Author: admin

The story in Monday’s paper said that urban and rural kids have about the same rates of death by guns. The difference is apparently that in the cities, the deaths are usually murders. In rural areas, it’s accidental shootings and suicides.

Anyone who had lived in Alaska for more than ten minutes can attest to the truth of those findings.

A few months ago a former reporter and I discussed Bush Alaska and its seemingly intractable problems of substance abuse, domestic violence and suicide. She said it had once been suggested to her that the reason things were so difficult

Am I the only one who gets a physical pain in her belly every time they run a photo of oiled pelicans and dying sea turtles.

BP should be damned to hell and so should we for our greedy dependence on a substance that dragged us into an unending battle in the mideast and is despoiling the world we will someday hand over to our children.

Shame on us all.

This past weekend I was knee deep into my one day of gardening a year when I plant all the little flowers in the pots I put around my house. When done, I salute them and wish them well. From then on, they’re on their own to survive. I periodically water them and add some food but other than that, survival at my house just means being hardy enough to withstand my benign neglect.

This year, my plants won the jackpot when my friend Janis came in from Dutch Harbor and did the planting for me. If flowers could be

I wake up every morning with some optimism about the day ahead. Then I remember the Gulf of Mexico and I just want to hide my head in a pillow and sob myself back to sleep.

I’m watching a TV show called “The Middle”. The sullen teenage son is dragged off to see a giant tree stump. He stares mournfully at it and states, “I had the lowest of expectations for this and even I’m disappointed.” I don’t know why but that line cracked me up. I mean laugh out loud, startle the sleeping birds cracked me up. And I have to wonder if I have grown so old that I’ve now come full circle and once again find adolescent male teen humor funny or have I simply lost my mind.  I pray the answer is

What will all those charities do when we use the US mail so infrequently that they can no longer send pages of address labels as free gifts for your donation? More importantly, what will I do with the thousands of labels I have so carefully stored away for years?

I’m tired of staring at the dead and empty plant pots lined up on the side of my house. I’m going to go buy plants, stick them in the pots, put them where the sun should be and figure if they are true Alaskans, they’ll survive until the sun actually appears.

It amazes me that we are willing to put millions into building more prisons but balk at putting a few thousand into programs that lessen the need for those prisons. Perhaps it’s because prisons are built for a concrete population. Putting money into helping foster kids make better choices as adults is more nebulous. We can’t know how many of them will make good choices and not end up in our penal system.

That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t give them the best chance possible. If we don’t want to do it because it is the right thing to

The weather clearly is not going to cooperate so I planted the damn strawberries and they are on their own to deal with Mother Nature.

On a good note, I found a big old earthworm when I dug down to plant the strawberry mass of entangled whatever it was and I’m pretty sure that’s a good sign. Now I just have to make sure that no one throws poison on my lawn or garden… though I wonder if you can call it a garden if the only thing in it is a nest of strawberry roots.

Blue wakes up reluctantly and moves slowly off her pillow. She gets to the top of the stairs and peers down. For reasons she can’t comprehend, Blondie and I are down there waiting for her to come. I call her again, very loudly, and she puts her foot tentatively on the top step as though waiting for me to say “I jokes” so she can go back to bed. I, meanwhile, working on the assumption that she has started her descent to go out one last time before bed, head to the back door with Blondie.

Blondie goes out. Blue