentioned it in her book about her win,
because she took half of her steak dinner with her and ate it as she
mushed through the blizzard that had pinned down all her competition.

Several mushers spoke about what they eat, ranging from junk food like
chips and chocolate bars, through gorp and dehydrated mountaineer
meals, to Charlie Boulding who subsists and nourishes his dogs on dried
Yukon River red salmon. 

The reporter said that “cooking” on the trail consists of pouring
alcohol into a bucket, igniting it, placing a smaller bucket filled
with water into the flaming bucket of alcohol and boiling… whatever.

A Twofer –

First:

WORDS

words, words, words….

I could probably let it pass, but where’s the fun in that? 
To

get

the maximum satisfaction out of this bloggy thing before the

government

curtails my freedom of speech, I must gainsay the claims made by one

of

my commentors in defense of “school”.

I’m assuming she

referred

to public elementary education because her argument about “basic

knowledge” does not seem to

apply to college or university, nor entirely to secondary

school.  However, on further reflection, there’s no way that

elementary school could teach even a gifted student enough “basic

knowledge” so that he wouldn’t have to learn more specialized terms
and

concepts as he explored various subjects.  Even one or two

university courses on a science won’t present everything a person
might

want to know about it.

Although I gainsay her statement as a whole, I cannot dispute that it

might be true for some
people.  There are broad individual

differences in learning styles.  Perhaps the writer is
speaking as

one who needs structure and needs to be force-fed
information. 

Where she went astray was in using the word “you” in addressing that

comment to me. 

There has never been anything I did not want to

know.  I want it all.  I’m interested in everything,
but at

any given time I’m focused on some things more than on others, and

those areas of focus are not determined by what someone else wants me

to learn.

As a small child, when I asked Spirit what my purpose in life is, the

Voice Within told me it is to learn as much as I can.  I have
not

pursued that goal to perfection.  I have occasionally slacked

off.  But I did something when I was fourteen years old that I
do

not doubt led me to broader and deeper knowledge than I would have

gained otherwise:  I dropped out of high school. 
School had

been slowing me down.  The lock-step learning promoted in
schools

kept presenting me with things I already knew, while monopolizing my
time and preventing me from

exploring beyond those bounds.

It would have been pointless, back then, to teach me a lot of technical
jargon in all

the sciences.  Some of it would have been forgotten through
disuse

before I’d found a need for it and integrated it into my conceptual

framework.  In truth, even after I’d gotten my GED and
enrolled in

college, I found far too much repetition and too little depth in the

courses I was allowed to take.  There is that foolish matter
of

“prerequisites”:  courses one must have taken before one can
take the

course one wants.  Libraries and search engines do not
practice

such foolishness, and they both provide dictionaries so that I may
fill

in the jargon gaps.

Learning my way, at my own speed in the directions I choose, has
always

benefited me.  I suppose missbehaves doesn’t know this because
she

hasn’t read my memoirs, but when I took my GED test in my mid-twenties

after a decade out of school, the test proctor said he was sorry he
was

only authorized to give me credit for twelve years of
education. 

My scores indicated the equivalency of twenty years — something on
the

order of a double doctorate.  I know beyond question that I’d
not

have learned so much in school in that time.

I have, by the way, heard that argument for school before.  It
is

a specious, spurious after-the-fact rationization for the existence of

a basically flawed and fundamentally misguided institution that has

outlived its usefulness.  Our education system was intended
to

produce a literate and numerate work force for the mills and factories

of the Industrial Revolution.  This week on public radio’s

TechNation

program Moira Gunn interviewed Henry Jenkins, Director of the

Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, author of Rethinking
Media Change and Democracy
and New Media.  In that
interview,

where he talked about how video games can revolutionize education, he

demonstrated merely by his existence that there are some good minds
and

progressive ideas

in academia, but his whole premise focused on the need for radical

change there.

---

…and then –

Iditarod
Update

In

the latest standings, 39 mushers had gotten into Nome. 
Harmony

Barron made it in the money ($2,193.33), in twenty-ninth place, just

ahead of her husband Jason who wins $1,880 (pictured here loving on

some of his dogs with the same lips he presumably uses to kiss his

wife).  Harmony’s father-in-law, John Barron, came in at 31st

place, getting a share of the “losers’ purse” that will be more than

$1,200.  The final amount won’t be known until the last
finisher

picks up the red lantern in Safety and carries it to Nome.

Jessie Royer, in eighth place, was the first woman into Nome this
year.  Her prize is $35,511.11.

Dee Dee Jonrowe was tenth, Aliy Zirkle eleventh.  Jessica
Hendricks came in at fifteenth and Melanie Gould at 23rd.  Diana
Moroney at 27th place and Trine Lyrek at 37th round out the women who
have finished thus far.  It is Trine’s first Iditarod finish, and
she’s the top female rookie this year.

The top rookie among the men was Bjornar Andersen in fourth place.

In Nome Mitch Seavey, who finished third, was asked what had
contributed to his speed this year.  He said it was his son,
Tyrell, who finished in sixteenth.  Mitch said that at every
checkpoint in the latter part of the race, they’d tell him that Tyrell
was coming up in the standings and,”I couldn’t let that punk beat me.”

This year’s trail was unusually rough, especially on the
back-of-the-pack who had to mush through soft slushy snow that had been
churned up by the teams ahead of them.  There were a record number
of scratches (voluntary withdrawals from the race), but few of the
physical injuries that have been common in other years.  Another
difference I noticed was in the mood of many of the mushers.  I
heard less of the upbeat humor that I’m accustomed to in the interviews
from checkpoints.  Even before the race started, many of the top
mushers were expressing disgust and dismay at seeing the serious
competition eclipsed by the gee-whiz hype surrounding a neurotic rookie
who proved in the end to not even make it to the end.

It isn’t over yet.  There are still 23 teams on the trail, all of
them hurrying along the Bering Sea coast between Shaktoolik and
Nome.  Shane Goosen currently has last position, but he’s had it
before and managed to pass a few others, so the Red Lantern Award is
not yet decided.

---

On second thought,
I’ll make it a threefer.

ANWR

The sneaky Republican majority in United States Senate slipped approval
of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into a budget
bill because they knew they didn’t have the requisite margin of votes
to pass it the right way.

I heard our idiotic Governor Murky trying to rationalize it by talking
about paying money to the “bad guys” for Arabian Gulf oil.  Never
mind that if all Americans would simply inflate their tires properly
we’d save as much gasoline as there is under ANWR.  Never mind
hydrogen fuel cells, electric cars and hybrid vehicles.  Never
mind.  My home state (or at least its administration and
congressional delegation) is the property of the oil companies, and
everything they say is said in the interest of increasing their profits.

I’m going to stop right here.  I’m too pissed off to be entirely coherent about this.

 

…better than going to school.

Google is better than going to school.  That’s the thought I
had this afternoon as I was using my unexpectedly free Thursday to
follow up on some things I’d been wondering about.

I didn’t learn much in school.  Relatively speaking, I mean, I
have learned much more on my own, out of school, than I ever was taught
by anyone.

The basics of math and reading I learned from my father, at my request,
before I started to kindergarten.  He never planned to “teach”
me.  He just held me on his lap in the evenings after work as my
mother was cooking supper, and answered my questions as I pointed to
words in the newspaper.

Numbers, I picked up that way too.  When I wanted to know how he
did the adding and subtracting for the plans he drew, we sat at that
same kitchen table with a bowl of cherries.  Two cherries out of
the bowl onto the table, and then two more and then count them all –
then one cherry into each of our mouths, and I’d learned 2+2=4 and
4-2=2.  I love both cherries and math. 

[Aside:  I managed to hang onto
that love of math despite all the best efforts of a couple of bad
teachers to make me hate it.  One doddering old fart in eighth
grade algebra used to send me to the principal's office for correcting
the mistakes he made in the equations he wrote on the blackboard. 
That didn't stop me.  Each time I saw him chalk it out wrong, I'd
start gathering up my books and papers, then raise my hand.  Even
at that young age I was more into truth than political
correctness.  And, of course, after the first time he punished me
because I was right and he was wrong, it became a fun game to me to see
how often I could do it  I'll bet none of his other students paid as much attention to him as I did.].


Geology, geophysics, seismology, tectonics and associated fields are of great
interest to me.  There’s a shortcut in my browser’s toolbar to NEIC, the National
Earthquake Information Center, so that I can quickly get the location and other
details of every earthquake I feel.  I subscribe to the BIGQUAKE  notification service so I’ll get immediate emails about every significant seismic event on the planet.

BIGQUAKE is the reason for today’s Googletrip.  In recent months,
I noticed a series of quakes centered along the East Pacific
Rise.  That’s a place that fascinates me.  It’s the planet’s
fastest area of seafloor spreading.  More new crust is formed
there than anywhere.  I don’t suppose I’ll ever get a chance to
visit it, but if I were a sea animal, I’d be a galatheid crab living in
a wormfield by a black smoker on the East Pacific Rise.  Imagine
living and thriving in boiling water!

Today, I finally got around to searching for recent news and detailed
info on the Rise.  One of my discoveries is that Garner Ted
Armstrong, on his End Times website, has a list of recent big
earthquakes.  I found a lot of things, including the fact that
right now the Rise is not as active as it had been a few months
ago.  I saw that there had been a big quake there three days
before the Dec. 26th quake and tsunami in Indonesia.  Between
those two, there was a big one off Macquarie Island. 

It’s all connected, y’know?  Long ago, I noticed that swarms of
quakes along the rise are followed by swarms of quakes here on the
northern edge of the Pacific Plate.  That makes sense, eh? 
New crust formed down there has to go somewhere.  It pushes the
Pacific Plate up this way, where it forces itself under the North
American Plate.  That’s why this ground is so shaky, and it’s
related to the fact that we have Denali, the big mountain otherwise
known as McKinley, and several active volcanoes.

One of the things I found today was a technical paper, Imaging the transition between the
region of mantle melt generation and the crustal magma chamber beneath
southern East Pacific Rise with short-period Love waves,
by Robert A. Dunn and Donald W. Forsyth.  I know those guys didn’t
write that for me.  They wrote it for geophysicists.  I don’t
even have time to finish reading it today, because I have to keep
stopping to look up words I don’t understand, but that’s okay. 
I’m learning all those new words and when I get the jargon of
geophysics then I can start putting it all together.

Here’s a sampling of some of what I learned today:


asthenosphere The weak or “soft”
zone in the upper mantle just below the lithosphere
, involved in plate movement and isostatic adjustments. It
lies 70 to 100 km below the surface and may extend to a depth
of 400 km. Corresponds to the seismic low-velocity zone
.

I learned about Pierre Bouguer and the Bouguer correction:

“The adjustment to a measurement of gravitational acceleration to account for elevation and the density of rock between the measurement station and a reference level. It can be expressed mathematically as the product of the density of the rock, the height relative to sea level or another reference, and a constant, in units of mGal:”

…and the Bouguer gravity anomaly:

“Strictly interpreted, the Bouguer correction is added to the known value of gravity at the reference station to predict the value of gravity at the measurement level. The difference between the actual value and the predicted value is the gravity anomaly, which results from differences in density between the actual Earth and reference model anywhere below the measurement station. ” (source: Oilfield Glossary)

Neat name, Bouguer, isn’t it?  I can imagine the snickers if one
were to try to teach a class of jr. high students about his work.

“Love waves” sorta got my attention, too.

A Love wave is a
surface wave having a horizontal motion that is transverse (or
perpendicular) to the direction the wave is traveling. (USGS)

Dunn and Forsyth were investigating anomalies, observations that
did not conform to expectations.  They found that the Pacific
Plate (west of the Rise) is moving more slowly away from the area of
spreading than is the Nazca Plate to the East, and that temperatures
under the Nazca Plate in that area are higher than under the Pacific
Plate — or was it the other way round?  Damn you Liz Dexia! 
I’ll have to read it again.  I guess I should take notes.

No Town Trip Today

I was ready — as ready as I ever am to leave the comforts of home and
venture down the valley into the traffic and pollution.  There are
attractions there, sure.  There’s Greyfox:  that’s a big
attraction.  And there are stores where I can get the things that
have been piling up on the shopping list for the last two weeks since
the last town trip.  This time, there’s also a bonus, a $100 gift
certificate Greyfox won in a drawing, from Builder’s Bargains. 
The plan is to use it to get materials to fix the leaky roof — again.

Still, those attractions are there every day but they don’t get me out
of here and across those fifty miles to town.  What impels me down
the valley to Wasilla every two weeks is my commitment to drive that
van from the rehab ranch to the NA meeting.  I volunteered to do
it and I mean to keep my commitments.  *sigh*  I blew it
again.

This winter, I have missed about as many of those every-other-Thursday
appointments as I have kept.  On the one hand, it means that when
I do show up the rehab clients are really glad to see me -there’s
nobody to take my place when I can’t make it.  The woman who
drives on those Thursdays between mine has missed her turn a few times
this winter, too.  When all goes well, the ranchers get two NA
meetings a week:  one H&I meeting on Monday there in the
institution, and one outside meeting on Thursday.  This winter,
they’ve been getting about one outside meeting a month.  AA is
available more often, but some of them don’t relate to alcoholics as
well as they do to us dope fiends.  They appreciate it when they
can get it.

On the other hand, I have this thing about keeping commitments. 
For the first thirty years or so of my life, it wasn’t any big
deal.  Promises were made to be broken, I’d been told.  I cut
myself a lot of slack.  Then I got involved in that weekly therapy
group run by the junkies of the Family House program.  They taught
me the importance of keeping my commitments and the connection between
that and self-esteem.  My self-image always did take a hit every
time I broke a promise or made one I knew I couldn’t keep, but I was in
denial about that for the first half of my lifetime.  I know
better now.

That’s why I got that sinking feeling when I turned the key in the
ignition switch and nothing happened.  And I’d just gotten a warm
fuzzy feeling because the left front tire that usually goes flat
between trips hadn’t gone flat this time.  Ups, and downs…
that’s the way it goes.  I checked wires, cleaned battery posts,
did every little thing I could think of.  Then while I kept trying
to call Ray, the neighborhood mechanic, Doug took the voltmeter out and
determined that the battery is dead.  It’s a new battery, got it
same time I got the new alternator last fall.  It has gone dead
before, but never at the same time that the tire goes flat.  They
take turns, I guess, like my alternate driver and me, and once in a
while one of them misses a turn, too.

Greyfox is coming up tomorrow, he said, to bring groceries and
jump-start the car.  Two weeks from now, I’ll try again to get to
town.

Either / Or

Either the little blind dog driver from Oregon realized it would be
just too much work and hardship to try to get to Nome before the
alloted time expires (back-of-the-pack mushers have a limited time to
finish before checkpoints are closed after the race is won), OR she
felt she had already milked the event for all the publicity and
attention it was worth, OR her father decided it was time to cut their
losses and skip out, OR [insert your own gratuitous speculation here].

Rachael Scdoris and her minder/keeper/seeing-eye-musher/”visual
interpreter” Paul Ellering scratched at Eagle Island shortly after
Robert Sorlie won.  Now I wonder.  They must have known
within a few days of starting that they had no chance to win
the race.  Unless that whole crew is way out of touch with reality
(a real possibility), they knew it before the race started.  So
what happened, I wonder? 

In public statements she has always said it was her ambition to
complete the 1,100 mile Last Great Race.  Now it looks as if she
is going to content herself with having bullied her way into the race
on her own twisted terms by threatening a lawsuit under the Americans
with Disabilities Act, and hogging the international spotlight for ten
days as dozens of real-life mushers went to Nome.

Her father, who last year did all the talking for her, must have
realized from the media criticism he received (more than one outlet
called him a “stage mother”), that he’d better yield center stage to
her.  We’ve seen and heard nothing from him up here this
year.  However, it appears unlikely that Rachael has been speaking
for herself.  She has an agent.  She declined several
invitations for local talk shows, reading prepared statements over the
phone instead.  On camera during the race, she appealed for
sympathy by showing her ouchies, but if she had much to say not many
media outlets (at least none of the ones I’ve been following) saw fit
to broadcast or quote her words.

Doug Swingley, another visually impaired musher, finished yesterday
about 5 PM, in fourteenth place.  Doug has a reputation as an
honest man.  He said that Rachael can see as well as he can, and I
am inclined to believe him.  There were a number of times out on
the trail when she was as much as half an hour or more ahead of her
guide.  It’s quite possible she could have entered and finished
the race on the same terms as every other team, but that wouldn’t have
gotten her all that attention and publicity for her book.

Some of the more gushingly delusional foreign (Outside of Alaska)
reporters have referred to her efforts as inspirational.  Oh,
Heaven forfend!  Please!  This is not a role model I’d like
to see the youth of the world emulating.  Let’s put it in the
Olympic context:  faster, higher, stronger.  The idea is to
challenge oneself to excel, not to try to bring the entire game down to
one’s level.  Some inspired beings had the vision to create the
Special Olympics.  Maybe Rachael’s father should be working to
organize a Visually-Impaired Iditarod.

I’ll be back with a few more gleanings from musher interviews I’ve
heard, the details on how the women did (right now, Harmony Barron is
hanging in there at 30th place), and the final word on who wins the Red
Lantern.  For now, I have to get ready to go to town.  It’s
my turn to drive the rehab van to the NA meeting tonight, and I have to
air up my tire and all that before I can get on the road.  Seeya
later.

Quick update:

The Iditarod is won but not over.  As of latest update, about 3 PM

our time, seven men had finished:  Sorlie, Iten, Seavey (Mitch, of

course), Andersen, Brooks, Baker and Lance Mackey.  The next three

mushers out of Safety are women:  Jessie Royer, Dee Dee Jonrowe

and Aliy Zirkle.  Following them out of Safety was Martin

Buser.  Martin is down to six dogs, and so was Sorlie at the

finish.

Harmony Barron has passed her father-in-law John and is now in 30th

place, right behind her husband Jason.  Guess who is bringing up

the rear.  Paul and Rachael checked into Eagle Island four days

after Robert Sorlie did.  Sorlie’s run to Eagle Island from the

restart in Willow took him 6 days, and it has taken Ellering and

Scdoris ten days to travel that same distance.  If they can

maintain that pace, they’ll get to Nome in about a week.