When I call Blue to go out and she doesn’t want to, her latest attempt to avoid the inevitable is to stand frozen in the doorway and simply stare at me with an unblinking gaze. There is not the slightest rustle or movement in her. She is clearly convinced that if she stands that way long enough, I won’t know she’s there because she will be invisible. I have timed this frozen stance and she can keep it up for five minutes before even having to blink if, in so doing, she avoids the dreaded outdoors. When I finally have had enough and head for her to grab her and eject her by force, she suddenly comes to life and saunters towards the door as though she’d been coming all along.

It’s a toss up between Sarah Palin’s autobiography being a best seller or the fact that a 16 year old kid named Justin Beiber is writing a memoir. I can’t wait to hear about his toilet training days.

I don’t think I’m what you’d really call a tree hugger. The thought of hugging trees honestly makes me very nervous. I mean, they have bugs and insects and sap and all that icky foreign stuff a city kid like me learned to fear at birth. When you consider I left the city for Barrow, where no trees have grown for a very long time, you can understand that my adult life has not exactly been filled with trees either.

However, I am a firm believer in respecting nature and the great outdoors because without trees we would run short on oxygen and I, quite frankly, have gotten used to breathing the stuff. Since trees apparently inhale our exhaled carbon dioxide and then reverse the process, exhaling it as oxygen, I say more power to them. (And may I also say to my college botany teacher, “See, I told you I paid attention sometimes.”)
My basic relationship with nature is that if nature stays outside and allows me to stay inside, then I think it should be allowed to just run wild. And that brings me to a topic that has filled my e-mail box this week – the proposed purchase of 60 acres of land at the mouth of Campbell Creek to be donated to the municipality of Anchorage for a city park.
From all I can gather, this seems to be a pretty sweet deal. Taxpayers are totally off the hook since the Great Land Trust will pay for the land prior to turning it over to the city. The Trust has raised the funds needed to pay for clean up of the property and address conservation needs of any park developed there.  State Fish and Game would manage the wetlands portion of the property, again alleviating the need for the municipality to kick in any money.
So if this deal is so good why is the mayor nixing it? If, in fact, the mayor’s reason for nixing the deal has to do with his desire to develop the land for housing, why isn’t there vocal support from people wanting that housing? Why isn’t there a hue and cry of support from developers? Why does the mayor purport to be representing private homeowners when the only private homeowners involved are the ones supporting the Trust’s plan for a park?
Once again, in the interest of full disclosure, let me make it perfectly clear that given a choice between a walk in the woods and an afternoon on the couch reading a book about life in medieval England, the book and couch would win every time. So I am not asking these questions because of some vested interest I have in creating a park where I can walk my dogs. Truth be told, the only reason my dogs are even willing to walk around my neighborhood is because they know they get a treat at the end of the walk. The woods hold no interest for them.
But it does seem to me, having lived in two cities with magnificent park systems, that having green spaces that regularly break up the monotony of city blocks is something worthwhile. And to be brutally honest, given what passes as housing in this town, green spaces are critical to keep us all from running screaming into the night at the sight of one more set of Levittown like condos crowded in on one another with no space for parking, playing or neighborhood.
Given the general ambience of what gets built in this town, we should all be beating down the door at city hall to get Mayor Sullivan to change his mind on this subject. We’ve got all the ugly housing we can stand. We don’t need another development of mindless cul-de-sacs that have taken the beauty and wildness of our state and beaten it into the mass of exchangeable bland matter that passes for homes for far too many of us.
What we do need is some of that wilderness kept close, even for those of us who don’t use it all that often. It cleanses our air, eases our minds and soothes our souls.
For goodness sake, if Philadelphia and New York can create amazing green spaces in their crowded urban environments, surely Alaska’s largest city can too.

If there is any reward for the hard work involved in raising a family of good and decent people, it has to be a luau at your nursing home with your sons and their wives. What a happy and handsome group I get to call my family.

The cell phone generation will never know the pleasure of calling person to person for yourself after arriving safely at whatever destination to which you were traveling so that your mother knew you got there safely without having to pay for a long distance call. And, if you were really quick, being able to shout an “I love you, mom” into the phone before the operator disconnected you when you mother announced you weren’t there and then tried to quickly add “Your clean socks are....” Usually that’s as far as she got before the operator, who was now onto the scam, disconnected you.
Next week, kids, we discuss what a long distance operator was.

Let me say how very nice it was to watch Chelsea Clinton get married before having a baby, without selling her story to US magazine or any of its fellow travelers. Let me say how much the Clinton’s personify a family in that they have stuck together through thick and thin and made their commitment to each other and their daughter the paramount moment in their life.  Here’s a… oh dear lord! liberal… family whose daughter didn’t do drugs or drink or get caught up in any party scene. She got her college education, got her master’s degree, held a job and married an old childhood friend while being walked down the aisle by her father who was able to sit next to her mother because they cared more about her than anything that might have happened between them.
Top that Sarah Palin!

Between her diabetes and old age, her body continually betrays her. She will start up the stairs from the office at 5 PM knowing that dinner is at the other end of her climb. She will bound up the first step and then fall. She will pick herself up with as much grace as possible and then plod dutifully up the rest of the stairs, carefully taking one at a time.
Her heart is still young. The puppy lives within her. But her body remains a continual reminder that time is passing.

If my fantasy could come true of an actual person coming into my bed at night it would be George Clooney. Not any character he’s ever played, but the man himself. He seems so sweet and caring and funny. You know a night with him would be wonderful.
But if my fantasy were to come true about a night of wild and unbridled passion, then it would be Tony Stark coming to my bed. Not Robert Downey, Jr. but the character he created. Because while I feel that Mr. Downey is probably the most brilliant actor of his generation - I mean, let’s face it, when he’s onscreen everyone else is just window dressing - you can’t take your eyes off what he’s doing at every moment or you miss some little piece of extraordinary acting.... but Mr. Downey is not who I want in my bed. I want Tony Stark - a somewhat deranged, emotionally screwed up megalomaniacal narcissist.  Talk about describing the kind of man who sets my bells to ringing.
It’s the story of my life… any man who is a little deranged, a little dangerous, a little criminal, a lot needy… any man walking the edge with one foot going over… that’s the guy I can pick out in a roomful of good solid citizens and he will be the only one who I gravitate to.
And this is why I actively choose to stay single.

I was driving down a beautiful section of town recently and saw a woman on the path next to the road who was roller blading while pushing her baby’s carriage and speaking on her cell phone at the same time. And I had to wonder if she was actually able to enjoy the brief moment of sunshine Anchorage was having or the sensation of the wind blowing in her face while she pushed her baby and listened to the newly hatched birds chirping for dinner from their parents.
Why have we seemingly lost the ability to simply enjoy the moment we’re in without the need to add sensation upon sensation to our brains until no one sensation can truly provide us with a simple moment of brief respite from our daily world?

I realize that most people who work for city and state government are probably very nice and relatively intelligent. After all, I was a bureaucrat once and I didn’t check my brains in at the door.  Well, at least I didn’t do that everyday.

But as I am slowly but surely being strangled by a ring of multiple roundabouts, all of which have been planned by the city to be within twenty feet of my front door, I have to wonder whatever happened to the concept of a traffic light.
You old folks out there remember them, right?  They had three colors that changed periodically giving all traffic its turn at the intersection. They also cost one heckuva lot less to install and maintain that the cost of building a roundabout. But it seems as though somewhere along the way, our city has become absolutely enamored of these fun monstrosities and decided that my little section of South Anchorage was the perfect spot to install all of them.
Given our economic climate, I must express some surprise that we are building these costly beasts with such frequency as opposed to putting in a simple traffic light. I am also amazed at the places chosen for a roundabout. 
Not far from my house is an intersection at 100th Street and Victor that handles traffic from Dimond Blvd. and Minnesota Drive. At what passes for rush hour in Anchorage, it’s a very busy place. There are twelve lanes plus turning lanes trying to maneuver through.
Yet despite the amount of traffic it handles, the intersection is controlled by a four-way stop sign system. You have no idea how much fun that is until you sit there and watch people either try to remember the protocol for four-way stops or just figure they’re in a truck so they’ll take their turn whenever they want.
One block away from this intersection is a roundabout that handles streets coming off a quiet residential area.  For the whole time that roundabout was being built I wanted to go there, tap one of the workers on the shoulder and suggest they’d missed their mark by a block.
When the new roundabout is complete, there will be two roundabouts within three blocks of each other coming south on C Street.  The one at C and O’Malley makes sense. That had been a highway interrupted by a red light. The roundabout allows highway traffic to continue without breaking speed for at least another block before it comes to… yes, you guessed, a red light.
I know there are traffic planners out there with all kinds of designs and numbers and concepts about why traffic circles are better than the invention of pizza. One of the main reasons I hear constantly is that a roundabout forces traffic to slow down. Well, I may be wrong about this, but so does a red light. And I’ve got to guess it’s more cost efficient.
But the best part of all when roundabouts enter your life is the excitement it adds to driving in Anchorage. Not that Anchorage needs more road excitement. Between moose, potholes, giant trucks that think they own the road and drivers who think it’s safe to turn right on a red light while sipping coffee, talking on the phone and writing notes on a work order, most Alaskan drivers have all the excitement they can stand.
While it is true that the average driver will eventually figure out how to navigate the roundabout in summer when all the arrows are showing and they’ve had enough practice, there is always one driver who is clearly entering the roundabout for the first time and has not a clue as to where to be or what to do. You drive defensively in fear of this driver’s sudden lane changes and exits.
Come winter, that driver is inevitably joined by the drivers who can’t seem to remember what they learned in the summer now that the snows of winter cover up all the directional arrows painted on the road.
Yeah, I couldn’t be more thrilled that yet another roundabout is coming my way. It brings back wonderful memories of riding bumper cars on the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City when I was growing up – just slightly more dangerous.

Isn’t there some level on which Rex Butler (head of Team Levi) should feel ashamed of his current occupation?

Oh how I long for a night’s sleep from my youth, uninterrupted by trips to the bathroom or simply waking up at 2 AM unable to go back to sleep but equally unable to do anything actually constructive beyond reading something I will likely not remember in the morning.

So it’s late in the afternoon and I’m at that stage in the day where each of my downstairs birds gets to come out of their cage and come into the office to visit with me while I work. Only I decided I could no longer resist reading my Best Friends magazine that had come in the mail over a week ago and was just waiting for me with its great stories.
So I put Wilson on the chair back which is carefully covered in a towel, put my feet up on the desk and read the issue from cover to cover. I then turned back to my computer to check my e-mail only to find that Wilson had crapped all over the wrist rest and the keyboard.
I am now writing this on a keyboard I spent over an hour cleaning.
I’ve owned birds for forty years. You’d think I’d know better.

There was a brief moment in time where I thought I’d give credit to the Tea Party movement for at least bringing new issues to the table instead of the same old crap we keep hearing from the Dems and Reps. But then they appeared here in Alaska and refused to refudiate their former head in California who wrote that horrible racist rant on the Internet. I mean, how hard is it to say that was way beyond just a mis-judgement in taste and something that seemed like a throwback to the era of the KuKluxKlan. But the Tea Party representatives who came to Alaska apparently could not bring themselves to call it what it was and to create as much distance as possible from themselves and the heart full of hate that created it.
And so the Tea Party reverts to the spot it had previously held in my world. And that wasn’t a good place.

Why does Blondie always have to pick the darkest corner in the darkest spot of the hallway right in front of the door leading to the garage for her morning nap? And why, after all these years, do I still forget she’s there and trip over her?