I have changed my mind...

I decided that this idea of putting this blog on hold until sometime after the New Year is nonsense. I am going to keep it going, but will attempt to discipline myself to spend a minimum amount of time on it through that time period, 15 to 30 minutes a day max. Of course, here I have reached the point where I am just starting my third sentence and I have already put more than 20 minutes into it.

Hmmm... part of this is the fault of my bloghost, Squarespace. As I have stated before, it is a buggy program, prone to misfire, and so far tonight I have had to bounce around between three windows in two separate browsers, just to get the photos placed. Some nights it works perfect, some nights it is a nightmare and cannot be brought under control no matter what I do. Tonight it seems to have fallen somewhere in between.

Okay... 25 minutes now...

I awoke very late this morning, I think because of what I went through yesterday and the night before, when I got almost no sleep, as I had to "prep" for the medical procedure referenced yesterday.

Now, I am supposed to eat a great deal of "real oats" until I clear up the damage that all these decades of an abusive diet has done to my digestive system, but after yesterday, I just had to go out for breakfast and get myself some ham and eggs.

I will eat oatmeal tomorrow.

When I walked into Family Restaurant, I saw that this man, Van Buskirk, had just sat down at a table. Sometimes, when I am out walking, he will come driving by and wave, and sometimes he stops alongside me, rolls down his window and we chat for awhile.

I was alone, so I sat down with him.

It has now been 30 minutes. I am behind schedule.

There was much from our conversation that I was going to write, but, as you can see, I am out of time.

I will note this: he served in the Pacific in World War II as part of the Army Air Corp occupation forces and then stayed in the military to make a career of it, but his heart went bad and he got drummed out. He suffered a massive heart attack and later had a few more, plus some strokes.

No one figured that he would last very long, but here he is, Van Buskirk, deep into old age, having breakfast with me at Family Restaurant. The lady showing him the love seems to be in charge of all the waitresses.

Van Buskirk picked up my ticket. I got out my wallet to at least leave the tip, but he insisted that I put it back into my pocket.

Thank you, Van Buskirk!

I should add that, after the waitress brought our food, he bowed his head and said a blessing.

It has now been 38 minutes.

After I got home, I went walking. Not far from where Van Biskirk told me he lives, I saw this secular Christmas display.

The afternoon and evening proved to be snowy and the already icy roads became dangerously slick. In Anchorage, a woman slid over the center line, smacked T-bone into my son Jacob's Tahoe and knocked him into the ditch. He did not seem to be hurt, although now he is quite stiff. Margie was at work and so, instead of working myself, I spent four hours alone with Kalib, until Jacob and Lavina finally got home.

Kalib had a great time, being alone with his youthful gramp. I enjoyed him, too, but I was left to wonder how my wife keeps up with him all day long.

During his waking hours, Kalib does not stop. I was going to describe some of his antics, but I have already exceeded my time limit by over 10 minutes.

I still must go back and put in the code that turns the opening words to every section red. If Squarespace would simply put a color button into their editor, this would be a simple task that would take seconds. I have suggested this to them a number of times, but they have some high falutin idea that they are going to force their customers to use headers correctly and they think their customers will just be lazy and ignore headers altogether if they have an option to colorize sentences, words, and letters at will.

Of course, highlighting text in the body of the blog has nothing to do with headers.

So far, they continue to refuse to add this simple feature - as well as to do many other things that would make life easier for a Squarespace blogger.

I shouldn't vent like this, but, damnit, sometimes, when you blog, and write what just comes off your fingertips as they move, you vent.

When I started this blog, I should not have leaped so fast. Now I am stuck with Squarespace - for awhile, at least. Maybe they will solve these problems and I can just stay with them.

Kalib turns on the charm for Granny B waitress; jet passes overhead; Lisa at work

It was just after noon and I had eaten nothing since last evening, as I had to do a blood draw today. After the draw, we headed toward Anchorage to see a movie and to drop Kalib off with his parents, but first I needed to eat so we stopped at Granny B's, where they serve breakfast all day.

Kalib quickly began to flirt with the waitress.

She was a pushover; she quickly succumbed to his charms.

Kalib enjoyed the attention. Breakfast was good. Afterward, we dropped Kalib off at his Dad's place of work, where they were having a Christmas party and he would meet Santa.  We then headed to the movie.

Slumdog Millionaire is what we saw. One of the characters in it was named Latika and in one scene, when she was a young girl begging on the streets of Mumbai, she reminded of a very specific young beggar girl who crossed my path in Bangalore. 

The movie got out about 3:45, so we climbed into the car to drive to see Lisa and this is what it looked like at that time.

Lisa at work at the admissions desk at the family medicine clinic of the Alaska Native Medical Center.

After we got home, I found the pictures of the girl in Bangalore and I was going to put them in this post. I decided the post had enough images, however.

So I will make a follow-up post, and put the Latika who was probably not Latika at all in that entry.

The street man: what his Alaska Native peoples fed me; what I gave to him

I saw him standing on the corner ahead of me as I drove toward the green light. I hoped it would stay green, but the traffic ahead of me was moving slow and when it turned yellow, I knew that I would come to stop on the corner, right beside him.

I did. He came walking toward me through the zero degree (F) air, a friendly smile on his face. I could not turn away as if he were not there, so I smiled back and rolled down the window.

"God bless you on this good day, sir!" he said.

"You too," I answered. "Where you from?"

"Mountain Village," he said. "Yukon River. It's located on the Lower Yukon."

"Yes, I know," I told him. "I've been there."

I've been in villages all over Alaska, which is different than going to villages in any other state. Mostly, you fly to these villages, as very few are on our limited road system.

The people out there have treated me good. They have put me up in their homes and they have fed me: moose, caribou, salmon, bowhead whale, beluga whale, seal, duck, goose, swan, beaver, sheefish, whitefish, crab, blueberries, salmon berries' berries of many kinds, seaweed, walrus, bighorn sheep, musk ox, mountain goat...

Food does not get better than what they feed me.

I gave the man a dollar. I don't know how he will spend it. The light turned green. I drove away.

The incident described happened in Anchorage. This is the kind of day that it was.

And here I am, a bit earlier on the Glenn Highway, passing through the East Side of Anchorage. I should replace the cracked windshield. But soon, it would be cracked again.

Passing by Merrill Field.

What it looked like when I reached downtown Anchorage.

This is why I went to Anchorage. I had something that had to be mailed today. The only Post Office that was open was the Airport Post Office. I took this picture, looking backwards, after I had been in line for over an hour. I still had quite a wait ahead of me.

I suspect that most of them were mailing Christmas gifts.

As I drive away from the airport post office.

The Marriott Hotel, with Conoco Phillips rising behind it.

And this is from earlier in the day, when a bunch of us gathered at IHOP for the usual Sunday breakfast. Tots always pick each other out of the crowd.

After the show, an image that is not Mom appears

I did my little show tonight at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and it was a lot of fun. The theme, of course, was how I was forced to shoot with just my left hand after my injury, and how this led me to the G9 pocket camera and the resultant images.

About three million people came (and considering that the entire population of Alaska is about 600,000, that's a pretty good turnout) and each one of them let me know they enjoyed it.

Afterward, Jacob, Lavina, Kalib, Melanie, Charlie and Lisa and I all went to get a late dinner at a place on 3rd Avenue called the Snow Goose. I would have ordered a snow goose, too, had there been one on the menu, but there was not. Yet, the halibut tacos.... OOOOOHH!.... exquisite!

I can still taste those tacos.

On the other side of the table from me were some large windows, darkened by the night. And I looked at one and saw... Mom... deceased now for almost three years... looking back at me. 

It was a hazy, mottled, reflection of a poster that hung on the wall behind me. "Who does that look like?" I pointed to the reflection and asked Melanie, who, at times, appears to me to be a darker, taller, version of Mom walking. "Gramma," she said, without hesitation. When I got home and put it on my computer screen, I called Margie out. 

"Mom," she said right away.

This is the poster that made the reflection. Doesn't look like Mom... and yet, it does. Interestingly enough, my mother often speculated that maybe somewhere back in her family there was some Asian blood. On my Grandmother Roderick's wall hung a portrait of my Aunt Myrtle, mother's oldest sister, who died in her mid-twenties, before I was born. 

When we would visit, I would study that picture for long periods of time, and then at night would lie awake in bed trying to imagine what this beautiful girl with the delicate, Asian-like features had been like in life.

For Mom to make that speculation was a bit amazing, because, from the time that I was small until the time that she knew that I was going to marry an American Indian, Mom was adamant that when the time came, we were all to marry within our church and race.

About the latter, she changed her mind after she met Margie.

She loved Margie.

And who could not?

Mom was a teetotaler and considered alcohol a gift from the devil.

Today we dined at Taco Bell

Even though it was Sunday, we did not go to IHOP today. Instead, as lunch neared, Jacob, Muzzy and I took off walking towards Taco Bell, somewhere between four and five miles away. Margie would be coming the other way, taking her lunch break.

She would pick me up, and Lavina would come from behind, and pick Jacob and Muzzy up.

Sometimes in the past, I have left early enough to walk all the way to Taco Bell and meet Margie there.

Before I got hurt, I often rode my bicycle and I would almost beat her there.

I would not have wanted to ride a bike today, anyway. This is a bike trail that we are on, right here. Someone had plowed it in the morning, but enough snow had since fallen to make a miserable pedal out of it.

Lavina, Jacob, Kalib and me at the Taco Bell order counter. That's me in the blue. I am holding the camera out over the cash register with my left hand, since it is still hard to stretch my right that far. I asked the kid behind the counter if he could see those three on the camera screen. He said he could, so I took the picture.

The focus could have been better, but it's good enough.

Kalib ignores his Cheerios to watch little kids pass by. I heard a girl at the table behind him tell her dad, "It's your birthday, Dad! Happy birthday, Dad!"

A car passes by as Margie and Lavina visit. Lunch is over. In just minutes, I will drive Margie back to work at Wal-Mart, and then I will drive home the long way. I have a series of pictures from that drive, too. Let's see if I get a chance to post them.

I have much to do, and every minute that I spend in here is a minute away from that. And thanks to the odd vagaries of Squarespace, my bloghost, I spend much more time here than I ought to, just wrestling with the strange glitches that invariably pop up.