We take a scary drive to take a dog home and then we get to see three boys who are not as little as they were last time

Muzzy had been separated from his immediate family for almost four weeks now and besides that he kept eating the cats' food. So, somewhere between 2:30 and 3:00 PM, we loaded his own food and personal possessions into the car, opened up the gate to the back and in he jumped.

We - Muzzy, Margie and I - then set off to drive to Anchorage. Down on the floor of this valley, the sun, which at its zenith now barely rises above the tops of the mountains to the south, had already set.

It's rays still created a beautiful fringe of light on the icy mountain tops.

The highway was icy, too, and scary. Here and there, cars had slid off the road.

I thought of the day before, when I had decided to sleep and let Margie drive herself into town for her doctor appointment. As I stated, she hates to drive in the dark, especially if there is ice on the road. In contrast, my night vision is probably about as good as anyone's except for a cat.

When I saw the ice on the highway, the big trucks and thought of Margie driving this gantlet in the dark, I felt very badly that I had slept. But, she did good. She came back alive and well.

We reached Muzzy's house in safety. In the window, I saw the face of a little boy who, it felt, I had not seen in years - even if it had only been a bit less than four weeks.

Dog and family exploded in joyful reunion.

Finally, it calmed down a bit.

Then Jobe noticed that grampa had come, too.

Kalib dragged his grandma to the downstairs playroom to see the trains. Jacob and Lavina bought this set of Thomas trains off Craigslist for $40 - and it has proved to be the best toys these boys have ever had - better than anything electronic or magical.

They hold it, they carry its cars here and there. They push it around the tracks and even where there are no tracks.

They never tire of Thomas the train.

I want such a set for myself.

I don't know where I could put it, but I want one.

Lynxton was sleeping in the very dimly lit master bedroom. His dad was still at work. It is kind of hard to get off a plane after three-plus weeks in Arizona, southern Utah and Las Vegas and go straight to work, but that is what he had to do.

Lavina goes back to work Monday.

It was hard enough for her just to leave the warm sun of the southwest and come back to Alaska.

Margie plans to go in Sunday night so she can stay and hang out with the boys.

The cats and I will be alone again.

Last Christmas, Melanie gave Margie and I a gift card to Century 16 and we still had one movie and one set of refreshments left on it.

So, at 5:00 PM, we headed to Century 16.

We saw Hugo.

MAGICAL movie.

I was entranched from the first fame to the final.

And that was the 2D version. The time of the 3D was off for us.

Yet, even the 2D often seemed 3D.

Gotta see it in 3D, some day.

Oddly enough, this latest wonder of modern communication technology really brought to life the wonder of books.

It made me want to do nothing but read books - and create books.

Afterward, we returned to the house to see if Lynxton had woke up yet. We found him asleep in the cradle of his dad's arm.

He soon awoke. Then his grandma took him.

I was amazed at how big he had grown - how chubby his face had become.

His had left with a lean, slender, face. He returned with chipmunk cheeks.

Lavina ate a lot of mutton in Arizona.

And then we left to go home.

As we always do.

View images as slides

The party begins with a buttery shout, progresses to flaming fire, and ends in displays of affection

The party began with a shout,"Pizzles stop licking the butter!" It was Liza who shouted, instantly causing all heads to turn to look at Pizzles as he licked the butter.

Shortly thereafter, Rex fed a piece of buttered bread to Cortney. Nobody shouted, "Cortney stop licking the butter!" 

No, this indignity was saved for Pizzles alone. True, Cortney was eating bread that the butter was spread on, yet, however one consumes the butter, in one way or another, one must still lick the butter.

Afterward, poor Pizzles begged for a piece of the bread spread with butter so that he might lick that butter too, but nobody would give him one. I am proud to say that, a little bit later, when I was eating my salmon, I gave three pieces to Pizzles. They were tiny pieces, yes, but he is a cat. He is a tiny creature. Tiny pieces for a tiny creature - just right and quite generous of me, because I wanted to eat all of the salmon - my piece and everybody else's, too.

I should note that Lisa took a little heat for calling Epizzles, Pizzles, rather than the nickname that has become the moniker of preference for him: "Poof."

This is because awhile back, Pizzles, who had always been an occasionally well-mannered cat, started to pee outside his litter box.

Poor Melanie and Charlie - they tried all the known remedies to convince a cat to restrict his peeing to the litter box, but nothing worked.

Then, they suddenly realized, "Pizzles.... Pizzzz..." Kind of sounds like the whiz of a cat peeing, pisssss. It occurred to them that everytime Epizzles heard them call him "Pizzles," he could be misinterpreting his name as an inducement to pee wherever he wanted.

So Melanie and Charlie quit calling him "Pizzles" and stuck to his other nickname, "Poof."

And sure enough, Poof quit peeing in the house.

I understand that he started to blow lots of stinkers, however. Nobody told me this, but it only makes sense.

Poof was well-mannered on this night, however, and didn't poof often, because he wanted some of my salmon and he innately understood that I do not share my salmon with Poof cats who are poofing all about.

Pretty soon, Charlie appeared with Lisa's surprise birthday cake. Her birthday was actually November 22 and we had all planned to celebrate together as a family down on my wife and children's ancestral White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona, but then Margie had to go to the hospital for emergency surgery.

I stayed home with her, of course, but given the fact that I was in the hard, early stages of the shingles that still bother me, if to a lesser but still sometimes very aggravating degree, traveling would have been pretty hard on me, anyway.

So we had a late celebration.

It has, of course, become a tradition that no matter whose birthday it is, Kalib, joined now by Jobe, with Lynxton on deck, helps to blow out the candles. But Kalib and Jobe are in Phoenix tonight. Tomorrow, they will board a plane and fly back to Alaska.

So Lisa had to blow her candles out all by herself. Without the benefit of the assistance of little people, this process, which normally takes at least 10 or 15 seconds, happened just like that. So I did not get to snap a bunch of frames, but had to settle for just one.

This was a wild berry cheesecake, by the way, made by Melanie with assistance from Charlie - I am pretty sure it was the best cheesecake I ever tasted.

Afterwards, the glow of young love brightened up the otherwise very dim room: Lisa and Bryce.

Melanie and Charlie.

Rex and Cortney... and a reminder of young love from a different time, which feels like maybe last week to me... the young love that made all of this evening's display of young love possible... Margie.

View images as slides

I have created my own Arctic winter day of night, right here in Wasilla; the new Uiñiq - front cover

I think I must be homesick for Barrow and the Arctic Slope, for those long nights that extend all the way through the day with no sun ever rising; those all-day nights during which, if one wants, one can slip into the comfort of a warm cacoon of darkness, hidden and protected there from the glare of world.

I think I must be homesick for this because, to the degree that is possible, I have converted Wasilla into a place where the winter sun never rises. Actually, it does, for just a few hours, but I go to sleep before those hours begin and wake up after they have passed.

So I do not see the sun. It is as if it never rose at all.

Today, I arose at 3:38 PM, pretty much right at the moment of sundown. It was time to head out for my regular afternoon coffee break, even though I had begun no task that I needed to take a break from, and to head to the drive-through of Metro Cafe, which is exactly what I did. I took this picture along the way. Admittedly, this is not a very good picture - I missed the good picture by a few seconds. It happened while I was too far back to get it, although I could have if I had had a bigger lens on the camera.

In the good picture, the one that I missed, the school bus had stopped and all of a sudden a whole passel of kids shot out and in a line sprinted through this little patch of light.

Oh, did it look neat!

By the time I got close enough to take that excellent shot, it was gone. A straggler got off and headed through the light, so I took this picture, so that I could tell you all about the one I had missed.

A couple of hours later, Margie was about to fix dinner. For some strange reason, I felt very hungry and decided that this a night to go out for steak - something we do maybe once every couple of years or so.

So we did, and here were are, at Denali Family Restaurant, where we had never tried dinner before. Margie had a chicken fried steak. They had a special that covered their New York steaks - $3.00 off but still pretty darned expensive, so I ordered one. The baked potato was very good, the roll was delicious - tasted like it might have been fresh out of the oven - and the once frozen half-ear of corn on the cob tasted the way corn on the cobs that have been frozen tend to taste.

The New York steak - it was okay. Not great, but okay and being okay it still tasted good. One would not call it "superb," "exquisite," "mouth watering" or anything like that. It was okay. Good enough.

Afterward, our waitress asked us if we wanted dessert, but we declined and went home, where I scooped up some Rocky Road out of the carton and made myself an ice cream cone.

I am happy to report that my shingles are diminishing. They are still there, but to a much lighter and more bearable degree than just two days ago. Maybe by this time next week, they will be gone altogether. My need for copious amounts of sleep still remains, however. 

Now I need to see if I can a little work done, so that I can finish up today's tasks in time to go to bed before the sun rises.

And here is the cover of my latest Uiñiq:

This is whaling captain Billy Oyagak of Nuiqsut, standing in the middle with members of his crew on Cross Island, balleen from their whale behind them. Other successful captains and crews that fall season of 2010 were Herbert Ipalook, Thomas Napageak and Edward Nukapigak, who hosted me.

That season happened very fast. The crews left Nuiqsut almost at the very end of August and arrived at Cross Island to find the weather perfect and whales passing by in good numbers. I could not come until September 2. Originally, I thought they might possibly have landed a whale or two by then, but that there would still be at least two, maybe three strikes left for me to follow.

As it happened they had landed all four before I even got there. They were still cutting and putting up the whales, and there were polar bears wandering about. I had a good time, took lots of pictures, but still fell far short of what I had hoped to do.

So I want to go back, get in a boat at Nuiqsut and ride out to Cross Island with them. Stay for a month, come back at Naluktak and a few other times, too. I had hoped to go back this year, but irony of ironies, I could not because I was working on getting this Uiñiq done. Nuiqsut/Cross Island was the first story that I laid out and originally I laid it out huge - my first layout filled up almost the entire 120 page magazine. But then, as I worked other storeis in, I had to keep cutting it back and cutting it back and so in the end it wound up at 17 pages.

That still left it as the largest single spread in the magazine, but 17 pages wasn't enough to even begin to do Cross Island-Nuiqsut justice. I couldn't even leave my polar bear shots in, and I had a couple of magnificent polar bear shots and a fun story based on polar bears coming into and passing by camp. Elsewhere in the magazine, I had a double-truck polar bear shot I took on the sea ice off Barrow, and that took up all the space I could afford to give to polar bears in this Uiñiq.

So I hope to go back and somehow find the way to produce either a Uiñiq or a Uiñiq sized or bigger publication wholly on Cross Island and Nuiqsut. In fact, I would like to do that with every village on the Slope - and some off the Slope, too, like Fort Yukon and Arctic Village.

But how do I all this? The decades are flying by. I still think of myself as a young man, fit and strong enough to do anything, but in fact I am on the verge of becoming old - and this bout with shingles that I have just about but not quite won is kind of a telling sign. And this work is not easy to do. It is hard - both in the field and back home, when it becomes necessary to put in 20 hours, 24 hour, 30 hour and even 40 hour days to ever get it done.

I do not wish to listen to this sign the shingles have given me. Yet, if I don't, and just keep living in the manner that I have so far lived, I might just get taken down and not get anymore done at all.

And there was a great deal of material that I gathered from all over that I did not manage to get in at all. I don't why, after all this time, but when I set out to make a 116 page publication (which is what it was budgeted for but I pushed it up to 120 at my own expense) I think that gives me enough space to cover the whole world.

So I shoot this, and I shoot that; I go here, I go there, I interview this person and that person and all the time I am thinking I can work it all in and then when it comes down to it, I can only work a fraction of it in.

That's one of the reason I plan to create on online magazine. I could work it all into an online magazine. I remain at a bit of a loss on how to go about it. I have a colleague who is expert at online publishing and he says he will help me set it up. He's booked solid until January. Once he helps me set the format I want, then how do I fund it?

It ain't cheap to travel around Alaska, you know.

Still, we will see what happens then.

For sure, I need a new airplane. I don't merely want one, I need one. It seems impossible right now, but I know it's not.

Well, I've been rambling, writing more words than most visitors will ever read. Guess I'll stop now.

I've got some things I must do and I had better get at it if I want to get to bed before sunrise.

A dog gets fed, I freeze in mild weather, a traffic ticket gets issued

As you can see, Margie is getting better. She's not running around or jumping about and she is still plenty sore, but besides making two pumpkin chiffon pies and baking rolls, she cut up some dog sausage for Muzzy. I don't mean sausage made of dog, but sausage made for dogs. When Margie was in the hospital, I stopped by Jacob and Lavina's just before they flew south, picked Muzzy up and brought him home.

The original plan was for Caleb to care for him and that's still the plan, but, in practicallity, most of Muzzy's care falls upon us as Caleb is either at work, asleep, visiting a friend or scolding the '49ers when they are losing on TV.

I don't know how it would have worked out for Muzzy and Caleb if Margie had not had to go in for emergency surgery.

They would have got through, I guess, but Caleb really does not have the time to care for a St. Bernard by himself. He can care for the cats, but compared to the dog, their needs are small.

As for me, I have been extremely lazy, doing almost nothing. Yesterday, I stepped out of the house just one time - to photograph the moose that appeared in yesterday's post. And that was just onto the porch.

Today, I got up very late, ate my oatmeal, then lay down on the couch, where two cats joined me, and then semi-dozed off.

Shingles make me not want to move. Shingles make me want only to sleep. Shingles makes it hard to sleep. But, come mid-afternoon, I decided I must do something. So I made myself get up and take a walk. I did not take Muzzy. That would be too hard on me right now.

I just walked by myself and I damn near froze to death.

It wasn't even that cold: 12 degrees, F (-11 C) - the kind of weather that would normally envigorate me. But today it just froze me. It has been that way since I came down with these shingles THREE WEEKS AGO! They are fading in color and the blisters have scabbed over, but they still bring misery to my every second.

But I don't want to write about shingles anymore. Until they go away, I think I must try to find the way to live as usual, as if I did not have them.

So I don't want to write about them anymore. One day - maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe next year, maybe the year after (I have learned that in some cases shingles pain can linger for months and even years after the shingles disappear) I will wake up and there will be no pain.

Then I will write again and say, "My shingles are gone. They don't hurt anymore."

At 4:00 PM, I went out and dropped some bills in the mail. Metro Cafe was closed, so I stopped at the Mocha Moose drive-through and bought an Americano to bring home and share with Margie. Across the street, a cop pulled someone over and appeared to write him a ticket.

Thankfully, Thanksgiving was already over, so the driver did not have to worry about falling short on turkey because he had to pay for a ticket.

I pick Margie up at the hospital and then drive her through insane traffic and panicked moose safely to our home

I slept with my iPhone right by my ear and so was awakened a bit before 11:00 AM by Margie's call to tell me that she would soon be released and so I could come in and get her.

11:00 AM - sounds very lazy. But I had not been able to go to sleep until 5:00 and I ran out of Vicodin two days okay and while it is possible that I could call the doctor and get the prescription refilled I have decided that I don't want to take it anymore and will just tough it out. I did not sleep that good. I bet my shingles woke me up AT LEAST 30 times. Maybe I should rethink that decision. We'll see. So, even at 11:00, it was very difficult to get up, but I did not want to leave my wife in the hospital, so I got up.

When I reached her, I was a little dismayed to learn that she has a plastic tube going into the place were her gall bladder used to be. Fluids drain out of that place into a little bag that she keeps safety pinned to the inside of her shirt. She must bear this burden until November 30, when I bring her back to see the doctor again.

Still, you can see that she was happy to be getting out of the hospital and headed toward home.

Anyone who read yesterday's post has probably already figured out that the building seen through the window is the hospital - the Alaska Native Medical Center.

Soon, we were on the Glenn Highway, headed toward the Parks Highway and home. As you can see, the traffic was absolutely insane. For some reason, when I look at this picture, I hear that old TV jingle that used to accompany Chevy commericials on TV: 

"See the USA in your Chevrolet..."

Back then, our family car was a Ford.

And today, I was driving a Ford.

Ford Escape.

"See the USA, in your Ford Escape..."

There were school buses roaming about, packed with studious kids who would have preferred to remain at school, but now had to go home.

About this time, a text came to our phones simultaneously. Margie was free to look at hers. It was from Lisa. It was an iPhone shot of her and Melanie, in Carrizo, Arizona, White Mountain Apache Tribe, standing with their Grandma Rose, Margie's mom.

Finally, we were in Wasilla, headed up Lucille Street. Just before we reached Metro Cafe, this moose crossed the road in front of us. When you see moose crossing the roads right in front of traffic and often dying in the process, they seem like pretty stupid animals. But I think in the woods they are pretty smart. Not as smart as bears and wolves, but pretty smart just the same.

If they weren't, they wouldn't still be here. The bears and wolves would have got them all and then the poor ravens would have had to make do without their moose carrion. It's just that living in the woods for how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or milliions of years, moose had no need to learn about roads so they didn't. They didn't even bother to develop the capacity to learn about roads.

Now they are undergoing a crash course and maybe sooner or later the survivors will ultimately evolve to the point where they figure it out.

They might even start driving cars themselves; they might run over us, sometimes.

I asked Marige if she wanted me to pull into the Metro drive through but she just wanted to go home.

The moment we got home, Margie asked if I would take a picture of her with her iPhone so she could send it in return to Lisa and Lisa could show it to Rose and all present so they would know that their mother and daughter had made it home safely.

So I did.

View images as sides