Catchup,* part 5: Margie nearly gets flattened by a rude mother in a truck with her two, beautiful, young daughters

There were several empty handicapped parking spaces near the main entrance to Carr's when we pulled in. Given Margie's condition, we could qualify in some ways, but the fact is we do not have the proper license plate or sticker, so of course we did not park there. No one who does not need those spaces should ever park in a handicapped spot.

Someday, I will post my photo-essay on my late brother, Ron, and you will understand why I am a hawk on this issue. I am learning to control myself, to tell myself that I am not a police officer and that there is nothing I can do about the rude, ignorant, dolts of the world, but I simply get outraged when I see a healthy person with no sticker park in such a spot. In the past, I have unleashed my wrath on more than a few, but now I try just to take a few deep breaths and move on.

Yes, when I post that essay, you will understand.

A big pickup truck was parked in one of the handicapped spaces. I could see no sticker, no license plate - but maybe there was something in the front window that was not visible to me from the back. 

Despite the fact she would be slow, Margie wanted to go into the store and shop for herself and I wanted to sit in the car and listen to All Things Considered on the radio. We were fortunate to find a parking space not far from the door, so I parked and she got out.

As she did, a fairly young woman with two little girls, who appeared to be her daughters, came bounding happily out of Carr's. And I mean bounding. All three were laughing and smiling, the little girls skipped and bounced and the woman moved at a brisk pace to easily keep up with them.

You can imagine my surprise when they climbed into the truck parked in the handicapped space.

That surprise soon turned to helpless terror when the lady backed out at too high a rate of speed - headed straight for my Margie, who was hobbling helplessly on her crutches. I was helpless. I could do nothing.

She missed her by inches.

Then, laughing with the little girls, she drove happily away, oblivious to what she had just about done.

Damn!

This was from one of those days when I got up late and groggy and had to go eat at Family Restaurant. It is nearly noon and that is why the sun is so high. If I had been there at a typical breakfast time, it would have been dark.

Family Restaurant.

When Kalib was a brand new baby, this waitress was delighted to see him. She oohed and aahed and cooed and all that kind of stuff. I can't wait until we can bring the next baby in and see how she reacts to him/her.

Old, wrecked, cars passing through Wasilla. Were they part of the Clunkers program? Or just old, wrecked, cars?

Did anybody ever make love in any of them?

How many hamburgers and hot dogs were eaten within?

Did anybody ever die in one?

Or break their neck and never walk again?

Or hit a man on a motorcycle and break his neck, so that he never walked again?

I find myself stopped behind a school bus.

On one side of me, this dog, Tequilla, barked furiously...

..simultaneously, on the other side, this dog barked, observed by two cows. Barking dogs, in stereo.

A typical scene from Schrock Road during a coffee break.

Jacob and Royce.

*Although I have scheduled this to appear Thursday, November 12, I actually made this post on Thursday, November 5. There are two reasons for this: 1: whatever bug it is that has got me down has left me unable to concentrate to the degree that I must to do my work. 2: The project that I have been working on is very nearly done, but I have never brought such a project to a close without going full-bore, night and day, on it at the end, distracted by no other tasks, including this blog.

So, before I go to bed, I am going to put up several days worth of posts from photos that I have recently taken but have not used. Then, for the next several days, I will not blog, I will stay away from the internet as much as possible and just bear down on getting this job done - but my posts will keep coming.

I think Kalib with get three of those posts, two at the very least.

Addendum - one image from today:

A shadow self-portrait. This is not early morning, it is not late afternoon - it is high noon. This is the season of long shadows.

Cocoon mode* - day 14: Three shots of the road through a rainy window

I was driving along, the temperature was 38 degrees and the rain was coming down hard, when I noticed that every now and then, a drop of rain would seem to shatter when it struck my windshield. It could only shatter if it had ice crystals in it. I thought maybe it did, I thought maybe it was a soggy snowflake. 

I could not be certain, as immediately after it would happen my windshield wiper would sweep it away before I could examine it.

So I turned the windshield wiper off, to see if I could determine whether or not the raindrops that seemed to shatter were actually soggy snowflakes.

And then I noticed that everything looked pretty neat, with the windshield wipers off, so I took a few pictures.

I know... looking at these little images this must look insanely dangerous, but the road was clearly distinguished to my eye even if not to the pocket camera and I never took my eye off of the road, which, furthermore, I saw in three dimensions rather than the two that you see here, so don't get upset and start calling me a lunatic. In fact, I had both hands upon the steering wheel, as I had braced the back of the pocket camera against the top front of the wheel in such a way that my fingers pulled the camera tight against the wheel even as my thumb gripped it.

So calm down. 

Just before I pulled into my driveway, a drop shattered that did, indeed, appear to have ice crystals in it. However, before I could determine for certain, other raindrops came and swept it away. I'm hoping that it snows down here in the valley tonight, but it probably won't.

I heard on the radio that it is supposed to snow in Colorado tonight.

That would be awful.

According to Jason Ahmaogak's Facebook wall, it snowed in Wainwright a couple of days ago and everything was freezing up. He was excited - pretty soon he will be snowmachining.

*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.

"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.

I take a trip to Anchorage - bikers blast past me, cloud dancers dance atop the clouds

I had a to take a disk of photo proofs into Anchorage, to deliver to a client. As I returned on the Parks Highway, two men on a Harley and Kawasaki blasted past me so fast and loud that I could not even react to snap a frame. If this is the case, you must wonder, then how did I get this picture of them in my rearview mirror?

It was in a highway improvement construction area, where the speed limit was 55 and signs warned that double fines would be given to all speed violators. This fellow was in the lead. When he had put about 300 yards between he and I, his friend right behind him, he suddenly braked and began to pump his hand up and down over the road, his fingers spread out and his palm facing the pavement.

There was a cop ahead, sitting off to the side of the road, waiting for double-fine candidates.

The other biker slowed down, waved a thank you and then both pulled right, out of the fast lane and into the slow. Now I passed them, which did not worry me because I was doing 55. Now, they could not have been going more than 45. 

A bit of an overreaction, I thought.

But maybe they felt like cop targets.

Maybe they are cop targets.

They stayed behind me for a few miles, then, still in the 55 zone, decided that no more cops lie in wait ahead and, once again, blasted past me. I was now pushing my luck, doing 59. It felt like I was sitting still when they passed by.

Hey, Sandy - I bet you would like a bike like this, wouldn't you? What a sight you would be, roaring through Bangalore, the fabric of your saree - cut and tailored especially for motorcycle riding - rippling in the wind. 

And just a little bit before, back in Anchorage, I had to stop behind these guys while they worked out whatever problem it was with the driver of the car in front of them that had caused them to stop.

I think they performed a good deed, that the driver ahead had experienced car problems of some kind and they got him going again.

This is pure speculation on my part, because right after I stopped, they got back in the car and, flying the Stars and Stripes with the Confederate Flag painted in triplicate on their roof, hood and trunk, set back off to wherever it was they were going.

And shortly before that, I was passing near the Anchorage Park Strip when I looked up and saw two people dangling below a hang glider.

"What kind of idiots are these?" I wondered, even as I wished that I could be up there with them.

Then I saw that it was not idiots at all, but fabric people, cloud dancers, dancing with the clouds from the tail of a kite.

And this was even earlier, in Wasilla, as I waited at the stoplight at the corner of the Parks and Palmer-Wasilla highways to change so that I could continue on to Anchorage.

Oh, no! The day just ended and I did not make a post! I feel as though I have squandered my whole life away

Here's why I didn't make a post - because this damn guy blocked the road in front of me and I had to sit here for 59 hours today and so I did not get a chance to post.

Actually, that's not true. I would like to blame him, but I can't. What happened was, all day long I have been working on a little project that I targeted to complete at 4:00 PM. I am nowhere near completion and now I hope to have it done by 4:00 AM.

But I doubt it.

And then, just before midnight, I could not find a picture that I needed and then my computer froze and then I had to do a restart and by the time everything was up and running again, today was over and tomorrow had begun.

So I did not make a post today, and now it is tomorrow, so I can never make a post today. Yet, it is today and here I post.

I did break away for just a little before today became yesterday and I crossed the bridge over the Little Su, doing 197 mph, and as I came around the corner, this is what I saw in front of me.

I had to act lightning fast and stop on the spot, or I would have crashed into this thing, been killed and I never would have taken this picture.

We photographers live dangerous and challenging lives.

I should also note that I spent the entire day by myself, I had no conversation with anyone, except for the cats and all they wanted to do was argue. They outwitted me every time.