Margie returns carrying a buckskin cradle board; Melanie's birthday celebration

So here I am, in the car, driving to airport "arrivals" to pick up Margie. See the smiling Yup'ik face on the vertical stabilizer of the Alaska Airlines jet on the other side of the new terminal building? That is Flight 91, just landed, coming in from Seattle where she changed planes after leaving Phoenix at 7:00 AM. Margie is still on board, waiting for them to open the door to the terminal so she can get out and come to me.

Soon, she is sitting beside me in the car, looking at a card that was sent by my niece Khena and husband Vivek. It has several pictures of their baby, Ada Laksmhi, half-a-year old now, highly intelligent, a full head of thick, black hair and, as you can see in Margie's expression, extremely cute.

She lives in Minneapolis. I hope we get to meet her, soon.

As for Uriah, he is home and has some healing to do, but is on the way to recovery.

I ask Margie if she is hungry, and she is. She has eaten only a bagel since flying out of Phoenix more than seven hours earlier. "Where do you want to go?" I ask. We are headed in the general direction of Melanie's work, because it is her birthday and we want to wish her a happy one. Plus, the engineering firm that she works for was recently bought out by a bigger corporation and she just moved into a new office, which we have not yet seen.

Margie thought about the question for about five minutes. "Taco Bell," she said.

So here we are at Taco Bell by Dimond Center. There is an empty parking space close to the door and these ravens have gathered in it. I make like I am going to park there and Margie scolds me, just like I knew she would. "Don't you dare!" she says. "Look at all those people you will disturb!"

So I parked elsewhere and several ravens came to join us. We went inside. I was not very hungry, so I ordered a cheese quesadilla and a small Pepsi.

Margie ordered a chicken soft taco and a small Diet Pepsi.

The ravens took whatever they could get.

We then went shopping, to buy her some gifts. Melanie loves dark chocolate, so her mother had brought her a box of Godiva chocolates that she had bought in Arizona. We went into Pier 1, which actually has some pretty neat stuff. Margie tends to think practical, so she found some nice, orange, couch pillows that seemed to match the decor of Melanie's living room.

I seldom think practical when buying gifts. I found a decorative pair of birds on a stand. They appeared to be dancing with each other.

We bought both the pillow and the birds.

Now we needed to get them wrapped, but to box and gift-wrap them seemed quite impractical, at this time. So we went to another store, where Margie decided to buy some fancy gift bags to put them. She thought she would be very quick, so I dropped her off and circled the parking lot.

As I came back, I noticed this bear, standing under this word, in front of Sportsman's Warehouse.

Margie did not find any gift bags, but she did find some little white bowls shaped like hearts. She thought Bear Meech and Diamond, Melanie's Anchorage cats, would enjoy them, so she bought them.

Next, we stopped at Melanie's new place of work. We wished her a happy birthday and examined the premises. Melanie told us about a nearby coffee shop that had the name, "cats" in it. She said the coffee was good there. We went looking for it, but never found it. We wound up at a nearby Kaladi Brothers instead.

The coffee was superb. 

From there, we did some grocery shopping for Melanie's birthday dinner and then we headed over to Jacob, Lavina and Kalib's. Margie was eager to see Kalib, but he was not there. His dad had picked him up from daycare and they had gone off to do a little shopping themselves.

Lavina was home alone, as she had been all day. She was almost desperate to see people. Margie then gave her the Apache cradle board that her sister, LeeAnn, had made for the new baby-in-waiting. That's white buckskin that you see on the cradle board. The part that Lavina is touching and admiring is made from cholla cactus.

During the time that Margie and LeeAnn had been snowbound and then even afterward, LeeAnn had worked hard and long to finish the cradle board. She completed it the night before Margie left.

She also made the one that Kalib spent his babyhood sleeping in.

All of our own children were packed in such cradles - made by Margie's mom, Rose. If you should ever get a chance to see the February, 1980, issue of National Geographic, I have a three-part story and photo spread on the White Mountain Apache Tribe in there and it includes a picture of Rex in his cradle board, as his grandmother works on others.

A few years back, the Governor of Arizona declared Rose to be an Arizona State Living Treasure for her skill in making cradle boards. 

I think LeeAnn is a treasure, too.

Even though I missed this trip, we are all planning to go down for a Sunrise Dance in June, so you will get to meet them all then.

As for the baby who will occupy this cradle board she... well, could be a he, but I have just been feeling that it is she, but I could be completely wrong... is definitely getting ready to be born.

Lavina is experiencing intense contractions again. Of course, this has been going on now for a couple of weeks - intense contractions, followed by light contractions. She visited her doctor today and our new grandchild is right there at the door, ready to exit.

As soon as Lavina's contractions get to be ten minutes apart, she is supposed to go in.

This is the longest labor I have ever known of.

Jacob and Kalib finally arrive. Margie is thrilled to finally see her grandchild again. Kalib reacted the way I used to react when my grandmother's would hug me.

Yes, I still remember.

Soon, everybody had arrived - except for Caleb, who stayed in Wasilla to sleep before heading out to his all-night work shift.

Can you guess whose feet these are?

We gather in the kitchen to get our avocado cucumber sandwiches and our baked potatoes and corn chips.

See the fact at the far right? The one that is just barely into the picture frame? That face is Lisa's face, just as the feet in the previous frame are Lisa's feet.

The arm at the right belongs to Bryce, Lisa's boyfriend.

The others, of course, are Margie, Melanie and Rex.

Kalib rips his sandwich apart and devours it. I suppose one day soon, he will have to start learning some table manners. I don't think the lessons will please him.

As he always does at anybody's birthday party, Kalib came dashing over to help blow out the candles. He puffed so hard that he nearly blew Melanie away.

She quickly recovered to blow out the remaining candles.

Next, she opened her gifts. I will not list them all, but I will note that this one is from Charlie and he did the raven painting himself. You can see how he docorated the package.

Afterward, Kalib rolled a big ball down the stairs several times. 

Is my beautiful, sweet, baby girl, who I love so dearly, so sweetly, who I cherish more than I cherish the sun that shines each day, the earth that spins, my own life, the little girl who, when she was small, would automatically appear in my lap whenever I sat down, really 29 now?

She really is.

How beautiful she is, from the first moment onward.

I wrote up an extensive journal entry about her birth, which started in excitement, turned frightening, and ended wonderfully. I was going to transcribe it into this post and I actually began to, but then, just as happens every time I read it, I began to weep. Twenty-nine years has passed, but I sat here at my computer and I cried, as they say, "like a baby."

I had to pull back.

Rex takes me to the concert, where a puffin flies over the orchestra, and moose, too

Just as I said I would, I ate breakfast at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant and so did this couple. I did a number of other things throughout the day and took pictures of various subjects, ranging from mountains to airplanes to a dog running directly in front of the car going in the same direction as me, but I've got to get to the concert, so I will skip all that.

Rex bought a couple of tickets to the Saturday night performance of the Anchorage Symphony and invited me to join him. So I drove into town, parked the car and walked over to the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, where I saw a family who identified themselves as the Barnes passing by on the sidewalk.

Other people were looking at the ice sculptures that adorn the plaza adjacent to the Performing Arts center. I heard a story on NPR this afternoon that explained why the Lower 48 and the mid-latitudes of Europe and Asia have experienced such cold weather this winter while the Arctic - even the North Pole - has been unseasonably warm.

It is not just because of El Niño, as I had suspected, but because of the Arctic Oscillation. Normally, the air pressure at the pole is lower than elsewhere and so the cold not only forms, but settles in. This year, there has been a shift in the air pressure, which has been higher on the pole than normal and lower to the south and so the cold air that would normally linger in the north has moved to the south.

The guy said that the odds of it happening this way are about the same as being given one draw from a deck of cards to pull out the Ace of Diamonds, and then you pull out the Ace of Diamonds.

I went into the lobby and soon Rex showed up with the tickets. 

After we entered the auditorium and found our seats, I snuck up to the front real quick so I could get a shot of the bass players as they limbered up their fingers and tuned their instruments.

I returned to my seat as the crowd poured in.

Here I am with Rex, waiting for the concert to start. Rex told me that part of what he has done to cope with Stephanie's abandonment is to start attending concerts and such, so that he could hear music that he had heard growing up in our house and remember it.

A guy in front of us looks at his watch. He needn't worry. The concert will start on time.

The concert opened with Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #2. The fellow playing the trumpet is Linn Weeda. BBC#2 requires the trumpeter to blow his instrument up an extra octave from its normal range and, if what I was taught in college is true, in order to play it, the musician must have lung power strong enough to inflate a car tire.

This is kind of hard for me to imagine, and I am not certain that it is true, but it is what I was taught.

I would like to tell you that the performance was flawless, that not a note was missed nor rendered even slightly shrill, but that would not be an honest statement.

What is true is that I greatly enjoyed sitting there with my son, having all these musicians playing their instruments to send sound waves of Bach flowing over us. It was very good.

It reminded me too of when Margie and I were first married, and I would often take her to recitals and concerts - classical and rock and roll. Then we would come home and go to bed and life would be sweet. Those were good times.

Linn Weeda played the trumpet, Roxann Berry the flute, Sherman Piper the Oboe and Kathryn Hoffman the violin. 

They accept their applause.

This is Paul Sharpe, playing a solo on the double bass during the performance of A Carmen Fantasy for Double Bass and Orchestra Prelude by Frank Proto.

It is a fact that I could have gotten pictures of much greater technical quality with any one of my big DSLR cameras then I got with my pocket camera - and with a telephoto lens I could came in much tighter on the subject.

But... I could not have used such a camera at all in here. I could not have taken any performance pictures at all. The pocket camera is perfectly quiet and exceptionally discreet and so I could get away with taking pictures, without getting kicked out or rising the ire of nearby audience members.

And that is a big advantage of a pocket camera.

For his encore, Sharpe played the Alaska Flag Song.

After a bit of Debussy, the Symphony wrapped up the evening with Exposition on the Anchorage Museum, a commissioned piece by California composer Gregory Prechel - who has also composed music for The Simpsons and various shows and films.

Throughout the work, selected paintings, sculptures and carvings from the Anchorage Museum of History and Art were projected overhead, beginning here with Alvin Amason's rendition of a puffin, title "It's a Sweet Dream that Keeps Me Close to You."

The painting, "Easter Tableu" by Pat Austin.

The mask: Txamshem (Raven Man) by Jack Hudson.

Update insert: As I prepared this post early this morning, I had naturally planned to give credit to the conductor, Randall Craig Fleischer, who has done good things with the Anchorage Symphony. You see the time stamped at the top: 3:06 AM? That's when I opened Squarespace to begin constructing this post, not when I closed it. I closed at about 4:45 AM and I was so tired and so anxious to get this done so I could go to bed that I forgot to credit the conductor!

Very bad of me, but here he is, Conductor Fleischer, waving his baton beneath the picture of Hudson's mask.

Afterwards, I said goodbye to Rex under an awning that he had helped to construct.

And on the way home I encountered this crazy driver. I had set my cruise control at 65. When I first came upon this vehicle, it was doing about 50 in the left lane - a no no - and so I passed on the right. Pretty soon, it shot by me, doing 75 or 80.

Shortly after that, I again passed it on the right. Then it zipped past me. Then it fell back... then it passed me...

That's the kind of driver that was in control of this vehicle.

Notice the fog - how it engulfs the lights, but does not touch the ground.

There's lots more that I would like to write about the day that has most recently ended, but its almost time to get up and I have a big day ahead of me Sunday, so I think I had better stop and go to bed.

I should note, though, that of all the music performed, it is Bach that continues to play in my head. The other pieces have fallen silent. 

Bach rules!

Kalib eats Kiwi Fruit; Mayor Edward Itta in front of my old photos; all of my Anchorage kids except for Melanie - but I did get her cats; I see Avatar

I have been flooded with angry complaints, all of which go something like this: "Where is Kalib? Why has he disappeared from your blog?"

Here he is.

Today I went into Anchorage to do a couple of things and after I did the first, I headed over to Kalib's daycare center. I arrived at lunch time, which explains the bib, and just before naptime, which explains why he looks so tired.

He was surprised and excited when I first stepped through the door. That was kind of nice.

He's eating Kiwi fruit. Think about that: a Navajo/Apache boy eating Kiwi fruit in Alaska in January.

That's the kind of world we live in now.

This is Edward Itta, Mayor of the North Slope Borough, which, of course covers the Arctic Slope with headquarters in Barrow. Even so, it is essential that the Borough keep an office in Anchorage. Mayor Itta had come down to take care of some Anchorage business, which gave me the opportunity to go in and do a little interview with him.

See all those photos on the wall behind him?

Those are mine and I made those prints probably about 20 years ago. Many of the people pictured have since left this life.

"Where's your camera?" Mayor Itta asked me when he first saw me. "I never see you without your camera." He was very surprised when I pulled the little, tiny, palm-sized pocket camera out of my pocket.

I had lunch with Jacob and Lavina...

...and Lisa, too. I got maybe one hour of sleep last night, and it is now getting late again and I am just too tired to recount any of the conversation or even to recall topics discussed.

It did feel real good to have Lisa put her head on my shoulder.

Jacob, looking sharp in his US Public Health Services Commissioned Corp uniform.

The view in my rearview mirror while stopped at a red light on my way to take care of another piece of business.

I have no idea what happened here.

This is Jack King of Camai Printing, and he is handing me a color proof from a job Camai is printing for me. 

After that, I went by myself to watch the 3D version of the movie Avatar. I won't review it, but it was definitely a threshold movie. I know - there have been 3D movies before this one, but I do believe this is the one that is going to mark the moment when 3D started coming at us for real.

It did not feel at all gimmicky. It took a fantasy world and made it real. If only, at the end, the movie makers could have risen above formula and cliche, it could have also been a great movie, like the Last of the Mohicans or Little Big Man, or Dead Man, because its the same story, really, and the movie did get off to a fanatastic start, story-wise.

As to the effects, fantastic from beginning to end. Soon, I suppose, such effects will commonplace, expected.

Melanie had to work very late and I did not get to see her. I did go to her house, though, and see her cats. Here is Slick, or Bear Meach, as he is also called.

And here is Diamond, the sweet ornery one.

And here's Epizzles, or Poof, who is actually Charlie's cat, but is staying with Melanie and her cats right now.

As for Royce, the results came back. It is a thyroid deficiency. Now, he must be medicated twice a day for the rest of his life. Other than that, the test results showed no problems.

It was Rex who let me into Melanie's house to see the cats. Now that Stephanie has gone, he is temporarily living in Melanie's basement apartment along with Cassie, the 11 year-old dog that Stephanie brought into the marriage.

Some of you will remember Box Car Bean, the very beautiful cat that I rescued and gave to Rex and Stephanie a couple of years back. I loved that cat from the moment I rescued it and brought it home. I never wanted it to leave the family and that's why I gave it to Rex and Stephanie, but when she left, Stephanie took Boxcar Bean with her.

Rex says Stephanie needed to have Boxcar.

Here I am, driving out of Anchorage.

And here I am, on the Palmer Hay Flats, almost home.

Now, once again, it is very late  - early the next morning, actually, and given my one hour of sleep last night, I am extremely tired. So I have already made up my mind - after I get up, I'm going to Family Restaurant for breakfast, even if it's closer to lunch time.

I know. I should stay home and cook oatmeal. Eat a banana.

But I'm going to the Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

I'm just going to do it. I don't care about economics, wisdom, or practicality. I'm going.

Detoured by death on the highway as I take Margie to the airport; bright, red, fingernails; Kalib rides the escalators

The plan was for me to drop Margie off at the Alaska Native Medical Center so that she could pick up the medications she will need for the nearly four weeks that she will be in Arizona.

I would then drive to Camai Printing where I had a little business to take care of, come back, pick her up, we would get together with the kids for coffee or maybe even dinner, should time allow.

I would then take her to the airport.

But, just before we got to the South Birch Creek exit, traffic came to a halt. There had been an accident ahead.

I knew that if I could get to the exit, we could get off the Glenn Highway, switch to the Old Glenn and go around the accident.

Several other drivers had the same idea, so it was a slow process, but, after close to half an hour, I made it onto the ramp, where traffic was moving maybe one mile-an-hour - but it was moving.

See all those cars still on the highway? They are beyond the exit and they will be stuck there for hours.

Furthermore, if we had been perhaps as little as one mile further back, we would also have been stuck. We would not have been able to make it to the exit.

As we crept along, a bulletin came on the radio. A very serious accident had happened and the highway was closed at this exit.

It is a strange thing when you find yourself in this situation. You are annoyed at the slowdown. You think of the inconvenience and trouble that it is going to cause you - in this case, Margie could potentially miss her flight, or have to go without her medications, which we would then need to get and mail to her.

Yet you know that, up ahead, at the source of the slowdown, someone might be badly injured, in terrible pain, perhaps facing a different kind of life from here on out. Or someone might be dead, or dying, their entire life now behind them. Several people might be.

And yet, you still want to get moving.

As we crept further, a new bulletin said that a helicopter was coming. We knew then that someone had been hurt very badly.

And still I wanted to get Margie to the airport, on time, with her medications, and I wanted to get my business taken care of.

Finally, we got to where traffic was moving and then arrived in town right as the rush hour was beginning. I dropped Margie off at ANMC, then headed to Camai and arrived just before closing. I took care of my business and then returned to get her.

But she had got stuck in another long line - at the ANMC Family Medicine pharmacy. Kalib was there, waiting for her with his parents. Margie had entered an area in which only patients picking up medicine are allowed, so I sat down as Lavina helped Kalib learn how to operate an iPhone.

See how red Lavina's fingernails are?

A friend at work had chosen Saturday to be her wedding day and had asked all her lady co-workers who would be participating to paint their nails bright red. She also wanted them all to wear black dresses.

So Lavina painted her nails red, went out shopping on her one free day and bought a black dress.

Then her coworker changed the wedding date to June.

Kalib watches the movie, Cars.

Lavina had heard an update on the accident - it involved a pedestrian. That seemed pretty strange, since it happened on the freeway.

Later, on the radio, we heard that a man was trapped beneath a vehicle. I hoped he was unconscious. How miserable would that be, to be broken, injured, and have a ton or more of steel sitting atop you, jamming you into the cold pavement?

By the time Margie finally got her medications, there was no time to get together for coffee, let alone dinner. So all of the Anchorage part of the family came to the airport, to see her off.

Kalib and his dad led the entourage toward airport security.

Kalib soon dashed into the area where only ticketed passengers are allowed. Thankfully, he turned right around and dashed back out before he could get arrested and thrown into jail.

Traffic was very light in the security area. Kalib gave his grandma a goodbye hug.

As Rex gives his mom a goodbye hug, Kalib reaches out to hug one of his aunties. Kalib hugged everybody, whether they were traveling or not.

Then he got to ride an escalator going down.

He rode a series of escalators.

At the entrance to the parking garage, we discussed the matter of dinner. Melanie suggested Pho Lena, a Vietnamese - Thai restaurant that was more or less on the way out.

At Pho Lena, the waitress brought a toy over for Kalib's amusement.

But Kalib was more amused by the paper and coloring marker that she also brought him.

After I arrived home in the late evening, I sat down right here, at my computer and found a bulletin from the Anchorage Daily News in my inbox. Robert Marvin, 76, had apparently experienced some kind of car trouble on the Glenn and had pulled over to the side of the road - but not all the way out of traffic. He was standing in front of a Volkswagon van when it was rear-ended and pushed 50 - 60 feet down the road with him under it.

Rescuers managed to get him out without help from the helicopter, but he was pronounced dead shortly afterward. Traffic had been stopped for three hours.

Now, as I write these words, Margie is in Seattle, where she has a seven-and-a-half hour layover before catching her 7:25 AM flight to Phoenix.

How miserable she must be!

I am afraid to call her, though - she might be napping.

Kalib blows out his own candle to become a "terrible two" - 2009 in review will begin tomorrow

I shot this about 3:25 PM, on the Parks Highway as Margie and I headed to Anchorage for Kalib's second birthday party. If we were on true solar time, this is what it would like at 2:30, but we are not. When we first arrived in Alaska, the state spanned four time zones - just like the Lower 48.

That makes sense, because if you lay the map of Alaska over one of the Lower 48, the Southeast panhandle is in Florida, the Aleutians reach to the California coast and Barrow is not far from Chicago.

There was a movement going on at that time to move the capitol to Willow, just north of here and one of the arguments was that Juneau was just too far away from much of Alaska, in time as well as in miles. Government workers in Juneau would be home eating dinner when Alaskans further west where it was mid-afternoon wanted to call them.

So, with the exception of Attu Island, which has been restricted to the US Navy since World War II, the entire state was crammed into one time zone.

The good news, of course, is that the days are getting longer now.

On the bad side, the weather right now is horribly warm - mid 30's here in Wasilla, just a little cooler in Anchorage. A warm mass of air moved up here from Hawaii and our cold air headed south, into the midwest. I just hope it doesn't get any warmer than it already is and that a cold front moves in, soon.

I hated this kind of winter weather.

Just about anytime a hard cold snap hits down there, it is because it got warm up here and the cold air had to go somewhere.

We found Kalib planted firmly on his little Spiderman throne, watching the animated film, Ice Age, for about the 90th time. He was riveted and did not want to be distracted by anything.

Out in the kitchen, his mom was breaking eggs to make a cake.

Yesterday, I mentioned Rex's buddy, Eddie, who now lives in Seattle but who grew up with Rex here in Wasilla. This is he. He was telling me about his new business venture, which I will not detail here, save to say that in the last few weeks he has sold product worth far more money than I have ever come close to dealing with.

To do so, he had to run up enormous debts, so he is holding his breath right now.

We used to go watch him and Rex play Youth League football together, and drop them off here and there to go fishing. Sometimes, they would go on long canoe trips.

Eddie served two years as a Mormon missionary and the letters he wrote were brilliant, like Mark Twain. Irreverent, like Mark Twain, too.

That may not be the kind of writing you would expect from a Mormon missionary, but it was the kind of writing he did.

But, like me, he doesn't really follow any particular religion anymore.

I kind of freaked out when I saw Melanie standing on this stool. That's what happens when you fall off a chair, shatter your shoulder, get it replaced and then realize you are never, ever, going to get quite back to where you were.

"Dad," she chided me, "at least this isn't on wheels."

Just then, a big "pop!" sounded beneath her. She gingerly climbed down.

Charlie and Rex eat their salad and mac and cheese. Kalib is still watching movies, but has switched to his other favorite, Cars.

Caleb went out to feed Kalib, just to make certain that he got to eat part of his own birthday dinner. Do you see why I refer to this little chair as Kalib's throne?

He did not want to leave the TV, but the cake finally lured him in. Anyone who has been with this blog for the past few months has seen Kalib helping to blow out other people's candles, but this one is just for him.

He blows it out.

And then he eats cake and ice cream. Sometimes, his dad is a bit over-indulgent.

Chock full of new calories, Kalib then went on a maddening spree, sprinting back and forth between the kitchen and the living room.

He received many gifts, but the most impressive was this T-Rex from his parents. This T-Rex walks. It opens its jaws and roars - as it is doing here.

Kalib is a little worried.

Kalib studied the T-Rex closely and bravely, but he could not be persuaded to touch it.

Let there be no doubt - Lisa came to celebrate, too.

For the remainder of the year, I will do a review of 2009. I won't call it "the best of" just "a review of." I will use some pictures that have already appeared here, and some  that, for one reason or another - usually lack of time - didn't.

As I do, I will also include something from the current day.