The lead-in to this memoir episode is here.

Having a car, Lucy our VW bug, and both of us having regular incomes, and both preferring the quiet green of suburban living over city life, Charley and I started looking for a more pleasant place to live than that dank and gloomy basement apartment a block from Anchorage's Park Strip.  As the last of the winter's snow was melting, we found a duplex for rent in Chugiak.  It was a recently built house on a hillside, the last house on that road, with nothing but woods visible from the windows on 2 sides.

Our half was upstairs with a ground-level entry off the street.  The downstairs neighbors had a ground-level entry downslope and around back.  We had two bedrooms.  The sunny one on the northeast corner of the house was mine, except when I invited Charley in for some fun.  My bed was a pile of foam carpet padding salvaged from an industrial dumpster, very comfortable.  I hung my rattan swinging love seat from an eye-bolt in the ceiling.  A few crates and planks supported by blocks completed the furnishings.  The landlord, a building contractor, had built abundant closets, cabinets, drawers, and counters into the house.

To furnish the living room, we already had two bean bags.  It was a big room and looked bleak and bare without furniture.  We started looking at serious furniture and temporarily set up a free-standing canvas camping hammock on a tubular metal frame.  The rest of our furnishings consisted of several fluorescent grow-light fixtures and a dozen or so marijuana plants.  Raven vs the State of Alaska had recently decriminalized marijuana, so we were open about our growing and smoking.

One of our friends had bought some land on the Kenai Peninsula, in an undeveloped subdivision a few miles outside Soldotna.  Michael and Mollie and another friend, and Charley and I went out there for a weekend of fishing and tramping around in the woods looking at real estate.  Michael and Mollie picked a ten-acre lot in a low spot of muskeg near the road despite Charley's warning that it would be flooded half the time.  I walked to the top of a hill, found a lovely wooded spot where 4 lots met, and talked Charley into buying all 40 acres.

The down payment was low and we were both making enough money that the monthly payments barely made a dent in our disposible income.  Charley didn't drink.  He'd sobered up in jail while doing time for some crimes he probably wouldn't have committed, or at least wouldn't have been caught at, if he hadn't been drunk.  He was so outspoken in his opposition to alcohol that it embarrassed and annoyed our friends.  I was happy without alcohol, being more into ups than downs.  We had started getting paid to go to concerts the previous winter, working security for a friend's concert promotion company once or twice a month on weekend nights.  Paid to party, and without any drug-related expenses, we had lots of money to spare around that time.

Charley, who had been working for the state-subsidized ex-cons' business venture, Re-Entry Construction Co., had a little accident.  He was operating a Pettibone forklift, moving a pallet load of building materials around on a mucky jobsite during spring breakup, and the topheavy machine overturned.  Nobody besides Charley was hurt, and his injuries were minor, but expensive damage was done, several days' work was lost, and a crane had to be hired to right the Pettibone again.  Charley was fired.

Since hiring for construction on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was being done through unions and he had belonged to the Teamsters when he was driving cab in the 'sixties, he reinstated his membership in Local 959 and started showing up at the hall every morning for job calls.  There was a great perk for me in his Teamster's membership:  I got to use the workout and spa facilities at the new Teamster's Mall.  That building is now Alaska Regional Hospital, and Local 959 isn't anywhere near as rich and powerful as it was in the Pipeline era.

Charley went out on a pipeline job, driving a belly dump at Pump Station 8.  He'd fly out to the camp, work a week, and come back for a week off.  I was commuting through Anchorage Monday through Friday to work at the Youth Employment Service in Spenard.  Every afternoon, I'd spend break time reading the bulletin boards in the Job Service office in the same building, watching for a listing in the social service field.  I went on a couple of interviews, but nothing jelled for me.

One day in August, when Charley had just gotten back from his week out at the construction camp and we were tokin' up, the landlord showed up on the doorstep with an eviction notice.  He said the neighbors downstairs had been complaining about the marijuana smoke.  Since the ventilation systems for both apartments were connected, he claimed, they were concerned for their children's health.  At the time, I considered that a thin pretext, a flimsy cover for his own moralism, devised to circumvent landlord-tenant law.  I am currently of the same opinion.

Finding that duplex apartment had not been easy, and it had taken us a few months of looking before we found it.  Anchorage was overcrowded with pipeline workers and the influx of migrant dreamers who had settled for less-well-paid work or had no work at all.  Now we had thirty days to vacate, and Charley was going to be out on the job for half of it.  I started answering classified ads. 

We were getting close to the deadline when I found something.  The ad said "mobile home for sale $2,000 cash only."  I was feeling desperate when I called the owners.  The 8' x 35' trailer was about 25 years old and in bad shape, but in that housing market the price couldn't be beat.  The best thing about it was that it was located in a small trailer park south of Anchorage, overlooking Potter Marsh and Cook Inlet, and the monthly space rental was reasonable.

The main problem was that I had only about one thousand dollars.  Charley would be back with his paycheck in a few days, but I was afraid the trailer would be sold by then.  Mr. and Mrs. Blackard were reluctant to accept my down payment, but I showed up at their door with $1,000 in cash, held it out, promised that I'd be back within a week with the rest, and reminded them that they could hang onto the trailer's title and risk nothing but a few days' delay.  They took pity and caved, and I started packing.

Everything except a few dishes, toiletries and stuff for daily use was stacked in boxes by the door when Charley's plane got in.  We stopped at the Blackards' and completed the transaction on our way out to Chugiak from the airport.  The first load of stuff we hauled into Anchorage, across town, out to Rabbit Creek Road, and up Golden View Drive to our new home, was the easy one.  Then we headed back out to Chugiak for another load, in early dusk of mid-September, as it started to rain.

Late that night, in pouring rain, we loaded the last 5 marijuana plants in their 5 gallon buckets into the VW bug, made a final sweep of the house to make sure nothing was left behind, gleefully woke the landlord to surrender the key, and headed home, to the first "home" either of us had ever owned.  The land it sat on was rented, but the trailer was ours, which was the opposite of comforting to me.  The risk and responsibility now were mine, not a landlord's.

Need I say...?
    ...to be continued.

This entry will have photos added, probably, if and when we replace our broken scanner.

Doug was letting the dog back in a while ago, standing in the open door, in no hurry to shut it before he let all our precious heat out and a blast of Arctic cold in, when he said those words:  "We made it through winter."

It's true.  I haven't had to wear multiple layers around the house for at least a week.  It has been about that long since I had to kindle a fire in the wood stove for warmth.  I did bake brownies a few mornings ago, to take off the night's chill in here, but by the time the brownies were done, the sun was doing its job in here.  If you haven't seen the latest batch of pictures from the neighborhood, taken yesterday, check the photo module on the left side of my main page.  I saw a pair of cranes in the cul de sac, and they posed for me.

We don't have to hook the snap end of the dog's chain inside the door to keep it from freezing shut.  It's a real relief not having to winkle that chain through the gap between door and jamb to hook it inside.  Sinks are draining, and that's a big relief too.  Those frozen drains were a pain in the ass.  It's bad enough not having running water and having to haul it all in in buckets and jugs, without having to haul it all out again after we've used it.

Now, if we just get through these next weeks of Mercury retrograde....  It has been gawdawful since I blogged about it yesterday.  CallWave wasn't working.  Several hours of online business-related activity may or may not have gone through -- I don't know yet.  At the end of the session, things went wonky, and my emails are unanswered as yet.  There's more, but why enumerate every little glitch and message gone astray?  I have to get off the computer soon, anyhow, because Doug is gaming again today.

...it could be because Mercury is retrograde again.

Mercury turned retrograde almost a week ago, in the second degree of Gemini.  Today, it passes back over the cusp into Taurus.  I don't recall another retrograde Mercury that I felt and noticed more than this one.  Here's just some of what's been going on for me:

• I stood in Greyfox's yard last Friday and asked him if I had everything from his fridge that I was supposed to take home with me.  He assured me that I did.  Before I got home, he had called Doug to confess that he still had three dozen eggs he'd bought for me when they were on sale.
• Doug and I went through one glitch after another doing the shopping for and purchase of a phone I need for work, and getting the new phone line wired in.
• Error messages!  On Xanga, Facebook, Google, and other sites, there hasn't been a day all week without something gone wrong.  Xanga wouldn't let me upload images, and then it stopped allowing me to access old images I have stored here.  And TYPOs -- I'm ordinarily a fairly fast touch typist.  Now I'm a fluent garbler and frequent backspacer.
• Four days after the new phone was supposed to be here by UPS, I got a postcard from a delivery contractor in Anchorage -- just like the postcard they sent us last winter under similar circumstances -- saying they needed more address info.  When I phoned (long distance to Anchorage) to give them the same info I'd given last winter, I was told, just like I'd been told then, that now that they know where we are there will be no such delays in the future.
• Phone in hand, I started installing it.  Optimistically, when Greyfox called me from the free phone at the library yesterday morning, I told him that Doug would have our original phone line tied up with his D&D session in the afternoon, but I'd call him on my new phone on the new line some time in the afternoon.  Need I say, it did not go that smoothly?  After ten last night, Doug finally finished up the game and I phoned Greyfox.  The new phone is still charging, and won't be charged until mid-afternoon today.

I have hit only the highlights there.  The three of us, and a number of my online contacts, have been going through a multitude of communication snafus.  I'd been only peripherally aware of the Mercury station, not fully informed as to the exact date and time, or the degrees of the Zodiac involved, until this morning.  Finally, I picked the ephemeris off the shelf and looked.  I almost wish I hadn't.

Mercury is transiting INTO my intensity zone (AKA the "curse/blessing pattern") and hasn't really gotten there yet.  This "stellium" or linked system of astrological aspects, is a curse/blessing in itself, probably the main reason I have been as successful as I have been at transcending dualism.  Nothing in my life is ever all bad or all good.  Everything goes both ways at once for me.  I don't go through hard times or good times.   Life goes from slack to intense for me, from rest to restlessness... from laid back with my hat shading my eyes to hanging onto my hat in a gale.

When Mercury goes direct at the end of this month, it will cover the same intense points in forward motion that it is just now beginning to back over.  I do love intensity and have learned to welcome challenge, and will be ready for a rest by the time one comes around the middle of June.  Sweet Summer Solstice and the Midnight Sun have never been more welcome.

...or maybe gastric bypass.  Or weight gain, instead of loss.  Another possibility would be death, I suppose.

I can't help wondering about the possible reasons for the multitude of very large sweat pants at one thrift store in Wasilla yesterday.  They were size 6X:  EXXXXXXtra large.  None were new, but all were in good condition, not worn out.

Earlier in the week, Greyfox had mentioned seeing some really large sweat pants he could tell were too big for me.  He might have gotten a pair for me anyway, if they had drawstrings, because I sometimes do wear several layers of fleece and/or Polar Fleece in winter, and just cinch up the waists of the baggy outer layers.  These pants all had elastic waistbands, no strings.

My quest for pants yesterday was made more interesting by the presence of those biggie baggies on the racks.  The shop does no sorting by size in that department, and each rack held several pairs alongside a range of other sizes.  There were at least ten pair, all in conservative dark colors, presumably all from the same plus-size source.  I didn't check labels, but as far as I could tell, except for color, they were identical.

Your guess is as good as mine.  What do you think?

After doing my shopping from the supermarkets' motorized scooters for a year or two, I still have no idea what to expect from other people in the stores.  I can make some generalizations.  In general, fewer people acknowledge my existence when I'm in the crip cart.  Most tend to avoid eye contact -- and this is a culture where eye contact, smiles, nods and words of greeting between strangers are not uncommon.  In the crip cart, sometimes acquaintances don't look closely enough at me to realize they know me.

Then there is the subset of people who pay too much attention, excessively defer to me (maybe they're just standing back out of the way because they fear I'll run over them), or offer me unneeded help.  I'm usually more comfortable with the ones who pointedly don't notice the cripple in their midst.  They give me the opportunity to pretend I'm a ninja.

Today in Wasilla, at my first shopping stop the batteries were dead in all the scooters, so I used the grocery cart as a walker, as I'd done for years before I gave in and started riding a scooter.  It was a trip being up there with the real people for a change.  It was fatiguing, though, and I was pleased to ask at the counter for the key and ride the scooter at Treasure Loft, a big thrift store.  I was exhausted and feeling gimpy by then (started the day with a hitch in my git-along that only worsened throughout the day), so when I was at the checkout counter I asked, "Would it be okay if I park the scooter in its corner and just toss the key (it is on a curly flex cord) back to you?"  The woman chuckled and offered to carry my bags over to the scooter's parking spot and take the key from me there.

My next -- and final -- shopping stop was a big box store, and I couldn't have made it through that one without the scooter.  In one aisle, an employee had a rack of potato chips out in the middle of the aisle so she could transfer bags of chips from the back to the front.  It didn't bother me to wait.  I was sitting comfortably, and had a display of bagged candy beside me for entertainment.  I had plucked some hot tamale cinnamon candies from the rack, wondering if I could eat them without getting irresistible cravings for more, when the young woman noticed what I had in my hand and asked me if I liked hot tamales.  I assented, and she said her husband loves them.  I said I liked the extra-hot ones even better, but hadn't seen any for quite a while.  That perked her right up.  She explained that there had recently been a mis-pick at the wholesaler and the store had received a shipment of Fire Hot Tamales they hadn't ordered, and the cartons of candy had gone directly onto the closeout shelf at a big discount.

She was headed in that direction to return to the stock room, and offered to show me where they were.  If I'd been on foot, I would have declined just because of the effort, pain, and fatigue involved, but in the scooter -- no problem.  As we crossed the store, with her shortening her stride so I could keep up, we talked about the differing ways in which normally-abled people relate to crips (my word, not hers).  She said something about knowing it was hard to get around on the scooters, and I said, "Actually, with practice it is easy, and fun."  It was kinda fun, having a conversation on my way to Fire Hot Tamale candy, 48 packages of it, for about the same price I'd have had to pay for 20 packages at retail.  Now, if one package gives me irresistable cravings for more, I can indulge myself until the lining of my mouth dissolves from the fiery chemicals.

Further on, I had the most unpleasant interlude of the day.  A young couple were shopping along ahead of me, with three boys aged about 7 to 12.  The lovely young woman was being bossy and verbally abusive to all four males, and they were taking it docilely as if it were perfectly okay.  I was the innocent occasion for her calling her husband stupid and telling him to "hurry up and get out of the fucking way," of me in my crip cart, as I was quietly and contentedly sitting there waiting for him to find what she wanted him to pick off the shelf for her.  I said there was no problem, and he glanced at me in surprise as if the furniture had spoken.  A bit further on, I stopped behind them again as she was heatedly saying to her man, "No, not that one you idiot, the other," and he was looking baffled as the 3 boys wandered back and forth across the aisle.

She exploded at the boys, and started physically trying to herd them into a smaller gaggle, pulling at their clothes, shoving from behind, and berating them for being "in the way."  She never said in the way of what, but I must assume she saw me, or at least somehow perceived my presence, even though she never obviously glanced my way, and reacted not at all when I spoke up and said, "It's all right, I could have waited," though all 4 of the males gave me startled eyes and then gave her guarded glances.  If Mama's unhappy, nobody's happy.  I would have loved to stop and talk to her a while about low blood sugar and its effects on personality, and the effects of verbal abuse on the developing personalities of children, but I didn't think she could have tolerated the shock of being addressed by a non-entity.  She would have just taken it out on the guys later, anyway.

There were delays in my getting through checkout because I had to ask for employee assistance in getting some heavy packages of cat food and kitty litter.  The checker relayed my order to a young man who misunderstood and brought three white buckets full of kitty litter and three plain, empty white plastic buckets, instead of the white buckets of kitty litter and purple bags of cat food she'd told him to bring.  It was a humorous incident, and the man waiting behind me made light of the wait with joking references to some of the contents of my shopping cart.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful.  Before I got home, Greyfox had called and told Doug that he had forgotten to give me the 3 dozen eggs he had bought for me on sale earlier in the week.  I had used up almost all my eggs, boiling a dozen for him.  His cooking facilities consist of a microwave oven.  He likes having hard boiled eggs to pack with his lunches when he's out on the stand, and boiling eggs in a microwave is not feasible.  We were to trade the dozen boiled eggs for 3 dozen fresh eggs, and now he's got all the eggs and no way to cook them.

I'm rambling and babbling here, the old tired-and-wired thing.  My next move is to bed with a book so I can unwind.  Later, all.  There's a whole 'nother story to tell about Greyfox's and my breakfast conversation this morning.

All right... I confess, I did it, really, so I can start getting paid for practicing one of my arts.  Doug and I needed to install a new dedicated phone line so I can go to work at a psychic hotline network.  Ill health and physical handicaps made me stop my summer rounds of fairs and festivals years ago, and KaiOaty doesn't generate much work, and a lot of that is pro bono.s  In the current economic climate, Greyfox can use some help supporting the family, and in hard time there's always demand for the services of psychics.

The local phone co-op has two levels of service.  Members can either pay them an extra $40.00 a month for the co-op to assume responsibility for the wiring inside the building as well as all the transmission lines outside, or we can be responsible for everything on our side of the junction box on a little pole beside the house.  Ever since I have had phone service in this valley, about a quarter century, I've done the inside work myself.

It may come as no surprise to those who know me that we did our wiring job on the cheap.  The bountiful dumpsters at Felony Flats have been generous in many ways, including telephone lines.  The cable that supplied the power and signal to the original phone in here had an extra two unused elements in it that would carry signal and power for the new line.  All we needed to do, I thought, was to open up the little box on the baseboard and wire into it a cable with a connector on the other end that can plug into the base unit of my new cordless headset phone when it gets here.

I did that:  found a 25 foot phone line that had been damaged near its middle, cut it in two, and wired one bare end into the box.  To get to the box, we had needed to move a lamp, a clock radio, box of tissues, a couple of dozen books, two bedside tables, and twenty pounds or so of assorted rocks and crystals plus ten or a dozen candles and candle holders.  The box where the phone line enters the house is in the corner at the head of my bed.

I assumed a position lying across the bed with my torso hanging off into a little hole about a foot and a half wide and two and a half feet long.  Moving a bookshelf would have given us a longer space and moving the bed would have made it wider, but either of those things would have required massive furniture moving, because things are jammed together pretty tightly in our main room here.  It was easier this way, take my word for it.

My first failure was in finding a way to remove the cover from the little box.  I'm used to an old style with a screw in the center.  This one had no visible fasteners, and I hesitated to force it.  Doug, who was standing by as ground support to fetch and carry, watched my butt and listened to my mutterings a while, then offered to see if he could figure it out.  We exchanged places, and he didn't hesitate to pop the cover off the box.  Then he let me get back down there to deal with the wiring.

We both thought it would be wise for him to watch and learn, so he contorted himself in and around the bookcase to watch.  I don't think he learned much.  I stripped insulation from wire ends, twisted things together, taped it all up, put the cover back on the box, and confidently crab-walked back out of the hole to test the new line with our old phone... nothing.

We discussed it, Doug examined wires and terminals, and we talked some more, discussing various possibilities involving wires of red, green, black and yellow.  Finally, I cut a terminal from one end of a new phone cord that had only two elements, one black, and one the copper color of bare wire.  It took me a while to realize that the "bare" wire was encased in transparent insulation, but even then my new wiring job conveyed no signal.

Finally, having run out of ideas and indoor options, I went out to the box on the pole to see if, perhaps, the man from the co-op had left something switched off or unplugged.  The sun was going down and mosquitoes were swarming.  Everything looked fine, except for the loose ends of the black and yellow wires protruding into the box from the end of the cable from which the green and red wires were attached to terminals in the box.  OF COURSE!

The woman in the office who took my order had said service would be delivered to the box.  The man who turned on the new line at the stanchion across the road and tested it at the box had said service was working, at the box.  I had been thinking that their part was outside and my part was inside.  That left the part between the box and the wall, which, contractually, is my part.  I'd not been thinking right.

First, Doug brushed mosquitoes away from my face while I stood substantially blinded by the setting sun so I could fumble around right-handedly trying to fit wire between little copper washers.  Then he offered to take over, and I swatted skeeters while he stood with his back to the sun and left-handedly finished the job.

Back inside, with a bit more stripping and twisting and taping of wires, I finally backed out of the hole behind the bed and tested the new line.  It worked.  Doug must have seen something pass across my face, because he asked me, "What?"

I replied that for an instant I had almost felt triumphant for having gotten the job done, but then the reality of the number and magnitude of my mistakes caught up with me.  He nodded, grimaced, pumped his fists in the air and said, "D-minus! YES!!"

Now, when the phone gets here, I can get to work.  Meanwhile, my hands are so fumble-fingered from the residual fatigue that I'm spending more than the usual amount of time correcting typos, and my shoulders and upper arms are burning.  I slept fitfully last night, as usual when I'm fatigued.  The more I need sleep, the harder it is to get more than an hour or so at a time.  Enough whining!  I did it, made a passing grade -- it's done.

The old village of Eagle, up near the Canadian border, is gone, destroyed by floods of ice water.  Three miles from the old village, the newer, larger, town of Eagle is covered in ice blocks all along the river frontage, with water seeping out from under the ice pack to flood areas further back.

Farther downstream on the Yukon, are more ice jams, floods, and flood watches.  Xanga won't let me upload photos right now.  You can see how it looked yesterday in news articles in the Fairbanks News Miner and Anchorage Daily News.

Last winter was a brutal one of heavy snows and long periods of deep cold.  This breakup is a match for it.

FG has prompted us to:

"Pick a Xangan. Write a letter to that person telling him/her why Xanga wouldn't be the same without him/her."

We are enjoined from identifying the object of our admiration, and we're supposed to keep it positive, so that leaves out a few of my favorite male bloggers who don't seem to want to stop killing themselves on the installment plan.  FG always demands that we keep it clean, so that leaves out several more of the men because I'd never be able to explain why they make Xanga such a fun place to be, without getting down and dirty about it.  Narrowing it down to just one person was impossible for me, so I picked a woman who is a whole crowd all by herself.  It's going to be a real challenge to keep this clean, but I'll give it my best shot.
. . .

Dollink, you always inspire me.  You have been blowing my mind since the day I found you here.  If memory serves, you were one of the noobs I found way back when Xanga still had the baby blogger box on the front page -- "recently created,"  I think it was labeled, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong.  I homed in on you and linked to you in a blog that very first day, and now some of my best friends are friends, fans, and admirers of yours, too.  It tickles me to hook up fantastic people with each other that way.

You are an artist with words.  When you have written about your experiences, you pulled me in and put me there, going through it with you.  Words don't ever seem to fail you, but if they did it wouldn't be much of a problem because you're even better with pictures.  I'm not aware of anyone who is any better at what you do, than you.  I can't understand why your work is so underappreciated by the masses.  Maybe you just go over their heads, maybe it's something in your stars or in your karma, or maybe it just hasn't happened yet.  It's certainly nothing lacking in the quality of the work, or in your dedication to doing it despite the challenges and obstacles.

When you get on a roll, you can paint vivid word pictures of things going on immediately around you, build big solid castles in the clouds, or tear apart every fool and buffoon in public life.  Xanga loses some of its life when you're not blogging, but I think I understand why you don't always hang out here like some of us do.  You've gotta do what you gotta do.  Just, please, never stop coming back here.  What would I do, surrounded by all these insane people, without you?

AVO warned this morning:

If it blows, flights will be grounded.  This is not a good time to be flying into or out of Alaska.  If you're coming here for your summer vacation, a cruise ship might be more reliable.