Where cats are concerned, I hesitate to make unqualified statements or predict their behavior.  For example, Jones, a black and white tomcat, disappeared years ago, and returned one day last winter, so sick and beat up we couldn’t save him, but alive nonetheless after we had long given up on ever seeing him again.  Several times lately, Granny Mousebreath has gone out… but let me back up and tell the front part of her story first.

The old catriarch’s original name was Sassy.  She belonged to Mark, who owned this old trailer before he gave it to me.  Sassy and her daughters, Prissy and Penny, were part of the house sitting job we took on that first winter that Mark was to have been vacationing in the sunny South, before he changed his mind about living in Alaska, came back for Leroy, his wolf-hybrid dog, and disappeared.

Sassy would dance around on her back legs, begging for food, and one of the names we had for her was, Sassafras the Dancing Cat.  Greyfox had a hard time distinguishing between her and her daughter, Prissy, despite the fact that Sassy had one tanto-bladed ear from a bit of frostbite, and her nose was tan and Prissy’s pink.  Greyfox took to calling the two of them Muffin and Meatloaf, indiscriminately.

Muffin’s name stuck even after Greyfox learned to tell them apart, and Meatloaf became Granny.  Mark’s three cats had all been spayed, and even after we brought new cats home and kittens were born, Granny asserted her status as Catriarch.  That situation continued until very recently, when she began showing her age — we guessed that she was about five years old when we moved in here in 1998.

A year or two ago, Granny began to slow down.  She slept more, and then occasionally she would roll off her place on the back or arm of the sofa in her sleep.  She would shake herself off, look around in consternation as if wondering how she came to be there, jump back up and go back to sleep.  Her appetite remained healthy and she kept herself groomed, expressing no pain or distress.  She still enjoyed going outdoors to participate in the food chain, and as she’d done for as long as we’ve known her, sometimes she would be gone for a few days.

The next development was that she would sometimes walk in circles, meowing.  It was worrisome, but since she still ate, groomed, was alert and responsive to attention, and we can’t afford a vet, we let her be.  One day she went out and was gone so long we began to wonder if she had died.  When she came back, it seemed that her health was much improved.  She no longer displayed any balance problems, no circling or meowing.  We marveled at the recovery and wondered where she had gone to attain it.

She was her old cantankerous self for a while, until one night she had a seizure.  Afterward, she seemed disoriented for only a moment before resuming her usual behavior.  In following weeks, seizures occurred every few days, then grew in frequency, until one day she went out again and had been gone three or four days when we got a call from a neighbor who had found her crying in their yard.  Doug went and brought her back, and upon her return home that time, there were no more seizures, and no other signs of illness but for some occasional muscle twitches.  Through it all, she had a normal appetite and kept herself well-groomed.

Like most of our cats, Granny could open the door and come and go at will.  She had always spent time outdoors each day in all sorts of weather, but recently she quit going out, and also stopped jumping up on the furniture, choosing to sleep on the carpet near the wood stove.  The seizures never recurred after that second long absence, but the walking in circles, always clockwise, to the right, continued, but this time without the meows.  She covered as much of the house as was accessible to her in those circular perambulations, and we would sometimes find her sleeping on a low shelf or with her head in a corner.

Last week, a few days ago, she went outside again.  I hesitate to try and guess whether we will ever see her again, or, if she does return, what her condition will be.

Part One, with all the drama and trauma, is HERE. 

I have long subscribed to the idea that a clean house is the sign of a wasted life, but I have also never been comfortable in total chaos.  Sometime last spring, when I could stand and move around without too much discomfort, I started cleaning house.  It was a process of working a little while and resting a while longer, then getting up to work until I needed to rest again.  Greyfox found a walker in a dumpster and brought it to me, but the house was too crowded and cluttered to use it in here, so I just leaned on furniture and stuff.  I needed a lot of rest, and the work went annoyingly slowly.

At first, the mess got worse as I pulled things out of the corners and crannies where they had been stuffed.  I’d been too sick for several years to go to the laundromat, so Greyfox (my soulmate, spouse, and partner in crime, in case you don’t already know) had been bringing me, along with groceries and other necessities, supplies of pajamas, sweats and lounge wear that he found in dumpsters and on the ten-cent table at his favorite thrift shop.  He also brought books, magazines and video, as well as assorted kitsch and schlock from the dumpsters… clutter, in other words, and it was everywhere.  I craved order and space, and knew only one way to get it.

Upon reflection, I understood that I had earned my pancreas’s rebellious behavior, digesting itself with its own secretions (a pithy phrase from one of the diagnostic websites).  Insulin is produced in the pancreas and I had been fooling around with my insulin and glycogen metabolism ever since childhood when I had first become addicted to sugar.  Beginning in the mid-1970s, I had kicked that sugar addiction I-don’t-recall-how-many times.  However many times it had been, I had relapsed that many times, too.

Usually, during those three and a half decades, deteriorating energy levels from insulin resistance and hypoglycemia were enough to impel me to kick sugar again.  A couple of times, I’d grown so fat that it became a struggle to wipe my own ass, and that would finally repel me back toward saner eating habits.  Unless my dementia progresses to a point where I forget that episode of pancreatitis, I think my last relapse was truly my last.

After a few days of NPO (nothing by mouth) but water (I didn’t keep a journal and don’t recall the timing), sleeping only on my left side, the pain and nausea receded enough that I thought I could get away with eating something.  I started on the anti-Candida diet because experience has taught me that sugar binges end up in systemic yeast overgrowth.  There was some mild nausea and discomfort at first, so I naturally kept the portions small.  By small, I mean 2 or 3 pecan halves, one or two leaves of romaine, or a  handful of sprouts.  I didn’t have an appetite.  In the absence of cravings for forbidden gooey sweet indulgences, I was anorexic.

I stayed on the Candida diet for three weeks.  Then, as a natural appetite returned, I eased back onto my regular sugarless, gluten-free diet.  I stayed focused on healing and cleaning up the mess around here.  As weather warmed up, I expanded the scope of my housework into the little cabin beside our trailer.  It had been used to store all sorts of things, the main bulk of which turned out to be boxes in which knives and swords, stock for Greyfox’s business, had been shipped.  Most of the boxes were moldy and all were filled with various kinds of packing material.  I flattened boxes and filled our two garbage cans with rotting cardboard week after week, accumulating one 50 gallon garbage bag full of foam popcorn which Greyfox took to the UPS store for reuse, and nearly filling another bag.

As I worked on clearing out and organizing the storage cabin, I’ve also been working in the house, from one room to another, day to day, work-rest-work-rest.  Occasionally I’d venture into the bathroom, pull a few things from the pile in the tub, and decide which of them deserved to go back to the dumpsters, and which were good enough to stuff back into the bathtub to wash when I was again able to do it.  At first, I wasn’t really sure I’d ever be so fit again, but I had to work on the theory that I would recover.  No other theory was going to work for me. 

Somewhere along the way the housework became compulsive.  Last week, as I passed through the kitchen where Doug was washing dishes, on my way to rest in the front room, I said to him, “I need to sit down a while.”  A moment later, he turned and saw me up and doing, and scolded, “You’re cleaning again!”   I can’t help it.  I actually started blogging again to distract myself from compulsive housework.

In the last month or so, I’ve had a vivid indication that I was making progress.  At first, after the trash was picked up each Thursday, the cans would be full again on Friday and there was often a bag or two of overflow hiding behind the cabin waiting for the next pickup.  Sometime in September, I noticed that it took until Monday to fill both garbage cans.  For a couple of weeks now, the cans haven’t filled up until Wednesday night when we take out the household trash, and this week one of them wasn’t quite all the way full when the garbage truck came. 

Doug has gone to the laundromat with me three times.  On our way home after the second laundry trip, I broke my old car, Blur, but that’s another story.  Now the pile of dirty clothes that previously filled the bathtub-shower enclosure to above head height is reduced to just a stack of five full laundry baskets — only two more trips to the laundromat and we’ll be caught up.  My closets and drawers are almost full, and bag after bag of too-large clothes have gone to charities.  I don’t know exactly how much weight I’ve lost.  The scale at Sunshine clinic showed me at 240-something last winter, and my bathroom scale read 140 last time I looked.  Size 18 was tight on me when the pancreatic crisis occurred, and now size 12 is comfortable — that’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans sizes, my personal standard of measure.

The cabin is substantially done now, with tools and hardware accessible and fairly well organized, orderly enough that we can find what we need.  I’ll have nuts, bolts, screws, etc. to sort and organize this winter, in here where it is warm, for storage out there eventually, just as I have stacks, piles and boxes of unsorted documents and publications picked up in here that still need to be sorted and filed or discarded.  Last time Greyfox was here, he commented charitably that the place looked, “almost fit for human habitation.”  Charley (my ex-, Doug’s dad) stepped through the door once a few weeks ago, looked around, did a  double-take and said, “What?  What’s this!?”  High praise from my best friend. 

I’m not sure which story to relate next… maybe the broken Subaru, or the complicated bunk bed… dunno — it’ll be something fairly trivial, fershure.

In nursing training, about half a century ago, I was taught, for purposes of accurate charting of my patients’ status, how to distinguish between pain and discomfort.  If the patient said he was in pain, we were instructed to chart, “patient reports discomfort.”  Repeated, whiny, grimacing reports were to be charted as, “patient complains of discomfort.”  If the patient was screaming, moaning, and/or writhing, we were to chart, “patient displays pain.”  A little over half a year ago, I had one of the most painful experiences in my long pain-filled life.  When it woke me in the middle of the night last winter, I knew immediately that it wasn’t merely discomfort.

When I was sufficiently wakeful to get my wits about me and control the moans and writhing, I used my old reliable painswitch technique to turn it into a neutral sensation, but I wasn’t able to get back to sleep that night.  Even the slightest movement would renew the pain and compel me to renew the remedy.   I birthed four children without any form of pain relief, and for decades I have had pain on a daily basis from M.E., but compared to this, it had all been relatively mild.  The new pain was accompanied by nausea and, at first, before I identified the cause, by fear.

It didn’t take long to diagnose myself.  I went online, to Google, and entered search terms: “diagnosis, severe abdominal pain, right upper quadrant tenderness, nausea.”  After refining terms and getting a second opinion, and then a third, I concluded that the problem was pancreatitis.  I was hurting enough to make me consider a trip to the hospital, but just hurting wasn’t enough to compel me to actually go there.  Dangerous places, hospitals are, and costly in more ways than one.  I was breathing okay, no seizures or paralysis, not bleeding from any orifices… I figured I might be able to handle it myself.

I searched for pancreatitis treatments.  With relief, I learned that there was no drug to treat it, no magic key for which I would need medical permission or intervention.  Whew!  If I was in the hospital with it, they would give me nothing by mouth and put me on IV fluids, plus morphine for pain.  I just stopped eating, drank enough of our pure, natural spring water to stay hydrated, and dealt with the pain in the usual way.  I soon noticed that some positions were more comfortable than others, so I avoided the painful positions.

Those first uncomfortable days with that new acute illness on top of the old chronic ones, before it became clear that my body was healing itself, I thought about death more than I usually do.  Ordinarily, I don’t try to avoid thinking about dying.  I know that death is part of life, that, “those not busy being born are busy dying.”  It just isn’t on my mind a lot, most of the time.  But during that bleak and tender time, I sat propped on pillows in my bed and looked around one night, at the chaos and clutter that had been growing in here since my major respiratory crisis a few years previously.  I thought, “I can’t die and leave such a mess.”

…to be continued.

For the past few weeks, ever since the weather turned cold enough for serious sled dog training, I have been seeing this one beautiful dog team passing by on the road in front of our place.  They are swift, smooth, and disciplined, working together silently and efficiently.  The musher is always wearing insulated, hooded coveralls and I have never gotten much of a look at her face, but just enough that I am fairly sure it is a woman:  a young, slender woman.

Each time I have gotten a chance to count, the team has numbered around 20 dogs, give or take a few.  This, and their performance, suggests that it is an Iditarod team.  Starting teams are limited to no more than 16 dogs, but mushers train more, and select the best team when the time comes.  There is no snow yet, so they are not pulling a sled.  The musher rides an idling 4-wheel ATV.  This morning, as they passed, she had one hand on the handlebar, and her other arm was wrapped around the child riding in front of her, a small one, toddler-sized or smaller, all bundled up with only a face showing, wearing a serious and interested expression, with bright, flashing eyes.

Previously, I have blogged about Jim and Sharon (finally, I learned their names after they moved out), the people next door who pushed a junk vehicle into my yard, became verbally abusive when my son asked if they intended to leave it there or remove it, and then brandished a gun at another neighbor who attempted to rectify the situation.  State Troopers dealt with the gun situation, and reporting the abandoned vehicle to them enabled me to have it hauled away at state expense.

Jim and Sharon were squatting there on Grayhorse’s property, without paying him anything, though they told neighbors they were buying the place — neighbors who know Grayhorse and had been getting his end of the story in phone conversations.  They virtually denuded the land of trees, bulldozed Grayhorse’s perennial herb gardens, left big heaps of trash and junk, and alienated nearby neighbors with loud music, bright yard lights, and barking dogs.  Before they moved in there, they had been “managing” a motel a block and a half away.  That matter is still in litigation as far as I know.  They might have been squatting there, too.  What I do know for a fact, because I observed it, is that they started demolishing part of the motel when they moved out, and used the lumber to repair and expand Grayhorse’s cabin.

I also observed the traffic coming and going from their place.  Based on the volume and frequency, times of day and lengths of stay, as well as some of the vehicles I recognized there, I suspect that they were dealing some kind of drugs.  Based on things I found there after they left, I concluded that somebody, sometime, had been growing weed there, too.  But I’m getting ahead of my story here.

Early this year, the yard light and loud noise situations changed.  The dogs still barked whenever a car drove by or if one of us stepped outside our door, and whenever some other stimulus set them off.  On one occasion, Doug encountered Sharon on a trip to the mailbox and she went on and on to him with a paranoiac rant about how people were driving or walking past her house just to make her dogs bark.  What had changed was that there was no more loud amplified music during daylight hours, and at night when the yard lights were on they were accompanied by the noise from a 2-cycle engine.  I took that to mean that they were no longer using electrical power from the local co-op, but were generating their own electricity.  Further, I took that as an indication that they may have accumulated an unpaid utility bill.

Last summer, “moving sale” signs went up in their yard and up by the mailboxes along the highway.  Once, when we had stopped along that side of this corner lot to offload some water for the garden before proceeding on around the corner into our driveway, Jim limped over and engaged my son Doug in conversation as I waited in the car.  Doug reported that he’d been told the man was going Outside for emergency surgery and they were selling everything.  He specifically mentioned water purification equipment and a submersible pump, items that I assumed belonged to Grayhorse.

One afternoon, Doug and I walked out the garden path and crossed over into their yard to see if there was anything at the yard sale that we might be able to use.  The dogs barked wildly until we spoke to them, then they quieted.  First the man came out briefly, greeted us, said he could understand about my leaning on a dog house to rest after the walk, then he shuffled painfully back into the house after telling us to go ahead and look around.  The woman came out a little later, bringing a handful of bags for us to put our purchases into.  She said there was a lot more that they hadn’t brought outside, “just ask.”  I did mention a couple of things I was looking for, and she disappeared back into the house to bring back them and a lot more.

She was talking nonstop, fawning, quoting ridiculously low prices each time I asked (nothing was tagged), and offering to give me this or that item in which I showed interest.  I declined a few such offers of things that would just have been in my way, accepted some others, picked out enough cheap kitchen tools, fabric remnants, sheets, towels, etc,. to add up to about $10 at her low prices, and filled a couple of grocery bags with them.  I had kept a running total, and told her what it was.  She said to give her $2.00 and we’d be “straight.”  Then she said she had a lot of clothes inside that would fit me, and offered to bring them to my house before she left.

As Doug  and I were walking back through our garden, I said, “I wonder what she’s on.”  Later, judging by the empty prescription bottles I found, I concluded that it could have been any one, two, or combination of 3 anti-anxiety drugs, and/or several illicit ones, too, I guess.  Again, I am getting ahead of myself.

One day, working in my yard, I noticed that someone was burning trash over in their yard.  It was a fat guy in bermuda shorts, someone I didn’t recognize.  Some days later, I noticed some different stuff out in the yard sale area, including tools and electronic gear that I could use, so I approached the house and knocked, since no one came out.  Fat guy introduced himself as Greg, and said he was there to take care of the dogs.  Jim and Sharon were gone, and the canine population was down to 3, which coincidentally is the limit allowed by the land covenants in this subdivision.  When Jim and Sharon were there, they had 7 dogs.  They had gotten breeders to take back 2 chows and 2 huskies they had acquired from them previously, leaving only 3 old female Rottweiler mixes.

He pointed to a sign I’d overlooked. stuck under a jar on one of the tables.  It said, “take what you want and leave a donation.”  That day, after accepting his invitation to come in and have a cup of tea, I gave him a few bucks and took home a couple of boxes of useful stuff.  He even loaded my stuff in his van and drove it around the corner for me.  We schmoozed and got acquainted.  He wanted to move into Grayhorse’s cabin, but had been unable to get the power turned on, because of a large outstanding bill, without getting a letter from the owner.  Walt, the neighbor on his other side, had snubbed him when he introduced himself and said he was the dogs’ caretaker.  Walt had been wanting to shoot those barking dogs for years.  Jim and Sharon had tethered the noisiest of them closer to Walt’s house than to their own.

I explained some of that history to Greg, and phoned Walt for him, attempting to get Grayhorse’s phone number for Greg.  Walt told me that the last time he had tried to call Grayhorse, the number was not in service.  Another neighbor later told me Grayhorse was running from the law.  I dunno about that — Grayhorse, as far as I knew, was pretty straight-arrow.

The last time I saw Greg, he said he needed money to buy a pack of cigarettes, and told me that anyone who’d give him ten bucks could have whatever they wanted from the house and yard.  I gave him the $10.  He said that he had been in contact with Darla, the borough Animal Care officer, who was going to come out and impound the three old dogs, “in a few days.”  Meanwhile, he was going to take his dog and go to Anchorage for an “appointment.”  He asked me if I would feed the dogs until he got back, and showed me two 40-pound bags of dog food he said he’d gotten from Animal Care.  I agreed to feed the dogs while he was gone.

When I went back that evening to feed them, one of the big food bags was gone, and the other was nearly empty and had some moldy dog biscuits in the bag with the food.  I picked out the moldy stuff, fed the old girls, gave them fresh water, talked to them, scratched their ears, rubbed their bellies and started bonding with them.  Several days later, I called Animal Care and left a voice mail for Darla.  When she called me back, I learned more about Jim and Sharon, and the two of us pieced together a few things about Greg.  He had not even been Jim and Sharon’s designated caretaker for the dogs.  They left after asking another neighbor to feed them temporarily.  Greg only knew Jim and Sharon from having stopped once at their yard sale.  He had discovered the dogs without food or water and moved into the empty cabin about the time I first saw him burning trash.

Darla told me she was powerless to impound the dogs without a warrant, and to get one she needed evidence of abuse or neglect, or a signed statement by the designated caretaker.  The man whom Jim and Sharon had designated had no interest in caring for the dogs, but wouldn’t sign to have them impounded for fear of retribution from Jim.  Darla had had several recent phone conversations with Jim, in which he was verbally abusive and threatening violence against her if she impounded his (abandoned) dogs.  Rather than being in Seattle, WA, where he had reportedly gone for surgery, he was in Reno, NV, presumably for purposes of gambling, or possibly for running a scam of some sort.  Papers left behind appeared to imply that they had been involved in several scams in the recent past.

Now I guess I’m no longer getting ahead of my story.  To cut to the chase:  I kept feeding and paying attention to the old dogs until Darla somehow managed to get her warrant despite the lack of abuse/neglect or the signature of a caretaker.  She showed up one day with a Trooper and took them away.  For a while, not having a dog bark every time I stepped out my door was novel and noticeable, but I’ve gotten used to it.

Having been invited into the cabin by Greg and having paid him the $10 he asked, in addition to having been offered a bunch of free clothing by Sharon, I started scrounging in earnest.  Being the person I am, I did not hesitate to snoop while I scrounged.  I learned that in addition to being abominable neighbors, scofflaws and freeloaders, Jim and Sharon were apparently involved in insurance and welfare fraud.  Empty prescription bottles revealed that both of them used a lot of psychoactive drugs.  Full or partially full bottles, boxes and tubes revealed that they filled a lot of prescriptions for antibiotics, anti-fungals and other drugs that they then did not use.  An enigmatic big bag of soap bars, apparently used just once each before being dropped into the bag, disclosed a mystery about which I have evolved several possible solutions and no final conclusion.

Many of the things I found there were identifiable as having belonged to Grayhorse or his lady, Kim.  The kitchen held two obviously disparate collections of foodstuffs.  Kim’s were heavy in the “from-scratch” ingredients, while the other included many quick mixes.  Other things I found in the cabin had been stolen from me, from my old place across the highway at Elvenhurst.  This might be evidence that Jim and/or Sharon had been among the thieves/vandals who ravaged my old home, or it might be evidence that the actual thieves included someone else who had lived in Grayhorse’s cabin, or one or both of the Flores brothers who had run the motel before Jim and Sharon moved into it.  One Flores had gone to jail and the other had died suddenly, and many items recognizable as theirs, some with their names on them, were among the things left in the cabin next door.

How my stuff ended up in Grayhorse’s cabin, I don’t know.  I have it back now, and more.  I now have a hacksaw and long-handled limb-lopping pruner which have already seen productive use in my workshop and yard.  Hardware aplenty were there and sorting it, organizing it, will give me productive ways to pass cold winter days in the warmth on my new upper bunk.  Some of the expensive exotic plant foods I bought from Greg on the cheap are going to enhance my indoor and outdoor gardens in times to come.  Possibilities are endless.

P.S.  Maybe I’m back to blogging regularly.  That’s how it feels.  I have so many stories, so much old news to catch up with, and even some memoirs to write down now that they have recurred to my mind.  I have thought often of Xanga friends, and happily anticipate renewing our acquaintance.  Be seein’ ya!

That was my son Doug’s parting shot as our dog Koji led him out the driveway a moment ago.  Both of them are belled:  Koji with a large jingle bell attached to his collar, and Doug with a deep-voiced brass bell on the bag over his shoulder, to avoid surprising a bear on their walk to the mailbox.  We have had several visits from a bear or bears in the past week or so.  Neighbors have been shooting at something (or nothing) at infrequent, irregular intervals during that time, and the gunfire increased markedly yesterday.  Late last night, Koji’s hackles were raised and he growled and whined in a way that made it clear a bear was nearby.  There were at least six gunshots during the night, coming from two different directions.

The bear (or bears) left evidence in the yard at least three times.  First, there was a 3 gallon water jug on the porch, filled with rainwater, reserved for the garden.  It was moved about five feet and dropped right in front of my door, pierced in several places by what appears to be sharp teeth.  The same morning I found that on my doorstep when I went out, I also noticed four fang marks from a single strong bite, spanning an edge of a sturdy plastic storage tub holding kindling wood on the porch.  The two sets of marks (upper and lower jaws) measure between four and five inches, canine-to-canine.

Yesterday morning, about a week after the earlier occurrence, I found some planters overturned in my garden.  Most of my gardening is done above ground, in containers.  A bear had apparently taken a single bite of a perennial onion top, leaving its 9-inch pot lying on its side in the path.  I know it was a bear, because paw prints were left in two containers nearby, which had been filled with potting soil but not planted with anything.  The containers had been prepared to receive runners growing off a Siberian wild strawberry plant I’m propagating.  The pots are ten inches in diameter, and the paw prints in them were about eight inches across.  A bit farther down the path, a gallon jug partially filled with fish fertilizer solution had been bitten but not drained.

Assuming that the bear had found the rotten fishy soup distasteful, I righted the jug, set it aside, and tidied up the remaining bear damage.  This morning, I again found the fertilizer jug in the path, more chewed up than before, and empty.  I can’t say whether the bear changed its mind about its palatability, another bear with different tastes came along, or the nasty stinky stuff just drained out of the fang holes.  Another onion had been overturned, tasted and rejected. 

Long ago I learned not to leave attractive food such as apples out where a bear might be lured by them.  The yard and the woods around here are full of bunchberries, bear berries, watermelon berries, salmon berries, crowberries, blueberries and other traditional ursine treats, but the onion and fish emulsion issues are a new problem.  This nocturnal visitor appears to be experimenting with new foods, and willing to accept things in less than appetizing condition.  Garbage cans have not been overturned, but vegetation has been flattened around the compost heap.

I have heard no reports of bear attacks on pets or people in this area this season, but Doug and I were in agreement on the idea of wearing bear bells until winter comes and the bear threat passes.  Yesterday, as I worked in the yard, I had a radio nearby, tuned to NPR talk shows, as much for the bears’ information as for my own entertainment. 

BTW, I have pictures, not only of the bear damage, but also of flora and fungi in the yard.  I need to either reinstall our old image processing software that I know how to use, or learn to use the new program that Doug installed, before I can get them ready for upload.  I have been busy setting up a new pair of bunks and completing other summertime tasks, getting ready for winter.  When we can spare more time, I’ll try to get the photos posted….  I hear bells.  My dingalings are back now.  Seeya later.

It shouldn’t, then, have come as any surprise when I saw a fox slinking down the road past the end of our driveway.  Foxes are always around but seldom seen.  When prey is more abundant here, they are more numerous and more active.  That one, a black and rusty brown cross between the red and silver races that live in this region, was bigger and had a longer, bushier brush than the little red fox that ran across the cul de sac ahead of us as we turned the corner on our way home from Wasilla last week.

Are bears drawn into our suburban subarctic subdivisions by the same bioecological dynamics as foxes following a population explosion of hares?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that bear sightings are up this summer, too.  As I unloaded my car Friday night after that town trip, my neighbor Dave stopped by on his ATV to tell me that a big grizzly had been seen around the neighborhood for several nights.  I had heard the distinctive “chuff” of a bear from off across the muskeg last month, and a week or so after that, my dog Koji and I had smelled bear scent on the breeze one day, raising the hackles on both our necks.

I love bears.  Each time I see one, it’s a thrill — especially the big grizzes with their glistening fur.  However, I do not feel comfortable in their presence.  I came right back in the house with my load of groceries and phoned Charley (my son Doug’s dad) and asked him if he’d gotten done with any of my guns yet.  He’s doing some work on them that Doug and I had neglected too long.  He said that he had been too busy, and queried why I was asking.  The guns had been unused for a long time, so what’s the hurry, right?

I related what Dave had told me, explaining that the news made me uneasy about being here with nothing but a couple of .22 rifles.  Charley replied that a sow and two cubs had been on his porch on two separate nights lately.  He puts milk out there in a pan for “his” feral cats, and mamma bear brought her babies up to enjoy the moo juice.  After listening to them thumping and grunting on the porch, he watched from a window as they passed under his bird feeder and off into the woods toward Cliff and Glenda’s place.

I resolved then to bungee my front door shut (still no lock, nor even a latch on it, so the cats can go in and out without bothering me to open the door for them), but I keep forgetting.  I have yet to see any bears around here this summer.  I’ve seen and heard cranes, loons, and other birds, big and small.  There are fewer aphids than last year (maybe due to heavier rainfall?), and more big carpenter ants than I’ve ever seen before.  The neighbors from hell moved out and abandoned three dogs, but that’s another story.

BTW, we had a hardware failure (computer’s power supply) recently, and Doug took the opportunity to upgrade his video and sound cards.  It is now just as if we had a new computer — lost all my old shortcuts, cookies, and such.  We were without the machine for weeks, and got a lot of work done around here.  Seeya later. 

What vacation?  I’ve gone nowhere.  I was frequently absent from Xanga for a few months late last year and early in 2010, due to a compelling addiction to several Facebook apps.  Then, sometime around Valentine’s Day, I quit going on Facebook, quit using the computer altogether.  In no particular order, here are some of the ways I have been spending my time while staying away from the computer:

• breaking up – this year’s breakup (the spring thaw in the local vernacular) has been a gentle one with little rainfall and freezing nights between the warm days, giving meltwater a chance to run off or soak in.  This was especially fortunate, because last winter’s snow was deep.
• taking care – I had lapsed from my healthy low-carb, gluten-free, non-allergenic diet, and was making myself ill — digging my grave with a fork and spoon.  An excruciatingly painful episode of pancreatitis shocked me back onto the nutritional straight and narrow.  I am now enjoying better health.
• getting some work done – Since the summer of ’07, when the series of lung ailments began that ultimately landed me in the hospital that winter, entropy had ruled in my home.  By working a little at a time, resting whenever fatigue sets in, and then working some more when my legs are again steady and my grip firm, I am making great progress on restoring some order and cleanliness in here.  I also removed the ornaments that had been on a hanging ivy plant through two Christmases and put them away.  The ivy plant was diminished by the experience, but is recovering.
• being vandalized – somebody, apparently randomly and without reason, let the air out of both my front tires recently.  The main clue that they had not gone flat on their own was the absence of dirt on both of those valve stem covers, while the ones on the back wheels were crusted with the usual layer of dried breakup mud.
• Bonding with my son – Greyfox acquired a full set (or nearly so) of James Bond videos at a Friends of the Library bag sale, very cheaply. Most were on VHS, and a few (including Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale) on DVD.  The Bond books and movies were key elements in my young adulthood.  I enjoyed seeing the old ones again and catching up on those I’d missed in the interim.  Doug enjoyed watching them with me.  We Bonded for weeks before returning the videos to Greyfox.
• getting gifts – We had been using the PS2 and X-Box as DVD players until Greyfox got a new system a couple of years ago and gave us his old DVD player.  The VCR we were using was an old one Greyfox brought from PA twenty years ago, and its tracking didn’t work.  The monitor for our game consoles was a big old TV we got for $25.00 at a pawnshop around the turn of the millennium.  This winter, the DVD player quit altogether.  The old TV would take days to warm up and the tube brighten if it was shut off, so we were leaving it on and wasting a lot of electrons.  Greyfox, in a startlingly uncharacteristic move, gave us a new media player that takes VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray (of which we have none so far), and offered us a 26-inch HDTV.  Doug supplied the extra bucks and made it a 32-inch.  We still don’t receive broadcast or satellite TV, and cable still does not come this far, but the games and videos really look good on the big screen.
• emergency macramé – as part of my housecleaning, I excavated many “new” things — the various good stuff to come from the dumpsters at felony flats — and had no place to put them.  We screwed new hooks into the ceiling and I made hangers for some of them.
• planting seeds and propagating – Some of my new macramé hangers are intended for nasturtiums and morning glories that are as yet just seedlings, and others will support plants that are now growing from cuttings that resulted from some trimming and grooming of my old houseplants.
• birdwatching – Waterfowl are returning here for the summer.  A few days ago, I heard cranes calling overhead and looked up to see two of them circling above me.  They kept up the song and dance until a raven intervened and chased them away.
• cracking books – I mentioned that it was originally Crackbook Facebook that led me to neglect Xanga last year.  I spent a lot of time there before developing an aversion to it.  Since then, I have been back to reading.  That has helped with the housecleaning, too, by diminishing the stacks, heaps, boxes and bags of books that have accumulated from Greyfox’s acquisitions.
• conquering the world – In the breaks between working, I have won victories as each of the sixteen civilizations and over all of them in the Civilization video game, in each of the first three skill levels, and two victories at the fourth level of difficulty.  It’s getting harder, taking longer, and I’m spending more time on other pursuits, so I don’t know how far that trend will progress before it fizzles out entirely.
• gearing up – Greyfox’s weekly booth at the Wasilla Public Market will be starting in about a month.  He’d like to have some earrings of Alaska jade to sell to the tourists, so I’m trying to clear up the clutter off my worktable.  In the process, I discovered that the roof had leaked into my tool caddy and some of my pliers and other tools are rusty.   Did you ever have a job that gets bigger the farther you go with it?  That’s my worktable.

   The rest of that quotation:  “…are greatly exaggerated,” often attributed to Mark Twain, may or may not be somewhat true of me.  I’m not dead, but who knows how near I may be, and thus, how “greatly” the rumors may be exaggerated.  What Twain actually wrote in 1897 was, “The report of my death is an exaggeration.”  I can state with certainty that any obituary for me would at this time be premature.

Sarah phoned twice, apparently concerned over my long absence from Xanga and Facebook.  She phoned my old number, the one that is now always connected to the interwebs, instead of the new one that comes to the phone I wear all day.  (btw, Sarah, that number is sequentially just one beyond the old one, a “5″ instead of a “4″)   Yesterday, my son neglected to tell me about the message on CallWave, and I only learned of the call today because we were talking when it came in and he said, “Sydney’s calling again.”  I tried to return her call, and got a busy signal.  **sigh**

I have developed an aversion to media such as radio and internet.  Years ago, I developed such an aversion to TV, and that one seems to be permanent.  Maybe this new one is temporary.  I don’t know yet.  Certainly, it is understandable and explicable.  I shall try to explain.  The easiest way is to draw an analogy to drugs.

In my teens, doctors began prescribing tranquilizers and barbiturates for me (downers).  I was already dependent on them (addicted), by the time I reached drinking age and started using alcohol.  I used the downers to achieve oblivion.  That pattern continued into my twenties, when I gained access to illicit amphetamines and psychedelics.  How can I best express this…?  Oblivion lost its appeal.  Faster, higher, better drugs took over, and I developed an aversion to downers that exists to this day.

For as long as I can remember, I have been an information addict, a news junkie.  Sources used to be books, newspapers, radio and TV.  Around the turn of the millennium, when we got onto the electrical grid after 15 years off it, the web supplanted them to some extent.  Concurrently with all that, I have been addicted to puzzles and games. 

Solitaire and jigsaw puzzles occupied much of my time while ill or in prison.  Pinball machines and pool tables were always the best things about working or hanging out in drugstores and bars.  In the mid-1970s, I got a simple first-generation Fairchild video game system, with games such as Pong and Cat and Mouse, and quickly became addicted to the point of carpal tunnel syndrome.  At the turn of the aforementioned millennium, my son and his friend Sephiroth got me hooked on later-generation games such as Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy.

To zoom forward to now — The aforementioned son, Doug, had an online fanfic writing tournament last month.  To placate and pacify me in the absence of my daily Facebook fix, he went through his game collection and found one he knew I could play (the finger work of many shooters, etc., are beyond these old hands of mine) and that he thought I would like. 

By the time the tournament ended, I was strung out on Civilization Revolution to the extent that I’d developed an aversion to radio (which had usually played all day in the background as I read, surfed, worked and played on the web) and also to the computer in general.  I hadn’t begun to tire of that game when Final Fantasy XIII came in the mail, having been ordered pre-publication.  Maybe when I beat the final boss, or maybe even before then — Who knows? — I might be back online more.  As my addiction situation stands currently, I’m not even following the Iditarod.  **wow!**

At 1:35 PM today, Hans Gatt won the 2010 Yukon Quest, setting a new record for fastest finish: 9 days, 26 minutes, 23 hours faster than the 2009 record set by Sebastian Schneulle.

Lance Mackey took second place, arriving in Whitehorse at 2:38 PM, an hour and forty minutes ahead of Hugh Neff in third place. The times set by each of the top three teams easily beat the previous record.