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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Ice cream is spilled, lips are kissed; a cop helps out; Jobe rests on the couch

Readers who were here yesterday will notice that I have slightly retreated from my summer retreat in which I have resolved to post only one, two, or three pictures per day and have instead posted four. It is because of these two. I did not expect them to appear in my life yesterday, but they did.

It is hard to limit my posts when they are here.

I could easily make this a 15-picture post, all pictures devoted exclusively to these two, but, given the fact that I am in summer retreat and worse yet that I am dealing with such a computer nightmare, I restrain and hold the total number of images to four.

Somewhere around 8:00 PM last night, Lavina called to say that, due to a mishap in the improvements they are putting into their house, they had lost their flow of water and could we take Kalib and Jobe for the weekend?

We agreed to meet her and the boys in Eagle River,  a little more than half-way between Wasilla and Anchorage. I had too much work to do to go and was going to let Margie go by herself, but then I thought about ice cream. I thought about how, if I went, we could stop and get four ice-cream cones before we returned to Wasilla.

What great fun that would be! The boys, Margie and me, all eating ice cream as we drove home, taking in the scenery.

So I put my work aside and I went.

But when we found them, the boys were already eating ice cream. Lavina had bought it for them at McDonald's in Eagle River. Or at least one of the boys was eating ice cream. The other had been, but had apparently had his fill of it and so had discarded it.

We transferred them from their mother's car to our car. Then their mother kissed them goodbye. We drove off, then stopped at McDonald's where Margie and I bought two ice cream cones, one for her and one for me.

The life of a freelancer being what it is, that ice cream about flattened our bank account and we are now fending off angry calls from creditors. But I expect to receive a good check Monday and everything should be good for awhile after that - I think I have enough work lined up that we will be fine for the remainder of the summer.

Fall will be another question. By fall, I must have the foundation laid to begin to make a living from an online base, for I expect my old ways of making a living in paper publishing to be completely dead by then.

That's what this retreat is about - not about relaxing and getting rest. This retreat is a retreat to work hard, to do what needs to be done now and to figure out what needs to be done in the future and how to do it.

On the way home, we passed by this scene. Someone had experienced difficulties and by all appearances the cop was helping them out. The LCD dash screen is a little hard to read at this size (easy at slide show size) but it states that is 9:10 PM and the temperature is 72 degrees.

Yes - after my note yesterday that we had not seen anymore 70 + degree days following the memorial weekend, yesterday really heated up. The sun blazed down upon us. It was damned hot and we sweated like crazy. I don't know how hot it got, but by 9:10 it would have cooled off a bit so I think we might have made it to the upper 70's.

Today, it is raining. My iPhone says it is 62 degrees in Wasilla.

I feel bad for all the people of Minot, North Dakota. How unbelievable are the pictures coming out of Minot?

And here is Jobe, at the house.

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Happy Father's Day, Son!

Lavina had a health fair to do in conjunction with the Chickaloon and Knik tribes at the Palmer fairgrounds, so Margie and I went and picked her up when it was all done, about 4:00 PM. Jacob and the boys came out about two hours later. The boys were asleep when he arrived and so we left them that way.

We took turns peeking into the car to see when they might wake.

Jobe woke first. He reached for me, right away.

In the past on this day, I have paid tributes to the fathers from whence we come. Today, I pay tribute to the fathers who descend from us and since one of those is my oldest son, I focus that tribute on him.

Here he is, yesterday evening, tossing my middle grandchild Jobe into the air.

Now he shows him the first frog of the season. It used to be that our yard teemed with frogs - one could hardly walk without stepping on one.

Now a frog sighting is an occasion to take note of.

Jobe does take note. 

As for the oldest grandson Kalib, he still sleeps in the car.

In time, Kalib wakes up and comes back, too. The frog is still hanging out nearby, so Jacob shows it to Kalib. He invites Kalib to touch it, but Kalib is wary.

To demonstrate that this frog poses no harm, Jacob gives it a kiss. 

A bit later, Jimmy begins to wander too far away for my comfort, but I am entertaining Jobe and Jobe does not want me to leave, so Jacob goes and hauls him back.

Well, I took a lot of pictures last night and my computer is acting up big time - it is headed to the repair shop tomorrow or Tuesday and if I could afford to I would just replace it because I am spending maybe 30-40 percent of the time that I work with it - and sometimes, all of the time for an hour or two straight - watching the spinning color wheel go round and round and suffering mulitiple freezeups and forced shutdowns, so it is just too exasperating to try to look at the photos I took.

It was possible to navigate my way through the spinning color wheel and crashes to the toss and frog shots, because they were clear in my memory and I knew just where to find them, and the two shots that wrap up this series were at the end of yesterday's take, but it is too much of pain to search through the others.

This one, however, just popped up on my screen as I was swearing and cursing at my computer and it was so damn cute I just grabbed it.

There are some serious people within the photographic community who dismiss cute photos as irrelevant and facile, but, damnit, cute is part of life, too.

Please take note: I am a very serious photographer and this is a very serious photograph of real and true life.

More serious stuff - my son, the dad, with his entire family, his wife and three children. Jobe is taking an ever greater interest in spatulas.

Wait a minute, the astute reader protests... your son Jacob has only two children, Kalib and Jobe... why do you say, "three?"

Remember when Jobe quit breast feeding and I noted that Jacob and Lavina had been using the breast feeding method of birth control and it would soon become apparent how well that worked out?

See that little bulge in the tummy, right behind Jobe?

That is how well that worked out.

Very well, indeed!

So here is my son, the dad, with his wife, his two children that the light now falls upon and the one that is scheduled to make a first appearance in the light of the delivery room in October.

Happy Father's Day, son!

I don't know how you ever got to be such a good dad. You didn't have the greatest example to follow and you were kind of wild there, for awhile. Yet, an excellent dad is what you have become. A little overindulgent at times, perhaps, but overindulgence is love, and infinitely superior to neglect. These kids of yours are pretty damn good kids and that didn't just happen.

I love them.

You make me proud.

And so does Lavina. Even though this is Father's Day, not Mother's Day, it has to be said.

Happy Father's Day!

To all you good dad's out there!

Young dads, old dads, dead dads like my good dad - all dads.

Happy Father's Day to you all!

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Memorial Day, 2011: the big water battle; flowers at roadside memorial; we feast

On the final night of Kalib and Jobe's final Memorial Day weekend visit with us, Jacob and Lavina came out to sleep at our house. On Memorial Day morning, we went to breakfast at Denali Family Restaurant. I fear that I am shifting my loyalties from the old Mat-Su Family Restaurant to Denali. It is the hash browns, that is why.

Hash browns have always been a gamble at Mat-Su. You just never know - they can come fried to a crisp, reduced to mush, or cooked just right. So far, they have been cooked just right at Denali every time - and it sure seems that they are fresh cut and not taken from a package. They are as good as any hash browns I have ever eaten, anywhere.

Denali Family Restaurant hash browns are superb!

Mat-Su Family has long been a place of morning refuge for me and I feel kind of bad about shifting over, but that's what excellent hash browns will do.

I will still go to Mat-Su, sometimes - if for no other reason than old times sake.

Later, in the early afternoon, Margie and Lavina went to the store to do some shopping. After awhile, I went out to see what the three boys were doing. Jimmy came with me. We found two of the three boys watching a butterfly pass overhead.

I am not certain what the other one was into.

Then Kalib turned on the faucet. He began to fling water around.

Soon, both boys were getting a bit wet and muddy. Jobe was most interested in the process.

Kalib got the idea that it might be fun to spash his brother, so he did.

After taking the blast of cold water, Jobe turned and momentarily fled.

In just seconds, he fully recovered, and began to laugh. He laughed so hard he blew the snot right out his nose.

Dad joined in the fight, allying himself with Jobe.

Oh, it was a battle insane!

Jobe was most amused.

Kalib checks his ammo as Jobe strategizes.

Jacob knew that he had to get the boys dried off and cleaned up before Mom and Grandma came home.

Jobe didn't stay clean very long.

As all this had been going on, Jim had found a patch of dirt to roll around in. Only his face remained undusted.

Jim then trotted off into the woods. I cannot let him go there alone, so I followed.

So did the other three.

Then the ladies came home. We guys mentioned nothing at all about the battle that had taken place. The ladies can find out when they read this blog. Jake will be in big trouble then.

The boys and their dad lay down to nap. I took off to ride my bike. I found a broken scooter on the Seldon Road bike trail, just lying there, abandoned.

I wondered what the story behind that was?

If I had the time, I would write a novel based on this mysterious scooter. It would be a best seller. I don't have the time. If you do, feel free to steal my idea - go ahead, write a novel based on this image.

When I reached the corner of Church and Schrock Roads, I was reminded that although Memorial Day was established at the end of the Civil War as a holiday to honor and mourn our military dead, it has also become a time that people take to honor all their dead, to bring flowers to graves and memorials.

This is not a grave, but is the place where where three people were killed in 1999 in a collision caused by a drunk driver - a woman, a teenaged girl and an unborn child. 

For years afterward, loved ones kept memorial crosses atop this pile of stones, but vandals repeatedly tore down the memorials until the loved ones gave up and settled for just the pile of stones.

On Memorial Day, someone had brought these wreathes and placed them here. 

Let us hope that respect and compassion can now replace ignorance and cruelty in the hearts of the vandals.

I stopped on the bridge over the Little Susistna River. These two came by as part of a carvan of four-wheelers.

I have crossed the bridge a number of times since I began biking again, but I had not gone down to the river itself. Today, I did - and symbolically put my front wheel in the water.

I do not know what this symbolizes, but it must symbolize something.

On the bank and in the shallows, people frolicked.

When I returned home, I found Margie and Lavina repairing the picnic table.

Inside, I found the boys napping. I then went off to buy some iced drinks and to fill the tank with expensive gas. When I returned, the boys had not moved at all.

Lavina began the cooking by roasting bread on the barbecue.

If one studies all the faces in this picture and then gives some thought to it... it is just incredible to think about, to ponder the history, the sorrows, the changes, distances covered, the links from then until now.

Lavina kept the grill going.

And then we ate - but Kalib was napping and Caleb was sleeping in prep for his night shift.

And then, somewhere between nine and ten PM, it came time to say goodbye.

Margie and I had enjoyed the rapidly enlarging little ones for three days, but now they were going.

Caleb missed everything. He slept through breakfast. He slept through the water battle. He slept through dinner. But he awoke in time to say goodbye.

And then off they went, the people in the car and Muzzy running alongside, all the way back to Anchorage.

Well, I exaggerate a little. Muzzy would only run to the stop sign, about 200 yards away. Then he would trade places with Jacob and drive the family home while Jacob ran alongside the car - all the way to Anchorage.

Don't worry. It's okay that the dog drove. Muzzy has a license.

I then found Margie in the back yard, cleaning up.

"It's too quiet now," she said.

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