I get my work done with a little help from my friend

It is now 1:49 AM. I am in my office. I first came in and sat down to work about 10:00 AM this morning and, except for a couple of small breaks, I have been in here ever since. This is pretty typical for me, so I decided its time to show this side of my life, right here, in Wasilla, Alaska.

I have been printing pictures from Kivgiq that will hang on a wall in the North Slope Borough Mayor's Office in Barrow - not in the room where the mayor sits, but out in the foyer where everybody congregates.

As always, Jim, my good black cat buddy, was here to help.

He did take a break to get a drink, however. For about 7 years, I had a big oscar in that tank, but it died about six weeks ago. I have not decided what to replace it with, but I am changing the decor of the tank. I recently bought a good-sized ceramic pig and a proportionally smaller piglet.

After I soak them for a couple of months to hopefully leech out any toxins that might be in the enamel, they will go into the tank with whatever fish I replace the oscar with. 

It won't be an oscar. It will be a big cichlid, however. Maybe two.

Right now, a giant pleco still lives in this tank, but I will have to find a home for it before I restock, because if I don't, it will eat the new baby fish.

As I continue to work, Jimmy crosses the room and takes a seat in the window sill above another tank. This one has a lively population. Too bad I didn't have the lights on.

Even when Jimmy just sits in the window, it is good to have him here. His presence helps to get me through the day.

Jimmy returns from the window sill and takes a seat on the keyboard. I needed to pause, anyway.

Then he decides to come to me. No matter how busy I am, I never turn him away. I have learned how to keep working when he does this.

He can make it a little difficult to see the screen, however.

Later, as he often does, Jimmy determines that I must take a break and pay attention to him, not my work, and so he digs his claws into my sweatshirt and pulls himself up onto my chest.

He stays a little while, then leaps to the floor and I get back to work.

A bit later, he does it again. He makes it hard to breath. You notice I only have one arm to support him with. Obviously, I man the camera with the other.

When I am not holding a camera, I am pretty skilled at supporting the black cat while simultaneously manipulating my computer.

He steps away from me. Before I can get back to work, he steps onto my keyboard.

I can't believe it! The photo that I was working with disappears right out of Lightroom. I panic for a moment, thinking that he has deleted it and I will have to go find a backup copy. But Jimmy did not delete it; he changed the rating from 3 to 1, and so it vanished from the screen, as I had Lightroom set to display threes and higher. This one popped up in its place.

I had been arguing with myself which of the two to actually print, and had decided on the other.

If you look closely at the picture, you will see also that Jim bumped the rating up from three to four.

For a moment, I thought, "Okay, Jim, if you say so, I will print this one instead."

But then I changed my mind and went back to the other.

I love my black cat, but I can't allow him to become my picture editor.

Now that we are on Daylight Savings Time, it doesn't get dark until nearly 9:00 PM. The sun goes down before that, but in the north, we have long, lingering twilight.

As you can see, the amount of daylight creeping into my office is declining with the hour, causing the screen to appear more pronounced.

Jimmy is still with me. He is that kind of cat.

He sticks with me all the time.

I have to print this picture several times, because ink splotches keep appearing on it. I clean the heads, print again, clean the heads, print again, and still the ink splotches appear.

Finally, I pull out a big pad of ink soaked lint. It looks like it might be made of cat hairs. The printing proceeds just fine, after that.

Now, it is completely dark outside. Jimmy keeps me going.

But wait! This is not Jim! This is not a black cat! This is a tabby cat!

Why, it's Pistol-Yero!

He usually hangs out here with Jim and I, but shortly after we got up this morning, he went to lay back down on the bed and soon fell into a nap.

He napped all day.

But now that it is night, he comes to the office to do his part.

Pistol-Yero!

Yesterday, I was too tired to tell the story of how that cup of coffee came to be set in front of me at IHOP, but I promised that I would tell it later.

So this afternoon, about 4:30, when I was taking one of those little breaks that I mentioned, I drove to Mocha Moose. I figured that I would get a new coffee picture and use that to illustrate the story.

This is Kaylee. At first, she was a little shy about the idea of being in the picture, but then she said, "ok."

But right now, as I type this sentence, it is 2:08 AM.

I have to get an early start tomorrow. I need to get to bed, sometime.

I'm tired.

I really am.

That story will have to wait.

It was not really my intent to blur this picture. I had set the shutter speed at 1/250 of a second, but sometimes the knobs on the pocket camera change without me knowing it. That's what happened. The shutter speed got reset to 1/40 of a second.

I don't really mind, though.

Life's a blur, anyway.

By-passed scenes from closing days of 2008: After being misrepresented and dissed on the Daily Show, her life moves on; a frightening face; light, shadows and footprints - both human and dog

I am a fan of The Daily Show. Even as this satirical romp makes me laugh, it also brings out larger truths that the real news media - especially cable news media - just flat out falls short on. If the Daily Show must sometimes take artistic liberty and even lie to get at that truth, I can understand, as their purpose is to create satire and comedy, not to report news. Yet, it still seems to me that what they did to Patti Stoll after they sent Jason Jones to Wasilla was unfair. She is not at all the person that one might think after watching the Daily clip on Wasilla.

A day or two before 2008 came to an end, I took a walk and soon found Patti, her hair highlighted by a nice fringe of frost created when her breath brushed her golden locks as it passed through the -24 degree (F) air. She was doing the same thing I was - walking. I have been running into Patti for decades. Before the developers took over the woods now known as Serendipity, tore down down the trees, cut out roads and built houses, I would be going one way on my cross-country skis and she would appear coming the other way on her's.

In the summertime, we would sometimes cross paths on foot as we walked opposite ways on wooded trails originally stamped out by moose. Other times, we would meet as we pedaled our mountain bikes up and down the roller-coaster hills. Always, we would stop and chat awhile. We still do, but now we meet along the road, or on the paved bike trail that runs alongside the extension of Seldon that was so recently punched through the woods to better serve the good people of Serendipity and anyone else who wanted to get to Church Road a little faster. 

I often affectionately refer to Patti as "the fit lady," because she always keeps herself in the best of shape and is not deterred by a little chilly weather. She does some amazing things - recently, she sailed the length of the east coast from the Carribean to Canada.

I asked about her Daily Show experience. She told me she had done a two-hour interview with Jason Jones, who had been very nice and had treated her with respect throughout. He had asked her what seemed to be serious and thoughtful questions and she had answered in kind. After two hours, he suddenly brought up the subject of drug abuse in Wasilla with one the healthiest-minded people in the community. 

The Daily Show editors then ignored the entire two-hour interview and zeroed in only on the drug-use portion, and even that was selectively edited and organized to make both her and Wasilla look as ridiculous, pitiful and foolish as possible. Also, she told me, the incredulous reaction of Jason Jones as he supposedly reacted to her words was taped later, then spliced in to appear as if that was how he had actually responded when it was not. It appears that he really put her on the spot.

And there were other liberties taken. In one scene, Jason Jones is shown walking down the divider between the north and south bound lanes of the Parks Highway while pretending to be walking down Wasilla's Main Street - kind of like placing a reporter in the middle of Highway 95 where it passes through Manhattan while talking about Broadway at Times Square.

Still, the underlying fact is that, to suit her political purposes, Wasilla's former mayor, Alaska's current governor and recent Republican Vice-Presidential candidate also depicted Wasilla to be an entirely different kind of place than it is.

As for Patti, she has shrugged the experience off as just something odd that caught her in the midst. No big deal. Although she may have to travel a little further from her house than she used to to get to it, there is snow to be skiied over and trails to mountain bike. There are oceans to sail.

After I took Patti's picture, I wondered what I looked like. So I turned the camera back on myself. Now I know why little kids scream, cry and flee when they see me coming. 

Also as I walked, just before New Year's, I came upon shaft of light that had traveled down the road known as Tamar. The time was about 1:00 PM, which is just about solar noon here. At its zenith, the sun was high enough to find its way down the road, but not high enough to reach over the tree tops on either side of the road.

I walked a ways up that shaft of sunlight, then turned around to see what it looked like behind me. I saw that the legs in my shadow had become very long, yet my shadow body was very short.

Someone walked through the marsh with a little dog, which perhaps turned around and ran in the direction from whence they came.

I had one more picture from late last year. It is of the insurance adjuster who works for Progressive, the company that insured the vehicle driven by the kid who rear-ended me the night before Christmas eve.

For the past two days, I have been suffering the the misery of shopping for a car to replace our faithful but now totaled Taurus. I have at least one more day of such misery to suffer through. Every now and then, as I suffer this ordeal, I lift my G10 pocket camera and take a snap. So I will photo-blog the experience. I will begin tomorrow, with the picture of the Progressive insurance adjuster.

January 1, 2008: Backyard moose, tots in the house, Iraq-bound Marine at KFC

In the morning (which, as I define it here, began about 11:00 AM and ended about 1:00 PM) a moose appeared in the backyard, as moose often do.

Inside, the fire in the woodstove burned hot. Babies - no, I can hardly call them babies anymore - toddlers Lafe and Kalib were happy and content.

Lafe's mother offered him a sip of soda pop from Burger King, where she and his dad had stopped on their way over to pick up their son after his overnighter here. Lafe gladly accepted.

We always cook a ham, along with potatoes, veggies, pies and such for New Year's, but, with all that has been going on lately, both Margie and I completely forgot about today's dinner. So, about 3:00 PM, we headed to KFC to get dinner there.

As we were leaving, I saw a marine, talking to a KFC employee who was taking a break. As I walked past, they suddenly hugged, to say goodbye. "I love you," the worker said. "I love you, too!" the Marine responded. I knew the moment was going to be brief, so, as quickly as I could, not realizing that my shutter speed had accidently been dialed back to 1/10th of a second, I pulled my G10 pocket camera from my jacket pocket and got off one blurry frame.

My impression was that the KFC worker had served in the military himself, for it seemed to be that kind of love - one soldier to another, one Marine to another - that had been expressed.

The Marine headed out the door toward his vehicle, where others waited for him. I stopped him before he could get there, and he was happy to pose for a snap.

Private First Class Bonty is stationed in North Carolina, is not from Alaska but has family in Wasilla and had come up on leave to visit. He departs for Iraq in two weeks.

There was much more that I wanted to ask him, of course, but Margie had taken a seat in the car and was waiting for me. He had people waiting for him.

I also wanted to go back into KFC, to talk to the worker who had hugged him, but his break was over and he had gone back to work. Plus, Margie was holding a box of hot wings that Jacob and Lavina had ordered, and we had to get it home while the food was still hot.

And this how the first day of year 2009 began for me, right here in Wasilla, Alaska.

As I chat with the roadscraper, a Jehovah's Witness missionary appears and offers me truth

I often see the roadscraper, clearing snow and ice as he drives our local streets. On yesterday's walk, I came upon him as he was enjoying a break. He opened up his door and started a friendly conversation.

His name is Ron Miller, and he is a friendly and conversational person, and I will not try to recount all that he told me. He has 102 miles of Matsu-Borough roads to scrape and over the past two-and-a-half days had put in 27 hours and still had most of this day left to go. He told me about what it takes to keep the scraper in good working order, and how, if a scraper gets careless, he can tear up a good stretch of pavement just like that.

Ron is a Vietnam veteran and served in both the Air Force and Army, in Intel. To this day, he says, few Americans know what really happened over there and have no idea of the tonnage of bombs that we dropped. He spoke of incredible numbers of bomb tonnage, packed into jets every day, dropped every day.

After we had chatted for awhile, a pickup with two men in it pulled up and stopped. This fellow introduced himself as Ryan and said he had something that I might be interested in: truth. He gave me this pamphlet that promised to introduce me to the truth. I asked him what religion he was and he said Jehovah's Witness. 

I put it in my pocket and planned to read it after I got home, so that I might share a bit of truth with anyone who reads this. But now I can't find it. It is lost. 

Truth and eternity remain a mystery to me.

I left Ron and Ryan behind and continued on my walk. Soon, I heard the sound of heavy steel scraping pavement. I turned around, it was Ron, making his way down his 102 mile route.