I sit facing the door; I see people come and go, I witness a man buying a newspaper; Jobe gets a bath

I took breakfast at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant and was seated at a table by myself, as Margie had already eaten oatmeal. I faced the door. From this amazing vantage point, I was able to observe this man buy a newspaper.

I also saw this woman and this little girl exit, hopefully with their bellies full.

This man entered, hungry, I assume.

And then along came this little girl, followed by two people who appeared to be her parents. I'll bet that she was very excited to be eating out with them.

These two gentlemen entered and then stood there, waiting to be seated, as one of them spoke to someone on his cell phone. I don't know who he was speaking too, but I have a hunch it was President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

Although this post will not appear until Sunday, right now it is Friday night. As soon as I finish it, I will make another, short, simple one and schedule it to appear Monday. I've got a very important task that I absolutely must finish up over the weekend and I am still recovering from the birth of Jobe and the mad round of blogging that I did afterward, so that is why I am clearing the weekend to be free of blogging. 

I will, of course, keep a camera with me through the weekend.

In fact, this final image is an example.

Come the evening of the day this post is scheduled is scheduled to go up, one full week will have passed since I last saw my new little grandson, Jobe. Lavina did text this iPhone pic of him getting a bath to my iPhone and I found it Saturday morning and attached it to this post.. As you can see, he has grown tremendously.

He is a veritable giant now.

Margie goes to town and drops me off at the edge of the highway, I find food to eat and see some fascinating sights

Margie had a physical therapy appointment in Anchorage this morning, so I had her drop me off at the side of the Parks Highway as she left town. I then went looking for food, and wound up at Mat-Su Family Restaurant, about 30 feet away.

This is my waitress, waiting on someone else.

I am a generous person and am happy to share my waitress with others.

Here is a fellow who has already finished his breakfast, walking back to his vehicle, keys ready to be inserted in the ignition.

She came by refilling coffee cups.

This is the view that I see as I look out my Family Restaurant window: Alaska.

Now I am walking home from Family Restaurant - close to four miles. A dog comes riding over the hill. There is a man in the vehicle with him.

The dog wishes the man would get out for once, and let the dog drive.

But the man won't. The dog does not understand why.

Bill. I think you should go to bed. Get some sleep.

A military jet passes overhead.

Then a military raven flies by. It is carrying little bombs. They will not kill you, but you don't want to get bombed - not by a raven, anyway.

This is Ken Clark. He is wondering why a strange looking man is walking down the street towards him, taking his picture.

He was very amused once he found out.

Now he will be remembered forever.

Just by looking, you can see that this was a very warm day. It got above freezing.

I suppose some people like it that way, but not me.

Not this time of year.

It's just not right. 

It's like mother nature has forgotten where we're at.

Through the Window Metro Study, #42A. That's Karl, Carmen's brother-in-law, and Cindy.

On my way home from my coffee break, I had to stop for these moose. Some may not believe this, but if this had been a cold, snowy, winter, instead of the warm farce that it has been, we would be seeing many more moose.

The number of horses would remain the same.

An insignificant entry

When one or the other of us has been traveling and returns - and it is usually me - Margie and I have a tradition. We always go out to breakfast the next morning. I still had a little over $7.00 left on the Funny Face Family Restaurant gift certificate, so that's where we went.

As always, it was delicious.

On my walk, I found this little saw lying by the side of the road. I often find tools and such as I walk, most of which I am certain have bounced off a snowmachine or four-wheeler.

A hand saw is not the kind of tool you would normally expect to bounce off a snowmachine. Maybe it bounced out of a pickup truck. When you find something like this, you wonder what you should do. Perhaps someone will come back looking for it, if you just leave it there.

More likely, if it bounced off of any kind of vehicle, by the time they discover it is missing, they will just be puzzled as to what could possibly have happened to it. They will never come back looking; if they do, it will already be gone.

So I picked it up and brought it home. But, it does bother me a little bit, so, if you live in Wasilla or nearby and you recognize this as the saw you just lost, you can have it back.

I had not seen this dog before - must be new in the neighborhood.

The above three pictures are all from yesterday. I fell behind after Margie got home, but now I am about to catch up.

This is from today. Margie, who had not driven a car since she left here to go to Arizona one month ago, wanted to drive into Anchorage to help Lavina get a room ready for her sister, Laverne, and Laverne's daughter, Gracie. They will arrive in Anchorage Saturday.

Margie left for town at noon, and I rode as far with her as Metro Cafe - about two miles away. I had never tried a Metro lunch before, it being a fairly recent feature, so I decided today I would. I had a panini ham sandwich and a bowl of tortilla soup, plus a glass of water.

It was just right.

Then I walked home.

The young woman working in the backgrounbd Kelsey, who readers might also recall seeing recently at work at Vagabond Blues in Palmer. 

Margie called not long after I got home. Lavina had gone to the hospital. Maybe the baby would be coming home, soon. But after a couple of hours, her doctor sent her back home. The doctor thinks it will still be awhile, but says also that it could be anytime.

Royce is hanging in there.

Now, I must keep this post short and simple, as I have much else to do, but struggle to do it.

It will probably be this way for a few days - but when this new baby comes, whatever I've got going on, I will drop it and you will know about it.

I am now caught up - although, actually, I never catch. I am always behind.

Obama stands as Grasshopper before House Republicans; Funny Face's gift certificate, elder Marine at Family, dog charges into path of oncoming cars; small view of beautiful evening

I am extremely frazzled at the moment, due to the fact that I have, once again, experienced technical difficulties with my Squarespace host tonight. Terrible technical difficulties. After preparing my photos, I first opened the program exactly one hour and 50 minutes ago and it has taken me that long just to get to this point - and I dread what might happen yet.

So I am exasperated. I just want to scream. I do not want to sit in this chair and battle Squarespace for another minute. But, I must get this blog post done. So I will proceed, although my wording might prove to be abrupt, reeking of frustration, all the way through.

Anyway - I did return to Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant for breakfast today and, just as she said she would, Cindy had returned the gift certificate that Funny Face and her Mister had so generously purchased for me three days before Christmas.

I am quite amazed that the wrong Bill had this gift certificate all this time and did not take advantage of it, but grateful, too.

So today, my omelette came courtesy of Funny Face - and there was enough left over for another one, plus a bit more.

So thank you, Funny Face - Sally thanks you too.

When I started blogging, I never, ever, expected or even imagined that anyone would do something like this for me. It is quite amazing.

As I sat there enjoying my omelette, this man came in wearing the jacket that told of his service in the US Marines. This set off a whole train of thought that I was going to write down here tonight, but given the frazzled state that these technical difficulties have left me in, I am just going to pass.

Suffice it to say that I wanted to know more about him, to learn his story, to find out when and where he served. In fact, I decided that after I finished my breakfast, I would introduce myself. But then when the time came, he appeared so content and thoughtful, absorbed in his own consciousness, that I could not bring myself to interrupt him.

Plus, I had many things waiting for me to do, although I never did do them all.

Still, someday, I would like to learn what I can of his story.

You will recognize this dog from yesterday. It came out again. I had more that I was going to say about it, but, AUUUGGGGH!

As Charlie Brown would say.

This black lab came with it, of course, dragging a stuffed turtle with no head. It was right about here that my iPhone rang. It was Margie, calling from Arizona to tell me that there had been an explosion at Sunrise, the ski resort owned by her White Mountain Apache Tribe, and that our nephew, Uriah, had been caught in it and had been air-medivaced out to Phoenix.

She did not yet know anymore that. I walked as we talked. This was the third time that I had met this black lab in the past week. Both times before, it turned around and went home right after greeting me.

This time it continued on with me and it brought the turtle.

"Go home, dog," I said as I walked and talked to Margie.

It did not go home.

Soon we came to Seldon Street. I could see a number of cars coming from both directions. Sometimes, you look at a dog and you immediately know that this dog does not understand that if it crosses a road in traffic that a car can hit, injure and kill it.

I could see right away that this was such a dog. And there it was, trotting happily in front of me, straight toward Seldon - toward the cars that were coming from both directions.

"Dog! Dog!" I shouted, with Margie on the other end, trying to tell me how things were down in Arizona in the face of this latest bad news. "Stop! Come back here!" The dog did not stop, but trotted happily right into the path of an oncoming car.

"DOG! DOG!" Fortunately, the driver managed to brake in time. Immediately after, a car coming from the other direction did the same. I took no pictures because I was talking on the phone and shouting at the dog.

The drivers both gave me dirty looks.

The dog made it across Seldon and kept going up Brockton. I had planned to go that direction, too, but I knew that dog was going to stick with me the entire walk. I did not want to be responsible for it. It was only a couple of hundred yards from its house, so I figured it could find its way back without me - if it didn't get hit by a car in the process.

I wondered if I should try to shepherd it back, but I knew that it was just as likely to get hit by a car if I was shepherding it as if I wasn't.

It had already proven that.

So I left it to its own few wits and turned left, down Seldon, and ditched it. I hope it survived. I suspect that it did, but I don't feel that optimistic about its future, unless something changes in its daily care. Not so long ago, there was another dog that lived 100 yards from where this one does now. Once, even as its people looked on, it came running to Jacob and I and a car had to stop so hard it left rubber in the road.

Not long after, that dog was struck and killed.

As I walked on, an airplane passed by.

A raven flew overhead.

These bare trees just looked pretty to me.

Royce seems to be doing much better.

I first found Obama's appearance before the Baltimore retreat of the House Republicans online at The Mudflats. It was 66 minutes long and I did not have 66 minutes to spare, but I watched it, anyway. It was beautiful. Remember the old TV show, Kung Fu, with David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, or Grasshopper?

Remember how Grasshopper would calmly and quietly face the raging, fuming bullies, who would sneer and laugh and then charge in multiple at him with their guns, knives, axes, fists, whatever? Remember how, with his superior knowledge, skill and basic sense of humanity, Grasshopper would deflect or dodge every blow and weapon they threw at him and would turn their own rage and force backwards upon them until they fell before him?

And even then Grasshopper would be graceful, and would give them another chance - should they be willing to take it? Some did.

That was President Barack Obama, standing in front of the House Republicans.

As to the website taking up the other half of my screen, that is Burn Magazine, founded by master photojournalist David Alan Harvey of Magnum, both to encourage "emerging photographers" and to create a new venue for serious photography. Burn is a good place. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves photography that might not be commercial.

And, honest to God, I already had Burn onscreen when I found the Obama/House Republican get-together. I did not stage this very appropriate juxtaposition of web pages - this is just another one of those coincidences that I told you about yesterday.

On my coffee break, I saw this dog. I also heard from Margie again. Uriah has second degree burns on his face, along with several cuts, but no critical, life-threatening, injuries. Margie did not know how much of his face had been burned.

I continued on and the moon came up.

Pioneer Peak at dusk. I had to go down to 1/8 of a second to get this one. There was no traffic behind me, so I stopped in the road and held the pocket camera out the window. As soon as I saw a headlight in my rearview mirror, I took off again.

I did the same thing here. This is the best thing about living in Wasilla. Sometimes, you can get frustrated and forget, but then you are reminded - Alaska is always out there, surrounding you, embracing you, providing nurture to your soul.

I am a little frustrated by all this, though. I am satisfied with the size that vertical images appear in this blog, but sometimes I want the horizontals to be bigger, including these final three images.

Squarespace has a feature that allows a blogger to link a larger image to the small, column-width ones that you see here.  It is a process that is tedious in its operation - compared to accomplishing the same thing in say, Blogger, where it takes less than 20 percent as long (yes, I have timed it). I have pointed this, and their other many shortcomings, out to Squarespace many times and have suggested that they improve them to perform at least as well as do the same features in Blogger, which is free, whereas you must purchase Squarespace, but, damnit, after a-year-and-a-half, I am convinced that they are simply never going to.

Still, I regularly go through this aggravating process so that anyone who wants to can click on an image and bring up a larger version.

That feature is not working properly in Squarespace tonight, so the larger image is not available.  Even if you would like to look at a larger version of the final three pictures above, you can't.

Curiously, though, it worked with the omelette and the raven, but with no other image. And yes, I cleared cached, refreshed pages, closed and reopened my browser - several times - and shut down and restarted my computer. It didn't help.

Can you feel my exasperation with Squarespace? Can you? Can you feel it? I have never, ever, experienced anything else like Squarespace in the digital/computer world. In the beginning, when I first came upon these problems, I thought the situation would improve as I better learned the program and as Squarespace upgraded and improved it. I was wrong. Yet, I am so far into it, so many links lead to my Squarespace work and I have moved so far up in Google... what do I do? 

Squarespace has wasted so much of my time! They claim to want suggestions and they swear they consider all of them, but they never act on them. No, not on a single one do they act!

The support staff is, almost to an individual, courteous and they do their best to help, but at its root Squarespace is fundamentally flawed and their developers seem content to leave it this way.

Can you feel my exasperation?

I have ranted - but - if you only knew what I have been through with Squarespace!

Thos, if you read this, I am about ready to use some frequent flier miles and get you on a plane to Alaska! If you can solve some of these problems for me, it would be well worth it.

Couch warfare; someone gave me a gift certificate to Family, but it went to another; dogs - both nice and mean; Through-the-Window Metro study

The day began with promise. I saw a human being right away - Caleb, deeply engrossed in his video war games. When I looked at the screen, he was blasting away at an enemy (the avatar of an actual person somewhere else) who was scampering down the street in great panic as he tried to avoid Caleb's bullets.

It sure looked to me like Caleb was hitting him, but he dived into an open doorway, apparently unscathed. Immediately after that, Caleb was firing at someone else when another fighter popped out from the side and almost ran into Caleb's fire. Caleb stopped shooting for just one moment, or he might have hit that guy.

"Wow," I said, "that guy almost ran right into your fire."

"That was one of my teammates," Caleb said.

"So if you had hit him it would have been a case of friendly fire."

"No," he said. "Nothing would have happened. This is set up so you can't kill your teammates."

Just then, some kind of rocket came down on Caleb's avatar and killed it.

"I hope I didn't cause that by distracting you," I apologized.

"Oh, no, you didn't cause it," he said. "Those rockets just get you. You can't avoid them. It happens all the time."

And then you just become someone else, or the old you pops back to life and you keep fighting.

Yesterday, after coming in contact with a total of three people all day, all at once, for just as long as it took to buy an Americano, I promised to go to Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant today. I did, and as I parked my car, I saw Sally walking towards her's.

So I shouted out to her. She gave me a hug, and then we talked for just a little bit. She asked me if I had received my certificate to get a free breakfast at Family Restaurant.

I was puzzled by this, as I knew nothing about any certificate.

It turns out that after I included her and a bit of her story about her battle with alcohol and drug abuse in a past post, one of my blog readers purchased gift certificates at Family for both Sally and me.

"Really?" I asked, puzzled.

"Yes," she said. "I got mine and I've used it already. Ask Connie, she knows about it."

So we said goodbye and I went in to get my breakfast, wondering if it had already been paid for. 

I ordered ham and eggs, over easy, plus hash browns and multi-grain toast, which I asked to be delayed until I had eaten everything else.

And here is my waitress, bringing my toast, after I had eaten everything else. But I forgot to speak her name into my iPhone dictation ap, and I have forgotten it.

After I spread strawberry jam upon my toast and ate it, I went to the check-out register and asked about the gift certificate. The lady behind the counter knew nothing about it, so she called out to Connie. Connie got a horrified look on her face and said that she had given the gift certificate to someone else.

This lady, Cindy, was standing in line behind me. "It was my husband that she gave it to," she said. She told me his name was Bill, too. She said there had been an argument at the time as to whether or not the gift certificate was supposed to go to her husband, but in the end he had taken it.

"I've got it in the car," she said. "I'll give it to you."

So I followed her to her car, where she did some rummaging, but she could not find it. She said it must be at home. She said she would find it and bring it tomorrow.

"I've just been wondering who Funny Face is," she said. That could be kind of puzzling for a wife, for her husband to get a mysterious gift certificate from someone she does not know by the name of Funny Face.

"Funny Face is one of my blog readers," I told her. "From Texas."

"Oh," she said.

Thank you, Funny Face.

I did speak Cindy's name into my iPhone, but, just as in every other case where I have done so, I remembered the name even without going back to the iPhone.

What are the odds that Cindy would have been standing in line right behind me when I asked about that gift certificate?

This is just another one of those hugely unlikely coincidences that happen to me all the time.

A bit later, when I took my walk, this dog that I first met Tuesday appeared again and came to greet me. It seemed to come from the same house where a dog named Angel lives. Angel is one of the nastiest dogs that I have ever met. Angel has bitten me. I think Angel is the Devil's angel.

The German Shepherd followed. I was a little leery, but it proved not to be vicious. It's still a bit of a pup, though, so its got time.

Maybe tomorrow, I will dig up my pictures of Angel and include them in my post - if there's room. Then you will see how mean she is. You will think that I had nerves of steel just to take such pictures.

The German Shepherd, in profile, tail down submissively. Maybe the future will be okay with this dog.

She told me the dog's name. I knew I would not forget it, so I did not speak it into my iPhone. I have forgotten it.

At the usual time, I headed to Metro Cafe. Carmen was feeling happy. The day was warm for Wasilla in late January and business had been good.

Through the Metro Window Study, #532.

I take so many pictures through the window of people on the other side of Carmen's counter that I just decided I've got a genuine study going.

I don't really know the number of this particular study, but #532 sounds pretty impressive, so I settled on it.

Carmen's husband, Scott, was taking down Christmas lights. He said these lights had been a disaster. The wind had pounded them against the windows, badly chipping the glass.

"I want it to be Spring," Scott said. "The older I get, the colder I get."

Despite the warmth of the day, right near freezing, the wind was brisk, so that must account for the fact that Scott, who works at Prudhoe Bay, was cold.

The moon was very near full.

Baby-in-waiting update: Still not here yet. Lavina is resting and is more comfortable now. Margie comes home in just over three days. I am a little more hopeful now that baby will wait for her/his grandma than I was last night.