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.

iPhone fun; a dearth of human contact; I hang out with cats and communicate with a fish

Yes, Michelle, I did get my iPhone* - just before I left for Barrow. It is such a long and absurd story and I have had so many things going on that I could not bring myself to tell it.

In fact, I cannot bring myself to tell it now, either. Basically, though, you will recall that I took the gift cards that Jacob and Lavina had given me for Christmas into the local At&t store where I was informed that they would cover the cost of an 8 gig phone, but I could get a 16 gig for $100 more. I did not want to pay $100, so I purchased the eight gig phone and the entire transition took about five minutes. 

When it was done, the salesman gave one of my gift cards back and told me that it still had $48 in it. That meant that I would actually have had to pony up only $52 for the 16 gig phone. That wasn't so bad, so I decided to go for it. The salesman said "okay," then attempted to complete the transaction.

About an hour later, he determined that, for some reason incomprehensible to me, he could not just transfer the funds that I had already paid straight over to the 16 gig phone. Instead, the funds had to be put back into the card, but they could not be put in for 24 hours.

"So come back in 24 hours," he said.

So I came back 24 hours later and a lady set about to complete the transaction. She took my extra $52, which actually came out to $53, and had me sign everything that needed to be signed. In the end, she could not complete the transaction, either. "The money is still not in the cards," she told me. "It will take ten days for the money to be put back into the cards. Come back in ten days."

Oh, boy... I just can't go on with this story. Let it be enough to say that each day for the next eight, a lady from At&t by the name of Elaine would call and we would talk - the first time for a good hour. Elaine would promise to get the situation taken care of so that I could pick up my phone within the day.

After a few days, she expressed great puzzlement as to why the money was going back into the cards at all, as the policy was to refund cash directly back to the customer, in which case, she said, I should have been able to get my iPhone that very first day.

Finally, three or four days after that, eight days after I made the original purchase, she figured out some way to bypass whatever convoluted thing had happened and to have the saleslady take the cards from me, cut them up and have me the pay the $53 all over again - then I could leave with my phone.

So eight days was better than ten.

I love the iPhone. It is so many things besides a phone. For example, if I photograph someone and then ask their name so that I can identify them in this blog, all I have to do is turn on iPhone dictation, speak that name and when I need it, there it is. So now I have no excuse ever to forget a name again.

But here is the curious thing: I have already used the dictation feature with a few names, but when it came time to do the blog I remembered the names even without opening the iPhone. However, there have been other names that I did not put into dictation, thinking that I would remember them, but when the time came, I had forgotten.

And of course I can now take pictures with my iPhone. The quality is terrible, but its still kind of fun and then I can send the picture to someone else.

Like this picture of Royce, for example. Melanie has been very worried about Royce and has spent much money on his care and diet, and now I can send his picture from my iPhone to her's and type, "well, he's taking his medicine, eating his soft food, and he's doing okay. The fish are doing pretty good, too."

Speaking of which, with Margie gone and me back from Barrow, I have almost no human interaction but tend to socialize only with cats and fish. I did see Caleb very briefly this morning. I woke up debating whether to cook oatmeal or go back to Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant. 

I was leaning towards oatmeal, with berries cooked into it, but then I heard the sounds of him playing war video games with his friends from around Alaska and the world. I heard the gunfire and the explosions, and the excited tone of his voice as he communicated with his team members as they battled the enemy.

I did not want to eat oatmeal in the middle of a battle, nor did I want to interrupt Caleb's game. My head felt groggy. I did not know if I could deal with cooking oatmeal and brewing coffee. I did not want to add more dishes to the pile. I knew that if I went to Family, I wouldn't have to.

I punched the auto-start to the car. Even before I left my bed, the car began to warm up.

"Hi Dad," Caleb when finally I stepped out, even as he blasted away at a enemy who dodged and blasted back at him.

"Hi Caleb," I said. Then I went to Family. There, I spoke briefly with my waitress, and with the lady behind the counter who took my money. As she was getting my change, I saw these folks admiring this baby, so I pulled my pocket camera out of my pocket and shot this scene and that was the total of my human interaction there.

"How was breakfast," Caleb, still fighting, asked as I reentered the house.

"It was good," I said.

I checked my email, then took off on my walk. I saw but one person, and he was atop a hill, about half-a-mile away from me. I did not see a moose. I did not even see a dog. I did see this raven, flying overhead. He had nothing to say to me.

Sometimes, ravens have lots to say, but not today - not this one.

And I saw this military jet.

And this airplane, which looks a lot like my crashed Running Dog. But I encountered no people.

By the time I reached home, Caleb had gone to bed. I came right out here to my office, sat down at this very computer and struggled to work. I don't know why I struggled, but I did. There was nothing unusally hard about the work, but sometimes, even when its easy, I struggle. I can barely do it. I find it almost impossible to put down a single word. It can take me hours to write two paragraphs.

And so it was today.

Finally, it was 4:00 PM, coffee break time, time to get back intp the car, grab an Americano and listen to the news. I had to drop off a bill, too. Along the way, I saw this kid. I said nothing to him. He was completely unaware of me and I'm pretty sure that's how he wanted it to be.

"Look!" said when I pulled up to Metro Cafe. "It's light! It's not dark. It's here, Bill. It's here." By "it" she meant light of course.

"Yep," I said, "it sure is."

"I've had a really good day today. It's been busy."

"That's good," I said. I want Metro Cafe to stay busy, because busy means staying in business.

"It's because we have lunch sandwiches now, and soup," she said. "People are coming for lunch."

"I will have to try your lunch, sometime," I said.

"Yes, you must," Carmen agreed.

And that would be the closest that I would come to having a conversation today.

When I saw this little girl exit her school bus, I thought that it really is a good thing that the light is back.

The road was slippery, though. One can never take an icy road for granted.

The moon is growing. I rolled down the window and shot a few frames as I drove down Church toward home. Except for the occasional glance, I did not look at it as I drove, but I knew where it was. I knew where to point the camera.

Wasilla moon.

Then I came back here to my office and here I have been ever since, not counting the half-hour that I spent inside the house, reheating some black bean soup that I made yesterday and then eating it, with applesauce for dessert. Just before 10:00 PM, I heard the sound of Caleb's footsteps as he walked from his room through the house and to the front door.

I heard the door open. I heard the door close. Caleb was gone.

At about 11:30 PM, I looked over at the parrot fish and saw him looking back at me, obviously wondering what I was up to. I have had him for eight years and for all but the first few months of that time, he had lived in the 55 gallon tank that I gave to Kalib just before I left for Barrow. I gave Kalib all the other fish that were in that tank, plus the giant plecostomus that had lived alone in the 90 gallon tank ever since the two big oscars died.

I am very fond of the parrot fish, and he likes me. He is smart, too. Very smart. He is the smartest fish that I have ever known. Some people think oscars are smart and they are, but they're not as smart as this guy. I could not bear to give him away, so I put him in the 90 gallon tank, which sits three feet to my right and kept him here with me.

Yesterday, I bought a little cichlid to go with him. It was yellow in the store, but it has been blue here. I also bought a little plecostomus, to be a house keeper.

"Hi, fish!" I waved.

The parrot waved back with the fin on his right side. "Hi, Bill!" he shouted.

I told you he is smart!

Who needs human interaction, when he has a fish such as this?

*see comments, previous post

On a warm and snowy day, I eat at Family, get barked at, pass by Wasilla's Hall of Wisdom and receive a generous offer to help Royce

During my all too brief meagre hours in bed, I kept looking forward to getting up and heading to Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant for breakfast. I had made up my mind before going to bed that this was what I would do and I was excited about it.

That doesn't mean that I popped right out of bed. I don't think that I have been to bed before 3:00 AM since Margie left for Arizona and sometimes not until 4:00 or after. And then I always lay awake for at least an hour, after which I wake up frequently through the night. So I wasn't popping out of bed for anything - not even breakfast at Family Restaurant.

But, at about 9:30, I carefully extracted myself from the quilt of cats that weighed down the blankets that covered me, took care of a few tasks, including some in this computer, and then headed over about 10:40 or so.

I got a new waitress, a woman who I do not recall seeing before, but she was good. She made sure the hashbrowns were done just right, and she took her time pouring the coffee, because one thing about this new little Canon s90 pocket camera - it is very slow to turn on and prepare. That's why she took her time, so I could get this picture.

I truly appreciate it.

Now I back up a few minutes, as I drive over, just to show you that it was a warm and snowy day - the first snow since before Christmas. Here I am, stopped at a stoplight, as this guy in front of me runs a green light.

One more shot from Family.

On my walk, Tequila came running, barking, growling, through the new snow.

Of course I know that she is a nice dog and does not mean any of it, but she forgets that I know. Or maybe she thinks that she can fool me this time into thinking that she really is mean.

Uh, oh! She gets bogged down in the new snow.

Oh, dear...

It's a humiliating thing for a nice dog who is trying to convince you that she really is mean and nasty to get bogged down in the new snow.

An empty school bus passes by King's Chapel, across the street from Metro Cafe. Well, if its empty, Bill then who is driving it?

I had a haircut scheduled for 4:15. I did not want to get a haircut at 4:15, but that was the only time available, the scheduler told me.

Along the way, I passed this hitchhiker. See that place behind him? The Mug Shot Saloon? You are probably already familiar with it - at least from the inside. As everyone knows, the national media all descended upon Wasilla after John McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his VP running mate.

Invariably, it seemed, the media always wound up here, inside the Mug Shot Saloon, seeking local wisdom, asking intelligent, probing, incisive questions to highly knowledgeable, clear-headed, sharp-minded individuals. They then dispensed this wisdom and knowledge upon the rest of the nation. Yes, they saw the Mugshot Saloon as Wasilla's Grand Hall of Wisdom and so came by to see how much of that wisdom they could soak up themselves.

After the haircut, an experience that I will not bother to describe, I went to the bank to transfer money from our business account to the personal account. It was a most discouraging experience - but I remain optimistic.

Now, I hardly know what to write, even though I have been thinking about it on and off for hours. In the comments to yesterday's post there is a message from Funny Face - the same generous person who surprised me with two gift cards to Metro Cafe.

After she read about Royce's trip to the vet, she offered to start up a little fund-raising effort to pay Royce's vet bills.

I am deeply touched and moved not only that she thought of this and even called the vet clinic, but that she got positive response - even from Mocha, who just lost a cat. I never imagined anything like this happening.

I did not respond right away because I had to think about it and I had to consult both with Melanie in Anchorage and Margie in Arizona. 

Royce came to us in December of 1994 through a stray cat that followed Rex home and then camped out with us for a couple of years. By the time Royce was born, we had already had a house full of cats and so we determined that we would give away his entire litter of four. One, a black cat, went to friend of Jacob's named Angel and she named it "Little Guy." Angel lives in Phoenix now, Little Guy still with her, and she often leaves comments on this blog.

Melanie fell in love with Royce. When we told her that too many cats already lived in the house, along with the dog Willow, and that the orange kitten just had to go, she was crestfallen but tried to be brave.

One day, a woman who had seen one of the ads I put out called and told me that she wanted an orange kitten. "Is the orange one still available?" she asked.

I was just about to say "yes," but then I spotted Melanie and Royce, snuggled up together, loving each other.

"No," I said, "I'm sorry, but the orange kitten has been claimed."

Melanie grew up, went off to college, got two new cats and now the three of them live together in Anchorage with Charlie and his cat Epizzles, or "Poof" as regular visitors, but she still loves Royce as dearly as she did when she lived in this house with him.

So I had to get her input. "I want to pay for his care, Dad," she told me.

I also talked to Margie. She noted that, sooner or later, after every natural disaster of major proportions, stories come out about animals in need of rescue. Margie suggested that Haiti might be a good place for the contributions that would go to Royce to be sent.

I am greatly touched. Part of this is probably also a desire to help me with this blog, something that a number of posters have expressed a desire to do.

Sooner or later, hopefully in February, (although I had once planned to do it in October, then November, then December...) I plan to restructure this blog a bit. One of the things that I plan to do is to create a store where I can make prints available. Then, anyone who wants to help will be able to do so and get a print, too.

Funny Face, I thank you, greatly.

And be assured - Royce will be in at least one of those prints, along with Kalib.

I expect to see Kalib tomorrow. So he will be in this blog again.

Royce; Ham and Swiss at the Alaska Bagel; strange animal in the back of a car by a pawn shop; Carpenter makes progress, etc.

Royce has an appointment to see the vet tomorrow morning at 10:45. Today, as usual, his appetite has been voracious and what he is doing right here is ordering me to "give me some chow, right now! Brown cow! Brown cow chow! Right now!"

But I fed him salmon chow instead - senior blend. I have fed him a number of times and, as was suggested to me in comments, have raised his water bowl up about half-an-inch off the floor, just in case that might help.

I have not found any blatant vomit today, although at one point I stepped in something slippery and almost invisible - a thin film of something. Maybe it came out of Royce, maybe out of someone else; I don't even know what it was.

Royce sure has gotten thin and frail, though.

Some readers speculate that it is because he misses Kalib, but he certainly has not lost his appetite - just his weight.

Basically, with Margie gone and Kalib and family moved out, I spend my entire days alone with only the cats. I do catch glimpses of Caleb in the morning, if I get up before he goes to bed. Usually, he is wrapped up in his video war game, or watching golf.

I took a pledge that this week that I would eat no junk food from beginning to end - and drink no Pepsi or any other soda pop. Despite the wrong impression I have managed to convey, I do not really drink a huge amount of pop. Maybe four Pepsis and half-a-root-beer per week on average.

But this week - none, not one soda pop - no junk food. 

I will see if it makes any difference in how I feel when the week is over.

So far, it hasn't made any difference at all.

I enjoy the company of cats and I am a person who does very well alone, but when lunch time came, I had to get out where people were circulating and eating and I had eliminated junk food as a means to do so.

The first alternative that came to my mind was the new place, The Alaska Bagel. It is fast food, but not junk food.

So here I am, placing an order with Johanna while her colleague, Erik, peers out from behind the bagels.

I ordered a ham and Swiss sandwich on a seasame seed bagel and helped myself to a glass of cold water that I poured from a pitcher. To any who might be having a difficult time reading Erik's right arm, it says, "Behold, I send you as sheep among wolves." His left, "As for me and my house, we will serve the..." the last word kind of fades from sight, but I strongly suspect that it reads, "...Lord."

The sandwich was good, the water, excellent, prepared just right.

On my home, I found myself behind this car and I was puzzled by the critter in the back window. It looked pretty cute, but something about it just didn't seem quite right. I hoped that there would be plenty of cross traffic at the stop sign just ahead, so that I would have time to study the critter, but there wasn't. The car briefly stopped, quickly took off and turned away fast.

Still, I got this shot off and, having looked closely at it, I have now concluded that it is not a real critter at all, but a toy - a stuffed cat.

Concerning the pawn shop ahead, I told the following story back in April, when I photographed Charlie playing my Martin Classical guitar, but I have picked up a number of new readers since then, so I will tell it again.

I first saw my Martin guitar in the display window of a music store in Globe, Arizona, in 1976. I went inside, told the salesman I wanted to play it, he took it out of the window, gave it to me, I took a seat, and played a bit of Bach on it.

Never had a guitar sounded so good in my hands. I had to have it. It cost $1800 and my annual income as the editor, reporter, writer, photographer, ad salesman and delivery boy of the Fort Apache Scout tribal newspaper was $10,000. I didn't care. I put some money down on lay-away and kept paying until that day came, a year or so later, when I finally brought that Martin guitar home.

I did love that guitar and I even played it in a master class with Christopher Parkening. Many people used to think that I was a superb guitarist, but that was only because they did not know better. Many said I should become a professional musician. I knew better.

There is only one way to be superb on the classic guitar, and that is to play and play and play and play. Practice, practice, practice. I'm a photographer, I'm a writer. I hardly have time for both. How could I be a classical guitarist, too? I can create original works through my camera and keyboard; through my guitar I could only interpret the works of others - and not nearly as good as those with true musical talent were already doing.

So I put the guitar aside. 

Once, during one of those times when I was broke and in dire need of money, I took my Martin guitar to this pawn shop. The man behind the counter considered himself to be sharp, smart, and savvy, wise to the ways of hoodwinkers hoping to get bucks for junk. He asked me how much the guitar was worth. I told him.

He laughed loud, long and scornful. "What kind of fool do you take me for?" he ridiculed. "I know guitars. That one, it's worth $150 at most. I'll loan you $50 for it - only because I'm so generous."

So I walked out of his store with no money but my guitar still in its case, leaving behind a chuckling man who had no idea of the potential profit he had just forfeited had he given me an honest loan and then I defaulted.

I often imagine that the day will come when I am able to devote myself fully to my books and this blog. I imagine that I might then find myself with a little time to play my guitar again.

No, no... It will never happen. My guitar playing days are in the past.

You will recall Tim, the professional carpenter who appeared here just last month, having finally raised two walls on the workshop that he had begun working towards slowly for four years. Despite the high winds, which just this afternoon tapered down to maybe about 20, I found him working on it when I took my walk.

Tomorrow, Tim says, the trusses will begin to go up. As for me, our walls are still almost totally bare of photos. He is way ahead of me.

Further along on my walk, this kid and I noticed each other.

Could this be the same kid, getting off his school bus?

Almost no matter what, I must take my 4:00 PM coffee break when All Things Considered comes on the radio. As usual, I stopped the Metro Cafe drivethrough.

It looks like I won't be joining Margie in Arizona after all. It's a matter of survival. I must stay here and see if I can drum up some work. Even if I never play it again, I don't ever want to take my guitar back to another pawn shop.

I think of all the rifles that I took to pawn shops - and a pistol, too - thinking that I would pay back the loan and get them back but now those guns are owned by others and who knows how they have been used?

Now I won't see Margie until February 2, but that's how its got to be.

I don't want to lose my Martin guitar.

Update: Perhaps some of you have wondered as I have how you might help the people of Haiti. Here is a link with different aid providers that you can contribute to:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/01/haiti_earthquake_how_to_help_a.html?sc=fb&cc=fp

As I photograph a Super Cub, the wind rips my hat off my head and keeps on blowing; Royce update

I got a bit curious today to see what kind of airplane is parked on Anderson Lake in the spot where I used to keep my, poor, crashed, broken, airplane, the Running Dog, tied down in winter.

I found this Super Cub, with another Cub behind it and a Maule behind that.

If I am ever to do this blog right, the way I envision it, I need another airplane. And its a crazy thing - if you were to look closely at my little business right now, you would see that a big struggle to merely survive looms right in front of me - and yet, I have this unshakeable, optimistic feeling in me that, this year, I am going to rise out of it all, make this blog into what I see it becoming, and once again fly about Alaska in my own, little, airplane.

Maybe it is a foolish, silly, absurd little feeling, based on fantasy, not reality, certainly not practicality, but a new friend of mine in India, Thruptha, who you can find in my 2009 May review, put this message on her Orkut page:

"The most successful people on the planet have failed more than ordinary ones."

So, you see, I, who have failed and failed and failed and failed and may well be about to do so again, am surely on the right track.

One more thing: I dream about airplanes frequently - just about every night. So my need to get another is more than just a utilitarian thing - my soul needs an airplane. I am not whole without one.

I am like a cowboy with no horse, a dog musher with no dogs.

As I photographed the Super Cub, my hat left my head and took off across the ice. It traveled so fast I did not think that I could catch it, but I went running after it.

It kept getting further ahead of me, but then it stalled for several seconds and I snatched it from the wind.

The wind has been howling, like 40, newspaper report said gusting over 55, I heard 80 on the radio. The temperature has finally cooled down a bit, too - not frigid, but cooler than it was and if you were standing in an 80 mph gust you would think it was cold. On my coffee break, depending on where I was, the temperatures ranged from 7 to 13 degrees. 

I have not read the forecast, but it feels like we are headed towards cold temperatures again. To the north of here, in the Interior, several places are into the -50's, so I think that air might slip down onto us.

I could be wrong. Another Pineapple Express from Hawaii could be charging up the Pacific, right now, headed straight at us.

It is an El Niño year, after all, and these things are supposed to be more frequent during such years.

That's the box that in which the newspaperman deposits our copy of The Anchorage Daily News every morning. You can see the morning paper itself sitting a littler further back in the snowmachine track. If you look real close at the upper right-hand corner of the photo, just above the entrance to our driveway, you can see the post on which the newspaper box once sat.

It could have been worse - it could have been our roof, or a tree might have dropped on the house or car, or maybe upon my head.

This is actually the first picture that I took today. Yes, I went to Family Restaurant again. I wasn't going to. I was going to cook oatmeal, but I changed my mind.

I think I will fall back to oatmeal for the rest of the week, but you never know.

Just as Melanie advised, I have been feeding multiple small servings of soft food to Royce. I am happy to say that he has not yet thrown up today and the end of the day draws nigh.