The New Year began with me sleepy and exhausted and I am sleepy and exhausted right now - too much so to write much with these pictures. So I will simply say that, with breakfast and such behind us, Margie and I are in the car, driving past Wasilla Lake, enroute to Anchorage to celebrate the New Year at Jacob and Lavina's house.
The wind is howling and it is one of those horrible warm winds from the South Pacific that sometimes materialize this time of year and then ruin a good Alaska winter.
There is nothing to be done about it, though, so we just drive to Anchorage.
The New Year got off to a poor start for someone. On occassion, these guys in their patrol cars with their sirens, beepers and flashing lights unnerve me a bit, but I am damn glad they are there.
While I do not believe the US should enforce or coerce its ways upon any other nation, I just cannot help but to think that if in India they set up and enforced traffic laws, honestly, with no bribery, to the degree that they do here, I might have slept a lot better these past six weeks and three people who should still be breathing and walking on this earth would be doing so.
Yes, only two of them went by crash, but the third would not have followed had there been no accident in the first place.
So, yes, I appreciate these uniformed men and women who we call cops, these who we ask to risk their lives to keep us safe even as they sometimes suffer our abuse. Yes, there are some bad ones to be found here and there among them - the same is true of preachers, teachers, astronauts, photographers, and baseball players -but on the whole they do a pretty good job and get cussed at all too often.
Even if they pull me over later today and write me a ticket, I will appreciate them. I will swear and cuss when they walk back to their car, but still I will appreciate them.
When we arrived at Jacob and Lavina's house, we found a bag filled with something in the living room. It was kind of curious, because the bag was upside down.
I wondered, what could this bag be filled with?
;)
Why, it was filled with Kalib!
Remember those dinosaurs Kalib had been surrounded by in yesterday's post? As part of his late birthday present, his parents let him pick one out.
This is the one he choose. They say that it was the most realistic out of the bunch. Some were bigger, they say, but Kalib went for realism over size.
I am jealous. I loved dinosaurs when I was little, too, but I never got to have one like this. I think the biggest dinosaur that I hever had stood maybe three inches tall and was made of hard plastic - and I only had that one because I found it lying in the road.
;)
Jobe had been napping when we arrived, but soon he floated out to join us.
Jobe and his mom.
Did you know that my daughter, Lisa, carried a full semester worth of credits this past fall even as she worked full time, and also made the honor roll?
She did.
I wonder who she is calling? Could it be me? Is it possible I placed my phone somewhere and could not find it?
I was lying on the floor, in front of the TV, feeling so exhausted that I could hardly move. Yet, I wanted to get a group New Year's day picture of everybody that was there. The light here is very dim, so I wanted to get them in front of the TV, both so that there would be a little more light on them and so I would not have to move from my position on the floor.
I called everybody over to pose.
I could see that it was going to be a challenge to get them to do so.
Still, I was determined to get the photo, and to do so from down on floor.
It took some doing, but finally I got it. You will notice that Caleb, Rex, Ama and Bryce are not here. Sometimes, you can get everybody together and sometimes you can't. So you take a group picture of those who you can.
I am in this picture, too - just on the other side of it, sprawled across the floor in front of the TV.
I was so exhausted I did not know how I was going to drive home. And Margie hates to drive at night, on black, slippery roads.
So Melanie poured me a cup of coffee from her cat thermos. "Charlie and I never go anywhere without a cat full of coffee," she explained. She also said that she was a chick-a-dee, and that in the winter she eats one-and-a-half times her weight everyday.
As for Lavina, she wound up with a cat full of... cat!
Just in case you were worried that with all the new Christmas and birthday toys Kalib might have forgotten about his beloved spatula...
Kalib and Jobe came home with us. Kalib feel asleep in the car. When I brought him into the house, he transferred his sleep to the couch. Then about 3:00 in the morning, he came in, climbed onto the bed and slept right by me.
Margie likes to collect rocks. She keeps some of them in this little basket. Looks like she needs to find a new place to keep the basket.
Jobe woke up maybe three times during the night, but went back to sleep after he dined on mother's milk stored in a bottle.
Looks like I wrote a little more than I though I would. I'm still sleepy and exhausted. I need to go back to Barrow before the sun rises, find a nice cubby hole somewhere, crawl into it, pull a quilt over my head and sleep for 20 days straight.
Hey - what would you do if you found a suitcase filled with $50,000 cash?
This actually happened to a friend of mine in Barrow. I will see if I can find him by phone or net and will make this the subject of my next post.