Warm sunshine, two boys, a cat, an uncle and a gramma

This is from almost right now - just shot these and then came in to put up a lazy blog entry. Lazy, because I slept in very late this morning and although I have had breakfast and coffee, I still feel groggy, plus the sun is shining, it is warm and the grandsons are here to spend the weekend with us.

I have much work to do - a magazine to be made press ready by Wednesday, thousands of pictures to edit and place for the next magazine after - and had been planning to work hard all through the weekend. Right now, I don't feel like it. I feel like all I want to do is to hang out with the grandkids and the cats and be lazy.

This picture really needs to be bigger to be grasped. That's why I make the slideshow, so readers can see bigger copies of the pictures, but the Squarespace slideshow setup is pretty tedious for the viewer, so, as I am only posting two pictures today, I also set these up in the "click and view" method, which, in Squarespace, is a very tedious process for the blogger, but as I only have two pictures today the tedium will not be that terrible. 

Click on the image and you will see a larger copy.

The grandkids and the good black cat, Jimmy.

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We celebrate my birthday in Anchorage to the taste of Arctic char from Kaktovik

On the evening of my birthday, I drove into Anchorage where most of the rest of my family already was. Margie had been staying with Jacob and Lavina since the day that I left for Kaktovik, as Jobe had been a little under the weather and she needed to take care of him while Lavina worked.

Soon after I arrived, Lavina threw a few of the Arctic char that I had brought back from Kaktovik onto the grill.

These particular char were given to me by Marie Rexford. Elizabeth Rexford also gave me a generous number from the cache of she and husband Fenton.

Oh, boy, was it tasty! Char is one of my favorite fish - right up there with salmon, halibut and trout.

Thank you, Marie, Fenton and Elizabeth - your generosity made my birthday extra special.

I will still try to work a few char fishing pictures in here, maybe tomorrow, maybe Sunday, maybe Monday.

I am told that Kalib still wields the spatula - usually on a weekend morning when he is cooking eggs, but I have not personally seen him carry the spatula for awhile.

It had been rainy and cool when I drove out of Wasilla, but when I got out of the car at Jacob and Lavina's house, the sun shone brightly upon me and I was surprised by how hot it felt - just like I remember from the southern Arizona desert.

Well, maybe not quite that hot.

We ate on the table that graces the back deck of Jacob and Lavina's house. When I sit here, I am always amazed at the typical American suburban environs my son and daughter-in-law have planted themselves in and how comfortable they seem within.

After dinner, a few of us sat in the living room and talked while others readied something out in the kitchen that I was not supposed to see just yet.

It was Lisa whose stories dominated the conversation, and they were mostly about the dogs that she had been caring for while their owners were away. One day, she came to the house to find that one of the dogs had pooped on important tax papers. She had to save those papers, and the process involved rubber gloves and drying and sterilizing things and it was not pleasant.

Charlie said the dog had only done what everybody wants to do.

After she told the story, Jacob came out with Jobe. Jobe tackled Jacob.

Look up there, on the wall. It's Jobe's Apache cradleboard, the one made especially for him by one of the most skilled cradleboard makers on the White Mountain Apache Reservation - his Aunt LeeAnn.

Jobe will never sleep in it again.

That makes me kind of sad, yet I so greatly enjoy watching him grow, learn and experience.

Margie came out, pulled the curtains and turned out the lights. Then Melanie entered from the kitchen, followed by Kalib, Margie and Lavina. She carried the object that I had not been allowed to see until now. It was a flaming cake that she had made, just for me.

Count the number of candles and you will see that on my birthday, I turned younger than I had been for five decades.

The little ones watched intently as grandma inhaled a deep breath. Could he do it? Not quite!

So Kalib, the expert candle blower-outer, finished the job.

Once again, I drove home by myself. Jobe was doing quite a bit better, but Lavina's good friend, Sandy, has hit her due date and could go into labor at any minute. She wants Lavina with her when she delivers and Lavina has promised that she will be. 

Jacob had to leave for Kipnuk early in the morning, so Margie stayed to be on hand to care for the little ones should another little one choose the next day to be born.

This is what I saw as I neared Wasilla, just a few minutes before midnight.

Midnight won't look like this for much longer.

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July 4, part 4: iPhoning it at the cookout

My hiking shoes are pretty good, but they seemed to have gotten a little bigger than the last time I wore them and my feet slipped around inside quite a bit. This had been particularly bad coming down and so my feet were sore when we got to Lavina and Jacob's.

I took off my boots and went inside. Next time, I will try to wear two pair of socks with them, the inside one being thin, flexible, skin-tight and a moisture wicker. Then I think my feet might not get so sore. I felt as though I never wanted to put those shoes on again.

There was no one in Jake and Lavina's house when Melanie and I unlocked the door and stepped inside. So we went to the back deck and this what we saw before us.

The battery in my camera had completely died, by the way, and so had my iPhone. I did not have my iPad with me, so I had to borrow Margie's iPhone to take these pictures.

Good thing, because her iPhone is still pretty new and the lens is not nearly so smudged up as mine.

"No, Daddy! No Daddy! My turn, Daddy!" Kalib screamed as he ran to use grandpa as a shield. 

Jobe got into the pool. It had been a warm day.

Now it was turning cool. Jobe's mother called him inside so she could dry him off and put dry clothes on him. Or maybe gramma did that. I'm not sure.

There's my bare feet amidst his tiny footprints.

Lavina, barbecuing.

Jobe, eating his barbecued corn. We all ate and it was all scrumptious - as is all food that Jacob and Lavina prepare.

Lisa and Bryce came, too. Lisa had wanted to go on the hike, but wound up babysitting some dogs for ten days - including the entire weekend of the Fourth - and so had to miss it.

And that's it, folks. I've been dabbling at this blog on and off all day long. I just want to get on my bike and not write another word or place another picture.

If you go to the slideshow view and just see little squares with the words, "Thumbnail Processing" inside, go ahead and click through anyway. The slideshow images will still show. Squarespace is forever misfiring and malfunctioning, causing me headaches and wasting my time in 1000 different ways and this is how it is doing it tonight.

I have been working this in both Safari and Firefox to try and get this solved, but it just won't solve. Although, in time, it probably will. Maybe by tomorrow. So, if you go to the slideshow and see genuine thumbnails with images, just ignore this rant. 

Squarespace does that to me. It is the most exasperating program I have ever used.

Anyway, I have now displayed my Fourth of July, in four parts.

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Melanie and I climb the Twin Peaks trail, where I find the July 4 photo of freedom, which I share with you on behalf of a certain civilian: Part 3 of 4

Melanie met us at the house at almost the very moment that we arrived home from the parade. I fixed a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, filled up a couple of water jugs, stuffed them into my little backpack along with 100 to 400 mm lens and then we finally left, sometime between noon and 1:00 PM. I had it in my mind that we would hike in Hatcher Pass, but Jacob and Lavina had invited everybody to their house in Anchorage for an evening cookout so instead, we headed towards Eklutna Lake, which is right one the way to Anchorage.

As we drew near to Eklutna, we saw this truck, hauling a bunch of new cars to the north - maybe to Wasilla, maybe to Fairbanks.

No other options, really. It pretty much had to be Wasilla or Fairbanks.

Two trails take off from the Eklutna Lake parking lot in Chugach State Park - one follows the northern shore of the lake for several miles, another heads off up the mountains towards the Twin Peaks. We wanted to climb and neither of us had done this trail before.

The park sign said the trail was 2.5 miles wrong, rose 1500 vertical and was ranked "difficult." That would make it a round trip hike of five miles and I wanted to hike more than five miles. Yet, if we were going to make it to the cookout, five miles would be okay.

And since we would be hiking up a mountain on a trail that was ranked, "difficult," it might feel like we had hiked more than 5 miles at the end, and it might take longer than walking five miles on an "easy" trail. So, off we went.

We pretty walked side by side, but near the beginning, I dropped back a bit so that I could get this picture of Melanie as she walked through the trees in her red rain jacket.

There were many flowers to admire.

I did not believe the hike would be all that "difficult," as it had been ranked. I had been on many hikes that I knew were much more difficult. And I had been riding my bike just about every day, usually ten to 16 miles, sometimes more. I had been taking regular walks.

Yet, in a very short while, I began to feel this hike. It strained my legs and taxed my breath. Maybe because it was my first hike in a year or so. Maybe because I am getting older. Maybe both. Despite all the biking I have been doing, the hike strained different parts of me.

So it was a little more work than I had anticipated.

My first thought was, "if this easy hike is this hard, there is no way I can climb Denali next year. I should just forget it."

My second thought was, "if this is this hard, I MUST climb Denali next year." Well, then, I had better get work on that project right now.

Generally, if I go hiking in a place where the trailhead can be reached from the road system, especially this close to Anchorage, I avoid the weekends and go on a week day, to avoid the crowd. This was not only a weekend, it was a holiday - the Fourth of July.

I figured we would see lots of people on the train - maybe two or three hundred, even.

But we didn't. All the way up and all the way down, we saw maybe 15 people, including these two. It must have been grueling, for them to push their bikes up the trail, but they did it and now they were speeding down.

And the trail was steeper than it looks.

Hanging grass alongside the trail.

After a bit, we reached a good overlook of Eklutna Lake.

Kayakers down on the lake.

Melanie had brought a plastic bag. As we moved up the trail, she plucked the tops off of dandelions, an invasive species.

"It probably won't make any difference at all," she said.

Yet, she stopped the flowers she plucked from maturing into several thousand seeds and those are seeds that now will never grow.

Yet, the dandelions will continue their invasion.

Even so, it looked the only place they could really find a place to grow was right on and along the edges of the trail.

Unbroken country seemed to be inhospitable to dandelions.

We found bear poop on the trail - really big turds. They weren't steaming hot fresh, but were still moist. For awhile after that, Melanie started calling out to the bears as we walked, to tell them we were here and meant them no harm and so they had no need to harm us.

Way up on the mountainside, I spotted what I at first though were Dahl sheep. Upon closer inspection, I think they were goats.

A tiny butterfly - maybe a moth.

These little worm-or-caterpillar like characters were hanging web-like threads from alder trees. They seemed to have taken a hard toll on the alders.

They also found their way onto necks and into our hair. It did not feel good when they did that.

The hiking was much steeper at the end than it had been at the beginning, but my body got used to it and it wasn't as hard. It had rained earlier and the trail was slippery.

This is one of the other 15 or so people that we saw. She came along as Melanie and I were sitting and admiring the country we had climbed over.

And then she took off on a run. Now... Civi has stated that he does want me to take a picture just for him, but I cannot change the fact that when I saw her jog across the mountain side, it looked like real freedom to me, Fourth of July kind of freedom, it looked like the very picture that I had been looking for and I thought about Civi and I took it.

But okay, Civi - this picture is not for you, it is for everybody who reads this blog, taken on behalf of both you and me.

After my first trip to India, I gave a camera that I no longer used to my new nephew, Vijay. He then went out and won an award in an Indian photo contest - that award was this little green backpack. He sent it to me.

Because I tend to carry so much equipment when I travel, I had a much bigger bag but I hated it. 

After Vijay gave me this bag, I figured out a way to leave that bag home and just take this one.

It has proven to be an exceptionally good gift.

Thank you, Vijay.

Melanie kept asking me if she could carry it for me. I was fine carrying it, but finally did let her carry it for awhile. She is always looking out for me like that.

On the way down, we found this beautiful Alaska wild rose.

Down at the bottom, we got back into Melanie's car and drove toward Anchorage and the cookout. I have related no details about the climb and the conversation and the company, because it would take a long time for me to that.

But it was good. The company was good, the conversation was good.

I wish we could do something like this every week.

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I seek a July 4 photo of American freedom for a civilian mass audience of Greece: Part 1 of 4: Breakfast at Abby's

I had wanted us to be at Abby's Home Cooking right at 9:00, so that maybe we could be her very first customers. But, when you are a sleepy person on a Fouth of July morning and you and your wife have two little kids to get ready to take with you - well, it just takes longer to get ready than you think it will.

So it was closer to 10 when we pulled in.

As we got out of the car, Kalib suddenly said, "taste of home."

I don't know how he came up with such a thing, but he did.

On the third of July, my friend in Greece who I have met only in a burning place online made a comment wishing all his friends in the USA a happy Fourth. Civi is an amazing guy, full of goodwill to just about everybody, but life has been challenging for him in Greece lately - as it has for his entire nation.

So I told him that on this fourth of July, I would find a picture to take, just for him.

Maybe I would find it during breakfast at Abby's?

We had barely sat down when my nose caught an aroma wafting through the air... and it wasn't home cooking.

It was Jobe. Margie had changed his diaper just before we left the house, but he waited until we all sat at the table to drop the bomb... and it was a smeller!

That's not Pepsi Kalib is drinking for breakfast, by the way - it's apple juice.

We placed our orders - eggs, bacon and hashbrowns for me, biscuits and gravy for the Margie and scrambled eggs, apple juice and toast for the boys and then dashed back to the car and off to the house to pick up a diaper for Jobe.

For some reason, I had imagined us having a nice, peaceful, relaxed, breakfast, but it wasn't working out that way. Neither boy wanted to sit still - they just wanted to jump up, run around, roll around, crawl beneath things and cause chaos. 

One kid would take off, I would catch him, sit him back down and then the other one would go.

I had my hands more than full and could hardly touch my camera, but I squeaked this one off. 

Paulie Parkhurst, the sister of Abby, came to the rescue. She took both boys from me and led them to a place where a play area had been set up, just for people in our situation. Paulie was very good at this, and Kalib loved her immediately.

Outside the window, Abby gestured to what I believe was a friend or relative, coming to check out the new restaurant on opening day.

It seemed to me that it should have taken Margie maybe eight minutes to get to the house and come back with the diaper, but it felt much longer than that. MUCH longer. But maybe that's all it was - although I do not think so.

In time, she returned and we commenced to eat breakfast.

Margie took charge of feeding Kalib.

I took charge of feeding my little man, Jobe. Everything was now peaceful and calm - for about three minutes. Then those boys were rambunctious again.

When I eat breakfast out, I generally ask to have my toast served after I have finished everything else, so that I can slowly eat and savor it as I sip coffee.

When my toast arrived, Margie took the boys so they could walk towards home. "You can enjoy your toast in peace," she said.

I hated to see them go, but, indeed, I did savor and enjoy my toast in peace.

And I got a little bit of a chance to visit Paulie, Abby and Abby's husband Andy Hammond. The morning of July 4 might seem an odd time to open an out-of-the way restaurant, but they had their reasons.

Abby and Andy first met in Canada, 20 years ago on the Fourth of July.

They got married in Dawson City, Canada, where the Mahoney's have a ranch, one year later - on July 4. At the wedding, they served a pig and a bear leg and then danced on a platform that Andy and Abby had made.

Since that time, the Fourth has been a doubly special day to them, a day of taking on and trying new things.

Hence, they opened their restaurant on the Fourth of July.

"We had a wild time," Paulie remembers.

Given the fact that there was a parade going on in town, and people were out camping and fishing, shooting off crackers and rockets and doing Fourth of July things, there weren't many customers on opening morning.

In fact, most of the time we were there it was just us - which, given the circumstances we faced with our energetic and rambunctious grandsons, that was probably for the best.

But, here is what I have to say - although I did not really get to savor it, the food was good. This is a real, genuine mom-and-pop and brothers and sisters and children and friends of children operation.

I know - down on the Parks Highways where everyday cars pass by by the thousands - this time of year, tens of thousands, I suspect - there are many good restaurants to stop and eat at - everything from sushi superb to some very excellent Mexican cuisine.

And for breakfast, there is IHOP, Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant and Denali Family Restaurant and maybe somewhere else too and you can get very good, satisfying and filling breakfasts at all these places and they are right on the highway, which is not Main Street but is Wasilla's main drag, and is a very busy place.

But, I urge you, if you are in this area and you are hungry, turn off the Highway at Church Road, drive about 2.5 miles down until you reach the corner of Church and Seldon.

There you will find Abby's Home Cooking.

Give it a try.

Margie and I will be back... I think without the boys next time, unless Jacob and Lavina are here with us.

When I stepped out the door and got into the car to leave, I discovered that Margie and the boys had not gotten far.

So, I stopped and picked them up.

"Want to go see if the parade is still going?" I asked.

I'm pretty sure Civi will enjoy these breakfast pictures - yet I did not yet feel that I had gotten my special picture just for him.

I wanted that picture to speak of America and the idea of freedom, which at times we speak always of how free we are enjoy more than we do at other times. Indeed, I would say that in starting out this little venture, Abby and Andy are acting in the best spirit of the freedom we Americans seek and boast of

Even so, and although I am pretty certain Civi will be impressed by this family and what they have, I still felt that the the special American Fourth of July freedom picture that I wanted to take just for him had not yet appeared before my camera. Maybe I would take it at the parade.

I will post something from the parade within the next hour or so and you can see if I succeeded.

And don't anyone worry - Metro Cafe will always be the coffee shop where I go every afternoon when I am in Wasilla and sometimes mornings too.

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