Desperate to live on, winter gives us a 35 degree blast of snow and rain, but spring continues to win; Kalib gives us all a bad scare

Now that I have an iPhone and can listen to the radio on it, I had decided to pedal to Metro Cafe instead of drive. Plus, the weather has been so nice lately, I figured that maybe I could get my coffee and then sit at one of the little tables on the patio.

That way, I wouldn't burn up any gas and I would still get to travel and listen to the news.

But, when I stepped out my front door, I was greeted by a fierce mix of rain and snow, coming down hard. 

So I got into the car and headed to Metro.

I did not shoot a study there, because Carmen was busy with some folks and could not come to the window. Afterward, I drove onto Church Road and this is what it looked like.

Two days earlier, we had been pleasantly shocked by 65 degree temperatures. Now it was 35. In Barrow, this would be outrageously hot for this time of year, but for Wasilla it was on the cool side.

That 91.1 is for KSKA, where All Things Considered was playing.

Church and Spruce.

Down by the park, the same one that I featured Monday, I saw three girls, eager to cross the road. They had probably not expected this storm to hit so suddenly when they set out to walk.

Now they were getting wet - and cold, I suspect.

In some places, the snow began to accumulate.

In other places, it didn't. This is on Schrock, where the temperature was just the same and the precipitation as heavy, but there was no snow in it. Only rain.

Out of curiosity, I circled back to Church and found that it was still coming down as snow there.

Curious lady, Mother Nature.

As I drove, my iPhone rang. It was Lavina. Kalib had become worse. He had blisters in his mouth and could not eat or drink. He was drooling. He was feverish. He was miserable. Jacob was coming home and they were going to take him to the emergency room.

I headed straight home after that, and gave Margie the car so that she could go in and take care of Jobe. I had work to do and so stayed put

Around 8:00 PM or so, I broke from my work to tale a walk. I felt very nervous. I looked at the trees and I could see that buds had become prominent on the deciduous trees.

Very soon, we will see leaves.

Try as winter might to deny it, it has been defeated.

A jogger jogged past me.

I picked my way along the muddy trail.

When I reached home, I saw these two balls on the roof - undoubtedly the work of Kalib, assisted by his Uncle Caleb.

I went into the house and called Margie.

Although we would have to wait 24 hours for the tests that had been run on Kalib to be diagnosed, the news was good. He had taken medication that had removed the pain from his mouth. He was eating, he was drinking, his spirits were good and his energy renewed; he had come home.

Lavina also had blisters in her mouth when she got sick last week, but now she is fine.

I am certain Kalib will be too.

Lavina is now breast-feeding Jobe again.

A free cup of coffee; 65 degrees, four-wheelers, the Little Su, black cat outside, a golf course far away

Just as All Things Considered began on the radio, I pulled up to the window at Metro Cafe yesterday afternoon only to discover that someone had bought me a cup of coffee and a cranberry muffin. She did not leave her name, but remained anonymous. And the day before, I found a gift card waiting for me from Funny Face.

My goodness!

Thank you all!

As Sashana prepared to hand me the cup, she and Carmen posed for:

Through the Window Metro Study, #3.3333333... and so on to infinity

As I drove away, sipping, I saw these two - father and son, perhaps; uncle and nephew, maybe; perhaps just friend and friend, out enjoying the 65 degree weather on a four-wheeler.

Yes. You read me correctly.

SIXTY-FIVE DEGREES!

I thought for a moment that I had moved to The Bahamas.

But it was still Wasilla. I could tell by the four-wheeler dust. Can you believe it? Just a few days ago, the ground surface varied between frozen solid and muck, and now a kid on a four-wheeler can have a blast, kicking up dust.

As I crossed the bridge over the Little Susistna, I saw this man and this young girl walking along the bank.

It turned out that he is Mike and the young girl is his 26-month old daughter, Dagne. They live five miles from the river and this is the first time that they have visited it since before the snow came down in October.

Jimmy also ventured outside for the first time. He kept pawing at the window until finally I relented, but only under the condition that he would remain always in my eyesight.

Chicago observed, but did not follow. In the ten or 11 or 12 years that she has been with us, Chicago has ventured outside exactly once. As I have mentioned before and will someday tell in detail, here or in a book or both, it took us seven weeks and two days to get her back and then she was damn near dead - nothing but a dehydrated bag of bones.

She is fat now.

As eager as he had been to go out, once he got out, Jimmy was spooked. Something out there was frightening him. He refused to leave the porch.

As for Royce, there in the background, I would have been happy to let him out but he never wanted to venture past the window - which is odd for Royce.

I am happy to report that, at long last, he is gaining some weight. Yet, he is still skinny. He eats a ton of food - more than the other three combined, I would say, and it just seems to go right through him.

But he is gaining some weight, so he must be retaining some of it.

It was Caleb that had spooked Jimmy so. Caleb had knocked some balls way back into the trees, at the bottom of the little hill and had gone down to search for them.

Jimmy could not see him, but he could hear him. He did not know what he was.

A bear, maybe.

If Jimmy even know about bears.

I doubt that he does. How would he?

He probably imagined that Caleb was something even bigger and more frightening than the biggest, baddest, bear out there.

From behind my office window, Pistol-Yero calmly observed it all.

This is Caleb this morning. Where do you think he is and what is he looking at?

He is at IHOP. Caleb had to drop his car off at the shop at 8:00 AM. He asked me to pick him up and then he took me to breakfast, his treat. Caleb loves IHOP pancakes, so that's where we went.

Well, he's still looking. At what?

Passing cars, is all I can think of.

Or maybe golf courses, far away, like Pebble Beach, Tucson, or Scottsman's Head.

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.

A little storm blew in just before tax day and came down upon an American bald eagle

I have fallen behind. April 15, tax day, is drawing close to its end and I have not even put up a post yet. It was a fairly eventful day for me. I went to town, had lunch with Melanie, visited with Warren Matumeak, who readers met in yesterday's post as he drummed for Suurimmaanitchuat, and his daughters; drove home, passed a Volkswagen, saw a bit of the Wasilla Tea Party rally.

But I am going to go to bed early tonight and I will wait until I get up Friday morning, April 16, and then I will blog about April 15 and try to have it up by noon, Alaska time; 4:00 PM East Coast. That means that this post will only be at the top of the page for a very short time.

In the meantime, just so the day does not end without me putting up a post, here are a few images from April 14, when a minor storm of no consequence blew in.

In the afternoon, as I headed toward Metro Cafe, I saw these kids walking through it.

I then drove down and crossed the bridge over the Little Susistna River, where I saw a bald eagle sitting in a tree. I was a little irritated with myself, as this was a job that my pocket camera simply was not up to. I wondered why I couldn't keep a DSLR with a long lens in the car, just for occassions like this?

Yet, when I set out to document the world around me with a pocket camera, I know that I can never do with it what I can do with a DSLR, but the goal is to get a picture that is somewhat worthwhile anyway.

So I parked the car and decided to see how close I could get to the eagle.

In places where eagles hang out by the score and more all the time, getting close to them is no problem at all. They will practically let you walk right up to them.

But this is not such a place.

At first, I walked straight toward the eagle and it watched my every step.

Then I turned so that I was not walking directly towards it, but rather at an angle to the tree, but was still closing the distance between it and me with each step. Then I turned back, still at angle to the tree, until I reached a point where something told me that if I came any closer, the eagle would fly.

I raised my pocket camera.

And the eagle flew.

At Family Restaurant, I am reminded of an assignment in my quest to find the soul of Wasilla; a girl squirts ketchup in her face; other moments

When I finally stepped into our room a bit after 5:00 AM to go bed, it was ice cold in there. This is because the five chords of wood that we began the season with is now down to a few sticks, so we had heated the house very conservatively, keeping the bedroom doors closed to hold the heat in the living room and kitchen, which left the bedrooms cold.

Plus, now that it is mid-March and spring draws nigh, the unusually warm weather that dominated December, January and February is gone and the temperature has dropped. I found Margie buried beneath her quilts, sound asleep. Although her knee injuries are much improved, she still must sleep in a bed by herself. Every night, I find myself lonesome for her.

Once I got down to my barefeet and was about to climb into bed, I realized that I needed to medicate Royce, so I did. By the time I was done and ready to finally go to bed, my feet had grown cold. In fact, I was cold all over. I climbed under the covers and waited to warm up.

My body gradually did, but my feet stayed cold. I would fall asleep and then they would wake me up again. Repeatedly. I kept thinking that they would warm up, but they didn't. Finally, after a couple of hours, I got up, put two pairs of socks on and went back to bed.

It didn't help. My feet stayed cold. I kept waking up and a bit after 8:00 AM, I reached a point where I simply could not go back to sleep - although I kept trying until about 8:45. Then I got up and came out here to my office, heated by natural gas, spent a couple of hours on my computer and then headed for Family Restaurant for breakfast.

I had not been there for awhile and I am still waiting for a check that I anticipated receiving last week, so I didn't really have any money to go but I did have a credit card. After staying up almost all night and then not sleeping well, I really needed to go to Family Restaurant for breakfast. Just Family. Nowhere else would do - not even home.

I invited Margie but she did not want to step outside into the cold, not even to pass through the short distance to the car. Plus, although I had been warming the car up for several minutes, she knew that the interior temperature would still be cool, but Caleb had made a fire in the living room so it was warm on the couch. That is where she decided to stay and eat her oatmeal.

When I stepped into the Arctic entry into Family, I saw this gentleman sipping on his coffee, looking right at me through the glass. I did not want to scare him, but it was a scene that I had to photograph and he was agreeable enough and so I did.

Afterwards, I chatted with him for just a couple of minutes and told him about this blog. He asked my name and when I told him, he said, "I've read your blog."

As it turned out, he is Tim Mahoney, son of the late Paul George and Iona Mae Mahoney, whose graves I came upon last summer in Groto Iona, after I pedaled my bike past a bare-breasted young woman and wound up on my knees amidst their graves.

At that time, I gave myself an assignment to learn something about who these two were as part of my quest to find the soul of Wasilla. I have not yet had the time nor have I been organized enough to do so, but I still intend to. Little reminders keep popping up - like my friend, Ron Mancil, appearing as a worker on the Mahoney Ranch, where those horses that I sometimes photograph hang out. Just last week, I received an invitation by email from Matt Mahoney to take a tour of the entire original spread, once summer comes and the snow is gone.

Tim's sister, Paulie, has also been in touch with me and has offered to help.

And today, I found a new reminder in a pair of eyes looking at me over a coffee cup as I entered Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant.

I was surprised when, shortly after I sat down, I saw a waitress who has often waited on me in the past enter the restaurant as just a regular Wasillan. It was Jolene, who you can find waitressing right here. She had told me about her children before, but I had never seen them and now here they were, with her - Javin, Jocelyn and Justice.

They were escorted to the table immediately across the aisle from mine.

Even though I know the names of all the children, and Javin is the little one, I forget which of the two older ones is Jocelyn and which is Justice. The older one took hold of a bottle of ketchup, but she squeezed it too hard and it squirted her in the face.

What kind of Justice is that?

She grimaced as her mother cleaned her face.

There was just enough commotion to catch the attention of the elder gentleman at the next table, who was amused by the whole little mishap.

Then the elder gentlemen visited briefly with young Javin - or perhaps Javen - I really should have followed Journalism 101 practice and asked for the correct spelling, but I wanted my interruption of their meal to be as short as possible so that they could just enjoy their food, along with each other's company.

When I went back to my car, I found this guy and one other, putting up a new sign on the marquee.

At 4:00 PM, I got back in the car and headed towards Metro Cafe for my news break. Michael was out, blowing the new snow out of his driveway. We chatted for a bit. He heads to work at Prudhoe tomorrow, but said when he gets back he will come and get me and we will go to Hatchers and go cross-country skiing together.

I can't believe that I have not been skiing once this entire winter. Last winter, sure, because I was in recovery from my shoulder injury and surgery and it would have been too dangerous. This winter, I have just been too behind and too unorganized, all winter long.

Maybe next week.

On the way to Metro, I drove by this moose, grazing from the Lucille Street bike trail.

Through the Window Metro Study, #392

Carmen, with Shoshanna, who she had just hired to help her out.

This is actually from yesterday, one of the photos that I had planned to use but did not, because I devoted the space to my friend, Vincent Craig.

This is what it looked like on Church Road, as I drove toward the Talkeetna Mountains on my way home. The shortest route would have been for me to turn right, very close to where I took this picture. Instead, I continued straight, then turned left, crossed the bridge over the Little Su and then drove out past Iona Grotto and the Mahoney Ranch.

I looked for Ron but did not see him, so I turned around and came home. That was seven hours ago. I have been here ever since, mostly sitting at my computer but not accomplishing nearly as much as I had intended to.

I will do better tomorrow.