The words, "fame and fortune," just seem to go together.  As a kid, I always thought it would be okay to be rich and famous.  I didn't have any clear idea about what I might do that would make me rich and famous, which may be one of the reasons it never happened.

By the time I was forty, I had achieved some minor local fame, at least to the extent that my name and face were recognized by a certain circle of people, mostly local psychics, metaphysical fans, entertainers, vendors, and fairgoers who saw me year after year in my booth doing readings at festivals and fairs from Girdwood to Talkeetna.

I felt good about that.  It seemed to be a pretty good way to be recognized.  I had wanted to demystify psychic work, put it in the public eye, and the success I had at that was gratifying.  Then, about the time my kid started to school a series of little incidents occurred that demonstrated to me that while I'd been gaining some small recognition there, I had accidentally become famous notorious, for something quite different.

Doug was in first grade and I was helping out at his school's fundraising carnival.  Suddenly, from across the crowded gym, I heard a piercing voice call out, "It's the fruit bar lady!"  As I froze, cringing, the mother of one of his classmates waved to me over the heads of a collection of teachers, kids, and other parents, several other people noticed which way she was waving, turned, recognized me, and the whole half dozen or so of them converged on me.

It caused me some minor consternation.  The damned fruit bars, or FUBARS among friends, came from a recipe I invented during the halcyon days following the Raven Decision, when Cannabis was legal in Alaska.  Their popularity endured and even increased after recriminalization, because they provided an unobtrusive way to consume the sacred herb in public.  Among my regular customers, for a while, before mandatory piss tests, I had two state troopers.  At state fairs, boothies and carnival ride jockeys loved fruit bars for their long-lasting effects and the ease of pulling one out of a pocket and eating it without needing to go hide somewhere.

They were nutritious, too.  I suppose there are worse things to be recognized for.  Imagine someone waving at you across a crowded room and yelling, "There's that famous safe cracker," or "It's that woman who goes around shooting out street lights."  At least with the fruit bars, few besides those who had eaten them understood what the fuss was about.  That's why I made them fruit bars and not brownies, because in the Matanuska and Susitna Valleys, brownies generally mean pot brownies.

After being a little bit locally famous for a while, and somewhat notorious in a small way, without getting rich at all, I came to accept my peaceful obscurity.  Now, blogging has brought me to the attention of a group of people whose numbers I don't know how to even estimate.  The numbers aren't of much importance to me, either.  Other factors of my current small fame, such as its widespread nature, interest me much more than the numbers.

I watch my Xanga Footprints to see where the visitors live, what sites are sending them my way, and which of my entries are most popular.  By far, until very recently, the most popular entry of mine was a rambling and profusely illustrated piece based on the old Maidenform bra ads.  I had titled it, I dreamed I was half naked...  In the nearly three and a half years since I posted it, traffic to that page has grown to the point that virtually every page of footprints shows several visits to it.

Most of them are referred from Google, and some from other search engines.  Many find me through image searches.  I enjoy looking to see what search terms bring up that page.  Often just the word, "naked" brings someone to that page.  Many times, the search string is something like, "removing+bra+without+taking+off+shirt."  That's a fun one.  Last week, somebody in the UK found my essay while seeking something entirely different.  The search string was, "pictures+of+men+in+bras+and+corsetry."  There are no men in those pictures... sorry.

[ heh... right after I posted this, someone found that page from Google in India, looking for "videos+of+women+removing+dresses."  None of that there, either, alas.]

Occasionally one of my new posts with a spiritual, metaphysical or karmic theme will receive a flurry of hits from totse.com when Greyfox posts a link to it in a thread there.  Visits from toste come at a rate of from dozens up to hundreds a day, diminish over following days, down to nothing as the thread dies away to obscurity.

For the past few days, another old entry of mine, first posted in 2002 and reposted in '05 for a Featured Grownups Challenge, has gained some popularity among readers from a different forum, clubchopper.com.  It's the one about my being raped by Gypsy Jokers on my 23rd birthday.  The amount of traffic has surprised me.  Hits referred from that forum are currently outnumbering all the rest of my footprints combined. 

One of the people who found me that way has opened a Xanga account and started reading my memoirs.  There's the fame.  Where's the fortune?

Deborah Bicknell got to Nome with 8 dogs about 8:30 last night.  Her time on the trail was 15 days, 5 hours, 36 minutes, 12 seconds.  That time would have been fast enough to have won the race in '73, '74, '76, '77, '79, '82, and '85.  Since 1996, winning times have all been under ten days.

NOTE:  Red Lantern update at bottom

I would enjoy being there some year.  Occasionally, some business holds a sweepstakes offering tickets to the mushers' banquet, and whenever I see one, I enter.  The mood is apparent in this photo of Sebastian Schnuelle accepting the four-wheeler he won.

DeeDee Jonrowe was awarded the Dorothy G. Page halfway trophy and $3,000 in gold nuggets for being first into the Cripple checkpoint.  She did that run into Cripple on her husband's birthday, so she gave him the gold as a birthday present.

Rookie of the Year honors went to veteran musher William Kleedehn of Carcross, YT.  He has finished the Yukon Quest as high as second place on two occasions, but this was his first attempt at the Iditarod.  He finished in 27th place, ahead of all other rookies in this year's race.  That adds $1,500 and a big trophy to the $5,700 he won for 27th place.  

He also won the Northern Air Cargo Herbie Nayokpuk memorial award, with a prize of a free air cargo allotment and a new Carhartt jacket with its pockets stuffed with stacks of dollar bills.  The Nayokpuk prize is voted on by checkers at checkpoints along the Bering Sea coast, to the musher who best exemplifies the late Shishmaref Cannonball's attitude on the trail.  Herbie was tough, and valued tradition, yet was an innovator as well.

The Sportsmanship Trophy and a $500 gift certificate from Fred Meyer went to Ray Redington, Jr., grandson of Iditarod founder Joe Redington Sr., for helping other mushers and replacing trail markers that had been blown down by the wind.  That one, I think, needs to be a bigger prize, maybe needs to find a more generous sponsor.  Little acts like that save lives, of dogs as well as mushers.

Jennifer Freking won an engraved crystal bowl and $1,000 in fuel cards from Chevron as Most Inspirational Musher.  One of her dogs was killed and another injured when a snowmachiner lost control and ran into her team as she and her husband Blake had their sleds stopped beside the trail to snack their dogs.  They had stayed together from the start in Willow, and when their dogs showed eagerness on the morning after the accident, they decided to go on together to Nome.  Blake established a record this year, with the fastest Iditarod run for a team of Siberian huskies, the pretty dogs.  Jennifer preceded him into Nome, but her team included a few of the mongrels we call Alaskan huskies.

Mushers voted the Golden Clipboard to Nulato this year for the villagers' friendly reception and their efficiency in moving the checkpoint from its former location at the community hall, to the school, which provides easier access and hot water. 

The Golden Stethoscope went to veterinarian Paul Nader (left), who showed, "real investigative skills and determination to save a sick dog at Kaltag. The dog had been dropped and was laying inside the checkpoint to warm up when one of the race judges noticed it seemed unusually lethargic. It was sick. Nader and the other veterinarians there first treated it with IV fluids and antibiotics, but they feared it had a bacterial infection and were scratching their heads. Nader is not a specialist, so he placed a call to a veterinary internist he knows in Pennsylvania, who mentioned the symptoms may indicate hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Nader then had the idea to check with the Kaltag village clinic, and found a resident who is a diabetic; the vet borrowed a blood testing unit from him. Sure enough, the dog’s blood sugar was low. Nader went back to the clinic, got sugar water for an IV to bring the dog’s sugar back up. The dog pulled through just fine. The other veterinarians there who helped out got an honorable mention: Vince Gresham, Vern Otte and Michael Zindeen."

Babe, Ramey Smyth's lead dog, who is nearly eleven years old, won the Lolly Medley Golden Harness award presented by the city of Nome.

"Babe has led for Smyth in nine Iditarods, finishing in lead eight times, including this year’s impressive third-place finish just behind Lance Mackey and Jeff King. Racing sled dogs are typically in their prime between ages 3 and 7, and rarely does a dog pushing 11 have the speed or intensity to help an aggressive, competitive team in the top five. Sled dogs, like all dogs, have a life span of 10 to 15 years on average. Her accomplishments would be tough for any dog to match. Smyth has said Babe has a gentle side as well, spending lots of time in the house, where she is motherly to Smyth’s one-year-old daughter, Ava.

"The Big Lake musher was unable to say any of that at the banquet, however. He couldn’t utter a word, he was so full of emotion, and walked off the stage to a huge round of applause. Smyth’s mother, the late Lolly Medley, came up with the award, and used to sew a gold-colored harness for the winner."  

Lance Mackey collects $69,000 and a Dodge Ram quad-cab 4-wheel-drive truck for his first place finish, plus the one-of-a-kind spirit mask by Orville Lind and $500 credit to fly on PenAir, for being first into McGrath.  The meal prepared for him by the head chef of Anchorage's Millennium Hotel (my favorite place to stay in Anchorage, for the food), which he wolfed down in Ruby for being first to the Yukon River, will be repeated later for him to enjoy at his leisure, for winning the race.

I could be wrong, but the dogs in this shot look to me like Larry on the left and Hansom (or Handsome--Lance seems to favor shorter variant spellings, and the newspapers often get them wrong) getting in Lance's face.  I don't know of many places where dogs get invited to banquets.  Here they are the guests of honor.

Jeff King won the Wells Fargo Gold Coast Award, $2,500 in gold nuggets and a trophy, for being first into Unalakleet on the Bering Sea.  Again this year, as last year, he got to Unalakleet just ahead of Lance Mackey, and to Nome just after Lance. 

The gold nuggets are nice, but Jeff might value more highly the Alaska Airlines Leonhard Seppala Humanitarian Award he won this year.  Voted by the veterinarians on the trail, it is awarded for exemplary dog care. 

The same competitive banter between Jeff King and Lance Mackey that has been going on since last year's Iditarod, continued at the banquet last night as they prepare for next week's centennial celebration of the All Alaska Sweepstakes. 

"I’m pretty sure I’ve got a couple more left in me, so don’t get relaxed," King said, glancing at Mackey.

"I’m very much looking forward to seeing Jeff on the trail again," Mackey said later.

You can read more at the Eye on the Trail.

The Red Lantern was not awarded at last night's banquet.  Liz Parrish got to Nome at 10:51 this morning, in 77th place.  Molly Yazwinski and Deborah Bicknell left White Mountain a minute apart before midnight last night.  Whichever of those two, Yazwinski or Bicknell, is last into Nome, she'll win the Red Lantern.

UPDATE:
Molly Yazwinski scratched.  This leaves only Deborah Bicknell out on the trail.  She dropped a dog in White Mountain yesterday and left there with 8 dogs at 11:21 PM last night.  If she makes it to Nome, she will win the Red Lantern.  If not, it belongs to Liz Parrish.

This is my entry for the current Featured Grownups Challenge:  Songs, Stories and Tales.

The Douglasses, my father's family, have three family traditions of long standing, that I know of:  tinkering or mechanical ability, music and dance, and storytelling.  My father, who died in 1951, played a fiddle, but couldn't read music.  He played by ear, only needing to hear a tune once or twice in order to play it.  The tunes I heard my father play included many popular songs like You Are My Sunshine and San Antonio Rose, instrumentals such as Orange Blossom Special and Flight of the Bumblebee, and a number of traditional folksongs.

He also told me a number of stories.  Since some of them were traditional tall tales such as the adventures of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, as a child I did not understand that many of the family stories he told me were true.  When I began researching my family tree and made contact with genealogists in the family, I learned that my father wasn't making it up when he said that one of the men who crossed the Delaware with George Washington had been an ancestor of ours.  It was my great-great-great-great grandfather, Abraham James Douglass (or James Abraham), born in Scotland about 1740.

I'm pretty sure the story of where the family got its surname was made up.  Daddy told me it came from one of our remote ancestresses, who had let her chickens into the house when she had bread rising on the kitchen table.  The chickens scratched the dough onto the window and thereafter the old woman was known as Old Lady Dough Glass.  "Douglass" actually comes from Scots Gaelic, dubh glas, dark water or black water.

My great grandfather, my father's grandfather, Cyrus Dow Douglass, the white-bearded old man in the photo below, was born July 28, 1835.   As a teenager, he crossed the plains from his home in Ohio to the California gold fields.  Later, he went back on a side-wheeler down the Pacific coast to Panama, and rode on the railroad that crossed the Isthmus of Panama before the canal was built.  Cyrus fought for the Union in the Civil War, was wounded and received a pension.  He homesteaded in Southwestern Nebraska, where many of my relatives still live. 

Grandpa Cyrus spent the latter part of his life in a wheelchair and would often call one of his grandchildren over to him and tell stories to pass the time.  Some of those stories came down to me through my father.  Twenty-some years ago, a cousin of mine, Karen Douglass Jackson, wrote down the stories of Cyrus's that her father, Albert Douglass, could recall, and I received a copy of her collected stories along with genealogical data from our cousin Adele Richard when I managed, through the internet, to make contact with my father's family.  Here I'll share just a few of Cyrus's stories.

A man came riding in on a horse that was lathered up from being ridden hard.  The guy jumped off the horse and just dropped the reins across a hitching rail, saying, "Why, there's the son of a bitch now!"  Then he pulled a butcher knife from his boot and slit a man's belly from side to side, and his insides just rolled out.  The guy fell over on the street.

People unhitched a couple of wagons, rolled the front ends up together, and roped the front wheels together to make the raised wagon tongues into an A-frame.  They strung the killer up right then and there, no trial, no nothing.  Nobody knew why he had killed the guy, what the other man had done, or anything else.  They just lynched him instantly.

They wanted to set up a grist mill up in the mountains where wagons couldn't go.  They needed to get a millstone that weighed about 500 pounds up some narrow trails.  They used a little donkey that weighed about 600 pounds to carry the 500 pound millstone.  The stone was padded and balanced on the donkey's back, with four men walking alongside to steady it.  Every quarter mile or so, they'd cut sturdy sticks, and prop the stone up on four legs to let the donkey rest.

Cyrus and his partners had a mining claim they worked, "in the mountains," probably the Sierra Nevada.  They salvaged canvas sails from ships that had been abandoned by their crews, who had deserted the ships and headed for the gold fields.  They sewed the canvas into hoses, and strung them from a water source high enough above their mine to provide enough water pressure to wash the soil out of the hillsides, moving more dirt with less work than using a shovel.

Their water supply came from a ditch they'd dug around the side of a mountain.  They had a pretty good little mine and were making money on it.  Then came an extra rainy winter.  Their ditch washed down the hillside with a mudslide, down to the bedrock.  The three partners would have needed some financial backing to replace their ditch with a wooden flume and resume mining.  Instead, they sold the claim to a bigger outfit.  Grandpa Cyrus headed back to Iowa, via the Isthmus of Panama, arriving home with about $6,000 from the sale of the gold claim.

On the sidewheel steamship between California and Panama, they got into a storm.  It was just about to drive them onto the rocks.  They broke out fat pork from the food supplies, throwing slabs into the boiler to increase the heat and get more steam.  The captain drafted Grandpa Cyrus to hold a piece of lumber as a lever over the boiler's safety valve, so they could generate more pressure and get more speed from the drive wheel.  The captain said, "Here, hold this."  Cyrus says to the captain, "Well, you'll blow it up."  The captain replied that he'd blow it to hell before he'd let it run onto the rocks.

The boiler must have held, 'cause all of Cyrus's offspring, all the subsequent generations of this branch of the Douglass family tree, were born after he got back to Ohio.
 

The young man second from left in the back row is "Eddie," Cyrus Edgar Douglass, my paternal grandfather.  A click on this picture will enlarge it greatly, for a closer look at Cyrus's sons and my great aunt Caroline, in center front, between her parents, Cyrus and Louisa.

Ever since I was on Xanga yesterday, I have been thinking about the partnership between people and domestic animals, particularly dogs and horses.  That train of thought got started after I backtracked one of the Xanga Footprints I found and it took me to a site where someone said how glad he was that the horrible cruel Iditarod was over for this year, "poor puppies."

Above: the winners of the first All Alaska Sweepstakes, in 1908.

In 1908, the newly formed Nome Kennel Club decided to organize a long-distance race.  The purpose was to have a race that was more humane for the dogs than the all-out sprint races common at that time.  Sled dog sprint racing still exists, and I know from first-hand observation that it is much harder on the dogs than the long-distance races, where their energy is conserved and they are give frequent rest and snacks.

This is an excerpt from the rules for this year's hundredth anniversary running of the All Alaska Sweepstakes:

There will
be no abuse or disregard of any dogs.
All dogs must be maintained in good condition. All water and
food must be ingested voluntarily. There will be no
cruel or inhumane treatment of dogs. Cruel or inhumane
treatment involves any action or inaction, which causes preventable
pain or suffering to a dog. Harnesses must be padded. No whips
are allowed! NOTE: In an excerpt from the Nome Nugget Mining
edition 1908, "The distance was made four hundred and
forty miles in order to force the drivers to nurse their dogs…!
To further insure against any cruelty or over taxation of the
strength and endurance of the dogs, a very salutary rule was
adopted, that each driver must return to the starting point
with every dog that he started out with and none others, so that the driver of each team was forced to take
the utmost care of each dog in order to comply with the rule."
No one convicted of a charge of animal abuse or neglect, as
such is defined under Alaska State law, may enter the All Alaska
Sweepstakes Race. Compliance with this rule is absolutely
mandatory!

The AAS rules have been updated and made stricter.  For those updates the organizers have used Iditarod rules as their model.  Isn't it ironic that the race which is targeted by PETA and the Humane Society for animal cruelty is recognized within the sport for just the opposite?

Lance Mackey, who last year was the first person ever to have won the Yukon Quest and Iditarod in the same year, and then had back-to-back Idita-Quest victories again this year, is registered for the AAS.  The entry fee for this race is a specified amount of cash plus an ounce of gold.  In the 2007 Yukon Quest, he and Aaron Burmeister were leading the race into Dawson, where a prize in gold goes to the first team to reach there.  They  agreed that whichever one of them won that gold, they would split the prize so that both of them would have the gold to enter the All Alaska Sweepstakes.  Lance won the gold, split it, and they are both set to race on March 26.

I suppose I'll be reporting here on who wins the AAS, and I will certainly be telling you who is this year's recipient of the Iditarod's Leonhard Seppala Humanitarian Award for exemplary dog care, and who gets the Red Lantern for bringing up the rear in this year's Iditarod, when that race is finally over.

I know I said I was exhausted and "outta here," but I couldn't leave the computer without checking on who's into Nome, who's still on the trail, who scratched, etc.  Then I thought I'd do a brief update for Chris, Pauline and you other sled dog racing fans -- you know who you are and if you tell me, maybe I'll be able to remember next time.

The field is down to 80 teams now, since Allen Moore and Rachael Scdoris scratched.  Fabrizio Lovati became the 48th finisher this morning, leaving 32 more teams out on the trail.  Liz Parrish got into Shaktoolik in 78th position with 14 dogs, 25 minutes ahead of Deborah Bicknell and her ten dogs.  They left Martin Koenig, the current Red Lantern on the trail from Kaltag.

William Kleedehn, in 27th place, is Rookie of the Year, with a time of 10days, 12 hours, 50 minutes, 39 seconds.

I had been rooting for Melissa Owens for Rookie of the Year.  She came close, and her 30th place finish wins her two firsts:

One of her dogs, Piko, had started limping coming out of White Mountain, so she unharnessed him and carried him in the sled bag.  Below, in a photo by Bob Hallinen of ADN, are Melissa, her mother Pat, and lead dog Yoda.

ADN.com also has stories on, "hardworking blue-collar nice guy Lance Mackey," and Trail gambits throughout Iditarod history.  The Fairbanks News-Miner has published a list of prize payouts.

Now, I think I really am going to crawl in bed and read a book.

Last night was the third night in a row that I have gone short on sleep.  That's probably not enough to bring on serious consequences from sleep deprivation, since I don't plan to sign any contracts, operate heavy machinery, undertake electrical work or roof repairs, etc.  In fact, I'm hoping that getting up around my usual time today, after having only a couple of hours' sleep, will help me get my diurnal cycles back into sync with my time zone.

Fatigue-induced sleep disturbances are old familiar symptoms.  It's comforting, even.  For the first time in a long time, respiratory problems are not the predominant symptom.  Almost anything is easier to live with than not being able to catch my breath.

I guess I have adequate reasons for being fatigued.  Tuesday night, I was up until after 4 Wednesday morning, watching Lance Mackey win the Iditarod, but didn't sleep in -- that "too tired to sleep" thing that happens with M.E.  Next night, the wee small hours just slipped up on me while I was sitting in bed reading, and I had to get up early yesterday to prepare for a trip to the clinic.

Greyfox had a dental appointment, and I had to see my doc sometime, so we coordinated our appointments and he drove up here, arriving with barely enough time to offload the frozen and perishable supplies he'd brought.  Then we went on up to Sunshine Clinic.

I was handling the trip okay, even managed to walk into the clinic under my own power.  Not having to be wheeled in was a biggie for me.  I was doing fine, actually, right up until the doc decided she needed for me to do a spirometry test to establish a baseline for my chart.  She left, and I sat there wondering whether I should duck out quickly to empty my bladder, but I sat wondering too long.

There were some thumps and bumps, the exam room door swung part way open, shut again, and then after more bumps and some muttering, it opened and the doc's young helper stumbled in with a bigger-than-a-breadbox and obviously weighty device under one arm, trailing an electrical cord, and a tool caddy like I use in the garden precariously balanced on the other forearm, freeing that hand for the doorknob.

As she plugged it in, she expressed the hope that it would work, and the opinion that it was a dinosaur.  It worked.  Three times, I had to take in a big breath, then let it out quickly and keep trying to force out air that wasn't in there, for a duration of six seconds each time.  By the end of that ordeal, I was weak-kneed and my nail beds were blue.  They could have gone with the first one, because, as she pointed out, my performance was consistent and the three different colored tracings, red, blue and black, overlapped along almost identical curves.

She left.  I waited a few minutes for the doc to return, then threaded my wobbly way through the maze of corridors to the rest room (that's the washroom, for you Canadians), took a wrong turn on my way back, and ended up doing more walking than I'd done in a single day since... oh, probably since August, because it was early September when I got pneumonia.

When the doc finally got done with me and I tottered out to the waiting room, Greyfox rose and came to meet me at the reception desk, saying I'd been gone so long he was half expecting someone to come out and tell him I'd died.  The clerk, who was sitting behind the desk waiting as I wrote a check, gave a nervous little laugh, impelling Greyfox and me into a little bit of guerrilla theater.

I said, "Well, you know I've been having trouble breathing...."  He acknowledged that, and I continued: "Guess what they had me doing."

His guess was "running," so I went on and said, "breathing."  Then I pantomimed the big deep breaths and forcing out more and more air after all the air was gone, hanging onto the edge of the desk, straining.  Then I went back to checkwriting and said, "By the time I'd done that third forced expiration, I thought I was..." and he joined me as we, deadpan and in unison, said, "going to expire."

In the car, as he backed out and headed for the highway, we discussed how the topic of death gets to normal people.  He said what I've heard him say before, that it's living that's hard, dying is the easy part... "been there, done that, got the karma."

We were in sync and in harmony on the way back here.  At one point, I reached over and patted his thigh and he turned and gave me such a loving look... then recovered his wits and swerved back into his lane.

He and Doug finished unloading supplies, then loaded up empty water jugs and made two trips to the spring while I fixed a quick lunch.  After lunch and "torturing the dog:"  confining Koji to his tether so that he couldn't get into the middle of our farewell hug, he was back on the road again, on his way down to Wasilla, his cabin, and his cats.

Doug got involved in his thrice-weekly D&D session immediately, and later in the day when I was hungry, I nuked something that was just sitting there, part of the clutter of supplies that hadn't been put away yet, I thought.  I discovered my error when Doug scolded me for eating the thing he had set aside for himself.

Then Greyfox phoned after nine, when we get into that extra block of off-peak cell minutes he buys each month so we have some time to maintain our marriage, and I confessed that I had forgotten to have him add cat kibble to the shopping list.  This means that either I find some way to get it close to home (unlikely, and expensive if I do), or he'll need to make an extra trip up here in a week or two when the current supply runs out.  I got scolded again for that because it's time consuming and takes almost a tank of gas, then scolded by Doug again when our phone conversation lasted over an hour and Doug missed the end of his RPG session.

It all came out okay in the end.  Before we ended the call, Greyfox told me how much he had enjoyed our time together, and I said, "Me, too.  Maybe we could get together again soon," and he said,  "Yeah... I gotta transcend that economic insecurity bullshit."  Then Doug forgave me, cooked burgers for both of us, and said the session had just about been wrapped up before the break anyway.  But the whole thing, the entire day, not just the scoldings and my guilt and chagrin, but the forced expirations, the long walks, the short sleep... it exhausted me.

Today is a day of rest, so that I'll be able to sleep tonight.  All I need to do is keep feeding wood into the fire until Doug wakes up.  It was blessedly warm yesterday for my outing, but it went subzero again last night.

I'm outta here now, back to my bed and a book.  Seeya later.

I'm not particularly fond of "personalized" mass communication.  In the
olden days, form letters came with blanks where some hapless clerk had
to type in or write in by hand the name or other personalizing
identifiers.  There was no pretense of truly personal communication
there.

I didn't feel slighted or insulted.  I have even used form letters to
communicate with my clients.  Some of them resented it, but that was
more because of the content of the letters, I think, than of the
impersonal nature of the form.

Then along came computers and form letters got slicker and sneakier. 
Eventually, we all adjusted to the point where for most of us the rare
appearance of a truly personal letter is more notable than the
ubiquitous form letters.

Through the magic of cookies and bots and other such marvels of
technology, I'm now assaulted with impersonal uses of my personal
identifiers at every turn.

Dammit, Xanga!  NO!  I am not tired of having SuSu as my username.  It took some getting used to, I admit.  I was mildly distressed at having to try a gazillion different names before you accepted one, but now I have adjusted.  Susitna Sue from Subarctic Suburbia is who I'm content to be, but I don't want to have to spell it all out all the time, so SuSu will do.

Now get off my back about it, okay?

There's a condition or quality called "institutionalization."  It isn't simply the fact of being in an institution:  imprisoned, an inmate in an orphanage, hospital, refugee camp or asylum, for example.  It is the state of mind that results from institutionalization.  Confinement and enforced routines develop a different set of habits.  We learn new ways of channeling our energies, and we lose the habits common to our "normal" counterparts.

I adjusted quickly and easily to my prison experience, because I was preconditioned.  Spending much of my childhood confined to a sickroom prepared me for being confined to a cell, which in turn has further prepared me to be confined again in a sickroom.  I went through my "climbing the walls" phase very young, and learned coping mechanisms because it was so abhorrent.

My coping mechanisms, as those of almost any institutionalized person, may appear to be indolence.  That's because my activity isn't primarily outward or physical.  At the time when I was sentenced to prison, except for the work I had been compelled to do to survive, and a few activities such as sex and dancing, my activity all had been mental.  In prison, I went even more inward.  I learned to still my mind meditatively.

The hardest work I do now is remembering.  I work at remembering to stop thinking.  If I don't make an effort to just be, my mind churns and buzzes, finds patterns, analyzes them, relates them to other patterns, shifts elements around from one idea to another... unceasingly, unless I remember to just be.

I can either be, or I can relate.  When I'm being, I am real but I am not in relation to anyone or anything.  When I relate to someone, there is always some interface intruding between that person and me, filtering the reality.  Usually, the filter is language.  Language is a sucky, pustulent, tortuous interface.  I am not myself in words.  I am not real when I speak or write, no matter how broad my vocabulary or how strenuous an effort I make at exercising it.

Realizing the inadequacy of language, I value and appreciate having to eat my words.  I don't assume that anyone has understood what I'm saying unless they give me high quality feedback that indicates comprehension.  The words, "I understand," or "That's true," are automatically suspect, too facile, too pat, not true feedback at all.

Only when someone picks at some flaw in my logic or zeroes in on some omission or inconsistency and requires me to restate, rephrase, or retract what I said, do I know that they have any idea what I was trying to say.  Only when communication has apparently failed do I have even the faintest hope that any real communication has occurred.

Really.

My husband phoned me as soon as he was awake today, to learn who had won the Iditarod.  He was going, "YES! YES!" exulting over the victory by "our boy Lance."

Lance has been his favorite musher for a couple of years now, ever since he learned that the guy is not only a cancer survivor, but also has a history of drug use and has done jail time.

I've had a soft spot for Lance ever since his fellow mushers awarded him the "Ugly Truck Trophy."  One time, somebody started to steal his truck, but it stalled before they got it out of the parking lot so they left it for better pickings.  He gave the new truck he won in last year's Iditarod to his wife and was still having truck trouble at the start of this year's race.  He just won another new truck, along with $69,000 to go with the $5,000 he won for being first to the Yukon River.
 

7.  Mitch Seavey

The race is not over yet.  It will end when the Red Lantern passes under the burled arch.  Deborah Bicknell entered Kaltag one minute after Liz Parrish this morning.  Maybe they are just keeping each other company back there.  They've been hanging together for miles and miles.

Meanwhile rookie William Kleedehn is in 27th position in White Mountain, with only 77 miles to go after he completes his mandatory rest about 6 PM today.  He has a substantial lead on Melissa Owens, who left Elim at 7:08 this morning in 29th position.

Rookie Rohn Buser is between Koyuk and Elim in 35th position, down to seven dogs.  His dad, Martin, below, embarrassed himself and appears to have lost some face over a prank with his GPS tracker, but at least he didn't suffer the humiliation of being beaten by his son.  Not this year, anyway.

photo by Bob Hallinen, Anchorage Daily News