Weak though this winter was, it does not want to die

Yesterday morning, I stepped out the door into the driveway to pick up the newspaper when I saw something that I had not witnessed since I arrived home from the east coast. There were puddles in the driveway, and they were liquid. On all the other mornings since I had returned home, I found the puddles frozen, often solid, top to bottom. 

Usually, they melted before the day ended, just as the snow was doing, but come the next morning, they had always refrozen.

I also saw some pussy willows, their fluffy baby kitty cats expanding rapidly towards the green into which they will soon disappear.

"Do you think its finally going to be spring?" a friendly man at Family Restaurant who introduced himself as Rob asked. Yes, I answered, and I told him about the liquid puddles, but I did not think to mention the pussy willows.

And then, in the afternoon, it started to snow. Big flakes. At the usual time, I got into the car and headed toward Metro Cafe. The external temperature read 32 degrees.

For you in the celsius world, that would be "0."

"Bill!" Carmen exclaimed, when she saw me at the window, "it's winter again!"

Then she, Baranson and Jason posed for Through the Window Metro Study, #22.39.

I am pretty certain that, by this time next week, MOMA in New York will have discovered this image and my financial problems will be solved forever. The money will flow in and Margie and I will spend a lot of time in Mexico, at last able to spend the remaining portion of our lives fishing under the sun, alongside poor people who have spent their entire lives fishing.

Carmen was born in Mexico. She gets that one.

We often laugh about it - the people who work hard all their lives so that they can save up enough money to retire to Mexico and fish.

I drove on, sipping, and saw this lady walking with an umbrella on Church Road.

And at another coffee shop, one that I often frequented before Metro Cafe opened and still sometimes do on Sundays when Metro is closed, I saw someone else buying coffee, or maybe soft ice cream.

I am certain, come the hot days of summer, that, despite our loyalty to Carmen and her coffee, we will still come to Little Miller's for ice cream now and then.

This was a weak, warm, winter. One of the warmest and weakest that I ever remember here. Maybe the warmest and weakest. I don't know. I haven't seen the final statistics. Plus, as warm and weak as it was, sometimes, even much colders winters are interrupted by big, huge, long-lasting South Pacific storms that blow in hard, bring driving rain and temperatures up to 50.

Those storms came, but not with quite the same heat and intensity, so I do know if this brought might have constrained the average from rising as high as it otherwise would have. But most of this winter, it was mighty warm for this area.

Sometimes, the warmest winters are the most reluctant to depart.

Now, as to that button, I had planned to put it up with this post, but I got sidetracked on a different site, where another photographer who thinks that he knows more than he does disparaged pocket cameras and any need to ever use them if one has a DSLR.

I had to defend the honor of the pocket camera.

It's true - technically speaking, all of these pictures would have turned out a bit better if I had used a DSLR instead of a pocket camera, but that is beside the point.

Thanks to that argument, I have no time left to figure out how to put up the button, so it will have to wait.

Jobe on the phone, a biker in the snow, along with other big vehicles; blogging with Jimmy

I can't believe it! It is now already two full weeks since Jobe was born. And I have not laid eyes upon him for 12 days. I have missed him every single one of those days - just as I have missed his big brother, Kalib. As I waited in the drivethrough at Metro today, I heard the text message tone go off in my iPhone.

It was this picture, sent by Lavina.

Jobe is growing so fast and I am missing it all. 

But, weather permitting, Margie and I plan to drive into town after we get up. We will see him again.

Finally, a little new snow. The temperatures are still warm - mid 20's today. Sadly, Laverne is going to take Gracie back to Arizona and the rez on Sunday and unless Nature gets her act together fast, when everybody asks if she froze in Alaska, Laverne will have to say it was warm the whole time she was here.

What fun will that be?

Of course, it's always warm when it snows. It can't snow when the temperature is cold. Maybe we will all get lucky and some cold weather will come just before Laverne and Gracie leaves.

My friends up on the Slope have been experiencing brutal weather lately.

That's what they tell me on Facebook. Nobody has said anything about temperatures. They have just said that it has been cold and windy. And when an Arctic Slope Iñupiat states on Facebook that it is cold and windy, you can pretty much believe its true.

Especially if they say, 

"Alapaah!"

A bit further along, I saw this school bus.

And then this snow plow.

Two nights ago, I mentioned how I was typing away with my good black cat buddy, Jimmy, sprawled across my chest. I also noted that I have had a great deal of time to practice this technique.

So tonight, I started working on my blog and, once again, there was Jimmy, sprawled across my chest, except that this time he was lying on his side.

I decided that I might as well try to photograph the scene, so that my readers will know that I do not lie or exagerate. So here I am, typing, working on this very blog post as Jimmy sprawls across my chest.

And I am taking a picture, too.

This is what is known as "multi-tasking."

Jimmy and I are good at it.

Jimmy sits up to think about things. Jimmy likes to think. He is a thinking cat. He is not quite as deep-a-thinker thinking cat as Thunder Paws was, but still, he is a thinking cat.

He thinks about many things.

He is very bright.

He is a bright cat.

A bright black cat.

He then executes a maneuver that would distract a lesser blogger, but, as you can see, I blog on, undettered. My powers of concentration amaze me.

Jimmy and I, blogging together.

Jimmy. My good black cat buddy.

What a character. What a friend.

How could I even do this blog without him?

The man who owns a '56 Chevy; a school bus goes off the road; dusk horse raises its tail

This is Bill, who lives two houses down Sarah's Way in the opposite direction from the one I took yesterday. Bill owns, rebuilt and maintains a very sharp looking, smooth-running, classic 1956 Chevy that he bought for $100. He painted it black and red/orange and when you see it coming down the road, it catches your eye right away and you wish that you were riding in it, Buddy Holly on the radio, that you were young and had a pretty girl clinging to you, nibbling at your ear, giggling each time she almost makes you crash.

Perhaps next summer, I will build a blog post around that Chevy. I know there is a good story in it.

Almost nine years has now passed since my first black cat, Little Guy, the one who passed straight from his mother's womb into my waiting hands, stepped out the back door on a day with three times as much snow as this one and disappeared.

I was devastated to lose that cat and I went up and down the street, knocking on every door to see if anyone had seen Little Guy.

For weeks afterward, whenever he would see me walking past, Bill would ask me if I had found my cat. He always looked very concerned. I know he was keeping an eye out for that cat.

I still appreciate that.

Bill blows the snow off his driveway.

A cottonwood tree, bent down toward Tamar.

Muzzy and a snowplow.

As I walked one way, this school bus came driving the other. Shortly after it passed, I turned just in time to see its right wheels slip off the shoulder of the road and then slide right into the culvert. 

Anyone who lives up here long enough will do this kind of thing sooner or later, probably a few times.

It can be embarrassing, but it must be worse when you have a busload of students.

One of the students looks out at me.

As St. Bernards do when people get into trouble in the snow, Muzzy comes to help out. Unfortunately, he forgot to bring his little barrel of brandy.

It's a good thing, because the driver shouldn't be touching brandy and the kids were all too young.

If someone had brought a dog harness, we could have hitched him to that bus and he would have pulled it right out.

But nobody had a harness.

I walked on, leaving the bus and kids in it to be rescued by the school district.

Margie is in town with Lavina and Kalib and will be staying with them overnight in their new house. She left some bills on the counter for me to pay. Along the way, I saw this guy on a green snowmachine waiting for a green light so he could cross the road.

When the light changed, the left turn arrow turned green for me, which meant this guy's light was still red. As I began my turn, he gunned his throttle and shot straight across the road directly across my path. Maybe he was not waiting for a green light at all, but only for a gap in the traffic passing in front of him so that he could run a red one.

I believe this falls into the category that Melanie AND Lisa* calls, "soooooo Wasilla!"

This is what it looked like in front of Wasilla Lake. 

This person got stuck on the divider.

A school bus passed by without mishap.

I took my coffee break at the usual time. After I stopped at Metro Cafe, I took the long way home and passed by this horse as darkness drew down. The horse raised its tail and then dropped something.

*updated to include both coiners of the phrase: see Lisa's comment

Three of my neighbors: Tim builds his shop casually, Patty fights off her cancer intently, Michael blows away the snow; umbilical cord discussed at IHOP; coffee-dogs-Kalib

This is my neighbor, Tim, the carpenter who lives kitty-corner across the street. Sometimes, people who in their professions do things for other people have a hard time getting around to doing the same things for themselves.

Some of you who have been with me for awhile have probably noticed that my walls are almost bare. Photos do not hang on them. True, there is one of Kalib when he was little more than a newborn wedged into a cabinet door in the kitchen and another of him crawling with Marty past Muzzy that hangs at the opening to the hallway.

Other than that, there are none at all and these two are only recent developments. Prior to Kalib's birth, in all the time that I have been married, not one photo has hung on my wall.

Not a single one.

Tim is doing a little better in this regard than I. He started work on the shop that you see going up behind him four years ago. There wasn't much visible sign of it until early this summer, when a foundation began to appear.

Now that it is cold and snowy, he built two opposing wall frames just last week. He says the entire shop will be done soon.

Regular readers have already met my neighbor Patty, who I sometimes refer to as "The Fit Lady" because she has always kept herself so busy and fit walking, skiing, biking, sailing and such.

Just last summer, she discovered she had a cancer that the doctor said was terminal - so terminal that it was pointless for him to treat her further. He sent her home to die and said it would happen in just months.

In fact, according to that doctor, she is supposed to be dead right now.

She's not - because after he told her she was finished, she told herself she was not.

As I have reported before, she took up holistic healing and found a doctor who would work with her and give her chemo as she set her mind and dietary intake towards healing.

That doctor now says Patty is a miracle woman. He has her come and talk to other patients who have "terminal" cancers.

She was just tested. The tumors in her colon have all disappeared. Her liver tumor is still there, but is a tenth of its former size.

There are many reasons for her success, she says, including just putting herself "in touch with the universe." She says that sounds corny and strange, but "it's true."

I am sorry that this picture looks so ratty, but I took it at about 4:00 o'clock and it was dark - considerably darker then it appears in this picture. There are cameras that handle this level of darkness pretty well, but not this G10 pocket camera.

They say its successor, the G11, is much improved with low light. When I can, I will get one.

The fact is, this time of year, even in the middle of the day, the light here is pretty dim. We plan to go to Arizona next month and when we first step into the sun down there, it will shock us.

And this is my neighbor, Michael, two houses down, who works in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, two weeks on, two weeks off. I most often see him when I'm riding a bike one way and he is riding the other, or when we meet on skis. He is often with his wife and his children were growing, they would often be with him, too.

Of course, I have not met him on skis for a long time, because after they built Serendipity, I could no longer step off my back porch, take off on my skis and go and go and go and go, because they put the damn subdivision in my way.

And I still have yet to take my first ski since I shattered my shoulder 18 months ago.

But Michael has been skiing - at Hatcher Pass. He says it is wonderful right now.

I told him I am going to try to go up there next week. He said we should go together.

I haven't done anything physical since I put down my bike to attend the AFN Convention and then it had a flat tire and before I could patch it the snow fell.

I don't think I could keep up with him.

"I think you could," he said.

That reminds me - Patty went skiing at Hatcher Pass last week, too.

Here is a bigger snowplow, coming down Lucille.

Here it is again.

This is one of the pictures from yesterday that I did not post because I had to go to bed. I took this picture from my car and when I saw his man, I had no idea what his sign said. I had to stop at a red light and that gave me some time to concentrate on the sign and try to read it, but I simply could not make it out.

I did make out the words, "Happy" and "birthday." So I figured it must be a Christmas message. The fact that he was dressed in red reinforced this idea. I figured maybe he was wishing Jesus a happy upcoming birthday.

But when I pulled the picture into my computer and was able to examine it, I saw that he was actually wishing happy birthday to the US Bill of Rights and that he had singled out the Second Amendment - the right to bear arms - for special good wishes.

To all others who might want to stand on street corners waving signs, let me suggest that you make your letters big and bold and even colorful, so that passers by do not mistake you for Santa Claus - especially if you are going to wear red during the holiday season.

This is also from yesterday, when I was at IHOP. I swear, I was not eavesdropping on these people's conversation, but all of a sudden, in a very animated and amplified voice, so loud that no one anywhere nearby could have missed it, the fellow on the other side of the table blurted out, "when the baby comes out, you just snip that umbilical chord."

Then, speaking just as loudly, the fellow at left said that he had heard that when you cut the umbilical cord -sploosh! - the stuff inside it just comes gushing out to squirt all over you and everything else.

At that moment, my waitress came to my table and laid my ham, eggs, and strawberry-banana pancakes in front of me.

On my walk, this dog ran out of a driveway and took off down the street. Pretty soon, this car pulled out of the same driveway, drove to the dog, stopped, and then the lady got out to catch the dog.

As I pulled up to the drive-through of Metro Cafe yesterday, I was listening to All Things Considered on the radio, where I heard what an important fellow Joe Lieberman is trying to be. He is saying that he is following his conscience. Another person contends that the real argument is how many hundreds of thousands of people will die from lack of good health insurance.

After Carmen opens the window, she tells the beautiful lady on the other side of the counter that I always take pictures of everything, that I even photographed the grand opening of Metro Cafe and that she can find it all on my blog.

Her name is Sherry and the kid wearing the hat is Greg.

Or is he Doug?

I'm pretty sure he's Greg.

If not - Doug, I apologize.

And if by chance he is neither Doug nor Greg, well, hell. I apologize twice.

Sherry and Carmen ham it up for the camera. Today, Carmen told me that Sherry comes in every morning at 7:30 AM. "Just like you come in every day right after 4:00," she added.

I wonder how it happened that Sherry and I came at the same time?

Tamar Street.

Yes, I took Muzzy on another walk.

 

When we got home, Muzzy flopped down in the driveway and began to pull the snow out from between his toes.

And here is Kalib and Margie with two stuffed Muzzies, this evening.

Now I might not see either of them for a few days. The new house is airing out pretty good, so Lavina and Kalib plan to stay in town tomorrow night and Margie is going to go with them. Caleb, of course, works all night.

Party time.

I will get out the cat nip and pop some corn. The cats and I will party like crazy.

I take a walk on a warm, dim and snowy day

I woke up late this morning to discover that it was a warm day - right up near freezing. Soon it started to snow. This is how it looked when I took my walk, a little after 1:00 PM.

As long as it doesn't get any warmer, it will be fine. As I sit down to write this, the temperature stands at 25 degrees. The humidity is 93 percent. I want to note this, because what people always like to say about Alaska is, well, your cold is a dry cold.

And that's true. When it gets truly cold, the air is always dry, because it loses its ability to hold moisture. Moisture freezes right out of it. But when the temperatures rise to warm cold, then we get humidity, too.

Snowmachine rider and dog coming down the Wards Road hill. When I was far away, they kept going up the hill and then they would turn around and come right back down again. I had hoped they would keep it up until I drew close, so that I could get the expression on the dog's face as its legs churned and its little lungs damn near burst, but they didn't.

This was their very last trip down the hill - and this is a tight crop from a much broader horizontal image.

The view from the top of the Wards Road hill.

Now, I have a big task to which I must fully devote myself for at least the next three days, maybe longer. My entries in that time will be very simple, like this one, maybe even simpler.

This makes me a little sad, because the hits to this blog have been steadily on the increase and now I must give some of it up.

Oh, well. When I start back up again, I will hopefully be ahead of where I was the last time I had to stop and restart.

And I do have some big plans for this blog. No resources to do it, but the plans are there and the ideas as to how to go about it have been taking shape.

The resources will come from somewhere. I have no idea where, but they will come.

All I have to do is build it.

Then they will come.

Hmmmm......?