A rumbling train causes Margie to sit right up in her hospital bed

Jobe and Kalib came to the hospital last night to visit their grandma. They did not quite know what to think of her hospital room and were a little hesitant to enter.

But enter they did. Kalib greatly loves his grandma and immediately began to tell her about a great adventure in his life. It had something to do with trains - and in particular, a train named Thomas.

Holy cow! What is that in Kalib's hands? Could it be a train? Could it be... Thomas the train?

Practically the whole family was there - except for Caleb, who had to stay home and go to his regular night shift and Lisa, who had spent some time hanging out here earlier in the day.

All present were very curious to see what Kalib would do with the train that he held in his hands.

Why, Kalib put the train on the table in front of his grandma, found a tunnel, and drove that train right through it and to the edge of a cliff!

Astute readers will notice that Jobe also holds a train engine - that's Percy - Percy the train. As we were all talking about Percy the train, the door opened and in walked my friend... Percy! Percy Aiken from Barrow, who had come down to be with his brother Earl, who is intensive care.

I know many people are wishing the best and praying for Margie and me, but Earl needs prayers and good thoughts much more than we do.

I went down to the ICU unit to see Earl and there I also saw some friends from Point Hope. Caroline Cannon who was there to support her son, Leroy Oenga, who also has a great need for good wishes and prayers.

This morning, I slept very late. I've been doing that a lot lately. When I got up, I knew that I should fix myself oatmeal, but, solitary individual though I am, I wanted to go someplace where I could sit in solitude among people, eat, sip a bit of coffee and be waited on.

So I headed off to breakfast.

Here is a lone diner, at Abby's. We were both alone, him and I.

The truth is, I forgot my camera when I to breakfast this morning, so these last two pictures are actually from Wednesday morning, before Margie came home from Anchorage, before her gall bladder struck her down. These pictures are standins for today, although today I went to Mat-Su Family.

They are now planning to subject Margie to two surgeries - the first one to remove her gall stones, and the second one to remove her gall bladder. I do not understand this. I do not know why they don't just take the gall bladder out with the stones in it and get it done at one time.

There must be a good reason, but I do not yet know what it is.

They are hoping to do the first surgery tomorrow and then the next the day or two after.

They would do the first today, but they still need to bring down her level of infection.

We are scheduled to depart for Arizona Monday morning on Alaska Airlines.

We are not going to make it. In Arizona, Lynxton will be introduced to his bigger Apache and Navajo family and we were greatly looking forward to being there for it.

I was going to do some heavy blogging.

Now it will go unblogged. It will be documented, though. Lavina will be posting on Facebook.

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How long can an iPhone last at -20 F? A "that's so Wasilla" moment

I still had my iPhone when I took this picture Sunday of Kalib back in his house after Rex's birthday. That phone has really become a part of me. My life is wrapped up in that phone. But it would soon disappear.

Look! Look! This guy has an iPhone! Is it mine? It must be! Mister, you better give my iPhone back, right now! 

Oh, wait a minute. I still had my iPhone when I took this picture. I was sitting in the passenger seat of Charlie's little car with Melanie at the wheel and we were stopped at a red light in Anchorage, watching penguins waddle by. This guy had called the head penguin and was telling her to get her birds out of the road, because he had places to go.

The penguins paid him no mind at all, they just continued to waddle by, one by one, until all 5,000 had passed through the light.

I would have taken a picture, but the penguins had posted a "Do Not Photograph the Penguins!" sign. I felt like my First Amendment rights were being violated, but penguins don't care about American law, the US Constitution, or the First Amendment.

They follow penguin law and penguin law only and they were carrying Ak-47's and shoulder-fired rocket launchers just perfect for blasting Charlie's little car right off the road.

I did not photograph the penguins.

This is where the story starts to get tricky. It was Monday afternoon. Thanks to these shingles and the fact that all my immediate work was out of the way, I hadn't done much but still I took my coffee break and went through the drivethrough at Metro.

I had my phone with me. On my way home, I saw this school bus stop on the road, red lights flashing. Naturally, I stopped, too. This dog came walking out to meet the bus. I was certain the dog had come to meet a student debarking from the bus. But the bus just sat there and the dog just stood there, for about one minute. 

Nothing else happened. Finally, the bus left the dog behind and continued on its way without a single student debarking.

Pretty strange.

After I returned home, I came out here to my office and got into my computer. After half-an- hour or so, I became aware that my iPhone was not in my pocket. I searched the area around my desk. It was not there. I searched every single place in the house that I had been. No iPhone. I searched the car. No iPhone. The weather had turned cold and I had been to the woodpile a couple of times, so I searched all around the woodpile.

No phone.

I called my phone in all these places and more. It did not ring. I called it with all the lights turned out, including the flash light. It did not glow.

I just could not find that phone.

Just before I went to bed, I did another outside search. I did not wear gloves. My hands are very cold conditioned and I can man my cameras bare-handed for long periods of time in zero degree F weather but it was well below zero now and pretty soon my fingers went numb.

So I built up the fire and headed for bed, making a stop at the bathroom to the master bedroom along the way. I could see my breath in there.

The next morning, yesterday, Tuesday the temperature here stood at -20 F (-29c) and it would stay below zero all day. I called my phone. It went straight to voice mail - this meant the battery had died. That meant that I had most likely lost it outside.

But where?

I did a lot of re-searching, both in places I had searched and in places I had not even been before the phone got lost.

Once, if you lost a phone, you lost a phone. Annoying, but no big deal, really. You just replaced it. But now when you lose a phone, you really lose something. Your whole identity gets wrapped up in that phone. There are notes and photos and recorded interviews and aps going here and going there and intimate notes sent back and forth to your wife written when you are separated from her and plenty of personal information.

Losing a phone has become a big deal.

Today, I slept in very late. I have turned the corner toward healing, but I am still battling these nasty, painful, shingles and I still need as much sleep as I can get.

When I got up, I found a note from Caleb. He had found my phone - wedged into a very strange place in the car where I swear I had looked myself. My theory is that the phone froze and so did not ring nor glow when I called - because I called it a few different times from within the car and never did it ring or glow.

But I have it now and life is okay, once again.

Now about the picture: yesterday afternoon I went to Metro one hour earlier than usual. I had not seen Carmen in two weeks, maybe more, because she leaves early these days to pick Branson up from school. So I dropped by a little earlier than normal.

When I pulled into the drivethrough line, there was big pickup truck in front of me, just one space behind the window itself. I could not see a car in front of the truck, so I reasoned that someone in a small car was sitting at the window in front of the truck, which I figured blocked my view of it. It was one of those trucks with a darkened back window, obscuring the occupants from view.

I sat there, waiting in line for several minutes, wondering when the order to the lead car that I could not see because the big truck was sitting between us would be filled and the line could progress.

Just as I was growing so impatient that I was just about ready to jump out and go up and see what was going on, a woman who I had never seen before walked out of the coffee shop, climbed into the truck and drove away. There was no smaller vehicle in front of her. She had just parked her car in the drivethrough line one space back from the window, left it there, went inside, made her order, and took her time.

Boy! This falls into the category of behavior that my daughters call, "That's so Wasilla!" It really isn't indicative of most Wasillans, but we have more than our share. Like all those times that you pull into a crowded parking lot and find someone has parked their big truck at angle across two spaces - sometimes three, if they can figure out how to manage it.

When I pulled to the window, I saw Shoshana and Carmen on the other side. They had wondered why it had been so long since anyone had pulled up to the window.

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Two November 13 birthdays, part 1: No alcohol at this party, but boy, it was a wild one!

It was Rex's birthday party - which one? - 33 I think, but I'm not certain...32? 34? He's my third son and I'm still a young man, barely into my 30's, I'm sure; possibly still in my 20's. That's how I usually feel, anyway - not so much right now, because of these damn shingles - but usually I think of myself as being just about as young as I was on the day I married Rex's mom.

So I don't know how he could be 33 or 32 - I hope he's not 34 - but, according to the calendar, he is, indeed, somewhere in that age range.

Oddly enough, Rex hosted his own party at the home he now shares with his special friend, Cortney, who has won all of our hearts since she and Rex first got together last summer.

It was a brunch party, with eggs, biscuits and gravy, sausage and a cut up fruit mix of pomegranate, strawberrys, pineapples, melons and such.

It began with coffee - french press or American style.

Charlie went for French Press, which is just what anyone would expect him to do. 

We had not been sitting and eating long before Lisa passed her iPhone 4 around the table, so that people could laugh at the picture on the screen. Rex and Cortney did, indeed, laugh.

I was slightly baffled. "It's a men-up," Lisa said. I had no idea what a men-up was, so after I got home, I googled the term. I learned that men-ups are  "colorful photographs of 20-something guys dressed in guises of stereotypical masculinity and posed like mid-century pin-up girls." 

Men-ups have gone viral. They even have their own men-up calendar.

Next, Cortney passed her phone around. Even before she and Rex got together, she shared her home and heart with another guy, Kingston. When she was not looking, Kingston kept opening the door to let the birds fly in.

For some reason, birds really like to fly into this cozy little log cabin.

This is Kingston. Not the honey - the dog. 

And this is Lynxton. He is studying the world that he was born into, trying to figure out what is what. I wish he had a camera that matched his eyes, so he could show us what he sees and how he sees it.

Kalib was as full of mischief as I have ever seen him. If I had had the energy and good health and had kept my eyes open more of the time, I could have taken about 3000 pictures of him doing things like this. He was all over the place, shooting from one side of the room to the other, then to the other sides and then all four sides, seemingly at once. 

He was under the table, then on this chair and then that chair.

One time, I opened my eyes and saw him running upside down across the ceiling. I don't know how he did that, but he did.

"That's impossible!" I exclaimed.

"No it's not! I could do that!" Charlie claimed.

"Well, do it then!" I challenged.

Okay," Charlie said. "I will." He then ran up the wall, took two steps across the ceiling and then fell onto his head, fortunately on the dog bed.

I photographed the whole thing, but, damnit, I forgot to use my camera.

Melanie, Lynxton and Margie, partying hard at the party.

Lavina shovels some nutrition into Jobe's mouth.

I enjoyed the food and the company. No matter what I am doing, I must bear the pain of these shingles, so I thought I would be just as well off feeling the pain at the party as sitting home. And Cortney is a doctor in residency and she reassured me of what I had already been told. While I can theoretically pass chicken pox from my shingles to someone who has never had the pox or been immunized against it, I cannot do so through the air. I can only do so with close physical contact.

The only person in the room who had not had the pox or been immunized was Lynxton. So, as badly as I wanted to pick him up, I did not. I kept my distance from him.

Yet, the experience proved to be much tougher on me than I had anticipated. I spent a good deal of the time huddled up somewhere with my eyes closed, trying to retreat from the pain into my own pysche and meditation. I was jarred from one such round by the sudden, loud, angry screams of a wronged Jobe.

I quickly gathered that he had secured a new prized possession, but someone had taken it from him.

He quickly got it back. The screaming stopped. Jobe was happy again.

Any long-time reader knows that whenever anybody in this family has a birthday, Kalib must assist in the blowing out of the candles.

So, after the candles had been lit and the cake placed before Rex, Kalib was called over to assist with the blowing out.

But Kalib refused to blow. He would not blow. Then he produced a Thomas train engine and developed a new method of putting birthday candles out - the "fan and snuff" method. He furiously pumped the train up and down over the candles, creating enough wind that he actually blew some out, but some of the flames would not yield to this little wind. These he snuffed out by bringing his Tom train engine right down onto the flame.

Jobe got to eat the first raspberry.

Then Kalib got a raspberry.

One wasn't enough. Laughing with each bite, Kalib repeatedly shot his hand in, grabbed a raspberry, shoved it into his mouth, then grabbed another before Rex could stop him.

I think he got about half the raspberries.

I only got one.

The cake was delicious, but the bite with the one raspberry that had escaped Kalib's thievery to make it to me was the most delicious of all.

Oh, that was a good bite!

But I only got one such bite...  :'-(

I got the idea that I should take a regular-style group photo of all who were there, except for me, to make certain that everybody present wound up pictured on the blog. It was okay that I would not be in the photo, because the mere fact that such a photo would exist would be proof that I was there.

So I asked everybody to gather on the other side of the table and everybody did - except for Kalib. As different folks called out, "Kalib, come over here," he dashed this way and that way, out into the entry and back again, but he would not join the group.

Then he ran beneath the table, where he knew I could not see him. I couldn't, either. All I could see was the top of the table and the people behind it - all of them damn cute, but Lynxton the cutest of all.

It suddenly occurred to me that if I dropped down to a squatting position, I would be able to see Kalib. I also knew that once I spotted him, I had to act instantly. As soon as he realized what I was doing, he would shoot out from under the table and be gone.

So I dropped down to a knee. At that very moment, Melanie began to choke mildly upon a raspberry, Jobe threw a fit and there was distraction all around. I shot.

I suddenly realized that from this angle, all the camera could see of Lynxton was the top of his head, including part of his right ear. "Margie, lift Lynxton u..." I began to shout.

Too late. Kalib scooted out from beneath the table and was gone.

Two November 13 birthdays, part 2.

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Two November 13 birthdays, part 2: Greetings, Larry Aqlunaq Ahmaogak!

Please allow me to introduce Larry Charles Aqlunaq Ahmaogak of Wainwright. I almost didn't make it over to see him on this, his birthday of origin, because I had first gone to the party which you will see on November 13 birthday #1. Thanks to these shingles, I got to feeling so weak, rotten, and drained over there that when the party ended, all I wanted to do was go home.

But a friend is a friend and family is family and this includes the family that adopts when you are in your 40's. So I decided to drop by, say "hi" to Jason and Iqaluk, give them my best wishes for the upcoming birth of their baby and then go home.

I called Jason, to see where I might find them. "We are here at ANMC with our son Larry," Jason answered in a tired but proud voice, "born this morning at 7:59 AM; seven pounds, 14.4 oz.; 20 inches."

So off I went to the Alaska Native Medical Center.

Jason Ahmaogak is the kind of guy who can go out on the flat tundra in whiteout conditions in the darkness of winter at 50 below, be just fine and never get lost. He can venture into the maze of broken, pressure ridge riddled ice and know where he is at all times. Even without GPS, he can boat out into the Chukchi in the fog and come home okay.

But Jason got lost in the hospital. He left Iqaluk and Larry - whether Larry was born yet or not I am not sure - to run an errand and then he could not find his way back. He wandered down this hall and that hall and all the halls just looked like halls.

Finally though, he made it back. That is good, because he has to teach this boy how to survive in the Arctic.

Larry Aqlunaq - this name comes to him from his grandfather, Jason's dad, who passed away very recently. This means a great deal in the Iñupiat way of life.

Notice the symbol on Jason's sweatshirt. I have a sweatshirt just like this. That symbol stands for Iceberg 14, the whaling crew that Jason's aapa, his grandfather, Benjamin Ahamaogak Sr, started up many decades ago. When Ben was still alive, I followed him and his crew to do a little photo essay and that was when they adopted me.

So today, I gave myself a new assignment: to follow Larry Aqlunaq off and on from now through the first whale hunt in which he takes on a role of high responsibility in the boat.

I recognize that I have given myself a huge challenge and to be quite honest, I realize that the odds are high that I will not be able to complete it. I will be a genuinely old man when that event happens. I might well be dead. I might be incapacitated.

But I just might make to that point, in decent health.

So that is my goal: to make it that point in decent health and follow Larry Aqlunaq into the boat, onto the sea, and to the bowhead whale that will come his way.

Because he is family - that's why.

Iqaluk is a fine Eskimo dancer in the Iñupiaq style. Larry Aqlunaq's older sisters are fine dancers. Small though they still be, they bring down the house whenever they perform. I suspect Larry will also be a fine dancer. I must photograph him dancing as well.

Larry Charles Aqlunaq Ahmaogak.

Note: I decided to run November 13 birthday part 2 before Part 1, because my son Rex is very familiar to the people who know him and to regular readers, too.

Not very many people have seen Larry yet, so I am going to post this first. I may post Rex's birthday tonight or I may wait until tomorrow. To be quite honest, I don't feel up to it right now - but I might in a little while.

Two November 13 birthdays, part 1. 

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In line to get John Baker's autograph

The AFN convention is now more than half-way through its second day and here am I, in Wasilla, unable to attend a minute of it because press deadlines push. So I missed Iditarod champion John Baker's opening day keynote address...

...but I was there the day before when Baker addressed the AFN Elders and Youth Conference. His words have been reported in widespread articles and news broadcasts and I am too pressed for time to write a story about it for this blog, other than to note he spent 16 years working patiently, quietly and determinedly towards the victory that would make him, at 48, the first Alaska Native to win the Iditarod in 35 years.

Most of that time, he was out in the Iñupiat country of Northwest Alaska near his Kotzebue home, alone with his dogs.

Baker is softspoken and quiet, and paid his highest tribute to his biggest supporter, his mother, who, as he was winning his race, was entering a hard battle with cancer.

Pictured here are several youth from the Arctic Slope, all members of the North Slope Borough Mayor's Arctic Youth Advisory Council, waiting in line to have him autograph their copies of the First Alaskans magazine that came out in conjunction with AFN and featured John Baker on the cover.

I will include all these MAYAC youth - and John Baker, too - in my next and perhaps final, perhaps not, issue of Uiñiq, which will be out very soon.

The youth pictured above: Aileen Frankson, originally of Point Hope, now living in Barrow, Danielle Sims of Kaktovik, Simon Aguvluk of Wainwright, Justina Neakok and Hilary Leman, both of Barrow.