Author: admin

Blue stares gloomily out at the rain, refusing to set foot in the backyard and risk getting wet no matter how much she has to go. But she also sits and stares at the front door, mentally willing me to stop working and take her for a walk as though somehow the weather in the front of the house will be better than the weather in the back of the house. She breaks down my resistance, I put away the document I’m working on, put on a jacket with hood, hook her and Blondie up and head out the door.

OK, Alaskans. Are you reaching the same point I am with the mining ads? My summer TV watching is already limited to sitcom repeats in the morning as I feed the animals and the Daily Show, Colbert Report and Letterman. And even with that restrictive schedule, I find my blood pressure rising the minute those damn ads start up. At this point I don’t care if all the fish all over Alaska die or we poison everyone with what the mines leave behind or if mines are the greatest things to hit the environment since sunshine. I just want the

Who would have thought that a passing comment on the weather would have generated so much interest.  But everyone really just needs to take a deep breath and accept, as St. Francis of Assisi put it so well, what they cannot change.  I view this summer as the Dick Cheney of weather. It’s ugly. It’s mean. It’s gloomy. And it is deadly to living things. But it too shall end…just in time for the snow!

One of my faithful readers told me that she tells tourists who complain about our weather that no one comes to Alaska for the weather.  When I first arrived in Barrow, it was the beginning of October and there was already snow on the ground. I remember thinking how much fun it was going to be because I loved snow. Six weeks later, everything was frozen, it was totally dark and I could write a novel on the frost that had built up on the inside of my kitchen window. The moral of this story is that even if you

It’s gloomy out. It’s been gloomy out. It will continue to be gloomy out. This is Anchorage. This is our summer. So get over the griping and get on with your life.  My plants did and they are the happier for it.

Am I the only person who gets muscle spasms just watching gymnasts?  I need to take extra potassium just to get through the Olympic trials. God help me when the games are actually on.

I plant seeds. I water the beds. I feed the soil. And maybe, maybe, I get some flowers to grow in time for the first freeze of fall.

Some bird seed drops on the lawn beneath my feeders and barely two hours after the snow has finally melted, flowers are blooming.

Is there really an explanation to this or is it just god messing with my mind?

Another state senator indicted. It’s like they are all sitting on a fence and the Feds are just picking them off one by one.  This week was Senator Cowdery’s turn.  Do we dare hope that next week or soon thereafter our favorite son will make the headlines?

A friend found a play pen for my birds at a garage sale. It looked perfect.  It’s up on a tall stand, has wheels, is all metal and looked as though there was no way to climb off it. It took my African Gray Abdul about ten minutes to conquer it. He climbed to the edge, swung his body down while clinging to the metal tray, got his body going in a swinging motion and managed to swing to the legs of the stand, slid down the leg and was whistling merrily on this way to the computer wires under

Maybe it’s just me, but when I go to the store to buy apples and find them boxed with a label that reads, “Food grade shellac” as the ingredient keeping them bright and shiny, I get nervous.  Is shellac really meant to be food grade? And what exactly does that mean? And how much food grade shellac can I eat before my stomach lining starts to get all hard and shiny bright? Until I feel much, much better about eating shellac, I think I’ll just stick to apples with food grade cannuba wax which, at least, is a natural product