Am I the only one horrified by the message that pervaded the Olympics about McDonald’s somehow being the official food of Olympians? Here we are worried about an obesity epidemic among out children and the message from the Olympics is that you can have an Olympian body AND regularly eat at McDonald’s because that was the Olympians “favorite” food. This is true only if you are cross country skiing ten miles a day at an Olympic race pace. And even then you’d be doing your arteries no good.
What a horrible message to send to our kids as we try to get them to eat healthier and exercise more.

I wake up from a sound sleep with two things foremost on my mind. One, I have to go to the bathroom immediately because apparently part of the aging process is the shrinking of your bladder until it is approximately the size of a pea. Two, I have a brilliant idea for a column. I pull out the pad of paper in the drawer next to my bed because I know by now that if I don’t write it down, tomorrow I won’t remember it. And at 3 AM, this idea definitely seems to be the one that will win me the Pulitzer.
The next morning I wake up, replicate my immediate trip to the bathroom and then grab that paper with excitement over the fact that I already have the best idea ever for my column and so I won’t have to spend the weekend mindlessly staring at a blank screen while weeping softly. Only I can’t read most of my writing and what I can read doesn’t seem to make any sense. And in thinking back on what I think I was trying to write, the thought occurs that it was a pretty stupid idea in the first place.
Maybe I should just get rid of the paper and pen next to the bed and then I won’t even remember I ever had these ideas.

The house rule is this - if I have to get up and go down the stairs to let the dogs out before we go to bed, then the dogs have to go out. Blue and Blondie are old enough that they now fall fairly soundly asleep by 10 PM.  And I do mean soundly. I have to practically stand over them screaming their name before an eye even twitches to indicate they are slowly realizing someone might be standing over them getting red in the face with effort. Why, you ask, don’t I shake them awake? Well, because I’m such a nice person that I don’t want to startle them. The few times I’ve put my hand on them to shake them awake, they have awaken with such a start that they fell off the couch.
Once I have their attention, I loudly announce that EVERYONE has to go out one last time. They both look at me like I’ve lost my mind. I go over to the stairs and go down a few. I stop, turn around and yell their names again. I wait. After a moment or so, I yell again. I hear them reluctantly partially get off the couch. Blondie especially has perfected the art of her feet on the ground while her butt is still on the couch as she looks towards the stairwell to see if I can possibly be serious about this.
Finally they come to the top of the stairs. I proceed to go down to the bottom landing. They stand at the top staring at me and thinking - I can only assume - that I called them over to watch me go downstairs and that I really didn’t expect them to go down also.
I order them down again in a sterner voice. They very slowly descend. We get to the backdoor. They go out. And they both pee for at least five minutes each, confirming in my mind that if I didn’t make them go out right before bedtime, I’d be getting up very soon after I fell asleep because they would suddenly have to go out immediately.
Once done, they slowly amble back to the door. Blue comes in and goes straight over to the bird cage to see if anything interesting has dropped since she started her evening nap that would make an appropriate midnight snack. Blondie follows behind Blue. As she walks past me, I close and lock the back door. I turn to go upstairs and find Blondie standing in front of me, head turned towards me with a look that says, “Are you finally happy? Did waking me up and making me get cold give you your jollies for the night? Because you can rest assured that for every night you wake me up to go out in the hope I will let you sleep late in the morning, I promise I will wake you up very early in the morning to go out again. You wake me up. I wake you up.”
Who would have ever thought that dogs had such a refined sense of tit for tat?

In 1961, then FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow famously said, “When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”

Minow was decrying the fact that for all its vast resources and potential, TV broadcasters all too often took the easy road by catering to the lowest common denominator in their audience. Instead of challenging viewers, broadcasters fed them pablum that kept them mindlessly happy.
There are those who might wonder where the harm in that is.  If TV is entertainment, then let it entertain.  But Minow’s point was that TV broadcasters had unprecedented access to American homes and with that access came some responsibility to appeal to our higher nature at least occasionally.
I have two TVs in my house. One is about twenty years old and its main purpose is to play cartoons and old rock and roll music for my parrots that live downstairs. The other TV is actually from this millennium and has HD capabilities. So when my cable company called to tell me I had to change out my box whether I wanted to or not, I figured I might as well get the HD box so I could see what all the fuss was about.
A very nice young man who is not scared by multitudinous wires extruding from the back of my TV, DVR player and cable box came over and made sense of the mess. And lo and behold, 30 minutes later I had HD TV in my living room.
My upstairs parrots that also mostly listen to rock and roll and watch cartoons on TV were totally unimpressed with the upgrade I’d just provided. Apparently they don’t care if Scooby Doo is in HD or not. But I was excited at the whole new world that seemed to be opening up to me. No longer would young people look at me strangely when I said I had to put in a cassette to tape the latest NCIS. Now I had not just HDTV, I had Tivo.
So I sat down and started scrolling through the almost 800 channels to which I now had access. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. Then I started again and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. Surely I had missed something. Because what I seemed to be finding was that I now had 800 channels of dreck instead of the original 100 I’d been living with over the years. Eventually I just gave up, turned off the TV and went back to my book.
I don’t want to sound like a snob here. I do watch TV. I am devoted to shows like Ugly Betty and 30 Rock and the Big Bang Theory. I live on the fantasies engendered by Mark Harmon and Nathan Fillion. But I had them before the 600 channels appeared. Now I had them in HD. It wasn’t as exciting as I’d anticipated.
As far as I can tell, what I’ve gained with the additional channels is a whole lot of stations whose programs have titles I’m embarrassed to even read while sitting alone in my living room. And I’m still too much of a Catholic schoolgirl to pause at any of them
It sometimes seems as though the only difference between 1961 and now is that the wasteland is much vaster.

Ah modern life. I was standing in my utility room getting dinner for the downstairs birds when the phone rang. Suddenly, a disembodied voice came from the phone after just one ring saying “bag lespee”. I thought it was odd that my answer machine was picking up in only one ring. I thought it was odder when I went in to the office to find no message. If no one had recorded a message on the answer machine, then where had the voice come from? I picked up the phone and there seemed to be nothing on the other end. I hung up. The phone rang again almost immediately. Once again a disembodied voice floated out of it insisting that “bag lespee” was calling. I picked up the phone and tentatively said hello. My friend Leslie Bagne was on the other end.
Apparently when I switched phone service recently, I got caller ID. They should tell people that. They should tell people their phone can talk to them. It’s simply not polite to scare old people. Now I wonder each day what else my phone can do - and will I be scared when I find out....
Ok god what I would give for a black phone with a rotary dial.

Turns out that having two hundred extra channels on TV doesn’t necessarily translate into having something worth watching. I now just have to scroll through more channels on the TV guide before turning the TV off and reading.

You can either freeze up or warm up completely. I’m beyond caring which you do. But for god’s sake, let’s stop the slop we are currently experiencing. It’s either winter or its not!

On Friday, a wonderful young man named Paul Mello came to my house and hooked me up to a HD cable box and a router for wifi Internet. I woke up in 1999 and went to sleep in 2010. He even fixed my remote so that it now controls everything but my bowel movements.If only I could remember even one thing he said. I can turn the TV on. That must count for something.

I know my dogs are bright and intelligent. I just know they are. But sometimes I do have to wonder.
When I got up the other day to let them out for their morning relief, I found a big moose all curled up in their yard enjoying a snooze. Clearly there was no going in the back yard. I went to the front door, opened it onto my front lawn and urged them to go do their business. They looked at me very puzzled. Clearly they had no idea why I was kicking them out of the house. And Just as clearly, they were leaving - certainly not without breakfast.
So I stumbled upstairs, pulled on enough clothes to not shock the neighbors, grabbed their leashes and took them out the front door to visit the lawn. They tore out the door, dragging me behind them. Due to a long dental appointment I’d had the day before, they had not had a walk. Clearly they thought I was making up for that with an early stroll.
I dug my heels in halfway down the driveway and repeatedly entreated them to go pee. Both looked at me in sheer bewilderment. And I wondered how an urge that was so clearly immediate when they were in the house could so quickly go away just because they were going out the front door.
Blue, my lovely little diabetic, finally managed to find a spot on the driveway that suited her fancy. Blondie never got a clue. We went back inside and, believe it or not, Blondie went back to bed as though the changed morning routine had exhausted her and she no longer could even think about peeing.
The moose finally ambled off about half an hour later and then Blondie went out and peed enough to raise the water table at least an inch. 
How does a dog do that? When I have to go, I have to go. I not only couldn’t hold it in, I can’t imagine how you can go BACK TO SLEEP with a full bladder. Maybe when I cross that Rainbow Bridge my dogs will be waiting for me with an answer.

I guess I shouldn’t complain about a four hour session at the dentist yesterday since I at least still have my own teeth to be worked on.  But still, four hours at the dentist is like four days anywhere else… unless you are having a proctology exam. Then it’s about equal.

As someone who has worked for over thirty years in the field of domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse, I cannot express how thrilled I was when Governor Sean Parnell put his money where his mouth is and launched an offensive against these heinous actions.

What you need to understand is that in this field of work, we are used to getting a lot of blathering and bleating from politicians but little in the way of real commitment. When the camera lights and microphones go away, so does the interest of most elected officials as they turn their minds to the more “important” topics that bring better press – topics like ACES and gas pipelines and revenue streams.  I’m not saying those aren’t important topics. I’m just saying so is the horror of family life in way too many Alaskan homes.
So here we were with a governor who actually believed that this was a topic worthy of his personal attention.  In fact, here was a governor who actually faced a camera and spoke about a subject that is the unspoken secret of way too many families – drunken abuse and violence perpetrated by a family member who should be ensuring the family’s safety.
I don’t know how many of you caught Governor Parnell’s ad before it was yanked but I found it fairly powerful.  His message is one that needs to be heard. And it needs to be heard coming from one of the most powerful people in our state because that too is part of the message. That tells people suffering in homes full of violence that things can change, things can get better and – probably most importantly – you don’t have to follow in the violent footsteps of your history. Because your father hit or your uncle abused or your mother was too drunk to ever protect you, you don’t have to re-create that history in your own family.
This was the governor’s message - you can actively choose not to repeat your parent’s mistakes. You can actively choose to create a better life for your family. You can give so much love and stability to your children that one of them can grow up to be governor no matter how badly you were treated.  This is a message that needs to be heard because it so rarely emanates from such lofty heights.
So, of course, it was inevitable that this would somehow become a political hot potato that was pulled by the sponsoring agency, the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. They claim they did not pull it because it became a controversial ad in an election year. Maybe. On the other hand, the last thing they need is to get caught up in the middle of a political dustup that could potentially endanger the funding they use to combat this epidemic in our state.
I just have to wonder if Ralph Samuels, the candidate for governor who objected to what he viewed as free publicity for the Parnell campaign, couldn’t have just this once considered taking a higher road.
While I am very aware that the higher road is not one that most politicians are familiar with or often travel down, what a breath of fresh air it would have been if he had just considered a stroll on it.  If, instead of crying unfair, he had said that the cause was so critical to the state he wants to run that he could only offer his support in whatever way possible to this campaign against the violence and abuse that is destroying the families one assumes he hopes to lead as governor.
But instead, the ad was pulled, politics trumped compassion and hope and a wonderful chance to show Alaskans from every economic and social strata of our state that the past does not have to be the only blueprint to their future was lost.
Samuels may have won this round in getting the ad pulled so that whatever advantage he thought it gave to Parnell in the way of free publicity was halted. But ultimately, in my mind at least, he lost any belief I might have had that his concern is for this state and its people and not simply his political future.

I figure it must be spring, or at least the return of the light, that’s causing the juices to flow. Captain (Amazon parrot) clearly wants to have sex… and, in fact, does every morning with his perch. CB (Bare-eyed cockatoo and his cage mate), who used to resignedly lay eggs for him to get him off her back, must be getting menopausal because she is absolutely refusing his advances and won’t lay an egg for him.  And so each day the arguments ensue and do not end until they go back to their sleep closet.
Either Captain is just being an asshole or the return of the sun is affecting him. Since he’s a male in heat, he’s clearly got a one tract mind. And if he doesn’t control it, CB will soon blow and he will be very, very sorry he didn’t just accept a relationship with his perch.

Am I the only one who goes to bed tired after watching the Olympics? Is this some kind of sympathetic reaction to all the energy they are expending? I don’t know the answer for sure, but I do know that I feel a great need to carb load even though I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t.

Remember just a month ago when health care reform was the issue our nation would stand or fall on?  Amazing how that whole crisis can suddenly disappear, isn’t it?

Even when I was young I did not understand the hysteria exhibited by some women if they did not have a date for Valentine’s Day. I guess when you generally didn’t have a date on any given day, one more dateless day just really didn’t stand out all that much.
And please, no pity needed. I buy my own treats and flowers and am surrounded by love, even if it comes from critters without the ability to take me to dinner. My life is very complete.