I get my work done with a little help from my friend

It is now 1:49 AM. I am in my office. I first came in and sat down to work about 10:00 AM this morning and, except for a couple of small breaks, I have been in here ever since. This is pretty typical for me, so I decided its time to show this side of my life, right here, in Wasilla, Alaska.

I have been printing pictures from Kivgiq that will hang on a wall in the North Slope Borough Mayor's Office in Barrow - not in the room where the mayor sits, but out in the foyer where everybody congregates.

As always, Jim, my good black cat buddy, was here to help.

He did take a break to get a drink, however. For about 7 years, I had a big oscar in that tank, but it died about six weeks ago. I have not decided what to replace it with, but I am changing the decor of the tank. I recently bought a good-sized ceramic pig and a proportionally smaller piglet.

After I soak them for a couple of months to hopefully leech out any toxins that might be in the enamel, they will go into the tank with whatever fish I replace the oscar with. 

It won't be an oscar. It will be a big cichlid, however. Maybe two.

Right now, a giant pleco still lives in this tank, but I will have to find a home for it before I restock, because if I don't, it will eat the new baby fish.

As I continue to work, Jimmy crosses the room and takes a seat in the window sill above another tank. This one has a lively population. Too bad I didn't have the lights on.

Even when Jimmy just sits in the window, it is good to have him here. His presence helps to get me through the day.

Jimmy returns from the window sill and takes a seat on the keyboard. I needed to pause, anyway.

Then he decides to come to me. No matter how busy I am, I never turn him away. I have learned how to keep working when he does this.

He can make it a little difficult to see the screen, however.

Later, as he often does, Jimmy determines that I must take a break and pay attention to him, not my work, and so he digs his claws into my sweatshirt and pulls himself up onto my chest.

He stays a little while, then leaps to the floor and I get back to work.

A bit later, he does it again. He makes it hard to breath. You notice I only have one arm to support him with. Obviously, I man the camera with the other.

When I am not holding a camera, I am pretty skilled at supporting the black cat while simultaneously manipulating my computer.

He steps away from me. Before I can get back to work, he steps onto my keyboard.

I can't believe it! The photo that I was working with disappears right out of Lightroom. I panic for a moment, thinking that he has deleted it and I will have to go find a backup copy. But Jimmy did not delete it; he changed the rating from 3 to 1, and so it vanished from the screen, as I had Lightroom set to display threes and higher. This one popped up in its place.

I had been arguing with myself which of the two to actually print, and had decided on the other.

If you look closely at the picture, you will see also that Jim bumped the rating up from three to four.

For a moment, I thought, "Okay, Jim, if you say so, I will print this one instead."

But then I changed my mind and went back to the other.

I love my black cat, but I can't allow him to become my picture editor.

Now that we are on Daylight Savings Time, it doesn't get dark until nearly 9:00 PM. The sun goes down before that, but in the north, we have long, lingering twilight.

As you can see, the amount of daylight creeping into my office is declining with the hour, causing the screen to appear more pronounced.

Jimmy is still with me. He is that kind of cat.

He sticks with me all the time.

I have to print this picture several times, because ink splotches keep appearing on it. I clean the heads, print again, clean the heads, print again, and still the ink splotches appear.

Finally, I pull out a big pad of ink soaked lint. It looks like it might be made of cat hairs. The printing proceeds just fine, after that.

Now, it is completely dark outside. Jimmy keeps me going.

But wait! This is not Jim! This is not a black cat! This is a tabby cat!

Why, it's Pistol-Yero!

He usually hangs out here with Jim and I, but shortly after we got up this morning, he went to lay back down on the bed and soon fell into a nap.

He napped all day.

But now that it is night, he comes to the office to do his part.

Pistol-Yero!

Yesterday, I was too tired to tell the story of how that cup of coffee came to be set in front of me at IHOP, but I promised that I would tell it later.

So this afternoon, about 4:30, when I was taking one of those little breaks that I mentioned, I drove to Mocha Moose. I figured that I would get a new coffee picture and use that to illustrate the story.

This is Kaylee. At first, she was a little shy about the idea of being in the picture, but then she said, "ok."

But right now, as I type this sentence, it is 2:08 AM.

I have to get an early start tomorrow. I need to get to bed, sometime.

I'm tired.

I really am.

That story will have to wait.

It was not really my intent to blur this picture. I had set the shutter speed at 1/250 of a second, but sometimes the knobs on the pocket camera change without me knowing it. That's what happened. The shutter speed got reset to 1/40 of a second.

I don't really mind, though.

Life's a blur, anyway.

Kivgiq: The gift that made me dance; a happy interruption

Isaac Killigvuk is a whaling captain from Point Hope, and when he came dancing toward me at Kivgiq, extending this watch in my direction, I at first thought that he wanted me to take a picture of it before he gave it as a gift to someone.

Then I realized that he was giving it to me. This meant that I had to go out on the floor and dance with him. Despite what I do to make a living, at heart I am a terribly shy person and I do not know how to dance. Every Kivgiq, I do dance at least once, but I pick a very crowded invitational fun dance and then go hide in the crowd.

Now, I had to dance in front of everybody. Worse yet, Isaac dances with such soul, power and grace, that I knew I would look pitiful and awkward by comparison.

But something happened that I would not have expected. I took the watch and then, as I watched Isaac's movements, I suddenly felt something inside me; it started out in my back and then moved into my arms and legs and then they started to move. I danced. People clapped. They cheered, they shouted.

When the dance ended, Isaac and I embraced. I was about to run off and hide but the crowd shouted, "more! more!" And so I danced again, with Isaac, the whaling captain whose father once drifted away on the ice and then, after an amazing experience in which he found himself not so alone as a person by himself on an ice floe would expect to be, drifted back again.

Now I owe Isaac a gift. All I have to give is photographs and somewhere in my hap-hazard, chaotic, 35 mm film archive there are some of his late father. I think I know what I must give to him.

Always, the women of Wainwright dance with such grace and beauty.

Such beauty.

Suddenly, the dance leader's motions are interrupted by the rush of a tiny girl.

The dance continues. You can expect to see the girl in motion in this line in future years. She is Kara and her beautiful mother is Taktuk.

I want to make a good Kivgiq spread, but so far I have still only touched a small percentage of my take, and it is late and I am tired. I will try to get in at least one more sample. Maybe tomorrow, but I don't know. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day, but I am planning to take a break to see if I can get Margie into a a movie theatre in Anchorage.

And here is a bicyclist, right here in Wasilla.

The old, internal, battle that I must always wage: home vs. home; Wasilla/South Central vs. Barrow/Arctic Slope

I have written before about this battle that forever causes turmoil and tumult to boil within my calm exterior - this battle of home vs. home. And now that I have just returned to my wife and family home in Wasilla after having spent nine wonderful days in my communal home of Barrow and the Arctic Slope, that battle rages.

My desire to go back is strong, to live again the life represented by the mask worn in this dance performed by my friend, Steve Oomittuk of Point Hope, during *Kivgiq. It is a life where people dwell with whales, polar bears, seals, walrus, caribou, wolves, ducks, fish and other creatures in the most intimate sort of way; in a land and seascape that is stark, harsh, and so bitterly, bitterly, cold, yet so abundant and all this binds people together in a way that I have seen nowhere else.

I find something there that I can find nowhere else.

So I want to go back to this home.

Yet, look at this! My two daughters, Lisa holding the cat that she just adopted, Melanie kissing that cat, my wife Margie looking on from inside the car. She is healing, yet her injuries still make it difficult for her to get up and walk about. This was the first time that she had been out of the house since February 2, but she felt she had to stay in the car.

This is my family of marriage and creation; my blood and my soul mate. They are never going to live on the Arctic Slope. Each winter now, Margie's longing to return to her Apache homeland in Arizona grows stronger and stronger and even this southerly part of the north bears down harder and harder upon her.

Do you see the dilemma?

I took this picture yesterday. Anyone who wants to know more about how this kitty came into my family can find a more complete account here, on the No Cats Allowed Kracker Cat blog.

Here I am, walking down Momegana Street in Barrow, the night before I left. 

And this is from today, as I headed down Lucas in Wasilla.

Back in Barrow, looking towards Osaka Restaurant. Just beyond that is the Chukchi Sea, frozen, broken, and jumbled. Bowhead whales will soon pass by, swimming through the open lead.

And this is Lucas again, from the other side of the same hill.

Once, maybe 100 years or more ago, an Iñupiat Eskimo who delivered the mail by dog sled all along the Arctic Coast built this house from the timbers of a wrecked, tall-masted, Yankee whaling ship. He raised a daughter here, who grew up to become a school teacher. 

McGee was a gracious Elder when I met her, and she kept her door open to people like me and always there was hot coffee, cake, cookies, and both Eskimo and Taniq (white man's) food waiting behind that door.

She lived with a tuxedo cat and a blue-billed parakeet and if ever I got to feeling lonely, all I had to do was drop in. She is gone, now, and so is the cat and the parakeet.

And this is my neighbor from across the street, right here in Wasilla, earlier today. He is plowing the soft, warm, snow that fell this day.

I do not even know his name.

I knew the name of his dog, though, "Grizz." I have not seen Grizz for several months, at least. I assume he, too, has passed on. There is another dog there, an Irish Setter, just like Grizz, but I do not know that dog's name. And there are two orange cats. I am quite fond of them. They used to come over and visit me, as did Grizz, but then a woman moved into the house and after that the animals were no longer allowed to leave the property. They visit me no more.

*More than 48 hours ago, I wrote that I would post a series of Kivgiq pictures within 48 hours. Maybe I will still post a sample series, maybe I won't. It will take me weeks, maybe a month, spread out over how long, to edit that four day take. I am working on a book on Kivgiq, starting from the first of the modern events, held in 1988, through this one. Plus, although there is no funding for it yet, I will probably get to do a Uiñiq magazine specifically on this year's Kivgiq.

I will post at least one more Kivgiq picture, because one night when i stepped into the Teriyaki House to have dinner, I met a 12 year-old boy who danced at Kivgiq and he had a couple of pretty good stories to tell, about adventures that most 12 year old boys could hardly imagine. So, if nothing else, I will post his picture.

Grand entry image from Kivgiq leads more to come soon; Barrow today

Within 48 hours, I hope to make a good Kivgiq post, with a variety of images. In the meantime, here is Isabelle and Vernon Elavgak and their young son (I am so sorry, I do not know his name - but I will find out) leading Tagiugmiut Dancers of Barrow onto the dance floor during the grand entry.

And here is what I saw late this morning as I stepped out of Pepe's North of the Border Mexican Restaurant, where I had just finished another big breakfast comprised of a combination omelet, potatoes fried with peppers and onions along with a side of wheat toast.

It was a beautiful, blustery, day in Barrow and I loved walking about in the frigid wind.

Kivgiq - a random pull

At the moment, I am pleasantly exhausted and lazy - far too lazy to do any kind of search or edit of my Kivgiq images - not even a superficial one. Plus, my internet connection here is very slow and, couple that with some of the awkward features of Squarespace, my host for this blog, and it makes posting images here a slow, tedious process.

Yet, to have all these consecutive posts with no images troubles me. 

So, I just plug a CF card into my laptop and grabbed the first image that came up and this is it, Robin Jonah Kaleak of the Barrow Dancers.

As for me, I finally got to bed about 6:00 AM. I woke up more often than I wish I had, but still I got some sleep and then finally got up a bit after noon.

Feeling pleasantly exhausted and lazy, I was slow to get moving, but I was also very hungry and I wanted a good breakfast, so finally I got dressed and walked over to Pepe's North of the Border Mexican Restaurant and ordered an Omelet with extra wheat toast.

It was delicious and I took my time, and sipped cup after cup as I finished off the toast, then walked back here.

The temperature was about -13 (-25 C), the wind about 15 knots and at Pepe's, there had been a fair amount of talk about the weather, about how nice it was that it had finally warmed up and was so pleasant outside.

I should do something, now, but I am much too lazy.

Maybe I will take a long walk a little bit later, with my pocket camera, to take advantage of this pleasant weather.