Melanie and Charlie give me a gift to take to Sarah Palin's book signing; Funny Face in Texas gives me two gift cards - so does Anonymous

About those HUGE "thank you's" that I mentioned in yesterday's post - I can sum them both up in these two photos of Carmen at the drive-though window to Metro Cafe. Yesterday afternoon, when I pulled up to Metro Cafe, Carmen pulled out this little log book and started reading something that she had written down in it.

I was a little confused. I thought it was a note that somebody had written to her and that she was so proud of it, she wanted to share it with me. She started to read something from a "Funny Face in Texas," who "loves your blog." This was very surprising to me because I did not even know that Carmen kept a blog. She had never given me a hint of any such thing. After she finished she handed me two business-sized cards and I thought that's what they were: business cards, her business cards.

I set the cards down in the little tray-like thing by my gear shift and placed my order. When Carmen brought it, I pulled out my wallet, removed a five and tried to hand it to her, but she would not take it.

"No!" she said. "You've got cards now. From Funny Face in Texas. Use your cards."

Holy cow!

Those hadn't been business cards at all. They were punch cards that cost $20 each but are worth $22. They were a gift from Funny Face in Texas, who reads my blog. So I handed one card to Carmen, she marked it, placed it atop the cup and handed it back to me.

So  again, Funny Face: a HUGE Thank you.

BTW: With a little help from her mister, Funny Face left a comment on yesterday's post. I think Funny Face wears fur - all the time, in cold or warmth.

So what does Funny Face's gift card have to with what Melanie and Charlie gave to me? The same thing this picture of Royce does. See, the above three photos are all test shots that I did with the gift that Melanie and Charlie gave me - a brand new pocket camera: the Canon s90.

It makes even my G10 pocket camera - which I thought was so tiny when I got it - look big.

What an Amazing thing Melanie and Charlie did! I am overwhelmed! And grateful!

Here is how it happened: on Sunday, when Melanie, Charlie, Jacob, Lavina and Kalib were visiting, we got to talking about the book signing that Sarah Palin had scheduled for Tuesday, December 22.

I was wondering if maybe this would finally be the time for me to break down and go take a picture of Sarah Palin. In our 28 years-plus of living in Alaska, I had met and photographed every governor from Jay Hammond on through Frank Murkowski, and had interviewed most of them.

But I had never met, photographed, or interviewed Sarah Palin - the one from my hometown, the one in the news every day now, the one that all America is talking about, everyday, in rage and adoration.

I'm not going to say that I had never seen her. It is possible that, before she became famous, we crossed paths in Carr's or some such place, but I have no recollection of ever having seen her.

Yet, I did not really like the idea of going to the Wasilla Sports Center to wait around for who knows how long just to photograph Sarah Palin when I've got so much to do.

And yet - I keep a blog on Wasilla. There is simply no way around it - news-wise, notoriety-wise, famous-wise, celebrity-wise if not wise-wise, Sarah Palin is simply the biggest name ever to come out of this town - or this state.

I figured that maybe it was time to break down and go get a photo of her.

But, I told Melanie and Charlie, I did not want to go over there carrying one of my big, professional-looking, DSLR cameras. I had read the stories about media people being denied access at some of her Lower-48 book signing events.

Such a camera would immediately brand me as "professional." I feared I might be turned away.

So it would be a job for the pocket camera. But the light in the Sports Center is horrible. Low and of atrocious color quality. I did not think that the G10 would do a very good job with it.

But I had read good things about the s90 and low light; I had seen some excellent samples.

So that was the camera that I needed. Sarah Palin book signing or no Sarah Palin signing, I had been wanting to get that camera.

But I was still too broke to buy it and could not afford to take the time to go to Anchorage, anyway.

Margie went to town yesterday with Caleb and when they got home, she handed me a gift-wrapped package and told me I had to open it, now.

"I can't wait until Christmas?" I asked.

"No!" she said. "Open it NOW!"

So I did. It was an s90 - a gift from Melanie and Charlie. And so, to test it out, I shot the above three pictures at 1600 ISO, jpeg, because I had not figured out how to make it RAW.

I told you that I kept some pictures of Kalib in reserve from last Sunday. Here, he has just thrown a squishy ball to Melanie. What a great stretch she made to catch it!

Then, to amuse Kalib, she put it on her head.

To amuse him even further, she bounced it off his head.

And then of all things, today, after I photographed Sarah Palin with the s90 pocket camera, I pulled up to the drive-through at Metro Cafe.

Carmen handed me two more punch cards.

An anonymous lady had come into the store and bought them for me, she said. Carmen had begged her to share her name, but she would not.

"You're rich!" Carmen exclaimed. "A lot of people come in and tell me they love your blog. They're all women! I'm jealous!" 

Anonymous lady - a HUGE thank you!.

So this evening, I finally found a little tree in our backyard that would do. Here it is.

So, what about the picture of Sarah Palin?

Look - I got to bed at 4:30 AM Tuesday and then woke up just a few hours later. Now it is 2:07 AM Wednesday. I need to go to bed. I need some sleep! It will take me some time to put the Sarah Palin book signing entry together.

I will do it tomorrow.

I know - the news value will be all gone by then. So it won't be news, just a record of what I saw.

Tomorrow I will put Sarah Palin in this blog.

Unless I decide to do it after I get up Wednesday morning. That could happen.

Either way, I will probably have all kinds of people yelling at me afterward - from both sides of the Palin fence.

As for my fear that my pro-camera might have kept me out, you will see that fear was justified.

The blogger Gryphen tells how he was banned from the event.

I pedal into the graveyard and am surprised to happen on Wasilla's former mayor - this individual who put us into our house on Sarah's Way

I have pedaled by the Wasilla graveyard on Aspen many times, but, until today, never into it. Today I did and was surprised to come upon this grave first thing: Charles Howard Bumpus - Charlie Bumpus. Mayor Charlie Bumpus. Were it not for this man, perhaps my family and I would never have lived in Wasilla at all.

Lisa would probably not even exist, because where else but inside this house could circumstance have brought Margie and I together at just the right moment to conceive her? 

We met Charlie Bumpus a little more than a year after we had rolled into Alaska, homeless and jobless. By then, I had a marginal income, plus the first Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend and the state had a low-interest, guaranteed, loan program to help first time home buyers on the struggling side to purchase a house. Charlie Bumpus had come up with a brilliant scheme on how to bring these home buyers to him.

Even with the state program, a house like the one we are in would have been out of reach, but Bumpus figured out that if he created a subdivision, then took orders for five houses at a time, he could build at package prices, lower the cost and make them affordable to more people and thus make a good profit himself.

So we drove out from Anchorage and met him in a downtown Wasilla devoid of fast food joints and chain stores. He was tall, slender and freckled; he had blond, curly, hair and was highly animated and energized. Soon, as we followed, both desperate and fearful to keep up, he sped at an insane speed down Lucille Street, which in those days was a narrow, windy, gravel, road, kicking up gravel, dust, and stones. Each time he rounded a curve, it looked like we was about to slide off the road. I could feel the tires slip a bit as we rounded those same curves behind him. It was easy to imagine that we might soon fly right off the road.

Finally, we reached Ravenview Subdivision, # 1, where we transferred to his car. Charlie drove us through the gravel streets past empty lots of birch, spruce and cottonwood that stood over a spongy, mossy forest floor and then gave us an inside tour of the few model homes he had already built.

"I'm not doing this for the money," he insisted. "I'm doing it so that one day I can drive through here with my daughter, show her a thriving neighborhood and tell her, 'your dad built this!'"

We chose a lot on Sarah's Way, picked the cheapest of the three-bedroom home models, looked at linoleum samples, cabinets, sinks, refrigerators, showers, toilets, ovens, woodstoves and such and chose what we wanted.

We then signed the papers, knowing full well that we had just wasted his time and ours. We knew the state was not going to approve us for the program.

But the state did. And here we are. 

Bumpus quickly rose to become one of Wasilla's most important residents, famous not only for his business skills, but his talent as a saxophone player. He ran in races and participated in other sports. 

He was fit and prosperous. Life looked good for him. In 1985, he was elected Mayor of the City of Wasilla. Less than a year later, at the age of 45, Mayor Bumpus suffered a sudden heart attack and died - right on the 15th birthday of his daughter, Sarah.

I wonder how many times he had driven her down the street that he named for her? Our street? Did he swell with fatherly pride as he drove her past our house? Did she feel daughterly adoration toward him? 

And what would he have thought of Sarah Palin, who, in 1996, became the third mayor to succeed him? If he had finished his term and had then been relected, the whole political landscape of Wasilla would have played out differently than it did. Would Sarah Palin have even become Mayor? Would anybody, outside of a few locals, even know her name?

So today I pedaled into the Wasilla graveyard and came immediately upon his headstone. It was a modest headstone, for one of such wealth and prestige.

A little further, I happened upon a cherub.

Just beyond that, I found a married couple waiting for three of their four children to join them. The other already has.

What did this mean? Was it a child's grave? Or an adult, who was loved by some who imagined this to be the way he had lived as a child? Or was he, perhaps, a fan of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer?

I saw some graves that were definitely children and, just as I did these, I photographed them as I pedaled past. But I didn't post the pictures.

Out in the trees, I saw the Virgin Mary looking at me.

A cherub, bathing nude in the sun.

In the upper graveyard, the new part, devoid of trees, I again saw Mary.

They seemed to rise from the ground as ghosts, and I could not even read their names. I wondered about their origins and how it was that they came to live in Wasilla, and if some of the many people of the old Russian faith that I see around here - the women in their long skirts and head scarfs, the men in their plain clothes - descend directly from them?

Since this was a bicycle shoot, I had resolved not to get off my bike or the trail, but I compromised, because I wanted to see this couple closer up, as individuals. I laid my bike down at the edge of the grass and walked over. 

This is he.

And this is she.

Can you see how much work I have ahead of me, if I am to meet my goal of finding the soul of Wasilla? 

So far, I have done very little. Given Margie and my needs to survive, coupled with all the work I still want to do outside of Wasilla, it seems so impossible, but I believe that I am going to do it.

That means that one day fairly soon, before I join them, I must get to know these two, at least a little bit.

I then picked up my bike and pedaled home.

Cocoon mode* - day 15: leaf melts frost, commode goes down Church, reaction to Sarah Palin's big China speech, a tooth is pulled; I blow it

This morning, there was a leaf on my windshield. It had melted a patch of frost.

As I drove down Church Road, I saw a commode coming the other way.

On Lucille, I saw this group of children waiting for their school bus.

The big talk all day in Wasilla, all over Alaska and it seems the whole USA and the world has been Sarah Palin and her big speech in China. I've visited the other blogs and online news outlets and everybody is going on about it.

Me, I'd rather show you this car driving by Wasilla Lake, as I drive the other way.

Margie lost a filling and came down with a terrible toothache. Jacob and Lavina took her to Anchorage with them and dropped her off at the emergency room of the Alaska Native Medical Center. When she was done, she called me and I headed in to pick her up. I came upon this gentlemen right here in Wasilla, at the stoplight at the intersection of the Parks and Palmer-Wasilla highways.

I have immortalized him for posterity beyond his mortal days and he does not even know it.

If you know him, perhaps you could tell him.

After she called me, Margie had to wait for an hour for her pain-killer prescrption, so the timing was just about perfect. Her tooth had to be pulled and she was in tremendous pain. She took one of two pills, but it did no good. The other pill had to be taken with food, but her mouth hurt her so bad she could not stick anything in it.

Poor woman! She has spent so much of this year suffering pain. So much! Damnit!

After I got her home, she managed to swallow some Saltine crackers. Then she took the other pill. The pain eased off a bit after that.

As for me, despite the increased number of pictures in this entry, I am still in cocoon mode. It's just that I burned out tonight. Completely. I could not do another lick. So I decided to watch a movie with Margie, something that we have not done much of together in quite awhile - although she has been watching movie upon movie upon movie, because of her injury. But tonight all she wanted to do was take her Vicodin and go to bed.

When I was recovering from my injury, I hardly watched any TV at all. I read books, and I learned to use the pocket camera, took pictures with just one hand and with that same hand pecked away at my laptop computer. I also slept a lot. It was amazing how much I slept. I miss sleeping like that.

And then one night I went to bed and I could not sleep at all. I threw away my pain killers, but still this condition persisted for a couple of months. It was awful. And now I sleep but I still don't sleep much and I am tired 100 percent of the time.

Oh, how I ramble! This is because I am burned out and don't know what else to do.

I did not want to watch a movie by myself, so I came out here, made this blog entry and since I could not work, put in a couple of more pictures than I should have, being in cocoon mode. I still left some out, though. Some good ones - even better than the ones I put in.

I am tired of working everyday. Every day! The whole damn summer passed and I did not get to take one break and do one damn fun thing (although I do have fun with my work, sometimes, especially when I was on the Arctic Slope) but I have got to get this job done.

It doesn't feel like I ever will, but I have got to.

And then I need to blow out and go to Mexico or Hawaii or Argentina or someplace for a few days. I've just got to! Brazil would be okay. I could dance upon the equator. If some of those women that you always see pictures of, undulating their way through the Mardi Gras, were to dance upon the equator at the same time as me, that would be okay.

Even when you are married and love your wife, who may or may not be with you, depending on whether she wants to go or not, it is good to watch women dance upon the equator.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I am not going to Brazil when this project is done. I will be lucky if I can make it to Glennallen. And any woman who tries to dance outside there had better be well-bundled, or she will turn into a popsicle.

I'm not going to proof read this damn thing, either, so if there's any mistakes, that's just too bad. I probably wouldn't catch most of them, anyway. 

Holy cow! My email just pinged. It was an Anchorage Daily News update: Former Anchorage Mayor George Sullivan has died. Oddly enough, the sharpest memory I have of him is of him sitting in a big car in the parking lot of the Sullivan Arena, named for him even before he died.

I must have photographed that moment, but who knows where the image is?

My condolences to the family and all those who loved him.

Well, he just kept rambling.

Not Mayor Sullivan - he's done rambling. Me, I'm the one who kept rambling. But I will stop one day, too.

But not today.

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.

Oh, hell! On the very day of the latest Sarah/Levi absurdity, I see two Wasilla dogs in my mirror, a Wasilla black cat peeks over my monitor

Oh, hell! How can I live in Wasilla, publish a blog on Wasilla, and, as much as I want to, utterly ignore the latest absurdities to originate in my town and rock the nation? Rock the world, I guess. For what is more important than Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston? So, reluctantly, I will discuss the matter - but first I will discuss these two dogs.

I was so pressed today that I decided not to take a coffee break, but to just sit here at my computer and work right through it, but, when 4:00 o'clock struck, I could not take it any longer and so I jumped up and headed to the car.

It is a good thing, too, because if I had not, I would not have spotted these two dogs. I suspect that, even with all the work that I did today, my most important accomplishment was to spot these dogs - or rather, to photograph them, which I most certainly would not have done had I not spotted them.

I was going very slow at the time, for I had reached the corner where I planned to do a "U" and then head back to the house, when just ahead of me, I saw these two looking at me, like they were mean or something. My pocket camera was lying on the passenger seat, turned off, and I had not taken a single picture all day.

"I don't think that I will take this one, either," I said to myself. "I've got no time to fool with dog pictures today."

But then, as I started to make the turn, the dogs ran off to the side and behind me a bit, then turned and charged in my direction. Suddenly, I could see that they were about to dash into a point of reflection in my mirror and it looked like it could be interesting.

But the damned pocket camera was lying on the seat, turned off, and as much as I like it, there is nothing fast about that camera. In a panic, I picked it up, turned it on, and tracked the dogs as I waited for the lens to come out. Finally, the lens was out, the dogs were charging toward the field of view of the mirror, I aimed and...

Bam!

Quick draw artist!

Oh, hell. Sarah and Levi. What can I say that hasn't already been said on cable TV and online news outlets and blogs by the thousands... tens of thousands?

I am really getting tired of this show. It is disgusting and pitiful. It is America at its worst. American politics, American media... at its worst. And today, I once again heard my town referred to as a place of hillbillies!

Hillbillies!? I have tried to correct this notion before. I will now try again. Look around this place. What do you see? Hills??? Little tiny hills? The kind of hills that billies come from?

No! Mountains! Grand and beautiful mountains.

We are not hillbillies. We are mountainbillies.

How many times must I correct this misperception?

And me, my name is Bill. It is not William, but Bill. I am a mountainbill.

Oddly enough, as I read the material from Vanity Fair today, I found myself feeling some pity for our former governor. Do not misunderstand me - I have been appalled at her statements and actions since she first stepped onto the national stage and fibbed about her role in the so called "Bridge to Nowhere" fiasco. Her "death panel" lie was just... and worse yet, it struck paranoia, got traction and derailed the debate, making an honest discussion impossible - at least for a time. Nothing has disturbed me more than the way she lathered her children in fat, threw them into the lions den and then screamed, "mean, mean, mean lions - why do you devour my children and not Barack Obama's?"

And the way she has pandered to the extreme, to that element of society that spawns those who carry guns to Presidential gatherings - not to protect themselves, not to hunt, but to frighten and intimidate those who disagree with them. It has, quite simply, been a horrible performance.

But when I read the Vanity Fair article, I felt sorrow for her, pity. She struck me now as a tragic figure, a person thrown into a situation that could only lead her through brief euphoria and then into sorrow and suffering, into pain. Genuine, true, pain. In Levi's words, I could see that she is feeling pain. She may be willfully blind to the cause, but pain is pain and I hate for anybody to feel the kind of pain that I believe she must now suffer.  And she is going to feel more pain, because this fantasy that John McCain threw her into is crumbling and is going to continue to crumble, until there is nothing left of it and then what does she have?

A few birthers shouting, "Sarah Palin, we love you!"?

Her good father, perhaps - and by the observations of my children who have declared him to be the best substitute teacher they ever had I can only conclude that he is a good man - to put his arm around her and say, "I love you, daughter." That, at least. I hope she will have that.

So yes, I felt sorrow for her.

John McCain is the one I blame.

He should have known better. He did know better. I once greatly admired the man, as I once loved Sarah Palin. That has all been destroyed and it is John McCain's fault, even more than it is Sarah Palin's. He thought that he had discovered a very clever way to take the female vote away from Barack Obama and that was all that mattered to him.

The competency, the preparedness, of the person who could so easily become his successor meant nothing to him. He just wanted to win, whatever the potential cost to the nation for which he had sacrificed five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war.

For those of you whose feelings I may have now hurt, or have caused you to seeth in anger, sorry about that, but this whole show grows ever more ridiculous by the day and I just want it to end.

For awhile, it had some entertainment value, but now it is just old and disgusting.

Anyway, I was working on photos at my computer when my good buddy Jimmy, this wonderful black cat who is as honest as the Arctic summer day is long, peeked over my monitor and looked at me.

That made me feel pretty good.

Update: I think I need to make a little clarification. This statement, "as I once loved Sarah Palin," has caused some confusion. No, I have never cast a single vote for Sarah Palin in my life. I voted for Tony Knowles for Governor. I was too leery as to what her position would be on certain issues of great importance to me, such as Alaska Native sovereignty, self-governance and hunting and fishing rights. So how could I have once loved her? 

That's easy. She came into office on the heels of Governor Frank Murkowski and immediately began to undo many of his bad actions. In those early days, it was Democrats, moreso even than Republicans, who were singing her praises, who were calling her "a breath of fresh air." So if readers who were not in Alaska then have seen only the Sarah Palin that emerged following John McCain's ill-fated decision, try to understand that you are seeing a completely different person than the one who we saw back then.

She was not promoting hate speech, she got along better with Democrats then she did Republicans, but just about everybody liked her - hence those 90 percent favorable ratings that you used to hear about. It was easy, in those first days, to imagine that as she moved around the state and learned more about the people out there that her misguided views on the issues that I have mentioned could evolve and become more enlightened.

This did not happen, as we saw when she nominated Wayne Anthony Ross to be attorney general. That was kind of like if she had been governor of Montana in 1875 and had nominated General George Armstrong Custer to be attorney general.

Nor does the fact that I find it in me to feel pity and sorrow for her mean that in my mind she is absolved for the hatred and distortions that she has promoted. She has encouraged and incited some very dangerous people and, when they have stood before her and shouted out death threats to the man who is now President, she spoke not one word of admonishment. And should any of those who listened to her and were encouraged by what she said ever attempt to take such an action, she will not be innocent. So pity and sorrow is not the same as absolution.

"Bare-breasted young woman" draws bigger cyber crowd than "Sarah Palin" - and there are kites, a crash, crutches, motorcycles and dogs, too

The crash actually came first, but the kite image is both more pleasant and striking, so I begin with it. The lady flying the kites is Garen, and I found her on the Anchorage Park Strip, after I dropped Margie off for her therapy, passed the crash and stopped by the camera repair store only to find out they did not have the screws that I needed.

All three of the kites above her are Garen's and she was flying them by herself - and she was trying to launch two more. "Oh, yeah," she said, "I can fly five kites at once. I do it all the time."

She started flying kites on the park strip about two years ago, after she moved here from Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast, where kite flying is a much bigger thing than it is in Anchorage.

"It's very soothing to fly kites," she told me. "I can do it all day. I fly them in the winter, too. You should come back then."

I was curious as to what she thought of The Kite Runner, but she had not seen the movie or read the book. She had not even heard of either. She flies kites, she doesn't go to movies about flying kites, but I recommended the movie so maybe she will watch it now.

I don't know if she ever got the other two kites up so that five were flying at once, because I had to go back to the Alaska Native Medical Center to pick Margie up from her therapy.

As for the crash, I have no idea how badly the victim was hurt, or if there was more than one victim or if it was a man or woman, a child or teen. I just don't know.

I drove by and that was it. 

The crash is not mentioned in the online edition of the Anchorage Daily News, so one might want to conclude that the injuries were not that bad, because if they had been life-threatening, the accident most likely would have been reported.

But my injury 14 months ago was not life-threatening; it did not merit a write-up in the paper and neither did Margie's two this year.

Yet, the impacts upon our lives have been tremendous. So I feel for whoever it is that is being pulled out of the car and put on the stretcher, because it's a mighty big thing to him or her.

Everything might be different now.

Margie was pleased with her first session of therapy. She was especially pleased that the first thing that her therapist did was to take away her old crutches and get her some new ones, because, as it turns out, those old crutches were a good two inches too short.

This guy was smoking a cigarette when we pulled up next to him at a red light and he let loose with a big puff of smoke and even in the shadows of his car it looked quite dramatic. So I readied my pocket camera and waited for him to blow another one, but he never did.

I suspect these boys are cross-country racers, from one or another of the high schools in Anchorage. 

I was glad to get out of that city and so headed towards home and then along came these guys on their motorcycles.

We stopped at the post office in Wasilla, but before I went in to get the mail, I took a picture of myself with this dog, who was very angry. Margie gave me the cup and told me to throw it in the garbage so I did.

When I came out of the post office, this dog was there. The man said that he was a very good dog and he told me his name, but I have forgotten.

So I just call him, "Pooch," or "Poochie."

Hey, Pooch! Here, Pooch!

Poochie, Poochie, Poochie!

Concerning the salacious title of this post, readers will recall how I earlier conducted a test that confirmed that merely by putting the words, "Sarah Palin" into a blog title, I could cause my readership to soar - even if the post had nothing at all to do with Sarah Palin.

Yesterday's post brought in even more readers then did the "Sarah Palin" experiment. I figure it was because my title included these words, "bare-breasted young woman."

I wonder what will happen today?

To be precise, the numbers were: "bare-breasted": 6,982,490,324 unique hits; "Sarah Palin": 6,783,814,293 unique hits. You can see that it was close.*

*It is possible that I might have under-reported my numbers ever so slightly, so as not to embarrass my competition out there in blog space, but the ratio of "bare-breasted" hits to "Sarah Palin" hits is correct.