A bug moves in, takes Margie down, then me too

IPhone photo of the cat warmer Chicago beneath the red and black blanket.

Yesterday, Margie ate only a few bites of her breakfast, then announced that she was strangely full and could eat no more. Shortly afterward, she announced that she was not feeling well and her tummy hurt. She then descended into a state of misery. Except for a few saltine crackers, she has eaten no food since and she basically spent the remainder of the day on the couch, looking miserable, able to do nothing at all.

I had three hopes: one, that she would soon get better, two, that my body would fight off whatever bug had got her (and Caleb) and that if it didn't the illness would be short-lived and would not affect me so badly as it had her.

I have too much to do to be sick.

Often, bugs hit others around me and do miss me. When they get me, they do not generally take me down as far as they do Margie. I might feel miserable, but I can generally function whereas she had been rendered unfunctionable.

When I woke up this morning at about 7:30, I felt a little queasy. I hoped it was just an early morning thing and would soon go away. I set some coffee to brew, then came out here to my office to skim through the beluga pictures from which I planned to make today's post, to check emails, do a comment respond, etc., and then I went back in to cook my oatmeal.

But I did not cook my oatmeal, for I knew I could not eat it if I did and Margie said she still couldn't eat. I knew I needed to eat something, so I got one of those little pre-packaged half-cups of applesauce. I took one teaspoonful and it felt like it was about to rip my stomach out. I did not take a second teaspoon.

I forced myself to drink a glass of water, which I feared was going to rocket right back up but it didn't.

I then found a red and black blanket near the couch-that-is-good-to-nap-on and summoned two cat warmers to join. I lay down upon the couch with one cat warmer beneath the blanket on my torso and the other atop the blanket on my shins and there I stayed in a state of immobile misery with respites of dose until after 1:00 PM.

So that's it. This is all the blog I can muster today. I feel horrible, as though I am about to lose all the food that I am not eating, as though there are tiny knives in my gut, stabbing at the lining from the inside. My head aches and I feel weak. No energy. I cannot do today what I had planned to do.

The belugas have waited quite awhile to make their appearance on my blog. They will just have to wait for at least one more day.

Memorial Day, 2011: the big water battle; flowers at roadside memorial; we feast

On the final night of Kalib and Jobe's final Memorial Day weekend visit with us, Jacob and Lavina came out to sleep at our house. On Memorial Day morning, we went to breakfast at Denali Family Restaurant. I fear that I am shifting my loyalties from the old Mat-Su Family Restaurant to Denali. It is the hash browns, that is why.

Hash browns have always been a gamble at Mat-Su. You just never know - they can come fried to a crisp, reduced to mush, or cooked just right. So far, they have been cooked just right at Denali every time - and it sure seems that they are fresh cut and not taken from a package. They are as good as any hash browns I have ever eaten, anywhere.

Denali Family Restaurant hash browns are superb!

Mat-Su Family has long been a place of morning refuge for me and I feel kind of bad about shifting over, but that's what excellent hash browns will do.

I will still go to Mat-Su, sometimes - if for no other reason than old times sake.

Later, in the early afternoon, Margie and Lavina went to the store to do some shopping. After awhile, I went out to see what the three boys were doing. Jimmy came with me. We found two of the three boys watching a butterfly pass overhead.

I am not certain what the other one was into.

Then Kalib turned on the faucet. He began to fling water around.

Soon, both boys were getting a bit wet and muddy. Jobe was most interested in the process.

Kalib got the idea that it might be fun to spash his brother, so he did.

After taking the blast of cold water, Jobe turned and momentarily fled.

In just seconds, he fully recovered, and began to laugh. He laughed so hard he blew the snot right out his nose.

Dad joined in the fight, allying himself with Jobe.

Oh, it was a battle insane!

Jobe was most amused.

Kalib checks his ammo as Jobe strategizes.

Jacob knew that he had to get the boys dried off and cleaned up before Mom and Grandma came home.

Jobe didn't stay clean very long.

As all this had been going on, Jim had found a patch of dirt to roll around in. Only his face remained undusted.

Jim then trotted off into the woods. I cannot let him go there alone, so I followed.

So did the other three.

Then the ladies came home. We guys mentioned nothing at all about the battle that had taken place. The ladies can find out when they read this blog. Jake will be in big trouble then.

The boys and their dad lay down to nap. I took off to ride my bike. I found a broken scooter on the Seldon Road bike trail, just lying there, abandoned.

I wondered what the story behind that was?

If I had the time, I would write a novel based on this mysterious scooter. It would be a best seller. I don't have the time. If you do, feel free to steal my idea - go ahead, write a novel based on this image.

When I reached the corner of Church and Schrock Roads, I was reminded that although Memorial Day was established at the end of the Civil War as a holiday to honor and mourn our military dead, it has also become a time that people take to honor all their dead, to bring flowers to graves and memorials.

This is not a grave, but is the place where where three people were killed in 1999 in a collision caused by a drunk driver - a woman, a teenaged girl and an unborn child. 

For years afterward, loved ones kept memorial crosses atop this pile of stones, but vandals repeatedly tore down the memorials until the loved ones gave up and settled for just the pile of stones.

On Memorial Day, someone had brought these wreathes and placed them here. 

Let us hope that respect and compassion can now replace ignorance and cruelty in the hearts of the vandals.

I stopped on the bridge over the Little Susistna River. These two came by as part of a carvan of four-wheelers.

I have crossed the bridge a number of times since I began biking again, but I had not gone down to the river itself. Today, I did - and symbolically put my front wheel in the water.

I do not know what this symbolizes, but it must symbolize something.

On the bank and in the shallows, people frolicked.

When I returned home, I found Margie and Lavina repairing the picnic table.

Inside, I found the boys napping. I then went off to buy some iced drinks and to fill the tank with expensive gas. When I returned, the boys had not moved at all.

Lavina began the cooking by roasting bread on the barbecue.

If one studies all the faces in this picture and then gives some thought to it... it is just incredible to think about, to ponder the history, the sorrows, the changes, distances covered, the links from then until now.

Lavina kept the grill going.

And then we ate - but Kalib was napping and Caleb was sleeping in prep for his night shift.

And then, somewhere between nine and ten PM, it came time to say goodbye.

Margie and I had enjoyed the rapidly enlarging little ones for three days, but now they were going.

Caleb missed everything. He slept through breakfast. He slept through the water battle. He slept through dinner. But he awoke in time to say goodbye.

And then off they went, the people in the car and Muzzy running alongside, all the way back to Anchorage.

Well, I exaggerate a little. Muzzy would only run to the stop sign, about 200 yards away. Then he would trade places with Jacob and drive the family home while Jacob ran alongside the car - all the way to Anchorage.

Don't worry. It's okay that the dog drove. Muzzy has a license.

I then found Margie in the back yard, cleaning up.

"It's too quiet now," she said.

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Fall of the ice cream cone; rise of the rainbow; some slept through the night and some didn't

There was one bag of corn chips. Both of them wanted it.

So Margie cooked some broccoli. I was a little skeptical, but Jobe loved it.

So did Kalib. I was just amazed. I hated all such vegetables when I was small. I liked peas, though. And green beans.

After they did such good job at eating their broccoli and potatoes, I figured the boys deserved a treat. So I loaded them and Margie into the car and off we went to Dairy Queen. I ordered small cones dipped in chocolate for Margie and I.

"Baby cone, baby cone," Kalib said as I did.

So I ordered baby cones for Kalib and Jobe.

They were greatly enjoying them but then, as we drove up Church Road towards home, Jobe began to shriek. Yep, he had dropped his cone. We could not see it anywhere. When we got home, I found it lying beneath my seat. Amazingly enough, it was in pretty good shape. Only about a teaspoon of ice cream had leaked onto the floor and there were just a few flecks of dirt and grime on the ice cream and cone.

I gave it to Caleb, he cleaned off the flecks and ate what was left of it.

Jobe, standing at the door.

A bit later, I found them all in the back of Caleb's truck. Kalib and Caleb were grabbing at mosquitoes. Jobe was feeding them. 

Yep. The mosquitoes are back.

Kalib, Jobe, and the pickup truck. Mosquitoes are flying.

I left Caleb and Kalib to fend for themselves and brought Jobe into the house to get away from the mosquitoes. His grandma snatched him right up.

The news was on, and at the very moment that I took this picture, a story came on about a four-year old boy who had been run over by a car in Anchorage. A reporter was at the hospital and right after the story began, she reported that she had just gotten word that the boy had died.

In this way, it was a very hard day for Anchorage. A man crashed his Cessna 180 on the railroad tracks and it exploded and incinerated. He died, his mother died, and three of his children died. His wife and one child had been left behind to mourn. 

He was reputed to be a skilled and safe pilot and a good Christian. He had gone to Russia many times to preach the gospel as he believed it and, according to the news, everybody who knew him and his family thought highly of him and all of them.

Also, in recent days, five climbers have been killed on Denali and two more on a smaller mountain that stands near it.

It is a frightening world that we bring our children into, yet we always keep doing it and they always go forth into the risk and danger - which is exactly what we want them to do.

To climb Denali was once a goal of mine, but May is the month to do that and May always had other conflicts and then a time came when I decided that window was behind me and that I would set my sights on lower mountains, mountains to hike in, and be content with that.

Oddly enough, hearing about these people dying on Denali has rekindled my desire to climb the mountain. If I do, I've got to do it soon, like next May, before I get much older.

I'm not saying I will, but the urge just seems to be growing stronger and stronger.

Uncle Caleb and Nephew Caleb were rewarded for their battle by a magnificent rainbow. I discovered this later when I found them in the house and Caleb showed me a pic he had taken of Kalib on his iPhone. I immediately rushed them back outside, but the rainbow had greatly faded now, and because he knew that I wanted him to be, Kalib pretended to have no further interest in the rainbow at all.

For those who are Facebook friends with Caleb, you will be able to find his much more magical and magnificent iPhone picture of the rainbow and his nephew there.

The last time Jobe overnighted with us, he was still sleeping in his Apache cradleboard. Now that he has outgrown it, we were not quite sure where he should sleep. Margie decided that she would sleep with him in the guest bedroom. She propped a mattress against the wall, pushed the bed against it and there the two slept - he protected on one side by her body and on the other by the mattress.

This is how I found them this morning.

One single "click" from my camera and Jobe woke up. He instantly rose up and extended his arms over his grandma outward toward me. I had no choice but to let my camera down and to pick him up and hold him.

I carried him into the living room, we took a seat on the couch and with my left hand I activated my camera. This is just how it is between Jobe and I.

It has been this way since he became conscious of the world about him.

I use the lens cap on a Canon lens, but I lose lens caps all over Alaska and elsewhere, so I often must make do with whatever brand of cap I can find.

Kalib slept quite a bit longer yet. This is where he spent the night - next to me on the master bed in the master bedroom. Jimmy and Pistol-Yero also slept with us. Chicago usually sleeps here on this bed, too, but she has an irrational fear of little people and so would not come him with Kalib on the bed.

She stood in the hallway, complaining, for maybe two or three hours right during that part of the night when a person lying in bed really wants to be bothered by nothing, when he wants to sleep soundly.

Kalib slept right through all the cat-er-wailing, but not me.

Margie says Chicago woke her up, too, but Jobe slept peacefully through the night.

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Kalib flicks dirt into Melanie's face - is he outgrowing the spatula phase? Branson graduates; Margie goes and I am left alone again

Melanie showed up late in the afternoon and gave Jim a pet as Kalib slyly observed.

This is the shoe Melanie wore on her left foot. The one she wore on her right foot looks pretty much the same, except that the toe tapers in the opposite direction.

When next I observed Melanie and Kalib, they had moved to the front yard. Kalib was busy observing something himself. What could it be?

It was ants. Fat, black, ants.

Not long afterward, I found them back in the back yard, a bit beyond the spot where Margie had placed the dinosaur boots that Kalib had muddied in the swamp the day before out to air dry after she had cleaned them.

But what are Kalib and Melanie up to in the background?

And what is that in Kalib's hands?

Oh - the thing that Kalib holds is a weed plucking tool. And right there in front of him is a dandelion, yet to bloom. Melanie is helping him shove the weed plucker beneath the dandelion so that he can yank it right out of the ground by the root.

Kalib yanks the dandelion from the earth and sends it and dirt flying straight into his Aunt Melanie. This turned into a big game - one that the two repeated time and time again, until all the new dandelion plants had been rooted out.

Even so, those dandelions will pop right back up again.

I view Kalib plucking out a dandelion from another angle.

Dandelion and dirt come flying right toward me.

As usual, Kalib brought his spatula to the house with him - but not once did I see him carry it or play with it. I only saw it sitting here, atop the classifieds on the coffee table.

Margie says she saw him play with it. She said he used to flip junk mail like pancakes. There, lying on the floor, you can see one of the pieces of junk mail that Margie saw Kalib flip.

Still, he basically left it alone.

It makes me wonder if he is outgrowing his spatula phase?

If so, the thought makes me a little sad.

It has to happen, sooner or later, though.

Later would be okay with me.

The original plan had been that Jacob, Lavina and Jobe would come out and pick Kalib up Sunday afternoon. Instead, Lavina called to say that Jobe was still sick and to ask if, instead, we could bring Kalib home and then leave Margie there to babysit Jobe for a day or two or a week or however long it would take until he was well enough to return to daycare.

Since Melanie had come, she drove Margie and Kalib back to town with her.

And once again, after just three days and nights together with Margie, I am left alone with the cats. Caleb is here, of course, but he works all night and sleeps all day, except for when he goes out to hit golf balls.

Now I back up to an earlier point in the day:

Branson Starheim, of Metro Cafe, just graduated from kindergarten Thursday night. I promised Carmen that if she brought him and his diploma to Metro Cafe I would take a photograph to commemorate this landmark achievement.

So she did and I took a pretty standard study of Branson and Carmen, posing with the diploma as Branson sat on his bike, but afterward I took this one of Carmen helping Branson don his crash helmet and I like it better.

Following the diploma photo session, Branson, the graduate, zooms past me on his bike. Branson calls me, "Uncle Bill."

Now - about that delayed Arctic Series that I had promised to run this week: I am going to! Starting tomorrow. It's just that I did not know that Kalib was going to spend the weekend with us. He did, and I had to post a few pics  for all of his many fans from Alaska to Arizona to India to see.

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Kalib gets his shoe stuck in the mud; straight "A" college student

Once again, Jobe had been feeling under the weather with his respiratory infection, so Margie and I went into town, picked Kalib up and brought him home to spend the weekend with us in order to make it easier for his parents to care for Jobe and do all they needed to do.

After he got up in the morning, Kalib laid lazily back down upon the couch.

He didn't stay lazy for long, though. Soon he was out in the backyard, gathering golf balls.

He knew just what to do with them.

Then he wandered down to the back part of the back yard.

Kalib, at the edge of the woods.

Soon, he wandered off into the trees. I wanted to follow, but I had let Jim out. I needed to keep my eye on Jim.

So Margie went off into the woods with Kalib while I kept my eye on Jim. Jim had not been out the whole time that I had been traveling, as he only goes out when I can watch him and make certain that he does not wander off and get eaten or run over.

It drove me a little nuts, though. 

I wanted to see what Kalib and his grandma were up to.

Finally, I got Caleb to take Jimmy into the house and I went off to find Kalib and Grandma. I found them returning from whatever adventure they had been on.

Then Kalib turned around and took off back in the direction from whence they had appeared. Margie followed. I followed, too.

Kalib left our property altogether and went out into what we still call "the swamp," or "the marsh." Dodd Shay, the friendly property owner, does not like me to call it "swamp" or "marsh."

"Meadow," he insists. "It's a meadow."

Perhaps he is right now. But for the first 10 or 15 years that we lived here, it was a swamp. If Kalib had been where he is in this picture, he would have been emerged in water to his hips - especially this time of year, when the snows have been melting.

Still, the swamp is not completely dry. A bit of water and a bit of muck still remains out there. Kalib scurried off to this four wheeler track, left by vandals who ignored all of Shay's signs telling them to keep their machines out of the meadow because machines damage it.

It looked to me like Kalib had stuck his foot into mud. "Kalib," his grandma and I both shouted out to him. "Don't put your foot in the mud! Take your foot out of the mud."

He just stood there, keeping his foot in the mud, smiling mischievously at us.

Finally, he pulled his foot out of the mud. We called him to come to us, but he would not. He just stood there with a troubled expression on his face.

No matter how much we called, he would not budge.

Finally, I walked to him. When I saw that he now wore only one of his little dinosaur boots, I understood the troubled expression. Look to the right of the frame. There you will see the little dinosaur boot that goes on his left foot - stuck in the mud.

His grandma came, pulled the boot out of the mud and helped him back into it.

Kalib did not want to walk in his mud-filled boot. He wanted to be carried. I offered to carry him, but he would not let me. Only grandma would do. Kalib is grandma's boy.

Then he got down and walked.

How did he get his knees so muddy?

Come night, Kalib and his grandma sat on the couch and reminisced about the day's grand adventure. They watched movies with Uncle Caleb.

A little after 10 PM, Kalib fell sound asleep in his grandma's embrace.

Yes, Kalib is Grandma's boy.

Grandpa then carried him into bed, tucked him in and there he slept for the next 11 hours.

Wow!

While I was traveling, Lisa completed all her class projects, took her finals and wound up with straight A's. It had been a very tough semester for her. She carried a full load, worked full time, and had to take on extra tasks such as dog sitting to make ends meet.

Once, we found her in tears and tried to give her some money to make it a little easier, but she would not take that money. She wanted to do it on her own and she did.

Right after she graduated from high school, Lisa went excitedly off to college in Durango, Colorado, but the year proved disastrous for her. She had an alcoholic roommate and she grew so homesick that when the year ended, she came home and dropped out of college.

But now she knows that college is something she needs to complete to go where she wants to go.

We are very proud of her.

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