At the recommendation of Lisa Kelly, the Ice Road Trucker, I return to Fat Boyz Pizza and find a super pie - and they are open Super Bowl Sunday; Kalib and Jobe make a surprise visit

This is not the Fat Boy, Tom, but rather the medium boy, Mike. Mike has just pulled this pizza out of the Fat Boy oven.

After we became aware that the the new mini-mini-mall that was being built on the corner of Seldon and Church Roads, where previously the only businesses were those that catered to moose, ravens, foxes, hares, bears and such - namely, nature's own smorgasboard, we were very excited to try out a pizza.

Fat Boyz Fattery Pizza would be only one-and-a-half miles from our house and in this sprawling, flung-hither-and-thither community loosely known as Wasilla, a mile-and-a-half is like being right next door.

So, on the very day that they opened, we ordered pizzas. 

Those pizzas were okay. Not super - just okay.

I like my pizza super, so I did not bother to return for awhile.

Then Lisa Kelly, the Ice Road Trucker, convinced me that I ought to give Fat Boyz another try.

She did this that day that I found her at Metro Cafe. She did it by naming Fat Boyz as one of her very favorite places in Wasilla, right alongside Metro Cafe.

I figured an ice road trucker ought to know a super pizza from an okay pizza.

I figured maybe there was just some kind of first day glitch that made that first pizza just okay and not super. I figured I should give them another try.

This is John Boy, hard at work just beyond the range of the desserts.

So, finally, thinking that Lisa Kelly should be paid attention to, I ordered another pizza - a small one. With Canadian Bacon, mushrooms, olives, onions and green peppers.

I brought it home. Margie and I ate.

And... oh, my! It was way better than ok. It was good... it was super!

Super - just right for Super Bowl Sunday.

Usually, Mike closes on Sunday, but today he is staying open.

So now we have place just one-and-a-half miles from the house to order super pizza.

This is the Fat Boy, Tom. Tom used to be the executive Chef at the Hilton Hotel in Anchorage, but decided he would rather work for himself and stay in the valley every day.

Business is doing good, he told me, so much so that he will soon open a second restaurant in "downtown Wasilla."

This is Shelbi, picking up her order of two pizzas. I had planned to order a pizza, too, to bring it home and finish off this post with pictures of Margie and I eating it. But Kalib and Jobe changed my plans.

They showed up unexpectedly at the house, with their mom and dad. Before I alerted Mom and Dad to my plans for evening pizza, Mom got dinner cooking - spaghetti and salad.

So that is what we ate instead of Fat Boyz pizza.

But that spaghetti was pretty super itself.

The salad was good, too.

And Jobe crawled quickly beneath the coffee table from one side to the other.

Margie, Kalib, Jobe and I hung out for awhile in the guest bedroom, the one that used to be Lisa's room, the one that later Jacob, Lavina and Kalib stayed in while they saved up money to buy a home of their own.

Right after I took this picture, I sat about to take one of just Jobe, as he crawled onto me.

Just as I was pressing the shutter, Kalib thrust his head between my camera and Jobe. Kalib stole the picture for himself.

They are gone, now, and they are holding a big Super Bowl party at their house in Anchorage. They invited us to come, but I leave for Barrow Tuesday and I have an impossible number of tasks to perform between now and then and I cannot take the time to drive back and forth to Anchorage and to socialize in front of the TV.

Still, it is Super Bowl Sunday and Margie and I must eat.

I wonder what we will eat?

The answer should be in tomorrow's blog - assuming that we make it through this day and into tomorrow.

I believe we will, but one never knows for certain.

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Even on this birthday, Melanie remains trustworthy; cats are not wierd, they are normal

Those of us who were free gathered together to celebrate Melanie's birthday. I will not tell you what birthday it was, but I will note that when I was a young adult, we feared this birthday above all others. The belief among young people was that no matter how good a person was before they hit this birthday, once they reached it, the ways of the world would overtake them and they could not be trusted after that.

Hell.

Melanie can still be trusted.

Now I will move write along, writing very little, because I have already spent quite a bit of time editing, preparing and placing pictures and I do not have time to write much. So I won't. Because if I write words that I do not need to write, it will just eat up my time, so why should I write such words that waste time when I do not need to write them?

So I won't write much.

Just a little bit.

Not much at all.

Because it would waste time.

And I do not have time to waste.

So I will write very little today.

I will just show you the pictures.

And not worry about writing many words.

That would be a waste of time when all that you need to know is in the pictures.

Well, maybe are other things that should know, too - like how to do math, for example.

Math is a good skill for anyone to have.

Here is Lavina, making frybread.

Once must have some comprehension of math to make frybread.

Otherwise, one might make 100 frybreads, when one dozen would do.

Or use 6 teaspoons of salt when one would be just right.

Kalib entered carrying his spatula, but then laid it down. I picked it up. He did not quite know what to think about that.

Melanie prepares her Navajo/Apache taco.

The tacos were damn good.

The day before, Rex had submitted his entry for a grant to help him with a sculpture that he hopes to create and then display at Burning Man in Nevada this summer. Unfortunately, due to some computer shenanigans, much of his proposal did not get submitted. Only a piece of it.

Anyway, this is model of only a piece of what he hopes to create. In the real thing, this salmon skeleton will be five foot long and there will also be a whole salmon, concrete, five feet long and a number of other elements as well.

His sculpture will cover some significant space.

I hope he gets the damn grant. 

Melanie was presented with two birthday cakes, not one. I am not sure why. I did not ask. I know Charlie made one of the cakes. I'm not sure who made the other.

Lisa made the frosting.

We ate the cakes with vanilla ice cream and they were damn good.

Afterward, she opened gifts.

All of the gifts were damned good.

Charlie gave her a damned good book titled "Cats Are Wierd." Not withstanding the fact that it is a damned good book, I take exception to the title.

Cats are not weird. As you can see, Diamond is as normal as normal can be.

Bear Meach is not weird.

Melanie observes Bear Meach being normal as Rex and Margie wash dishes.

Kalib studies Poof. "This cat is not weird," he would have proclaimed, had the proper words come to him to thus proclaim.

Perhaps it is little boys, not cats, who are weird.

Jobe goes for Poof, who is not weird.

The Three Musketeers showed up: Carl, Charlie and Bryce. They did not bring their swords. I was disappointed. I wanted to borrow a sword to cut the cake.

As the party drew towards its wild conclusion, Kalib crawled up to see his mom.

Two of my children, paired off. Lisa came late to the party, because she is carrying such a heavy load between being a full time student and full time job, and taking on extra tasks to help pay for it all.

She must deal with stress.

And then, as always happens, the time came to say goodbye, see you later.

Always this time comes. 

What a fine thing it has been these past 30 years to have Melanie as my daughter.

An absolutely fine thing.

Oh, dear! I was not going to say, "30 years," but I did.

Even so, I trust her.

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Jobe and Kalib stand in as I put, "Contemplating..." on hold for yet another day

Yesterday, before I headed off to the funeral that I had mentioned, Lavina called to let us know that, once again, Jobe was not feeling well and to ask if Margie could come and spend the night and care for him Monday, today. Naturally, we agreed - we would do anything for little Jobe and his big brother, Kalib.

So I dropped her off before I went to the funeral.

As recent readers know, my plan for today was to delve into "contemplating the future of this blog, part 3" and to let three parts do it.

But I have a huge amount of work that I want today on what for me is a most important projectand I do want to be distracted from it any more than necessary, not even by this blog.

So I am going to keep it short and simple. While I will still be working on that project tomorrow, if I can get enough done on it over the next 12 to 14 hours I think I will feel okay about taking a couple of hours in the morning to nail down part 3.

And, as coincidence so often seems to happen in my life, the funeral - or rather my history with the woman for whom the funeral was held - ties into this theme in a way that I had not even considered until mid-way through the services for her.

So I will use a few of those pictures as I contemplate.

In the meantime, here is Margie and Jobe.

Even when he is feeling under the weather, Jobe tends to be optimistic and pleasant.

He is a very rare and wonderful little guy.

He did cry though - he cried when he saw me start to leave. He reached out his arms toward me. 

So I did not leave as quickly as I was going to. I went back, took him in into my arms, retired to the couch and held him for a bit and did a self-portrait of the two of us.

The thought occurred to me that in so doing, the bug that has got him might come and get me, too.

But what the hell. I've been got by lots of bugs in this life. I have always gotten better. Should this one get me, I am certain that I will get better again.

Before I left, I also had to find Kalib with his spatula. I looked into the TV room, that will be his bedroom when the time comes for him to move out of mom and dad's room. There he was, watching TV. He had his spatula with him.

And this from India: Banu and Ravi

Banu and Ravi - parents of Soundarya, Sujitha and Ganesh. It is the morning following the wedding of Soundarya and Anil.

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Finally, last Sunday with kids and grandkids, abruptly remembered; jail house romance wrongly credited, near miss

Folks, I feel very abrupt today. For many reasons which I will not delve into, save to note that this damn computer, which has served me so well these past three or four years, seems to be getting ready to fail and it is wasting a lot of my time. This post should have been completed an hour ago.

So I am going to be abrupt today.

Sunday, however, was a good day. 

So I will return to Sunday, and will abruptly tell you how Jobe sat down and the waiter came...

Oh, hell... why should I tell you at all?

Look at the picture! You can see for yourself!

There were adults at the table, too. I was there, as well.

When you are little, you are as aware of the bottom of the table as you are the top.

Honk, honk!

At one point, Kalib got up and ran off to another table, being mischievous. He could have got away with it with his dad, but not his Auntie Mel. He had to come back and sit back down.

This is what you call, "sibling rivalry."

After we returned home, Melanie and Charlie tried to get comfortable on the couch. Kalib whipped them with a blanket.

So they got up and danced instead. Kalib played with the voice mail box on the phone. The first message was, "no new messages." So Kalib made it go, "no! no! no! no new. no! no! no new messages." Kind of like a disk dj. 

Then he got into a message left awhile back that I have not bothered to erase.

A gruff but happy sounding voice comes on talking to me, Bill Hess, saying I will know right away who he is and he leaves a number and tells me to get back to him.

I did not know who he was and there was something about the familiarity of the message coming from a voice that I did not recognize at all that put me on a bit of an edge, so I never called back.

Then one day he called back and got me. Turns out, he had spent time in jail in Palmer with a Bill Hess who was not this Bill Hess and that Bill Hess had somehow introduced him to the woman who became his wife and when he saw that this Bill Hess lives in Wasilla he thought it must be the same Bill Hess and so he was just calling to let that Bill Hess who wasn't me know how great everything had worked out with his marriage and to thank that Bill Hess for bringing the two together.

Sorry, I said. Wrong Bill Hess. I haven't been in jail since I got out of Juarez in November of 1969, just in time to eat Thanksgiving dinner in a casino in Las Vegas.

I don't know why we even bother to keep this phone anymore. Everybody calls us on our cells phones. Except for people wanting money, and folks who think they did time with me.

Then Melanie danced with Kalib, who seemed to enjoy it.

Kalib takes a break.

Caleb watched the NFL playoffs.

Lisa talked to Bryce on the phone.

At 4:00 PM, a bunch of us went out to get coffee. Metro is closed on Sunday so we went to the place at the corner of Fishhook and Seldon. As we waited for our coffee, we saw an exchange being made. Money for pizza. 

Now, there are two things notable about this picture. It is 4:00 PM and look how much light is in the sky! The long nights are in rapid retreat.

Also, the temperature stood at about -10 F (-23 C) but no real snow on the ground. Just ice and a hard crust.

Lisa and Jobe, back at the house.

After we returned home, Kalib laid his spatula upon the floor and ran circles around it. 

As always happens, it was soon time for them all to go. Lisa and Kalib head out the door.

Melanie and Kalib walk to the car.

They backed out and then, with their headlights shining through their frozen exhaust, began the drive back to Anchorage, where they would drop Kalib and Jobe off with their parents.

"It sure is quiet in here," Margie noted, after they had been gone awhile. 

I had not seen Chicago since Kalib and Jobe had arrived. Now that they had left, she came back out. 

Quiet is how Chicago likes it.

And this one from India:

This is what it is like riding on the Indian highways. Constantly. While it is exhilarating to a certain degree and on the surface seems to carry a bit of romance, it is deadly. And once that deadliness catches up to you it is awful and that, more than all the other reasons combined, is why I feel so abrupt today.

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Knocked down by bugs in the throat and computer

This is the very first frame that I shot yesterday. Five-hundred and sixty-three more would follow before the day ended, but so far this is the only one that I have pulled up and looked it, because last night and today has been such a mess that I decided just to grab the first picture that I shot, post it and be done with it.

The mess last night happened because a bug of some kind got into my throat and kept me coughing violently all through the night. I did not get to sleep until it was time to get up and then I did not get up.

Then, this program, Lightroom, that I like to use to edit pictures, even though it can be very buggy and exasperating itself, misfired and set off a chain reaction of computer calamities that have taken me two hours to resolve.

Anyway, this was how we began yesterday, at Family Restaurant, where Charlie took us all to breakfast.

I have lost too much time. I am exasperated. This is all that I am going to blog today.

Well, one more, grabbed at random, from India...

...just to leave no doubt...

Two boys at Badami.

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