I'm preparing to go to work full-time, working by phone, from home.  I start getting paid for my work tomorrow, after weeks of preparations.  I suspect that the preparation phase is a lot more work than the work itself will be.  It is not a job in the sense of being an employee.  I'm an independent contractor -- or that's what the contract says, anyway.  My de facto independence does not seem to conform to the written terms of the contract.  Much remains to be seen.

I haven't been blogging much because I haven't had much on my mind besides this work-related stuff.  I have been scattered, and I can't blame it all on Mercury retrograde, which, by the way, is no longer retrograde.  (yay!)  When I've had time and attention to spare, I've been relaxing with games.  I did take a few photos yesterday, and they might possibly show up in my photo module later today.

[Greyfox, if you see this, I left the requested link for you privately.]

I'm studiously NOT thinking about things like contagion and incubation periods.  Sufficient unto this day was the pain therein.  I'm not even borrowing trouble anticipating any possible sleep problems tonight or fatigue hangover tomorrow -- what comes will come.  Right now at this moment I am whacked, knackered and cream crackered, having no need nor desire to borrow tomorrow's trouble at all.

Greyfox showed up here early this morning, and with help from a groggy sleep-deprived Doug, unloaded some perishables he'd brought for us from supermarkets in Wasilla.  Then we all piled into his car to go to the clinic up between here and Talkeetna.  Way long time ago, days and daze ago, I'd had an inconclusive blood test for hepatitis and had to repeat it.  When the result on the second test was also inconclusive, the doc told me to get the whole family in for testing just in case.

Neither Greyfox nor Doug was cooperative, much less willing, and not anything approaching enthusiastic about it, and so time went by.  I brought it up a few times, and finally one time when Greyfox was headed up there anyway for a dental appointment, I set up appointments for the three of us on the same day.  That was the day a few months ago when Redoubt Volcano exploded, the ash cloud blew this way, travel advisories were issued, and I canceled the appointments.

A couple of weeks ago, Greyfox finally got around to rescheduling his dental appointment, and set up medical appointments for all 3 of us again.  Today, we kept them.  The only thing I needed was to get my asthma prescriptions renewed, but I was talked into getting routine blood work done, too.  First, a medical assistant stuck me three times, and managed to fill one of the two tubes of blood she needed before causing a hematoma on the back of one hand and switching to the other hand for the next stick.

That poke with the needle went directly to hematoma without getting any blood into the tube, so she gave up and went for the phlebotomist, who poked me three times, more painfully than the first one had, before getting the second tube filled.  Both of them seemed extremely rueful and were profusely apologetic about the proliferation of colorful circus-print bandages on my hands and arms, but for me it was nothing new.  I am blessed with lousy, hard to find and easy to rupture veins.  They probably saved my life forty years ago when I was running meth into them.  If it had been easy, I know I would have done more, and I am sure I had enough as it is.

Doug's blood draw was done quickly and easily.  He had his Nintendo DS with him, so the wait while mom got perforated didn't bother him.  Greyfox had both a dental appointment and the blood draw, and he has such excellent veins that he used to be a professional blood donor.  Therefore, he and I were done about the same time.  As we left the clinic comparing notes, it became apparent that either (a) Doug's blood work won't come out right because he wasn't fasting or (b) Greyfox was misinformed about the necessity for him to fast for 8 hours before his blood draw, which necessitated his making a new appointment for next week.

We needed two things from the hardware store, but when we stopped on the way back, neither Doug nor I could recall what they were.  Instead, we bought quadrille-ruled pads for D&D, flypaper strips, and stick-on numbers for the mailbox, which we needed but hadn't thought of previously.  It started raining after we got home.  When the drips started hitting the pans in here I remembered that one of the things we'd wanted to buy was new tarps to fix the roof.  That jogged Doug's memory and he recalled that he needed bulbs for his flashlight.

Our second and last stop after the clinic was Jack's store, for milk, which Greyfox had forgotten to bring.  Jack was on his weekly buying trip to town.  His wife Lois saw us pull into the parking lot, left her bake shop next door, came over and unlocked the grocery store for us.  We got our milk and I found a different kind of sticky fly-catching gizmo.  Then I saw two trays of film-wrapped pastries on top of a chest freezer beside the door to the back room.  I picked up two cherry turnovers and asked Doug if he saw anything there he wanted.

Lois interjected that those were old and she was about to throw them out.  I asked her if she'd throw some my way.  She said, in a distressed and discouraging tone, that they were two days old.  I said none of them looked moldy and I could nuke them and make them like fresh again.  She let us bag up the whole batch, about a dozen and a half pastries, donuts and cookies, being apologetic about their stale condition.  I was smiling, and Doug was grinning and making mmmmm sounds, as I said, "At least I didn't have to go into the dumpster for them," and we left.

Greyfox stuck around here long enough to get some computer time without the timer running as it always is when he uses library computers.  While he was online, I went through some bags of dumpster-score clothing he'd brought, and sorted out ones we couldn't use.  They'll go back and be donated to people he knows or to one thrift shop or another.  I also boiled one of the dozens of eggs he brought, for him to take back to Wasilla with him.  He likes hard cooked eggs, but has only a microwave for cooking in his cabin.

We're getting a fine soaking rain now, which was much needed for the health of the forest and gardens and to keep down the danger of wildfires.  The dog and his Doug are out now, walking in the rain.  Doug has always loved walking in the rain.  For one thing, it brings out the colors of the stones in the road, which are not crushed gravel but the tumbled droppings of ancient glaciers.  Koji, I think, likes walking in the rain because it enhances his natural scent.  It truly does.  He comes back smelling just like a wet dog.

The day started hazy.  When the haze burnt off, I had to get out in the sun.

That's the sky to westward over my backyard.

And this is the sky over the muskeg on the eastern, sunrise, side of the trees:

P.K.Piebean went with me for a walk.

She's a talker, and she was mrrrating at me all the way.

Doug and I have a lot of work to do, pitching the leftover firewood into a neater pile back farther from the road so we can take delivery of next winter's load sometime before September.

There's a lot more wood than we thought there was when it was buried deep in snow.  We had begun to think we were running low on wood as it became hard to find.

The muskeg is drying up and last year's brown swamp grass (really sedge) is giving way to new green.

The frogs are quiet now, and their pools are drying up.

The forest floor is a patchwork of spider webs.

The only flowers in full bloom now are on this ultra-hardy ornamental plant I have in about ten containers in the part of my yard I call the garden.

Everything there is potted and perennial.  I dug them up at the old place across the highway, and there's no ground here prepared for a garden.  It is all peaty, root-riddled, forest floor.

Mostly, what I have are hardy onions like this, and chives.

There are also a few pots of Shasta daisies, some Siberian strawberries, Valerian, and, of course, the rhubarb in big raised "tubs" made of chicken wire.  Those are the things that survived five summers of neglect and six winters of frost before I got around to moving anything.  At first, I thought we'd only be here temporarily.  Last fall, there were some raspberry vines in the garden over there, too.  If they come up again this year, maybe I'll get them moved.

Native plants are beginning to show buds.  Spirea, commonly used as hedges in the suburbs, is a wildflower here.

Lots of blueberry buds indicate abundance of berries later on, unless it rains at the wrong time and knocks the fruit off.

Okay.  We're going back in now.  Tell everybody 'bye, P.K.

David Traver of Anchorage was the grand champion in the 2009 World Beard and Moustache Championships.  It's woven like a snowshoe, and he plans to shave it for charity.

Many more pictures of various categories of competitive facial hair can be seen at the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau PR Flickr Photostream.  ADN.com has an illustrated story, too.

Another Alaskan man in the news is Alec Turner of Fairbanks, who summited Mount Everest a couple of days ago.

Happy Birthday, Greyfox.

Six years ago today, I made a panic-run down the Valley to Wasilla, pulled my Old Fart out of a puddle of piss and spilled booze, and (at his request) helped him get to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.  That's a long story, as most of mine are.  Soon afterward, we both started going to Narcotics Anonymous and for a while we were attending meetings of both those 12-step organizations several times a week, and Double Trouble in Recovery (the one for people with dual diagnoses:  addiction and mental illness) on Sundays.

For several years, each of us held various service positions in AA and/or NA.  Additionally, I was a volunteer at a rehab center in Wasilla, driving a vanload of their residents to NA meetings.  Neither Greyfox nor I was addicted to any of the programs.  When he would share at meetings, he often referred to one or both of us as 12-step heretics.  We outspokenly do not believe in personal powerlessness, and to us there is no mysterious "X-factor" that makes one person an alcoholic while other people can drink in moderation with impunity.  We know that the key to addiction is as simple as ABC:  it is all brain chemistry.

We hung on there for a while, a few years, as I said, hoping to help a few addicts free themselves of their addictions to drugs and the programs.  We watched a bunch of True Believers go out, back in, and out again through those revolving doors.  Twelve-step programs claim they have a 15-25% success rate.  I'm not sure it's that high.  Neither of us has been to any meetings for months.  In my case, it has been years.  I just now got a big smile on my face, at the thought that, sure as anything, there are people in those programs who assume that since we're not suiting up and showing up there we are using again.  Ha!  The joke's on them.

Six years ago, Greyfox stopped using alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and various other recreational drugs, mostly downers ('cause the man never met a CNS depressant he didn't like).  He quit all at once, something few in the field of addiction recommend, or even think possible.  He says it was easy.  He tells people that, "not using is simply doing nothing and it is easier to do nothing than to do something."  His withdrawal was made painless and effortless by the regimen of orthomolecular supplements I put together for him.

About half a year before he got clean from his various drugs, I had kicked a lifelong sugar addiction using orthomolecular supplements -- not the exact same mix of supplements, but the same principles of balanced brain chemistry.  When I had done "hard" drugs my drug of choice was methamphetamine.  When I quit, in the early 1970s, I followed the advice of some professional former junkies, and used sweets and coffee to allay the drug cravings.  Then, in the fall of 2002, I used orthomolecular supplements to get off sugar and caffeine.

At the time that Greyfox got clean, in spring of 2003, I was growing and smoking weed.  With no more economic need to grow it, I stopped, and in the eyes of NA, that makes today my "birthday," too.  I had never been addicted to weed.  I am one of the people for whom weed is a stimulant.  Greyfox is one for whom it is a relaxant, and they are the ones more likely to become addicted to it.  Those differences had always made for some interesting complications in our using together, resulting in each of us using more, in company with the other, than we'd have used alone.  But I suppose that's a whole 'nother story.  Maybe I should just get on with this story and get to my point.

I was "clean" by my definition:  free of addictive drug use, before I started going to 12-step meetings.  Greyfox and I both remained "clean" by NA's definition throughout the time we attended their meetings, and continued after we stopped going.  Ironically, within a few years of attending those meetings where coffee is brewed and consumed by gallons and anniversaries of clean time are celebrated with birthday cakes, I yielded to the temptation and went back on caffeine and sugar after years of abstinence.  Greyfox had never tried to abstain from caffeine or sugar.

Recently, he has become concerned about weight gain and has cut down on his sugar consumption.  My own sugar addiction is an on-again-off-again thing.  I go for days or weeks eating sensibly, then binge on candy or pastry.  Both of us moderate our coffee consumption most of the time.  His caffeine use spikes on weekends when he works trade shows, and mine spikes when I spend time with him in Wasilla.  At home, I drink a pot of half-decaf every morning, and sometimes a pot or two of decaf when that is gone.  One constant for us both is the knowledge that using is a choice, that we have the power to do, or not do.  After lifetimes of playing around with our brain chemistry, we still do, even though we don't always feel good about it after we do.  Of course it feels good when we do... that's the point isn't it?  The dopamine, the sugar rush... that's why we do it.

Hmmm... did I have a point here?  Did I make it?  "Clean" or "sober," like so many other words, means different things to different people.  My dope-fiend friends in NA would say I'm clean because I'm not using alcohol or other substances they consider to be "drugs."  I know better, because I was fumbling around here bleary-eyed this morning until I downed those first two cups of half-decaf and they had time to hit my blood stream.  There's a box of brownie mix and bag of marshmallows in my pantry, and I intend to use them.  I ration myself to one bag of Hot Tamales Fire candy a day.  By my definition, I'm using -- it's not healthy, but I know it could be worse.  I could be running meth in my veins, but I'm not and I'm not going to be.

Anyway, Greyfox, Happy Birthday.  We had twelve and a half years of hell together while you were drinking and using, and we have had a heavenly six years since you quit.  I have enjoyed watching you grow into a decent human being.  I love you more than I can ever fully express.  You're aces in my book, Darlin'.

[If you skipped over that link to the story of my first ever AA meeting at the top of this entry, here it is again.]

I like facial hair on men.  Generally speaking, I like bearded men.  I think that a man who chooses to let his beard grow naturally is showing good sense.  Shaving and other forms of depilation are wasteful of time and other precious resources.  Stubble on faces is abrasive and not conducive to happy nuzzling and smooches.  In addition to all that, there is something a little creepy about a grown man who tries to look like a beardless boy.

Some of these men, in my opinion, might have gone a little overboard with the beard thing, though.

adn photo by Bob Hallinen

Actually, the members of the South Central Alaska Beard and Mustache Club, hosts of the 2009 World Beard and Moustache Championship, above,  look pretty much okay to me.  They just look like Alaskan men, letting it all hang out.  It's the ones like Gerhard Knapp, below, a contestant from Germany, who turn me off.  I just don't understand the rationale behind the wax and the freakish, funny-looking thing.  Who would want to nuzzle that?
 

Competing for ribbons in the Alaska State Fair was my favorite pastime during the years I lived off the grid.   Each winter, the annual premium book that listed all the categories and prizes would arrive about the same time the first seed catalog arrived.  My seed orders and garden plans were devised to enable me to enter as many different categories as possible.  I would also enter crafts, wine, preserves, and baked goods, but this story involves garden produce.

One year, I purchased seed that was described in the catalog as "giant hot Hungarian yellow wax pepper."  I allowed the plants about half a dozen containers in one corner of my greenhouse.  One pepper matured before all the rest, and I picked it one brilliant morning as I was opening up the greenhouse for the day.  I took a bite.  It was fragrant and tasted sweet, for an instant, before the heat hit.  My mouth was on fire.  I choked, coughed, and spat all the way back to the house, and guzzled milk from the jug to put out the fire.

I tended those peppers with the same loving care I gave everything, and I nipped off late blossoms to give the developing peppers every advantage.  Vegetable entries all require a certain number of specimens.  I think that for hot peppers it was three or four.  Uniformity is one of the features that are judged, so I entered several peppers as identical in size and color as possible.

That year, I was operating The Beanery, my natural foods booth, at the fair.  After I dropped off all my entries in the various barns and exhibit halls on the day before the fair opened, I went back to the old school bus and continued with preparations to feed the crowds for the next two weeks.  Early the next morning, when the exhibits opened, I left Charley to serve breakfast to the early risers and made the rounds to see what I'd won.  I was pleased but not particularly surprised to see not one, but two ribbons:  a blue "first" for the hot pepper category, and a big purple "best of show" rosette for the entire greenhouse vegetable division, on the giant hot Hungarian yellow wax peppers.

A few days later, with some spare time, I made a more leisurely circuit of the exhibits and saw, to my horror, that my purple rosette was gone and there was no ribbon at all on my yellow wax peppers.  The judge, a man named Fox, was seated nearby so I asked him what was going on.  He said the peppers had been entered in the wrong category, that they were actually a sweet pepper, not a hot one.

With vivid recall of that choking, eye-watering run for the milk jug, I challenged him to taste one of them.  Smugly, he declined, and told me if I wanted to challenge his decision there was a procedure and I'd have to take it up with the staff in the front office.  It was a long walk, and I was running short on time, but the injustice of it all impelled me to rush over to the office.  I presented my case to the clerk there.  She said that the judge's decision was final, and I asked her which decision:  the original "best of show" decision, or the erroneous reconsideration.  She shrugged and handed me a challenge form, saying that there was a $25 fee for filing a challenge to a judge's decision.

That defeated me.  I couldn't afford $25 (non-refundable, even if I won) for anything as frivolous as a showy purple ribbon and a cash prize that was, I think, $12.00 at the time.  The annual prize check, which usually arrived in mid-winter when we needed the money most, was my main justification for all the time and resources I put into the competition.  I handed back the blank form, told her the whole affair was grossly unfair, left in tears, and went back to work in the Beanery.

I had put the whole experience behind me by the time the prize check arrived that winter.  I'd won over $300.00 that year, and it would come in handy.  I got a surprise, however, when I read the itemized printout of my prizes.  I got paid for both the first and the best of show on the peppers.  I don't know if it was a clerical error, if Mr. Fox had re-reconsidered (perhaps after tasting a pepper), or if somebody else had overruled his capricious behavior.  I thought it prudent, at the time, to cut my losses and spend the money without questioning its provenance.

That was long ago, and I have transcended all my indignation and resentment.  I put the hurt feelings behind me, but I am still left with questions about how things finally fell out the way they did.  Either way, whether (according to the rules "judge's decision is final,") I really deserved the prize or not, I hadn't deserved all that on-again-off-again aggravation, and if the prize was rightfully mine, I didn't deserve to be deprived of the ribbons to add to my collection, and robbed of the glory of having them displayed to fairgoers in my name.  *sigh*  Oh, well....

This reminiscence was prompted by the current Featured Grownups challenge:

UNDESERVED

If you have a story about something you did not deserve, blog it (keeping it clean and coherent) and post a link to your entry, HERE.

We live about a mile from the Susitna River.  At this point in its course, it is a broad braided stream, a mile or more in width, with many channels interspersed with islands ranging from minute sand bars to high wooded isles.  When I was more able, I used to love walking the trail along the Sheep Creek bluff to where the land falls away steeply down to the Big Su.

I haven't made that walk for years.  Doug goes out to the bluffs several times a week when the trail is passable, not too muddy or deep in snow.  He comes back and tells me about what he has seen.  Last Saturday, he took the camera with him.  I was at the computer when he brought it in and put it on the desk, for me to save the pictures and do any cropping or modification on them.  The first thing that hit me, generally, about this batch of photos, was how apparent the difference in our height is.  Familiar scenes are shown from a higher angle than in my shots.

When I saw this shot:

...it took my breath away.  I don't think I'd ever have thought of taking that POV on the railroad tracks.  It sings.

The shot below hit me in the gut.

It's a beautiful scene, well-composed, but that's not what got to me.  This is one of my favorite places on the planet.  I used to pack a lunch and sit on the bluff at that point to eat.  I did that in all sorts of weather, all times of day, from May through November, through a couple of decades.  I missed it, missed those long walks in the woods.  I expressed some of those feelings, and Doug said that was why he took the camera... so I could see.

Greyfox called.  Even traffic lights are out.  He described it as, "demented carnival atmosphere."  3 of his neighbors are sitting in lawn chairs in the middle of the highway, waving "slow" signs at cars approaching a big intersection.