Three cats on a shaded tin roof in Bangalore, India

I feel compelled to let readers know that, in addition to this blog, Grahamn Kracker is running a series of photos of Indian felines that Melanie and I met during our recent trip - most notably the three above. He fell way behind, but now he is getting caught up again.

You can follow that series right here.

Kalib goes away - I wonder how he will have changed when next I see him, six or seven weeks from now? (Part 2 - and then some more India)

When we leave Auntie Lisa's to return briefly to Auntie Melanie's, Kalib rides with us, holding his teddy St. Bernard.

Up the stairs to Melanie's Duck Downs apartment.

Kalib climbs into a kitty tunnel. He meows and purrs and swishes his tail.

Soon, we are the airport, where he looks upon the stuffed remains of a once wild Kodiak brown bear.

Kalib tries to sneak on with the baggage. Jacob grabs him.

He was with his dad in the bookstore, but then he saw his mother.

His dad kisses him goodbye.

Then the three of them head for security and out of sight.

Poor Jacob! He drives away separately from me but does not get far before Lavina calls him. Kalib does not have his teddy St. Bernard. It was left at Melanie's place. Jacob drives over. Melanie runs out to meet him and gives him the St. Bernard. He rushes it back to the airport. He can see Kalib, Lavina, and Margie on the other side of the security barrier.

A security man comes forward. Jacob gives him the bernard. He takes it back to Kalib. The flight is on.

Kalib goes away - I wonder how he will have changed when next I see him, six or seven weeks from now? (Part 1)

Very early this morning, Kalib (and his mother Lavina and grandmother Margie, my own dear wife) boarded an Alaska Airlines jet and headed for Phoenix. From there, he and Lavina were going to a workshop in Flagstaff and Margie would meet her sister and head back to her native home, the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, home to the White Mountain Apache Tribe.

Later, Lavina and Kalib will join them. Jacob will go down, too.

Shortly before they boarded the plane, we all met at the home of Kalib's Auntie Melanie in Anchorage.

Kalib found a stool to get under.

Those are Charlie and Melanie's tomato plants behind them. Tomotoes don't work around here if you plant them outside - the growing season is just too short. So they planted them inside.

We were all going to go to Arizona for an Apache Sunrise Dance that Margie's sister was going to be a Godmother for, but a relative of the medicine man died and so it has been put on hold for a year.

Margie had not secured her ticket yet, but I still had mine from last year, when I didn't go because I wound up in the hospital. That ticket had to be used this month or go to waste, so I gave it to Margie.

After giving Kalib a diaper change, his dad tossed him around a bit.

They will be gone for three weeks, but when they come back, I will be on the Arctic Slope until late July. So I will not see them for at least six, maybe seven weeks. I hate to think of all that I am going to miss. He will practically be grown up by then; he will be reciting poetry, and batting a baseball.

I will wonder where the time went and how I missed it all.

Kalib and Diamond.

We all decide to go and check out Lisa's new apartment. Kalib is first to the door.

He walks away from Melanie's Duck Downs apartment toward the car.

He does not get into the car, but onto his dad's shoulders who walks over with Charlie. It is still hard for Margie to walk very far, so we drive. Melanie comes with us because she knows where the new apartment is and we do not.

Immediately after this scene falls behind us, we hear Kalib scream in grief. He did not like to us drive away without him.

Inside Lisa's empty kitchen, Kalib watches Juniper go for the fake mouse. Lisa and Bryce moved because they have not had water in their old apartment for the past month. Their landlord ignored all their pleas to get the problem fixed.

So they moved. Now, the next battle will be to get their $1000 security deposit back.

Before we left, Kalib tipped over a box and out came this cat thermos. Melanie was amazed. The thermos is her's and she has been looking for it for awhile. She was a little chagrined with Lisa. Lisa said that she had planned to return it sometime when Melanie was not home.

Then Melanie would have returned and there it would have been. She would have wondered if she was going crazy.

Back in Wasilla, I bike upon a gold panner mining the Little Su (as for India, there is plenty more to come)

I pedaled my bike over the bridge that crosses the Little Susitna River at Schrock Road and saw that there was a tiny number of people downstream but no one upstream, so I decided to go upstream.

It had been awhile since I had pedaled along the Little Su. Last summer, due to the fact that I was recovering from my injury and shoulder replacement, I could not pedal a bike at all.

Sometime before that, I had bounced off the back of a snowmachine and broken my tailbone and although that injury did not lay me up, it made it too painful to ride a bike for quite awhile and so I did not.

When finally I was able to ride again, the seat injured my prostate and gave me pain that lasted a mighty long time. The only way I could ride my bike was to stand up all the time and never sit down and sometimes I did, but not much and I did not go to the Little Su.

Then, the summer before last, I felt like I could ride again. One of my sons had borrowed my bike when I could not ride it, but now he was buying a new one for himself, so I told him I was going to come and pick mine up.

"Wait, Dad," he said. "I want to get it all tuned up for you first." The whole summer then passed with my sometimes telling him that I was going to come and get my bike, and he responding that I must wait until he could get it tuned up.

So last spring, I just went and bought a new bike, rode it maybe one dozen times, then went north, took my big fall off of chair and could not ride again until this spring.

So I did not know that someone had put a barricade up, to keep all people off the trails that go upstream. But, as you can see, someone had.

In Alaska, we all own the waterways and no one can keep you off of them. But they can keep you from getting to them. On one hand, I felt mighty irritated at the private property owner who lives somewhere else but chose to put up this barricade. On the other hand, it is a hard, undeniable, fact of life in Wasilla that there is an army - yes, a minority of the whole but an army none-the-less - of snowmachiners and four wheeler drivers that have absolutely no respect for anything, be it property, nature, peace and civility and they will tear things up and throw their litter and beer cans anywhere and everywhere.

So I suspect the property owner has had some problems with these folks.

I suspect he still does. This little barricade will not stop them. They don't care. They believe that what belongs to them belongs to then alone but if it belongs to someone else or to the public, they got the right to trash it however they want.

Meanwhile, they cost the rest of us access that should be ours.

So I crossed over to the downstream side, and soon came upon this fellow panning for gold. He introduced himself as David.

David told me that a geologist told him that 100 percent of the dirt in Alaska has gold in it, its just that, in most cases, it is there in trace amounts.

Before they turned the Hatcher Pass area into a state park, there were many active gold mines on the Little Su about 15 to 20 miles upstream from here, but they are all gone now.

David told me that a friend of his once had a bunch of gravel fill brought in to fill his driveway. He panned that and got gold out of it, so David figured that proved that his geologist friend was right.

David studies his pan for color. He doesn't see any.

He says he has found some, though, and its here, miniscule flakes, in this little bottle. It might not be much, David says, but it is a better way to spend such a beautiful, sunny, day than to sit inside and watch TV.

David, the gold miner. Wasilla, Alaska, USA.

Down stream aways, on the next island over from the tiny one upon which David has established his gold-mining operation, I see a man on a four wheeler and his black lab dog. The dog swims in the water. I decide to pedal over and see what's happening.

So I charge into the river, pedaling hard, determined to keep my feet out of the water.

I fail - perhaps because I was trying to take pictures and pedal at the same time - and into the water my feet go. The water will get deeper and soon it will be over my knees. The river water that I got into in India was warm - very, very, warm - but this water is cold.

Very cold. But it feels good. I am glad to have fallen into it.

And this is the man and his dog and it is the only frame I was able to shoot, because my pocket camera battery went dead. It was the dog's first swim ever, and the man was mighty proud of him. The man had come to do some fly-fishing for trout, catch and release.

I should say right away that I am most confident that he is not one of the outlaw-type four wheel drivers that I complain about above. Earlier, I saw him turn upstream on the opposite bank of the river from where I had been, but as soon as he came upon a barrier, he turned around and headed downstream.

I agree - if I had stepped just a bit to the left, it would have improved the compoistion of this picture, but my battery had gone dead. When I lifted the camera and pushed the shutter, I did not think it would even take.

But it did. I tried again. The battery was again dead. Somehow, this one last shop sneaked in.

I turned around, and there were some late teenage boys, or maybe even early 20's, pumping air into poontoons for their pontoon boats. They were going to float all the way to the mouth.

"It's a long eight hours," one of them, a tall, lanky, fellow told me. "We did it just a few days ago and you should have seen it. There was a bald eagle and a duck, and that bald eagle was diving on that duck. The bald eagle was trying to eat the duck. It was some crazy shit!"

He said the duck escaped. I could not get another shot out of my dead battery, so I left them un-photographed.

Then I looked up and saw two jet trails, side by side, reaching from directly overhead all the way to the Talkeetna mountains. The wind up there was blowing at different speeds, so there were curves and bends in those two trails. The sky was deep, deep, blue. It was so incredibly beautiful to look upon, but I could not photograph it.

Then I pedaled for home. As I went up Church, through the midst of a marshy area, I suddenly heard some mighty splashing and thrashing. I looked to my left, and there was a moose, charging out of a pond.

I could not photograph it, for I had forgotten to recharge my battery.

That battery is charging, right now, as I type this very sentence.

Time to get Soundarya and Anil Married!

I fear that I have left Soundarya and Anil hanging out there in an unwed state in this blog for far too long. There is much, much, more ahead of them in this ceremony, but it is time for them to become wife and husband. So I am going to skip quickly through and hurry the process along.

"Hurry and get these two married, #1"

Hurry and get these two married, #2.

Hurry and get these two married, #3.

Hurry and get these two married, #4.

Hurry and get these two married, #5.

Hurry and get these two married, #6. (As you can see, they and their families are all now tied together as one.)

Hurry and get these two married, #7.

Hurry and get these two married, #8.

The sacred necklace that will bind them together.

And, for a brief, beautiful, moment, the videographer turns his spotlight off. It is good to get a good look at the necklace now, because after this it will almost always be hidden from sight, right next to Soundarya's heart.

Anil puts the necklace around Soundarya's neck.

As he ties the knot, the crowd begins to clap and cheer, and throw rice.

Please, click on this image so that you can see it a little bigger. It doesn't really work at this tiny blog size, but it is an important moment in the wedding.

Now they are wed, and will next stand in line to shake hands and then will pose for group pictures. But that doesn't mean its over. There is still much ceremony ahead. Perhaps I will put up another wedding post to sum up a little bit of that.

In the meantime, I must go for a bike ride, here, in Wasilla, Alaska, USA, with my pocket camera and post that.