I haven't been moving around much.  It has rained a lot lately.  A couple of days ago, when a heavy downpour hit suddenly, I grabbed an umbrella and ran out to cover the tadpole pans so they wouldn't overflow.  I wasn't feeling tiptop before that, was stumbling and fumbling a lot - "sensorimotor deficits."  Ever since that quick trip - calling it running is wrong, I don't run - I have had a screaming pain in my hip joint whenever I put weight on my right leg. 

Today, the sun came out again.  On my way to the outhouse early this afternoon, movement and color caught my eye.  A spider with an abdomen as big around as a quarter was dangling about eye-level off the edge of the cabin roof.  I came back in and got my camera, watched the spider go up and down on it's silken string, gathering the silk as it climbed, adding it to the bundle a few feet above my head, and spinning a new string down to ground level before gathering that one up.  I shot 54 images of it, and saved 11 of them.  Variously lit, from all angles, for a while they can be found in my photo module, and later on in the "Bugs" photo album.

Since I was already out there, I moseyed over to Tadpole Ranch, took
the lids off the north forty and the south forty, watched the froglets
swim around, then headed out to see how the Baby Huey rhubarb is doing
(big and green).  On the path through the woods, between this shady end
of the yard and the sunny south edge where the garden plot is, I
spotted lots of new fungi, and shot a few of them.

The hip hadn't stopped hurting, still catches me by surprise tonight when I move it or put weight on it, but the sunshine was too pleasant to miss, so I took off out the cul de sac.  In all, on today's little walk I captured 104 images.  I uploaded twenty-some choice examples, including a couple of wide shots that show the first hints of fall color, and one picture of a clump of fireweed that has totally bloomed out and started shedding seed.  This is the end of summer.

As I was coming back toward home, a dragonfly posed for me.  I
approached the rock where it was resting, and it flew... around me and
landed again on the same rock.  It did that four times before I got the
perfect shot of it and moved on.

After I turned the corner and was walking along the edge of the road, looking down at the bunchberries,  I noticed that a lot of them show signs of having been sampled by something -- maybe birds, maybe insects.  I have been finding lots of little downy feathers floating in the tadpole pans, suggesting that birds have been bathing there.  I've also seen some small seeds, apparently from berries, in the pans.  I don't think the tadpoles went out and got them, so birds are the suspects there, too.

I was keeping my eyes open for ripe lingonberries, "lowbush cranberries" to Alaskans, but most of them were not ready to eat.  Then I struck it rich:  BLUEBERRIES!  They are too good to pass up when they are right out there by the road and easy to get without a long trek across rough ground.  The handful at right includes a few ripe lowbush I found, a bunch of bunchberries, and some sweet orange things whose name I don't recall.

I had eaten a few handfuls of mixed berries and moseyed on toward home when I noticed a thicket of rosebushes with ripe hips.  A couple of mouthfuls of their sweet mushy flesh and I was ready for a tart, juicy, palate cleansing handful of blueberries, so I doubled back and waded through the brush for more blues.  Oh, my!  The berries were more than worth the effort.  YUM!

It was a pleasant walk, despite the pain.  This is so very much preferable to sitting indoors watching through the window as the seasons change.  What right would I have to miss summertime if I didn't get out in it while I had it?  

Sometimes I'm disgusted over my own semantic sloppiness.  Other times, I'm appalled at my ignorance.  I have observed that I am a lot quicker to correct the latter than the former, but I haven't a clue why that might be true.  Wait a minute... maybe I do have a clue.  I know that our brains secrete a little jolt of dopamine every time we learn a new fact and make a new neural connection.  If there is no equivalent spot of pleasure for correcting an error, perhaps that explains my recalcitrance.

Anyhow, one of my semantic trouble spots involves "healthy" versus "healthful."  I use the word, "healthy," frequently, and "healthful" is barely in my working vocabulary, even though I am clear on the differences and probably have as many occasions to use "healthful," or even more of them, than times when "healthy" is the proper usage.  "Healthy" comes trippingly off the tongue, and therefore from the keyboard, while "healthful" does not.  I refer to a healthy diet, and can rationalize that it's approximately correct.  Calling it healthful would probably be closer to what I mean when I say it, but... oh, well, so what?

Strictly speaking, a person, plant, or animal can be healthy - possessing or exhibiting health.  Attitudes, weight ranges, successful strategies, and the like, can also be "healthy."  Diets, environments, and other things which produce or promote health are more correctly called "healthful."  This culture tends to overuse "healthy," to mean other things such as robust, hardy, successful, etc.  There's another word that has, in some minds, become synonymous with healthy, which has some insidious connotations and dangerous repercussions when used that way.

I have questioned people on their usage of "normal," and have discovered in many cases that they think "normal" means something akin to okay, acceptable, or healthy.  Recent research has revealed that 61% of American adults are overweight.  That statistical majority means that obesity is the norm.  It is definitely normal, in this society, to be too fat for health, just as it is normal (statistically average or in the majority) to have some form of insanity or psychopathology and not to have sought or received treatment for it.  The fact that it is normal to be that way does not mean that the normal individual is healthy.  It means that the society is sick.
 

I knew, when I wrote about squeamishness and the ability to control one's reactions to various things, that some readers would disagree, but I wasn't sure anyone would come out and say it.  I had questioned whether anyone would agree with me, but I was pretty sure that if the piece was read by someone who had knowledge or experience in that area, I might get a comment.  I was pleased to see that there were both agreement and disagreement in the comments (sometimes both in the same comment), and questions, too.  Questions that challenge me, that make me think deeper or go digging for data, are the most enjoyable part of blogging for me.

Of course, I grossly oversimplified everything I wrote yesterday about squeamishness, didn't bring up the physiological and neurochemical aspects.  Only because some of the comments brought it up am I going to address those details now.  My central thesis still holds:  we can control that stuff.  Yogis consciously control their heart rates, body temperatures, and other supposedly autonomic responses.  Martial artists are another class of people who exert a great deal of control over their autonomic responses.  Studies have shown that we flighty, harried and impatient westerners can be quickly trained, through biofeedback techniques, to do the same things, without the lifetime of practice it takes to become adept at Yoga or martial arts.  Some of us, if the intention is clear and the motivation is strong, won't even need the biofeedback. 

i think a lot of people are reluctant to control their feelings; they
think it's a sort of self-betrayal... i encountered a lot of that in
rehab, some within myself, and i suspect you've seen it a lot too.
people think their urges and reactions are the truest parts of
themselves sometimes, which i suspect you will find silly.

i'm always guessing your reactions to my comments. sorry.

this post made me hungry for nachos, somehow, still.

TheCrimsonNinja

Kyle, I adore your profile pic almost as much as she evidently adores you.  When I look at it, I see neuroelectrochemistry in action.  It's sweet.  Guessing is okay; I don't mind.  I won't let your guesses influence my reactions one way or the other.  Your urge for nachos is just natural suggestibility.  I have a lot of that regarding foods, too.  Some of the biggest challenges to my healthy dieting are visual representations of unwholesome foods, or things such as the red and white Coke logo.  Say the word, "chocolate," and I have to deal with the urge to eat some.  Which way I deal with it is my choice.

Yes, I have seen that reluctance to exert self-control that you mentioned.  We are complex creatures, even at our simple-minded best.  Speaking for myself, I have had to peel away layer after layer of rationalization and denial to get down to the basic drives and motivations underneath.  We can choose to identify with any part of that complex being and reject the rest, or we can accept it all and work to shape it toward our ideal.

Those who perceive controlling their feelings as self-betrayal are identifying with their feelings.  I see a lot of that with addicts.  We identify with our addictions and feel threatened by anything that could take away the addictive responses.  E. J. Gold calls this, "identifying with the sleep of the machine."  (I am referring to more than
substances, here, too.  We can be addicted to many things besides
drugs, and the subtler, "process," addictions are more insidious and
often harder to recognize, diagnose, and heal.)

I don't think it is "silly" to perceive one's electrochemically mediated perceptions as one's "self".  The life repercussions to that can be tragic.  Few of us are reared by parents who are hip enough to teach us otherwise.  Self-realization is not in the normal school curriculum.  Religious and political authorities have vested interests in keeping us ignorant and relatively easily controlled, and the livelihoods of everyone in advertising and the media, as they now exist, are dependent on our ignorance and compliance.  Reality as defined in fairy tales and soap opera is the reality that favors the entrenched authority of those who would enslave us to their own purposes.

The particular example of conscious control over the reflexes of "squeamishness" might seem to some to be unrelated to politics, but in general principles I see the same dynamics working here as Erich Fromm noted in Escape from Freedom in 1941.  Many people are afraid to take responsibility for their own thoughts, feelings and behavior.  That fear is such a horrible trap!  By making excuses such as, "I can't help it," or, "I couldn't help myself," we relinquish our power and perpetuate our helplessness.  While it is true that we might evade blame in the eyes of those who know no better, we never fully evade the consequences of our choices.

Code words come in handy as a standardized way to say something generic about a situation or set of feelings without going into detail, or as a preface before going into detail.  Using them that way, we invest ordinary phrases with special significance.  In the therapy group that turned my life around in a few months, back more than half its span ago, the words, "I've been having a hard time," signaled some heavy emotional dumping and a need for supportive feedback.  In many relationships, "We need to talk," is often more difficult to say than to hear, though neither party exactly relishes the bad news or controversy those words signal.  Thing is, code words only carry meaning when all parties understand what they signal.  Otherwise, they may convey no message at all, or one that wasn't intended.

I tried out half a dozen... more than half a dozen titles for this entry.  The first (A Rough Patch) was a code phrase I then realized wouldn't mean much to most readers, and the rest were more or less inadequate or inaccurate, so I borrowed an idea from someone who has taught me a lot, Dick Sutphen, who occasionally will pause in the middle of a speech or lesson, to say, "...and all of that is true, unless it isn't."  I just don't know what is significant in the long run, or what will eventually turn out to be not the way I now perceive things to be.

Two days ago, I bit into a crunchy tortilla chip, part of a plate of homemade nachos with jalapeños, and something went snap in my mouth.  It was the remaining half of my right upper bicuspid.  The tooth was split down the middle from trauma cracks and dentists' drilling, and the inner half of it had been causing me a lot of pain when I ate, before it became loose enough for me to work it out with my fingers.  That was over five years ago, in the first weeks that I was keeping this blog.  I wrote about it then.

The outer cusp of that bicuspid stayed firmly rooted in my jaw until this Friday when it broke loose with that snapping sound and a jolt of pain.  It hung in there and wiggled and wagged, and I avoided solid foods for a day before I made up my mind it had to go, resigned myself that there was no point in delaying the inevitable, and tore it out.  I use the word, "tore," because that's what I did.  I tried pulling, but it adhered.  It took some lateral motion and a bit of a twist to get it out of there, and it came with a tearing sound.

The night before, in our regular evening phone call, Greyfox had gone all squeamish about it as he usually does about such things.  He said he couldn't stand to hear about it, so I told him if he wouldn't ask me about it, I'd say no more except to report when I had finally gotten it out.  He asked, of course, the next morning, but at that time I had no progress to report.  When I did report having removed the tooth (half tooth), he had other things on his mind and barely commented.

Anyhow, I got to thinking about squeamishness.  It was never a tremendously notable part of my character, and I have grown less squeamish as I have become more accepting and less judgmental.  I asked Doug, "What's the opposite of squeamishness?"  He was online and looked it up, but found no antonyms listed.   Merriam-Webster says "squeamish" means:

To Doug, I expressed my puzzlement:  "I wonder why people choose to be squeamish."  He guessed that they couldn't help it, and I quashed that idea immediately.  As soon as I said it was a choice and the reaction could be controlled, he assented to the truth of that, and had no further input as to the motivations for squeamishness, except to speculate that maybe some people didn't know that they could control their feelings.

The "nausea" connection reminded me of motion sickness.   I related a story Doug had probably heard before, about how, back in the 1940s, I used to ride in our old car, standing up on the floorboard behind the front seats, holding onto the loop of strap I suppose had been put there to help people pull themselves up and out of a two-door coupe.  On winding mountain roads, I would sway back and forth, looking through the back window at the road receding behind us.

On several occasions, that activity made me vomit.  My father told me to cut it out, so, of course, I cut it out.  Mind over matter:  it's what every guru teaches.  Some people, I guess, just haven't met their gurus... or their fathers never told them to cut it out.  As I see it, there is no positive payoff for that wrinkling of the nose and the "eeeeww" response, or the unattractive green around the gills look, the rapid retreat with hand held firmly over mouth (and vomitus streaming from the nostrils), or frank public upchucking.  Any possible payoff for such behavior is of the "negative" sort:  pity, attention, an excuse for malingering... neurotic shit like that, or an equally pathological belief that one is "above" the stark natural reality of dirt, unpleasant smells, scary thoughts or risky situations from which one quails.

I felt that I'd gotten "over the hump," past a major obstacle, a while back when I got rolling again on my memoirs with the story of my marriage when I was fourteen.   The latest hiatus was caused not by any problem recalling details of what happened, nor any reticence about telling them.  I couldn't, at first, figure out what to call it. 

One day, as I contemplated the story, I thought of titling it, "My First Suicide Attempt."   Then I said to myself, "Hey, wait a minute!  That one wasn't the first... remember those times in San Jose...."  That had been soon after my father died, when I was consumed with grief, and guilt for having wished him dead.  Several times, I held my breath into unconsciousness.  I had been warned against holding my breath, told you need to breathe to live, and I thought I could die by holding my breath.  I don't recall whether I've written about those incidents, but I suspect that I hadn't written about them because until now I hadn't recalled them.  I will have to go back, reread and maybe revise some past segments.

Back story for this episode is linked from my main page.  The narrative summary for that portion of my story directly preceding this episode goes like this: 

"Even though we didn't have to, "Ford" and I
got married, had an itty-bitty
honeymoon, and set up
housekeeping together.

Readers' reactions to that impelled me to post a little piece about neurochemistry and penis size."

About seven years after those first inept and ill informed attempts to kill myself, I tried again.  It was the day after my step-father picked me up from the hospital in Amarillo and took me back to his and my mother's house in Vernon.  I was alone in the house and felt like I was alone in the world.  It was as if the roof had fallen in on me.  My illusions were shattered,  my heart was broken... all those ridiculous clichés that people have devised to distance themselves from their true feelings.  As many people do, even ones a lot older, better educated, and presumably wiser than I was, I was using the fantasies of a broken heart and shattered illusions to cover up my personal sense of failure.

In truth, I was not disillusioned.  I still had plenty of illusions.  I was ready to take all the blame for the failure of my marriage.  For a few days, I had put my mother's needs ahead of my husband's, and he had turned to another woman.  Layer upon layer of denial and self-deception, blaming myself for my marriage's failure kept me from thinking that my mother had been right all along and we were too young to get married.  Bottom line:  I felt like I'd made a total mess of my life; what lay ahead for me was something I didn't want to think about.  I had learned a thing or two since those initial suicide attempts as a child.  I knew that holding my breath would make me pass out, lose consciousness, but that my lungs would then begin to work on their own and eventually I would wake up.  I decided that time I would poison myself. 

Poison hadn't been my first choice.  I had thought about shooting myself, but there were no guns in my mother's house.  I had heard of people slitting their wrists with razor blades.  There were razor blades in the bathroom.  I had never heard of, "hesitation marks," the scratches and shallow cuts that are often found on the arms of unsuccessful suicides and the bodies of suicides who try and fail a few times before eventually succeeding at bleeding themselves to death.  I made a few such marks on my arm, and soon realized that it was not going to be as easy as I had assumed it was to kill myself.

I started looking around for poison.  There were very few things in that house with the old skull and crossbones symbol on the label.  A tiny cardboard tray of grains dyed green with rat poison was under the sink.   It didn't look like enough to do much harm to a full size human, so I passed it up.  Knowing what I know now, I think it might have been more toxic than what I settled upon.

I found a quart bottle of rubbing alcohol, isopropyl, in the bathroom.  It wasn't completely full, but what I drank was probably close to thirty ounces.  I was unconscious in a puddle of vomit when they found me.  I woke in the emergency room of Christ the King Hospital, with a sore mouth and throat from the alcohol and a fiery trail from my right nostril down my gullet from the tube used for gastric lavage.

The nun attending me, Sister Diane, gave me a stern lecture before letting my mother in to see me.  She said that my baby might be born blind because of my "rash and selfish" act.  She said that if I had succeeded, my suicide would also have been murder of my child.  I hadn't even been  thinking about my unborn baby.  I was so focused on my fear and despair that I hadn't given a thought to my responsibility for the life I carried.  Sister Diane's admonishments did nothing to relieve my fear or give me any hope, but it did convince me that I had a reason to go on living.

I have often heard unsuccessful suicide attempts such as mine called, "plays for attention," or, "cries for help."  I remember wanting to die, wanting an easy way out of the mess I had made of my life.  I had been getting more attention than I wanted.  I was in a depressive withdrawal, and wanted to be left alone.  I didn't believe that anyone could help me.  I had killed my father, disappointed and alienated my husband, and endangered my unborn child.  I didn't deserve to live and had no right to die.  Right then, a month or so before my fifteenth birthday, I felt hopelessly trapped in an impossible situation.

Before I forget it again:  an anecdote from the last water run.  It slipped my mind after the encounter with the drunk pissing in the stream.

After carrying his first few loads of empty containers down to the waterhole from the car, Doug picked up something from the ground.  It was clothing made of formed plastic for a very small doll.  The little flexible shirt fit over the tip of his index finger.  He held it up to show me, saying, "I found a little rubber shirt."

Then he paused, looked around intently, turned back to me, and said, "It's torn off.  Maybe this was the site of a little rubber rape."

Yesterday I met Greyfox (above) at his stand at the regular Wednesday summer market on the grounds of the museum in Wasilla.  I took some photos, bought some produce (below), then went to complete my shopping before meeting Greyfox back at the market around closing time.

The shopping trip went well, relatively painlessly.  I found what I needed and got a few bargains.  Thinking I was finished after the supermarket, I went to the library, parked in the shade, checked out an armload of books, and read for a while.  The museum is next door to the library and shares a parking lot, with the grounds where the market is held being just across the alley behind both buildings.  The old building in the museum's "historical park" are historic cabins, barns, a sauna, schoolhouse, and such, from early Wasilla.

Also on display is the cabin that was built at Willow for the governor's residence after the voters decided to move the capital from Juneau.  The cabin became a historic relic when the voters learned what the move would cost and elected to leave it down there on the panhandle where it's relatively out of reach for most of us.  A few views of those buildings are in the background of the photos I took, such as the schoolhouse behind Greyfox up top and a barn, in the shot below of the produce stand where I bought my romaine.

After the library visit, sitting there in my car in the parking lot waiting for the market to end, I remembered that I hadn't gotten the tarps to fix the roof.  Rejecting the first few examples I found, finally at a builder's supply store I found some heavier duty tarps at a price below what I'd have paid for lesser ones at some other stores.  Greyfox was about ready to start packing up when I got back to the parking lot.  I followed him to La Fiesta, our favorite restaurant, and parked my little station wagon in the shade of his big minivan for the sake of the perishables in my car.

Dinner was excellent, the conversation pleasant, and afterward he followed me out to his place to load up some things that he had been acquiring for me  since my last visit.  I was fatigued by then, but I managed to trim his beard.  It is the first time I've done a public beard trim.  Our audience consisted of some of the neighbors.  The alcohol fueled comments from one of them, and my responses, provided a few laughs.

By the time I returned home, I was exhausted.  Doug put away the perishables and everything else is still bagged up and in the way in the kitchen.  I may not get it put away today.  My muscles are still burning from lactic acid, my ears are ringing distractingly loud, and my physical responses are slow and clumsy.  I need rest.  Rest is what I'm going to do.  PS2 and FF Tactics, here I come.

In June, serving time in Los Angeles for misdemeanor trespassing, Pedro Guzman, an American citizen, was illegally deported to Mexico.  He borrowed a phone and called his mother, so for the last two months his family has known what happened but they were unable to locate him.

The ACLU filed suit against the government over the illegal deportation, seeking help to find Guzman and return him to the U.S.   They didn't get it, but this Sunday when Guzman tried (not for the first time) to cross the border at Calexico, he was taken into custody and taken to Los Angles, where he was finally released.

I'm sure his family is glad he is home, but...

"They took him whole, but only returned half of him to me," she said. 

REUTERS

Hearing this story, after putting myself in Pedro's place, eating from garbage cans (done that), bathing in rivers (done that), and trying repeatedly to get back home through a border checkpoint (I've never had to do that.), for a fleeting instant I wondered, "What if that happened to me?"

It was, of course, an absurd thought.  I'm a freckle-faced redhead.  There may be a few people in this world who would like to see me deported to Hell, legally or not, but nobody is going to be sending me "back" to Mexico.

Oh, yeah, I'm so proud to be an American.

(PS - town trip today, gotta go get ready.)

Not much.

This is the time of year when things get moldy.  I'm allergic to mold.  There's indoor mold in winter, outdoor mold from July to snowfall.  It is the reason I take asthma meds, but at times the mold overcomes the meds.

After a week or so of rainy days, the sun was out today, and so was I.  I walked slowly, stopped frequently, and didn't go too deeply into the woods.  Only time I was in the woods was passing through my yard on the way to the road.  The undergrowth is so thick that even the regular animal trails are hard to walk.

I made it all the way out the cul de sac, and paid a visit to the moldering moose remains at the end of the road.  Someone has taken away the blue tarp that once wrapped the gutpile.  Animals have been gnawing and scattering the bones.  The calf's skeleton has disarticulated, no longer held together at the joints.  The cow's ribcage has collapsed, but her spine is still intact and her ear still upright on a hide-covered skull, but her ribs now mingle with the teeth of her lower jaw.

I poked around a bit, pulled the only remaining calf's leg with hooves uneaten out from under the cow's ribs, found the remaining foreleg of the cow among the weeds and carried both legs home where they will continue decomposing.  Probably by the time the snow melts next year the hooves will be clean enough to handle.  I'll either make something or give them to a carver - maybe to Dancing Bear to make knife handles. 

 I was rewarded for my poking about in the loose pile of fur where the gutpile used to be.  There, back among the brush and weeds, I found a bountiful crop of puffballs.  If I had gotten to them earlier, I would have picked a bunch to eat, but they are 'round the bend.  After the centers turn dark like that, they are nasty inside, going to spores.  My reward wasn't the puffballs, but just the lovely sight of them and a couple of decent images.

Additionally, I captured (photographically) two insects, a small cluster of vivid red bunchberries, a bunch of raindrops trapped in a spider's web, some images of mature largeleaf avens for the field guide at Flickr, some sky-and-clouds pictures, and probably more shots of a fern than were really necessary.  I just couldn't decide which fern shot I liked best.  The one up top was an arbitrary pick for a sample.   That fern I shot was a compromise.  Weeks ago, before things were so overgrown out there, I found an old giant of a fern and I wanted to shoot it.  I didn't because, a) I didn't have the energy to fight my way through the brush and weeds to where it is, and b) if I do, I should take Doug with me.  One of us can shoot the other beside (or amidst) the fern, to show scale.

Despite the breathing difficulties, and the not-too-sweet odor of the moose legs I hauled home (microscopic particles of which still reside in my nose), the real downer of the excursion was what the fireweed told me.  See how the long, pink, tubular seed capsules below the cluster of open blossoms outnumber the unopened buds above it?  That says summer is over half over.  I could use some more sunny days and warm weather.  I still haven't bought the tarps for this year's roof repair, so whenever the next town trip is, a high priority when I get home will be to get the tarps laid out and tied down on the roof.

There is also a herd of tadpoles at the ranch that are not yet frogs.  They need a little more time.  I scooped one of the largest ones into my hand a few days ago for a close inspection.  It has the visible beginnings of bones in its vestigial legs, but they are so tiny...  Actually, it's not just a single "herd" because the "ranch" consists of two pans.  I call them the north 40 and the south 40, in keeping with the ranching theme.  "Frog farm" is just too alliteratively cutesy, and besides, I was a West Coast girl.  Out west, we've got ranches.  I think Rana Ranch is just cutesy enough.

My favorite radio program has won national honors for the third year in a row.  I have always known that this was good radio, better than anything I'd heard anywhere else in the country.  It doesn't exactly surprise me that the members of Public Radio News Directors, Inc. (PRNDI) chose AK as the top news and public affairs program in the nation.  A number of my blogs have been inspired by things I heard on AK.  The
recent series on the World Eskimo Indian Olympics was suggested by an
AK segment.

Of course, the rest of the country also lacks a lot of the other wonderful things that many Alaskans take for granted.  AK's producers have plenty of sources of great material here, including Greyfox.  After I entered one of his poems in a statewide contest for him, without telling him I was doing so, he was interviewed for AK.  His poem didn't win the contest, but for a while people were stopping by his roadside stand, saying, "Hey, I heard you on the radio."  I think that got me off the hook for my sneaky act.

It pleases me, in a way, that the show's creators are gaining the
recognition they deserve, but I'm sorry that the rest of the country
has no radio of that quality.  One of the judges said of AK, "the quality of this program made me wish I lived in APRN’s broadcast area so I could listen to AK on a regular basis."  Horrors!   Next year, AK had better submit an episode in which they focus on bear maulings, hypothermia deaths, moose stompings, limbs amputated from frostbite, etc.   We still have new immigrants coming in who have heard about the jobs available in construction on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which was completed about thirty years ago. 

Hey, really, folks, the lifestyle is overrated, jobs are scarce, prices are high and you wouldn't want to live here, really.  You can hear AK on mp3 or by podcast.  Just click the button below.

This week's subject is suggested by HereAreLindasPhotos.

Magnificent Buildings

Magnificence is relative, isn't it, like everything else in this finite observable universe?

In my neighborhood, most permanent buildings (as opposed to mobile homes, which probably outnumber cabins) look like this one owned by my current husband and occupied by my ex:

Given such standards, the new Sheep Creek Lodge, erected almost twenty years ago to replace the rambling, low-ceilinged original that had been destroyed by fire, is pretty magnificent.

One of the most magnificent buildings in the area was the old Susitna Valley Jr./Sr. High School, destroyed by fire earlier this summer.  I'm sure the one they build to replace it will be even more magnificent.

The young man third from left above, is my son Doug, pre-beard, on his graduation day in 2001.

Despite having been born in a city (San Jose, CA) and having lived in a few of the mid-sized ones (Wichita, KS, Boulder, CO, Cheyenne, WY, Tacoma, WA, etc.) and visited places like Phoenix, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Seattle and San Francisco, I was usually just in a hurry to get out of the city, and have few photos of the buildings there.

The most magnificent buildings I have ever seen were in ruins when I saw them.

The photo above was taken on Greyfox's and my honeymoon.  My Old Fart is the guy second from left with the cane, and Doug is the distant figure at far right, making his stealthy getaway from the tour group to descend the ladder into a kiva at Spruce Tree House, Mesa Verde.

There is Doug again, in profile through the window, reading the guidebook at Casa Rinconada, Chaco Canyon.