Kalib at the Fair, Part 2: Kalib is frightened by a horse, dines on nutritious fair food and sees wondrous sights

Kalib and his dad went down the big slide. 

Kalib spotted a little girl riding a horse. He decided that he wanted to ride one, too.

It was a tiny, tiny, horse, a Shetland pony, but once Kalib was placed in the saddle, he suddenly perceived it as a gigantic monster. He wanted off.

His dad convinced him to try a couple of go arounds. After all, both Navajos and Apaches are known for their natural horsemanship abilities and since Kalib is both, that ought to make him twice as good.

So off he went, clinging to his blankie and his dad.

But then he just got terrified.

So the horse lady helped him off and handed him back to dad, even as the horses and their riders continued to go round and round. 

Lavina bought corn for herself, Jacob, Kalib and me, too. Or did I buy it?

I don't remember. We kind of mixed the buying. They would buy a treat, I would buy a treat.

Kalib loved his corn.

And he saw many wondrous sights that seemed new to him.

Next up in part 3: Two hot church group chicks battle for Kalib's affections.

Kalib at the Fair, Part 1: He visits the animals; we bump into Taktuk

We had to park far, far, away from the entrance. And there, in the makeshift grass parking lot, which I suspect was originally a hay field, Kalib got his first amusement ride.

As for me, I had a big debate this day - whether to bring my big pro digitial single-lens reflex camera and two or three lenses or my pocket camera. The argument for the pro camera was that it would give me a lot more versatility and I would get many more good pictures. I would be able to count on the camera to shoot the instant I pushed the shutter (you just never know with the pocket camera) and I could knock off a dozen frames or so all at once if I wanted to catch a sequence of events.

The technical quality of the images would be considerably better than those I could produce with the pocket camera.

The argument against the DSLR was that it would be big and heavy and bulky and when it was all over, I would have many more photos to edit and so it would have to spend more time doing so.

The pocket camera had one thing going for it. It would be light and easy to carry.

I chose the pocket camera, even though I knew it would cost me some pictures. And it did. It cost me plenty and it put limitations on those that I did get, but, oh well.

It made the fair experience more pleasant.

We had to stand in line for a very long time, but afterward Kalib saw some goats. I am not quite certain what he thought of them.

A goat sticks its head through the rails of its pen to get a better look at Kalib.

Kalib turned to his dad for protection against the frightening goat.

Donkeys are very special to Lavina. When she was a small girl on the Navajo Reservation, her grandmother had one and Lavina used to ride it.

It wasn't easy, because the donkey was stubborn. She would climb on and it would just sit there. Only a whip, repeatedly applied, could get that donkey to go.

She liked it anyway. "Donkeys are so cute," she explained.

When she saw this little tiny donkey, she was quite thrilled and took Kalib straight to it. He placed his hand upon it.

Kalib fed some tiny goats. I wonder who the goats will feed?

Kalib learned something about birds, big, birds, Thanksgiving turkey birds.

Kalib also learned about bees - busy, buzzing, honey- making bees. Sadly, the bees here have but one season of life, because they cannot make it through the winter and so they must be replaced each spring with new shipments from the Lower 48.

However, somebody had made a super-insulated, heated, big bee house where people can bring their hives, so they are going to experiment and see if they can get these Wasilla bees through the winter.

I hope they succeed.

Every year when we got to the fair, I see someone from the Arctic Slope. This year, it was Taktuk,  Roberta Ahmaogak of Wainwright, part of Iceberg 14 - the whaling crew and family that took me in and made Wainwright home to me - with her children. Roberta is studying at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. You can find Taktuk and daughter Kara dancing at February's Kivgiq in Barrow right here.

Next up in part 2: Kalib gets frightened by a horse, he zips down a slide and dines on nutritious fair food.

Steve Heimel - radio reporter and program host, keeps people driving after they would have shut their cars down

This is Steve Heimel and he bears a great deal of personal responsibility for the increasing pace of global warming and the next fuel shortage. Steve is a radio reporter and program host for the Alaska Public Radio Network and he keeps people in their cars, driving, long after they would have parked and shut down their engines, were it not for him.

How many times have I myself been driving, headed home, listening to Talk of Alaska on KSKA when Steve has asked a guest a pointed question that I would never have thought of and then sparked and moderated a discussion involving people from every region of this far-flung state that I simply could not pull myself away from, so I have driven on, spewing green house gas, burning gasoline.

And how many Sundays have I been headed home, intent on parking and getting out of the car as fast as I can, listening as Steve hosts Truck Stop on KNBA. All of a sudden, he's got Johnny Cash doing Fulsom Prison Blues and then maybe Hank Williams wailing about the tear in his beer because he's crying for you, dear, followed by Woody Guthrie declaring this land to be my land and his land.

Who can stop their car and turn off the radio in such a situation?

I sure can't. So I drive on, even as millions upon millions of other Alaskans do the same thing.

We are all helpless. We cannot shut our cars down. It's Steve's fault.

This picture is from earlier tonight, when I saw him at the "Send Congress back to DC with a Message" at Romig Middle School in Anchorage. The event was held to give Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski a pro-health care reform message as they return to Washington DC for the next session of Congress.

Before the event got under way, Steve mused about the unbelievable fact that he is 66 years old. Listen to him on the radio. He sounds like a young man.

It has been a long, busy day and I am exhausted and must go to bed, so I am going to put my pictures from that event into the queue, where they now compete with Kalib at the fair.

"Bare-breasted young woman" draws bigger cyber crowd than "Sarah Palin" - and there are kites, a crash, crutches, motorcycles and dogs, too

The crash actually came first, but the kite image is both more pleasant and striking, so I begin with it. The lady flying the kites is Garen, and I found her on the Anchorage Park Strip, after I dropped Margie off for her therapy, passed the crash and stopped by the camera repair store only to find out they did not have the screws that I needed.

All three of the kites above her are Garen's and she was flying them by herself - and she was trying to launch two more. "Oh, yeah," she said, "I can fly five kites at once. I do it all the time."

She started flying kites on the park strip about two years ago, after she moved here from Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast, where kite flying is a much bigger thing than it is in Anchorage.

"It's very soothing to fly kites," she told me. "I can do it all day. I fly them in the winter, too. You should come back then."

I was curious as to what she thought of The Kite Runner, but she had not seen the movie or read the book. She had not even heard of either. She flies kites, she doesn't go to movies about flying kites, but I recommended the movie so maybe she will watch it now.

I don't know if she ever got the other two kites up so that five were flying at once, because I had to go back to the Alaska Native Medical Center to pick Margie up from her therapy.

As for the crash, I have no idea how badly the victim was hurt, or if there was more than one victim or if it was a man or woman, a child or teen. I just don't know.

I drove by and that was it. 

The crash is not mentioned in the online edition of the Anchorage Daily News, so one might want to conclude that the injuries were not that bad, because if they had been life-threatening, the accident most likely would have been reported.

But my injury 14 months ago was not life-threatening; it did not merit a write-up in the paper and neither did Margie's two this year.

Yet, the impacts upon our lives have been tremendous. So I feel for whoever it is that is being pulled out of the car and put on the stretcher, because it's a mighty big thing to him or her.

Everything might be different now.

Margie was pleased with her first session of therapy. She was especially pleased that the first thing that her therapist did was to take away her old crutches and get her some new ones, because, as it turns out, those old crutches were a good two inches too short.

This guy was smoking a cigarette when we pulled up next to him at a red light and he let loose with a big puff of smoke and even in the shadows of his car it looked quite dramatic. So I readied my pocket camera and waited for him to blow another one, but he never did.

I suspect these boys are cross-country racers, from one or another of the high schools in Anchorage. 

I was glad to get out of that city and so headed towards home and then along came these guys on their motorcycles.

We stopped at the post office in Wasilla, but before I went in to get the mail, I took a picture of myself with this dog, who was very angry. Margie gave me the cup and told me to throw it in the garbage so I did.

When I came out of the post office, this dog was there. The man said that he was a very good dog and he told me his name, but I have forgotten.

So I just call him, "Pooch," or "Poochie."

Hey, Pooch! Here, Pooch!

Poochie, Poochie, Poochie!

Concerning the salacious title of this post, readers will recall how I earlier conducted a test that confirmed that merely by putting the words, "Sarah Palin" into a blog title, I could cause my readership to soar - even if the post had nothing at all to do with Sarah Palin.

Yesterday's post brought in even more readers then did the "Sarah Palin" experiment. I figure it was because my title included these words, "bare-breasted young woman."

I wonder what will happen today?

To be precise, the numbers were: "bare-breasted": 6,982,490,324 unique hits; "Sarah Palin": 6,783,814,293 unique hits. You can see that it was close.*

*It is possible that I might have under-reported my numbers ever so slightly, so as not to embarrass my competition out there in blog space, but the ratio of "bare-breasted" hits to "Sarah Palin" hits is correct.

Four standing portraits; my health care/Obama comment on New York Times website gets top number of reader recommendations

One week ago today I took portraits of four individuals standing still that I had intended to post that very day. However, I got distracted by Pia and her tomatoes and so did not.

On Saturday, I took many pictures, but I do not want to edit them right now. It is well into Sunday morning and I want to go to bed as soon as I can. So I am going to hold them for tomorrow and post last week's standing portraits instead.

This is Dillon, a reincarnated gangster from the 1920's and he has dropped by Vagabond Blues in Palmer to pick up a little "protection money" to insure that the coffee shop does not fall victim to the local bad elements.

I jokes! I jokes! 

It's just Dillon, a kid in a cool hat, and the money that the barista holds came from our own Charlie. He was buying coffee and pastries for us all.

And here he is, Charlie, one week ago today at Vagabond Blues. As you can see, Charlie is a man of the world. He, Melanie, and his dad should right now be camped out in Charlie's dad's boat, somewhere out in Prince William Sound, not far from Seward.

They wanted me to come and I desperately wanted to, too, but I couldn't. Not because of Margie - she is doing much better and between Jacob, Lavina, and Caleb, she would have been covered. The fisher trio will not be coming home until Monday afternoon, and I just have too much work to do to take that kind of time off right now.

I just hope they bring us back a salmon, a halibut and a rockfish, because they are hoping to catch all three.

We saw this cat standing in a mud splattered car, about four blocks from Vagabond Blues. I hope it heals, soon.

Given what has happened to both Margie and me over the past 14 months, it kind of unnerved me to see Kalib standing like this. But you know what? Little kids are going to climb and stand on many things and they are going to fall, too, and most of the time they won't lose their shoulder, like I lost mine after I fell in Barrow, or break their knee caps and femurs the way Margie did.

They might cry a bit and then they will get up, laugh, and go climb something else. Most of the time. That's what they've got to do.

Still, it makes me a bit nervous.

Speaking of falling, on Friday, I left a comment regarding health care reform on an opinion piece written by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Over 400 other readers left their thoughts before the Times closed the comment period down. The Times allows readers to recommend columns and then gives those that get the most recommendations special attention on their own page.

To my amazement, my comment has so far received the most reader's recommendations of any, 369, making it number one on that list.

I know that this sounds like I am boasting and I guess I am, but I am so disgusted with the current state of health care in our country, and the demagoguery, lies and deceit that the opposition, including-you-know-who from right here in Wasilla, has thrown out there to scare people in the hope that they might inflame unjustified fear and thus bring down our President, the good of the country and its people be damned, should that good get in the way of their political ambition, that I must speak out.

You can find my comment, and the Herbert article that it is attached to, right here:

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/opinion/22herbert.html?sort=recommended