Two views of the cats on Charlie's t-shirts: full front and rear, too; Ketchup in an empty restaurant; big mid-winter meltdown; Ramz - the girl who defended the tiny goat

Charlie showed up wearing this t-shirt. This is the front view.

This is the rear view. Charlie suggested that we all go to Anchorage and stroll through the Fifth Avenue Mall together, drinking coffee from cat mugs, but none of the rest of us wanted to join him there.

It seems that I have lost the ability to sleep - except for those blessed moments when I just crash. I find myself typically going to bed between midnight and 2:00 AM. It takes me too long to go to sleep and after I do, I might sleep for close to an hour and then I wake up and just keep waking up, multiple times each hour until finally I just give up and get up.

So far this week, I have not felt like cooking and besides, the steel-cut oatmeal was gone and so were the frozen berries that I put in it.

Family Restaurant opens at 6:00 AM, so for the last two days in a row I have headed over there at that time.

Both days, I have found the restaurant eerily empty.

Just me and the ketchup.

And a waitress or two.

Cooks in the back, cooking just for me, waiting for the crowd to start coming in.

I get in the car and leave to drive home. The fringe edge of the crowd has finally begun to arrive.

Corner of Seldon and Church Roads, on my way home from breakfast.

Despite the fact that I am peripatetic by nature, I have not had much energy for walking lately. Still, I must walk - especially since I have begun to lay the plans for a big Brooks Range hike this summer.

So I go walk, and this dog comes barking. Back in the trees, I hear a man shouting at the dog. He orders the dog to come back. The dog does not. The dog keeps following me, barking and barking.

The man keeps shouting orders, all of which the dog ignores.

In time, the man's voice fades into the trees.

The dog is still following, but barking less now.

The dog seems unsure of itself, now.

Maybe this is the farthest the dog has ever been away from home on its own.

The dog is probably wondering what it got itself into.

Soon, I will be home in my office with the cats, Jimmy and Pistol-Yero. 

They do not bark and they do not chase people down the road.

They just hang out in my office, knock things off my desk, counters and work table, spill my coffee, break my cups, prance across my keyboard when I am typing, interrupt my work and sit down on my lap every time I get on a roll. Sometimes, they even delete pictures!

So far (I think) I have always discovered each deletion in time to undo it.

They drink water from my fish tanks and throw up on the rug.

I sure do love these damn cats.

I see the tail of one them right now. It hangs down from the window sill beneath the cat, who is covered up the drape. He is looking outside at some creature that he would like to hunt - a raven, maybe. A moose, perhaps.

If so, that creature is damn lucky there is a pane of glass between it and the cat.

This is about as bad as a mid-winter warm-up can get. Well, not quite as bad. It hasn't rained all that much. The problem is, even through all the cold weather, we have had a dearth of snow and much of that had already been scoured away by the wind, even when the temperature was still cold, where it ought to be.

I read the part in the Anchorage Daily News that said this warmup was the result of Chinook winds. The Daily News is wrong. These winds have blown in off the Pacific. Chinook winds are caused when air flows down off mountains, warms up and spreads across a valley or plain.

My dad was a meteorologist, so I know these kind of things.

The Daily News is wrong.

This blog is right.

Here I am, on my 4:00 PM coffee break, which I got started on just a bit late. I have been to Metro. where Shoshana served me my Americano and cinnamon roll and told me that she and her boyfriend greatly enjoyed their New Year's jaunt to Chena Hot Springs, even if the temperature was 40 above instead of 40 below, where one would want it to be.

And here is one from India: Ramz my niece and Facebook friend

Recently, Ramz invited me to become one of her friends on Facebook. Ramz Iyer is Soundarya's cousin, but sisters is also a word they use.

I accepted the invitation, of course, and was very touched when I looked at all her profile pictures and saw one where she was hugging a small goat close to her chin and was smiling big. I have pictures like that of Soundarya, too.

Another of her Facebook friends, one closer to her own age, responded with this comment:

"dont u feel eeew!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Ramz retorted:

"i feel more eew wen ppl eat it ! rader dan carrying it ! i luve animals ! nd nyways .....it was neat nd tidy !"

The friend eventually replied:

"i was just kidding,"

Ramz stood her ground:

"but I was not !"

I was pleased and proud.

I just went and took another look at her page. Her new profile pic depicts her as a platinum blond with blue green tint in her hair, dark blue eyes and a tattoo on her pale face!

I remain: pleased and proud!

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A cat full of coffee and other New Year's tails

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.

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Kalib's birthday, part 2: We party, there is fire in the house, dinosaurs roar, a dragon flies and a train goes round the track; goats take the right of way

Once again, I am running behind. Time to catch up and put Kalib's birthday behind us for another year. Anyway, readers will recall that on Christmas night, Jobe came down with a nasty bug and so the family stayed with us that night. The next morning, December 26, Kalib cooked breakfast for us. It was his third birthday.

His mother had planned to throw him a big sledding party in the afternoon at a park near their house in Anchorage, but, given the circumstances, had to cancel those plans.

Still, except for Caleb, who was not feeling well himself, and Bryce, who had just lost his grandfather, we all gathered at Kalib's house in Anchorage in the evening to throw him a little party.

Kalib was happy to see his new love, Ama and so came with his spatula to visit her and his Uncle Rex.

After a bit, I heard the sound of laughter and commotion out in the kitchen. It was Lisa, playing a YouTube video title, The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland. There is a line in it that could only have been written about Charlie - "in Portland, you can put a bird on something and call it art."

Readers from way back then will recall that Charlie and Melanie put birds in his beard Charlie, which won him a big award at the national beard championships in Portland and got his picture spread round the world in a multitude of both print and online publications.

Lisa and Melanie, and Charlie and I believe Bryce as well, have all fallen in love with Portland, the city where young people go to retire, and sleep until 11:00. They think it is a great city and they talk about moving there someday.

Jobe was still under the weather, but improving. When the party ended, I would go home alone so that Margie could stay for two or three days and care for Jobe until he gets well enough to return to day care.

Readers who have been with us for previous birthday parties may have noted that cakes have been brought out for people in the 20's, 30's and even the breach of 60's that have had very few candles on them - even as few as three.

Now one was brought out for a three year-old and it had a bunch of candles. 

Kalib did not object.

Kalib cut the cake himself - with just a wee bit of help from dad. He did not need anybody's help to clean the cake-cutting knife.

Lisa and Martigne. She also entertained us with You-Tube videos of Maru, a Japanese cat with an obsession for boxes - even tiny, tiny, boxes that it cannot fit into, but fits into them anyway.

Then, as Walking With Dinosaurs played on the TV, Kalib set about to open his presents. It was clear from the box that this one from his grandma contained a dragon, but, try as he might, Kalib could not open the box.

He tried so hard to open the box that he stubbed his toe and started to cry. He went to his Uncle Rex for comfort. In the meantime, Jacob went and found some tools and began to try to open the box.

At a certain point, Kalib shifted to his mom, and there received comfort. 

Whoever had designed and constructed the box really did not want anyone to ever open it and to free the dragon. It took Jacob several minutes, but finally the dragon was out.

It was Toothless, from the movie, How to Train Your Dragon, piloted by his Viking friend, Hiccup.

Kalib went flying with them.

How they flew! And what magnificent things they saw!

If you might be worried that such a fine gift would cause Kalib to forget about his spatula, put that worry away right now.

Lisa is certain that Toothless was patterned after her black cat, Zed. To prove this, she pulled up a picture that she had taken of Zed with her iPhone and put the two side by side. "See? Toothless looks just like Zed," she said.

Since I first saw Toothless in the movie, I have been convinced that he had been patterned after Jim - not only in looks, but in movement and mannerisms.

He also got a little train.

Kalib, Toothless, Hiccup and Margie.

And this one from India:

The open road is always a wonderful and dangerous place, but, much to my now ever-lasting pain, the Indian highway is an exceptionally dangerous highway. There may be traffic laws, but if they are acknowledged at all, it is only as suggestions meant to be ignored. Lanes mean nothing. Tail-gating is taken to the extreme. It is considered good driving to charge straight at the oncoming driver from an impossibly close distance and then to swerve at the last instant and escape death from headon collision by one inch.

But there is a law on the Indian highway that is absolute. Everyone obeys this law:

Goats have the right of way.

Goats always have the right of way and that right is respected and obeyed.

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Jobe deceives his grandmother and causes things to get hot around here; Christmas Tree; the cold, empty streets of Bangalore

Just in case anyone might doubt that Jobe was actually a willing and not an innocent accomplice to the deception that was played upon his grandmother, I would note this about him:

Of all the babies that I have ever known in this world, it is Jobe who is the most pleasant. He is the happiest, most good-natured baby that I have ever spent time with. Seldom does he ever fuss, cry or scream and if he does at all, it is only because something is truly wrong and the moment that wrong is righted, he is cheerful again.

And... might I add before I continue... Jobe loves his grandpa! In fact, he adores his grandpa! If you do not believe me, just look at this picture.

This is Jobe, and how he feels about me... how I feel about him...

Anyway - the deception: While I was still in Barrow, I got a call from Margie. Jobe had fallen ill, she said. He had an upset tummy, apparently caused by a bug of some kind. He was crying and pooping, doing all the things that babies with upset tummies do. He could not go to daycare, so she was going to go into town in the morning to take care of him while his parents went to work.

I called her the next day while she was at Jobe's house with him.

"How is he?" I asked.

"He is doing better," she said. "But he was pretty fussy this morning."

Fussy?

For Jobe to have been fussy, he had to have been feeling downright uncomfortable.

But here's the thing - Jobe had not been sick at all. And Lavina and Jacob skipped work that day when Margie thought she was caring for a sick baby just so that they could go to work.

Melanie had been concerned about our woodstove, getting close to 30 years old now, and had persuaded her siblings to join her in buying us a new one as a Christmas present.

So, while Margie was babysitting a Jobe who was not at all sick and I was hanging out in Barrow, our children had come out to the house to oversee the installation.

Margie stayed in town one more night and then the next day picked me up at the airport. I then drove us home. When we entered the house, we were both surprised to see this new woodstove, glimmering with heat atop the rock slabs in the living room.

It even had a glass door, so that we could look through to see the fire burning and the coals glowing.

So here is Jobe, in the arms of Charlie, as seen in a reflection off the window of the stove brought into this house through his deception.

Thank you, Jobe! Thank you, children and grandchildren!

Even before she had been deceived, Margie had picked this tiny tree that was growing right beside the house and would have to come down at some point anyway. She waited until I was home, until most everybody was present, to begin decorating it.

Decorating the tree. Remember what I told you about Jobe adoring his grandpa?

Jobe observes as his mom hangs a birch-bark canoe ornament. Perhaps next year he will hang it himself.

Jobe scoots toward a tiny helicopter.

Jobe and the helicopter.

Charlie and Kalib look at a picture Charlie just took.

Kalib admires the tree. "It's a real Charlie Brown tree," Margie said when she looked at this picture. Yes, it is kind of tiny and scraggly, but when you see it in real life, it is very pretty and somehow seems just right.

When children and grandchildren visit, they soon must leave. Remember the Volvo that Jacob bought Lavina for her birthday? It has lost its front bumper already. They must get it repaired now.

And this one from India:

In the middle of the winter close to two years ago, I woke up and came to this computer to find an email from Sandy waiting for me. She was still engaged then and she told me how late the previous night or rather in the very wee hours of the morning, she and Anil had been wandering about on foot through "the cold, empty, streets of Bangalore."

I laughed at the very thought. Bangalore streets - cold, empty? The steamy, overflowing with the constant surge of humanity streets of Bangalore? Cold? Empty? Still, I put the image in my mind of the two of them out there alone on dimly lit streets in weather that might have plunged down to maybe 60 or even 55 degrees walking, talking, sometimes serious, sometimes smiling, enjoying, happy to enjoy solitude in a city with scant idea of the meaning of solitude... and it was a pleasant image.

I then went to Barrow and when I arrived the temperature was in the -40's... -47 or -48 if I recall correctly. So I took a picture late at night, with not a soul on the road and sent it back.

"The cold, empty, streets of Barrow," I typed.

As to the above picture, I took it the day after Sandy and Anil married. Several of us were in an auto-rickshaw with a smoky, two-stroke engine and she was sitting right beside me. We would all eat pizza shortly.

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We celebrated Jacob's birthday in Anchorage; two cling together in the Bay of Bengal

As already noted, Margie and I had brought the two little ones home to spend the night with us so that Jacob and Lavina could go out and have a Jacob birthday date, all to themselves. Now, the night was over and it was time to take Jobe and Kalib back to their mom and dad and eat a birthday lunch with them.

I had planned to have Margie drop me off at the airport so that I could fly to Barrow, but then I had to postpone my flight until early Monday morning, as I just could not get everything done that needed to be done.

I found Jobe ready to go, however - looking quite dapper in his new hat.

And Kalib was ready with his spatula. It was time to head to town, to celebrate the birthday of their father, our eldest child.

We left the valley in fog and when we drove into Anchorage, we found this snow-laden truck, creating its own mini-blizzard.

The plan was to meet at the Spenard Road House. Charlie arrived just ahead of us and walked to the door, his shadow tagging along.

Amazing, isn't it? How such a slender guy can cast such a burly shadow?

Kalib momentarily replaced his spatula with Color Crayons, most of which would wind up on the floor.

Jobe, of course, intently observed his surroundings. He is a most observant little tot.

And so I remembered that night 36 years ago when I took Margie to the labor room in Provo, Utah. She had been looking forward to giving birth to our first baby, but now she was not happy. It hurt and she did not want to go through with it.

"I've changed my mind," she said. "Take me home."

She wasn't joking, either. She was very serious. When I refused to take her home, she got quite upset with me.

Later, though, as she held this little one to her breast and then offered me a kiss, she completely forgave me.

As we sat there, remembering, Jacob put Jobe on my shoulders and held him there. Lavina could not resist and so took my camera away from me and turned it back on me.

It doesn't matter whether she is using the most simple, low-quality point and shoot or her iPhone, Lavina knows how to take a picture. She could be a pro, if that were her heart's desire.

She caught it all, right here - the sadness that I cannot conceal, even in the most happy situation, coupled with the essence of all that I have to live for.

I hope you catch this one soon, Suji - your little love Jobe, with your Uncle Bill, half-way-around the world from you but traveling this hard part of the journey with you.

And you, too, Gane. Maybe one day we will have a little granddaughter niece for you and she can be your little love.

That's Carl, Rex's friend that he met through Ama, sitting with us. As for Rex and Ama, they are right now driving through British Columbia, headed toward the Alaska Highway so that they can drive to Anchorage and then catch a jet to New York.

In the past week, Interior temperatures have been as cold as -50, so I am a little concerned about this drive.

Muzzy had missed the dinner, but insisted that I come out and say "hi" before we left.

Margie wanted a mint, so I stopped at the Holiday Station by Merrill Field. As I went in to buy her one, this plane came by on final -reminding me of a promise I once made but can now never keep.

And then we set off to drive home.

It was foggy on the Hay Flats.

My plan now was to get everything done by 10:00 PM, 11:00 at the latest, go to bed, get up at 3:30 AM and then head back Anchorage and to the airport, where my flight was scheduled to depart at 6:00 AM.

I was well on track to meeting that goal, when Lightroom misfired, and then launched a two hour process to diagnose and repair itself and then, at the very end of that process, declared the catalog to be corrupted beyond repair. So I had to start anew. There would be little time for sleeping ahead of me.

And this one from India:

The Bay of Bengal, about 30 miles south of Chennai: They play, and cling together.

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