Smoked salmon, Trevor Study # 5 and the flight to Barrow; Aarigaa Java (Good Coffee) with the temperature closing in on 40 below

The lady at the baggage counter informed me that the current temperature in Barrow was -33, and then I went through security where a huge man with gigantic hands patted me down. Frankly, I would have been less uncomfortable if it had been a petite woman with small hands.

I then continued on through the concourse toward Gate C-4, when I saw Janey coming in the opposite direction. We stopped to give each other hugs and then she pulled a packed of king salmon, smoked Yup'ik style, out of her bag and gave it to me.

Janey had been in Bethel, where someone had given her a bunch of salmon. When she learned that I was going to Barrow, she wanted to come, too, but she was going south.

The kid sitting by the window is Trevor, who graduated from Wasilla High with Caleb. Over the past few years, I have happened upon him a number of times at airports and in villages where he has gone to work on construction projects.

Even before I started this blog, I kept a photo journal, so I always photographed him and put him in it.

I have enough photos of Trevor to start calling him a study. So I will call this, "Trevor Study, #5" - five being a number I just picked out of the air, because I really don't know how many times I have photographed him so far.

He was on his way to Wainwright, via Barrow, to work on the ongoing water and sewer project there.

I wonder where "Trevor Study, #6" will be photographed?

These two board in Anchorage. They will debark in Fairbanks.

The flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks is only 40 minutes, so they offer you a choice of only two beverages, water or orange juice. I went for the water. I was parched, so I was glad to get that water.

We dropped the Fairbanks people off, picked up a few dozen more passengers, then headed on to Barrow. Now we are about to get off. I am sorry, but I have forgotten their names. 

I join my fellow passengers and debark in Barrow, where the temperature is still - 33. I am a little disappointed. I had hoped it would be colder.

People come from all over the world to drive Taxi's in Barrow. I have had drivers from Latvia, the Middle East, Korean, Phillipines - from all over. This fellow is from Asia and had a strong accent, but I don't know what country.

He dropped me off here, at Roy Ahmaogak's house. Roy is my host and that is his dog, Dawson, who has been around for a long time.

In the summer, Dawson jumps in the boat and goes to caribou and fish camp.

 

This morning when I got up, it was still -33, but then temperature started to drop. I took this picture at 12:30, as I walked to lunch at Osaka, eager to order Bento Box #3, which comes with three pieces of sushi, Terriyaki chicken, miso soup, rice, and a wide array of tempura vegetables and shrimp, plus a pot sticker.

About 3:30, I headed over to Aarigaa Java. "Aarigaa" is the Iñupiat word for "excellent, superb - very good."

"Hi Bill. You want your Americano?" Thelma asked when Noe drove us up to the window. Thelma does not forget, even though it has been six months since I last came to this window.

By now, the temperature was approaching -40 and still dropping.

This caused me to feel better about things.

In the evening, I took a short walk and photographed the steeple of the Utgiaqvik Presbyterian Church. I brought my big DSLR's on this trip, but I did no photography work today so I never got them out.

I stuck with the pocket camera.

No, it can't match the DSLR's in so many ways, but I love the pocket camera. It is so much fun.

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 and his fellow patients at the vet; Art blows the snow away; linemen and At&t iPhone limbo

These are symptoms that an aging cat with thyroid problems can be expected to exhibit: voracious appetite, gorges food, vomits often, powerful thirst, becomes very vocal, meows more than ever, once-beautiful fur coat becomes ratty and ragged.

I learned this from Dr. Gerald Nance of the Wasilla Veterinary Clinic, seen here giving Royce a good look-over.

Royce is a bit nervous, but he enjoys attention and he is getting it.

Whoa! Maybe a little bit too much attention! Royce gets his temperature taken.

The only way to know for certain that Royce has a thyroid problem is to take a blood sample and get it analyzed, for several conditions. So Dr. Nance took Royce into the backroom and got a sample taken. We should know by Friday.

Up front, a tiny patient named "Teddy Bear" waited in the arms of a clinic receptionist.

And a dog named "Gunner" waited his turn. I wonder what kind of guns he uses, and how does he shoot a gun, as he lacks both thumb and fingers?

Or could his name be "Gunnar," not Gunner?

It could be, I suppose.

That's what they teach you in "Newspaper Reporting 101":

"Always ask how the name is spelled - never assume." A boy's name might sound like "Jim" to you, but it might actually be, "Gym."

And no boy named "Gym" wants to see his name in print spelled as "Jim."

But this is not a newspaper. This is a blog. The rules for blogs are different than newspapers. In fact, there are no rules for blogs. A blogger can do whatever he pleases.

And no dog that I have ever met gives a whimper how you spell it's name. Call it what you will and it will still wag its tail if it likes you and growl at you if it doesn't; maybe even bite you.

Gunner wouldn't bite. He would just shoot.

Unless he is Gunnar. In that case, he has no need for guns.

Still, at some point, I think I should adopt that old newspaper standard when it comes to the spelling of names, dogs included.

And this is Buttercup, who is not sick at all, but just hangs out at the clinic with her people.

Gunner(ar) goes in to get checked up.

Shortly after I returned Royce to the house, I took my walk. I took a picture of my hand, just as an exposure check. I had no intention of putting this image in this blog, but, what the heck. Surely, this is a picture I should give the entire world the opportunity to gaze upon.

I will probably win a big prize for it.

I walked and walked without seeing another person. And then I saw snow blowing. It has not snowed here since well before Christmas, but the winds of the past three days have blown snow around, sometimes putting it back from where it had already been removed.

So Art removes the snow from his driveway again.

"It's practically as hard as concrete," he told me.

That's what a driving wind does to snow - it makes it hard, so that you can walk right on top of it without breaking through. 

On my coffee break, I saw this lineman at work in the face of Wasilla's own little "Big Ben." Notice how the clock says 4:15 and look how light it is. The light is coming on fast now. The official sunset time today was 4:12, four minutes and nine seconds later than yesterday.

Remember how a couple of days ago I noted the cold temperatures to the north of here and speculated that they might soon slip down?

So far they have not. On my coffee break, depending on where I was, the temperatures ranged from 13 to 19. It will probably go a degree or two below zero overnight. I just checked to see what the temperatures are in two of my favorite communities:

Fort Yukon is -56.

Barrow is -25, fairly warm for January. Barrow doesn't get as cold as Fort Yukon, though, because Barrow sits at the edge of the ocean and even the Arctic Ocean moderates temperatures a bit.

Still, Barrow can be a lot colder than -25 this time of year. And Fort Yukon can be much colder than -56. Barrow gets cold earlier and stays cold longer. The wind blows more in Barrow, and harder. Still, Fort Yukon gets the colder temperatures. Fort Yukon gets hot, too: 101 degrees. The very coldest places in Alaska are also the hottest - not counting the tops of mountains. It must get colder up there than anywhere else and it never gets hot, but they don't keep official weather stations on the tops of Alaska's big mountains.

And the places that get the most snow are much warmer than the places that don't - like Valdez. The snow piles past the eaves in Valdez, but super-cold temperatures don't happen. I've found both -20 and -24 listed as the record low in Valdez. The wind can really blow in Valdez. 

Anyway, now that I am not going Arizona next week, I am going to go to Barrow instead.

I will tell you what the weather is like when I get there.

There were actually two line men working.

And no, I still don't have my iPhone. I have spent hours on the phone this week, talking to a friendly woman from At&t who genuinely seems to want to get the problem solved, but so far she hasn't been able to.

Each day, she says she will have the problem solved by the end of the day, but when the day ends, the problem is not solved. I still do not have my iPhone.

I could describe the problem as she has described it to me, but it is totally illogical and she doesn't even understand herself why it has played out as it has and I lack the energy to explain.

It's enough to know that I still don't have my iPhone, and I damn well should.

Yet... off and on throughout the day, I have been seeing images coming in from Haiti. It makes me wonder why I am even concerned about such a small matter. In time, it will get worked out.

Probably most people have figured this out by now, but here is the same address that I posted yesterday where people can go to help those in Haiti:

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.

Anonymous coward retracts the insult; on a stultifying, hot, winter day in Alaska, I remember a more agreeable one

To be quite honest, it was not a very good picture-taking day for me. In fact, I think it may have been the worst picture-taking day that I have experienced in months. That is because I spent basically the entire day sitting right here, at my computer, furiously working to finish that little proposal project that I told you about.

As usual, Pistol-Yero interrupted me now and then, as did Jim.

It always annoys me when they do this, but I don't know what I would do if they didn't. Their interruptions are the only thing that keeps me partly sane.

I am happy to say that I just finished that project, at 1:19 AM, pretty early for me when it comes to finishing something, and it is printing to pdf right now.

When I did go out, briefly, I hardly saw anything and if I did and tried to photograph it, I messed up.

This is not from today, but I figure that it is a good lead-in to the next picture, which is from today and is essential to this post, even though it is boring. As this project neared completion, I realized that I was missing a certain image that I wanted to include and so I went looking for it. I found it. This is not it, but this image was in the same folder and, as I say, it makes a good lead-in to today's essential, but boring, image.

This is the essential, but boring image. This is where I first found the car three days ago, sometime after it slid off the road and got stuck. Yes, the very same car that some cowardly, anonymous, person had used to insult and slander me by scrawling "dumbass" into the mud caked on the doors.

I am happy to say that the car has been pulled out and is now gone. The insult has been removed.

Undoubtedly, the anonymous person who scrawled it read yesterday's post. Undoubtedly, that person felt shame and humiliation for ever having slandered me in such a way and so went and removed the epithet.

I thank you, anonymous person, for coming to your senses - and yes, I accept your apology, abstract though it may be.

So my walk was very short and I saw no one. But I did see this Cessna flying overhead. One day... one day... it has to happen... it has to!

It was still stultifyingly hot today. At one point, I saw the thermometer reach 34 degrees. But in the same folder referenced above, I found this image, from three years ago, taken on a much better weather day than today.

For you Celsius people, that is - 32 degrees. The thing to remember is that when a cold snap settles in here, it tends to be 10 to 15 degrees colder out here where we live than in downtown Wasilla. 

I always knew it was colder out here and there was one time when Melanie put a Pepsi thermometer in the yard and it went down to something like -46, but in town the temperatue was in the lower -20's. I was not certain that we could fully trust that Pepsi thermometer, but, since we bought this Ford Escape, the built in thermometer has confirmed these kind of temperature spreads between here and downtown Wasilla.

Oddly enough, on a day like today, when it is warm, I have discovered that it is actually a few degrees warmer out here than downtown.

From the same folder. That whole mall in the background, Cottonwood Creek, is gone now. Target is there instead.

From the same folder.

From the same folder - shoppers leaving Wal-Mart.

From the same folder - raven and stoplight in blowing snow.

And to you who are suffering down in the Lower 48 because of this recent cold snap that has frozen you and warmed Alaska, I am not making this stuff up. In winter, I truly prefer the cold weather to what we are having now.

If I didn't, I would live down there instead of up here.

It makes me feel good when it's cold - as long as I don't freeze, as long as the cold does not overcome me. Once it does, there is hardly anything more miserable. When the cold overcomes you and you become cold, life becomes hell. Yet, I love the cold.

It's not this warm everywhere in Alaska right now. I see that Fort Yukon was -20 today, Barrow -9, but what you have to understand is that, in those places, in January, those are warm temperatures.

Well, I am very tired. I have been playing with pictures and words all day long. I am growing incoherent.

So that's all I have to say.

Tavra!*

*Iñupiaq for "that's all I have to say."