I go to Anchorage to pick Margie up and find Kalib ill; he eats the fish food; Tyler and his saw; Bear Meech and Diamond

Margie had spent her four days babysitting Jobe while Lavina went back to work and it was time for me to pick her up. So, in the afternoon, I climbed into the Escape and headed for Anchorage. Along the way, I passed this guy on his big Harley Davidson.

By the time I reached the house, Lavina had already returned home from work. Kalib had not gone to day care this day, because he was feeling a bit ill.

I found Lavina giving him comfort.

Margie held the sleeping Jobe, strapped into his cradle, on her lap. Lisa came by and sat down next to them. Jacob had yet to return from work.

Lavina and Kalib.

Jacob returned at about 6:00 PM. His ailing son lifted his finger and the two touched.

This caused Kalib to feel a bit better, so he got up and stood beside his father as they watched a bit of the evening news. The big story was about how the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is much worse than BP originally reported and appears to be on its way to becoming a true environmental disaster.

Shell Oil plans to drill five exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea this summer, where bowheads, belugas, gray whales, polar bears, walrus, seals, migratory birds, fish and plankton thrive.

President Obama, maybe you should give this a little more thought.

Next, Kalib dove onto his Auntie Lisa to wrestle with her. This was a good sign that he was feeling better.

Then he headed toward his bedroom to feed the fish that I gave him.

His dad handed him the cannister of food. Kalib knows that he is not supposed to eat the fish food himself, but he pulls out a stick, smiles mischievously at his dad, then shoves it into his mouth and eats before anyone can stop him.

Jobe woke up before it was time for him to wake up. He started to cry. Lavina picked him up and began to rock him back to sleep.

Soon, Jobe would return to sleep. He remained in his cradle throughout the duration of my visit.

Then Margie and I headed over to pay a short visit to Melanie and Rex before we headed home. Directly across the street from Melanie's house, her neighbor Tyler had downed a tree and was now cutting it up.

Bear Meech observed as we headed up the stairs to Melanie's front door.

Inside, Diamond chilled warmly. Poof came trilling to my lap right after I sat down. I spent more time with Poof than with anybody else, but, somehow, I don't know how, I failed to take a picture of him.

Oh well. He was the star last time.

I had a lot of work that I still wanted to do before bedtime, so soon we headed home, where I got lazy, and put most of that work off.

I guess that I had better get it done today.

And my thanks to those of you who clicked that button and contributed. This blog has a long way to go, but now it has begun to generate revenue. Thank you!

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.

On their way to the grotto to pray; Rowdy and Oscar; an iPhone look back at New York - young couple on subway, man down on sidewalk

I had stopped to visit Ron Mancil when Patrick Mahoney, owner of the ranch where Ron works, came out from the back on his motorcycle with Mary Angela Wassillie, who lives near Metro Cafe. Mary's mother was ill and in the hospital. "We're on our way to the grotto to pray," Patrick told me.

I pulled out onto the road and they pulled out behind me.

I drove at turtle speed, so that I could take this snap as they passed me.

They then turned off into the grotto - Grotto Iona - to make their prayers. I thought about stopping, too, to visit a little more there, perhaps take a few more pictures. As I related last summer, on that day that I pedaled my bike past the topless lady and then wound up on my knees before the graves of Patrick's parents, I have given myself the assignment to learn about this grotto and the couple who built it and now lie in it.

But I had just met Patrick and Mary. So I drove on and left them to pray alone. There will be time in the future. 

That was two weeks ago, this is yesterday:

I had gone to town for a business meeting and on my way back, I pulled off in Eagle River. Charlie's mom had sent me a Facebook message, asking me to stop sometime when I was passing by. So I stopped in the parking lot by Jitter's coffee shop to call and find out where Jim and Cyndy lived.

As I called, this old car and this young man riding a bike passed by in front of me.

This is Rowdy, ten years old, and those are the hands of Cyndy, Charlie's mom. Rowdy literally smiled at me when we were introduced. I am not kidding. It was a genuine smile. He smiled a few more times and I got my camera out and tried to photograph it, but Rowdy is not named Rowdy for nothing.

He was continually in motion and then he apparently decided that we had known each other long enough and now he didn't need to smile all the time.

So now I have another assignment - to catch Rowdy's smile.

And this is Oscar, their sixteen-year old cat. Not so long ago, Oscar was down to skin and bones and the pigment was gone from his nose. Cyndy and Jim believe it is the homemade food that they began feeding him that has restored him.

That is why they asked me to stop by - Jim had made another batch of food for Royce.

Three leftover iPhone images from New York:

This is from what was supposed to be my final night, before I got stranded at JFK. I had just left Chie Sakakibara and my camera battery was dead. I could not resist this couple riding the subway with me, however, so I used my iPhone.

After the couple got up, these people sat down where they had been.

When I came up the stairs that lead from the subway to the street, I found this scene. I was not exactly certain what was happening nor how I should react. I asked if everything was okay. The man who has a grip on the wrist of the one down on sidewalk said it was. He gave me the impression that he was a police officer, said that he had everything under control. He did not try to stop me from taking a picture, which I figured that someone who was up to no good would do.

I walked away. But now I wonder - what if he was not a cop?

Maybe I should have called 911.

As seen through my iPhone: we go to see Ira Glass, then hang out with cats and eat pizza

Before the Ira Glass performance began, Margie and I headed to the Kaladi brothers attached to the Anchorage Performing Arts Center. We had not planned to meet anyone else there, but when we arrived, Melanie, Charlie and Lisa were already standing in a long line, so Margie and I gave them our orders and found a place where we could all sit.

Soon, we all did: Melanie and Charlie.

Charlie and Lisa.

Margie and me - although I cannot be seen. Yet, I am here, as you can see, taking pictures with my iPhone.

Following the Ira Glass performance at the PAC, those of this family who attended all gathered together at Melanie and Charlie's place to eat pizza and hang out with cats. Three cats were present to hang out with, but, for some reason, it was Poof who kept putting himself into the middle of things.

"I can tell, Poof cat is getting ready to do something bad," Melanie said at some point. Apparently, the night before, as Charlie had been cooking, Poof had repeatedly tangled himself up in Charlie's feet and disrupted the cooking in a number. Finally, Charlie scolded him.

It is hard to imagine Charlie ever scolding a cat, and I am pretty certain that as cat scoldings go, it was a rather gentle one, but Charlie does insist that he actually scolded Poof. "I did. I scolded him," Charlie said.

Here is Poof, studying Lisa and Bryce. That's Lisa's feet on the table. 

Ira Glass fans are probably wondering why I do not have a picture of him here.

For one, given the situation, me armed with only an iPhone and faced with a difficult exposure situation and no way to exert any control over shutter speed, aperture and the like, it would have been very challenging to have gotten a picture of Glass.

I did not intend to bring only my iPhone. Before Margie I drove out of Wasilla, I put a full charge on my pocket camera battery, cleaned the lens and got it all ready to go. I then thought that I put it in my pocket but when we arrived in Anchorage and I got out of the car, I discovered that I had not. The only items in my pocket were my wallet, iPhone and lens cleaning cloth.

Then, just before Ira Glass came out, this fellow appeared on the stage and instructed everyone who wanted a photo to take it right now, of him, or the person seated next to them or whatever, because no photos would be allowed once Ira stepped onto the stage. Please turn off all cameras, cell phones and recording devices.

So, just before Ira stepped out, from the very excellent seats that Melanie and Rex had secured for us, in rows 5 and 6, almost directly in front of the table that had been set up for Glass and his sound equipment, I used my iPhone to snap the guy who was telling us that we could not take pictures.

I got the hand of the lady in front of me, too, as she put her hair in place.

I have been asked to give a full report on the Ira Glass performance, but I am at a loss as to how I might do that. He entered the stage in the dark, set down at his table in the dark, and then spent the first few minutes talking in the dark, to emphasize that radio is an acoustic medium, where the visuals are put into your head through the words of the speakers, not through photos or moving images.

He spoke of the power and direct connection this creates between the story tellers and their audience.

Indeed, sitting there in the dark, I felt very connected to every word that he spoke, and I felt the power of it.

Ira Glass said many things and even though I was exhausted and tired beyond all reason, it seemed to me that each one of his words reached me - even after the lights came on - and that I understood everything that he intended me to.

Although I work with images and written words rather than sound and even though I am reaching an age where some might want to believe my opportunities to truly succeed as a story-teller are in the past, Glass inspired me. In his voice, I heard the potential before me - if only I can but reach out and grab it.

Just before the performance started, someone took the seat immediately to my right. Then the lights went dim and I never really saw who that person was or what he looked like. Through the performance, he laughed boisterously and with approval and then mustered up the courage to ask a question during the Q&A period at the end.

As he asked his question, I looked at him and suddenly realized it was Jack Dalton.

Jack is himself a story teller - an actor, playwright and poet with both Yup'ik and Iñupiat ancestry and his fame both in and out of Alaska is growing.

This is he, Jack Dalton.

Lisa and Rex can be seen behind him.

Afterwards, those of this family who had attended discussed what we should do next. After five or ten minutes of indecision, during which time I swore I would make no recommendations, as, being a reckless and irresponsible eater, my recommendations sometimes get me in trouble with my daughters.

In time, though, I forgot my pledge and absent-mindedly recommended pizza from Milano's, delivered to Melanie's, where we could eat and hang out with cats at the same time.

And that is how we wound up going to Melanie's to hang out with cats and to eat pizza from Milano's. Despite my well-earned paranoia, my suggestion had been warmly received.

We had hardly stepped through the door into Melanie's house when Poof appeared and made his presence known.

Poof Cat.

Poof Cat, again.

I looked around and soon found Bear Meech. I could not see Diamond, so I asked where she was.

Immediately after I asked, she pranced into view.

She leaped up onto a table and looked at me as though she wanted me to pet her. I could not believe this, for usually, if I try to pet her, I am met by a growl as she jerks her head away from my hand.

Cautiously, I reached out to her. Diamond did want a pet!

My day was made.

But, as I have already noted, it was Poof who kept inserting himself into the scene. There were seven humans present, and he kept wandering about among all laps to make certain that his presence was acknowledged and adored by all. Here he is, winning Melanie's adoration.

Now he goes to Charlie, but fails to get his full attention.

Poof puts on his full charm. He gains Charlie's full attention.

Soon, he tucks himself in next to Margie.

Then he moves to my lap.

Suddenly, there was great clatter, clashing and banging, as dishes and pans and pizza box crashed onto the kitchen floor. Poof shot off like a rocket and immediately disappeared, as it was he who had caused this commotion. Once the humans among us regained our composure, we focused our attention upon a green-haired doll that had been with Melanie ever since she was a tiny girl. None of us can remember exactly when the doll came to Melanie, or just what was that TV series or cartoon character it was connected to, but, for as long as she can remember, this doll has always been with Melanie.

Not even the calamitous results of Poof's own mischief could long subdue him. Soon, he reappeared and took Rex over.

Poof - with Lisa and Bryce. Bryce did not go to the Ira Glass show, but he did come for pizza.

PS: Given the fact that the competition includes one of the most successful blogs in history, one that appears to have millions of followers, I recognize that the odds are against me but smahoney has nominated this blog for a Best Photography Blogger's Choice award and it has actually popped into first place for the moment.

I thank all who have voted for me and here is the link for any who might yet want to.

Also, I have encountered some problems in posting a Pay Pal donation link, but, when I can take 15 minutes to do so, I think I can solve those problems.

Thank you, smahoney!

Things I saw on the bike ride that took me into springtime Wasilla; I nearly crashed

Monday rapidly ages, and I have yet to complete my post on Saturday's bike ride, so I guess that I had better get to it.

As noted, the day dawned sunny and while the morning was cool, the afternoon turned warm and beautiful. The temperature rose to 48 degrees and the sky went to deep blue. The wind was calm. I climbed onto my bike and headed out to see what I might see.

I see that I overexposed this image. That's because sometimes camera settings change on their own and when you are pedaling a bicycle, you are unlikely to notice. If you do notice, then you have to stop to make the changes.

I got a better exposure on this one. The man walked with a dog and they were close together when I first spotted them from a couple hundred yards back, but, by the time I got close enough to take a picture, the dog had gone off into the trees.

"Good afternoon, sir!" I called out as I pedaled past.

"Good afternoon," he smiled back.

It used to be that you would see these golf-ball domes sitting atop towers spaced at regular intervals all along the Arctic Coast, in the Aleutian Islands and at various places in the interior, such as Clear and Fort Yukon. They were part of the Distant Early Warning Line, operated by the US Air Force to scan the skies for a Soviet nuclear missile or air attack against the United States.

On a clear day, before I got GPS, I could spot them from my airplane from as far as 50 miles away and then I could just relax, place my map aside and fly straight toward them.

Of course, I have also had the experience of thus relaxing, only to see fog sweep in off the ocean and cause the golf ball that I was following to disappear - along with the entire village by which it sat.

This always made the flight a little more interesting.

Some of those golf balls are still out there, but many have disappeared. I first spotted these in Wasilla about the time they began to disappear from the bush, so I assumed that they had been moved here from there, that perhaps I had safely followed one or more of these very balls to my destination, but I've never actually researched the origin of these to find out if that's true or not.

I often see this young gentleman from my car, as I drive by him. Usually, he will smile and wave as I drive by. I return his greetings. On this day, he smiled and said, "hi."

"Hi," I answered back.

Just down the road, I saw this police officer, parked in his car near the park that used to be the Wasilla airport. I used to keep my airplane here.

And in the park, I pedaled past young people flying - not by airplane but by swing.

As I did, my iPhone vibated and chimed in the instant message mode, so I stopped to see what the message was. It was a photo of "my boys" - Jacob, Jobe and Kalib, sent to me by Lavina, who had taken it in Hope. It was good to see, because that told me that, after being so sick, she was feeling well enough to want to travel and see things.

A bit further down, young people shot baskets where airplanes once parked.

Kids flowed by, riding bikes and scooters.

Many had come to the park to enjoy the weather.

At one point, I saw a kid pedaling around a curve toward me, looking at the trail behind him instead of ahead. He was all the way to his left and I soon realized that we were on a collision course. No big deal. All I needed to do was apply a little brake and get out of the way. 

I held my camera in my right hand, so I braked with my left. Remember, now, this was only the second bike ride that I had taken since mid-October and I had forgotten just how sensitive that left-hand brake is. Worse yet, it affects only the front brake. The front wheel came to an instant stop and the back wheel began to rise. I then realized that the bike was going to do a complete flip and I was going down.

Woe be unto me if I were to land on my artificial shoulder!

I don't know how I did it, but somehow, after the bike passed the vertical position, I leaped right over the handle bars and came down on my feet on the bike trail. The bike then crashed to the pavement, upside down, behind me as I ran forward.

The kid went by, wide-eyed, looking at me. "It's okay!" I told him. "No problem."

I can imaging how strange it must have looked to a boy of that age, to have been looking backward from his bike, only to turn around and see what to him could only have appeared to be an old, old, man with a whitening beard leaping over his handle bars as his bike took to the air.

This was not the kid, by the way. The kid wore a helmet. This would have been just a little bit before the kid appeared.

I stopped at the skateboard park just long enough to shoot a few frames from off my bike. There, I saw eight-year old Cole preparing to use this ramp even as his mother was shouting at him, telling him that some older boys were headed towards it and had asked him to clear the space.

The older boy thought that he could miss the younger boy by scooting along the top of the steel railing, but he lost control. His skateboard sailed through the air and very nearly missed giving Cole a good whack on the head.

"That was the worse moment of my life," the older boy, whose name I did not catch, exclaimed afterward. "I have never been so scared in all my life."

As for Cole, he took it calmly in stride. "I love to skateboard," he told me.

"Oh, yes," his mother added. "He does love it."

I used to love it, too. Cole, I'll bet you down know it, but it was me and my peers that pioneered skateboarding for you. We started out by taking steel-wheeled roller skates, separating the front from the back and then nailing them to short wooden planks.

We had a blast on these, coasting down hills, shooting about on broad, school-yard walks. Then, one day, a kid showed up with the first commercial skateboard any of us had ever seen.

Thus began the revolution, which you young guys keep perfecting. We came up with many tricks that we thought were pretty spectacular. My father could not believe his eyes when he saw what we did on our skateboards - but I cannot believe my eyes when I see what you young guys do today.

One day this summer, I will take my big DSLR's to the skateboard park and just hang out for awhile, just to show people the amazing things that you kids are doing there. 

Afterward, I pedaled on into and through the graveyard. I saw a few graves that broke my heart, for they were children's graves, decorated with artifacts of children playing and swinging, doing the things the children who lay beneath had been robbed of ever doing. I did take a couple of pictures and at first, I put them in this post, but pulled them out before I published.

As I pedaled on through the trees, I saw children playing across the street from the graveyard.

Play, children. Play hard. Laugh, and love every minute of it, even when you fall and scrape yourselves, even when someone is mean to you and you cry and think you are miserable.

Laugh. Play hard.

I got back onto the bike trail and pedaled towards home. "Hello, fellow bike rider!" the girl in the back shouted at me as we passed.

When I spotted these boys, they were close together, spread out across the trail so that there was no room to pass by. The image took me right back to challenges that I had faced as a child when my path would be blocked intentionally to intimidate me, but, as you can see, these three respectfully cleared a path through which I could pass.

As I passed it, this dog growled and eyed me threateningly. After I passed it, without looking backward myself, I pointed my camera behind me and took this snap.

I should note that, after I flipped the bike, I remembered that it was my broken shoulder and the fact that for several months I was able to shoot pictures only with my left hand that got me into pocket cameras in the first place. I had become adept at shooting with my left hand, so why had I switched back to my right, even while riding a bike?

Hence I took this, and most of the pictures that followed that flip, with my left hand. This way, if I should happen to need to brake again, I could brake with my right hand, and it would be the back wheel that stopped. The bike would not flip.

I also recalled that the reason that my shoulder suffered such a grievous injury in the first place was that because when I realized I was going down and there was nothing I could do to prevent it, I had tucked my camera into my chest and there protected it by taking the brunt of the blow directly on my shoulder.

Hey! That was an expensive camera! Very expensive! The best and most expensive DSLR on the market at that time.

But that expense was cheap compared to the losses that followed if I had only protected myself first and not worried about the camera. In fact, those losses are truly responsible even for the rough spot I temporarily find myself in. This pocket camera is relatively cheap. It occurred to me that if I found myself going down, I could just toss it aside.

It might get damaged, but better it than me.