Author: Elise Patkotak

I came to on my bedroom floor, scratching at it and wondering why it wasn’t my bed. I tried to move and was hit with an intense pain I’d never felt before. I apparently had a heart attack and broken four ribs in the fall. I then did what any sane person would do. I dragged myself to my phone and called Bird TLC to tell them I wouldn’t be in for my volunteer shift. Thankfully, they called 911.

I am now post heart attack, post four broken ribs, post open-heart surgery and wondering when the heck I got so Continue reading →

Honey buckets… just those words alone can send me into a paroxysm of odors; full buckets in the morning after a party, icy cold seats with the contents actually frozen yet somehow still smelly. And Pine sol – poor Pine sol – what did you ever do to deserve the reputation you hold in the minds and hearts of anyone who ever lived with a honey bucket. It’s not something you can ever clean with again.

All these memories came rushing back when I read that the Leona M. and Henry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust gave $20 million to Engineering Continue reading →

Back in the day, when I was young and somewhat up on the latest electronic trends, my mother asked me to help her sisters, my aunts, learn how to work the new fangled VCRs which had just arrived on the market. In case you don’t remember this, the instructions that came with them could be rather confusing. So my aunts all got VCRs that just sat there, as did my mother’s. But one day while on a visit to the family home, my mother asked me to help her with it. I took the instructions and rewrote them in very Continue reading →

Remember that time when almost all of us actually learned to spell Murkowski?  Ah, good times. Well, they are returning. Only this time with a rival candidate who hasn’t lived in Alaska all that long and who had to have the government pay to move her here or she might not have come. So I think we can all admit that we have some issues to raise with Lisa’s new opponent for the Republican nomination to the US Senate.

Oh yeah, remember when we all learned to spell Lisa? Good times.

If I am understanding this situation correctly, the Republican Continue reading →

While this pandemic is hardly over, for many of us it is at least finally starting to end. This means that those of us (me) who are totally vaccinated can now go back out and enjoy some level of what once counted as normal life.

I actually went to a restaurant where a waiter filled my water glass and asked if there was anything else he could get me. After an extremely long year, I was finally being waited on again. And the food that came to the table was fresh and hot – not warm and in a bag, Continue reading →