Cocoon mode* - day 15: leaf melts frost, commode goes down Church, reaction to Sarah Palin's big China speech, a tooth is pulled; I blow it

This morning, there was a leaf on my windshield. It had melted a patch of frost.

As I drove down Church Road, I saw a commode coming the other way.

On Lucille, I saw this group of children waiting for their school bus.

The big talk all day in Wasilla, all over Alaska and it seems the whole USA and the world has been Sarah Palin and her big speech in China. I've visited the other blogs and online news outlets and everybody is going on about it.

Me, I'd rather show you this car driving by Wasilla Lake, as I drive the other way.

Margie lost a filling and came down with a terrible toothache. Jacob and Lavina took her to Anchorage with them and dropped her off at the emergency room of the Alaska Native Medical Center. When she was done, she called me and I headed in to pick her up. I came upon this gentlemen right here in Wasilla, at the stoplight at the intersection of the Parks and Palmer-Wasilla highways.

I have immortalized him for posterity beyond his mortal days and he does not even know it.

If you know him, perhaps you could tell him.

After she called me, Margie had to wait for an hour for her pain-killer prescrption, so the timing was just about perfect. Her tooth had to be pulled and she was in tremendous pain. She took one of two pills, but it did no good. The other pill had to be taken with food, but her mouth hurt her so bad she could not stick anything in it.

Poor woman! She has spent so much of this year suffering pain. So much! Damnit!

After I got her home, she managed to swallow some Saltine crackers. Then she took the other pill. The pain eased off a bit after that.

As for me, despite the increased number of pictures in this entry, I am still in cocoon mode. It's just that I burned out tonight. Completely. I could not do another lick. So I decided to watch a movie with Margie, something that we have not done much of together in quite awhile - although she has been watching movie upon movie upon movie, because of her injury. But tonight all she wanted to do was take her Vicodin and go to bed.

When I was recovering from my injury, I hardly watched any TV at all. I read books, and I learned to use the pocket camera, took pictures with just one hand and with that same hand pecked away at my laptop computer. I also slept a lot. It was amazing how much I slept. I miss sleeping like that.

And then one night I went to bed and I could not sleep at all. I threw away my pain killers, but still this condition persisted for a couple of months. It was awful. And now I sleep but I still don't sleep much and I am tired 100 percent of the time.

Oh, how I ramble! This is because I am burned out and don't know what else to do.

I did not want to watch a movie by myself, so I came out here, made this blog entry and since I could not work, put in a couple of more pictures than I should have, being in cocoon mode. I still left some out, though. Some good ones - even better than the ones I put in.

I am tired of working everyday. Every day! The whole damn summer passed and I did not get to take one break and do one damn fun thing (although I do have fun with my work, sometimes, especially when I was on the Arctic Slope) but I have got to get this job done.

It doesn't feel like I ever will, but I have got to.

And then I need to blow out and go to Mexico or Hawaii or Argentina or someplace for a few days. I've just got to! Brazil would be okay. I could dance upon the equator. If some of those women that you always see pictures of, undulating their way through the Mardi Gras, were to dance upon the equator at the same time as me, that would be okay.

Even when you are married and love your wife, who may or may not be with you, depending on whether she wants to go or not, it is good to watch women dance upon the equator.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I am not going to Brazil when this project is done. I will be lucky if I can make it to Glennallen. And any woman who tries to dance outside there had better be well-bundled, or she will turn into a popsicle.

I'm not going to proof read this damn thing, either, so if there's any mistakes, that's just too bad. I probably wouldn't catch most of them, anyway. 

Holy cow! My email just pinged. It was an Anchorage Daily News update: Former Anchorage Mayor George Sullivan has died. Oddly enough, the sharpest memory I have of him is of him sitting in a big car in the parking lot of the Sullivan Arena, named for him even before he died.

I must have photographed that moment, but who knows where the image is?

My condolences to the family and all those who loved him.

Well, he just kept rambling.

Not Mayor Sullivan - he's done rambling. Me, I'm the one who kept rambling. But I will stop one day, too.

But not today.

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.