Elise Sereni Patkotak

It’s Sunday morning and I’m pulling up to my friend’s house to pick up her niece for lunch. It is snowing out. My flowers are still in bloom, it’s only the 3rd week of September and it’s snowing out. But that’s not what was remarkable. What was remarkable was that as I sat there watching the snow land on my windshield, I heard the weather report come on the radio and it informed me that it was partly cloudy out with lots of sunshine breaking through and temps that would be considered balmy for September in Anchorage.  Hmmm, I thought,

Blondie, god bless her dim little soul, loves to get treats as much as Blue. She just doesn’t particularly want to eat them as much as she wants to parade around with them in her mouth and then coyly hide them in a non-existent patch of grass in the dog yard. Blue, of course, thinks this is the greatest game of hide and seek ever since she doesn’t have to do much searching to find the treat sitting in front of her on the bare ground. So when she goes out at night to do her final business, she always

… but it seems as though with each passing day it’s a little harder to get it revved up to go.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that Palin is just Pain with an L?

Is it the fact that stores are already showing Christmas cards and decorations, making me wonder if I overslept both Halloween and Thanksgiving… in which case I’d be really, really pissed because Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday… all food and no shopping… or is it the fact that I have a friend who is actually checking her holiday wrapping supply and going back to buy what she needs? I may have to crawl into my “anti-holiday” hole a lot earlier than usual this year.

The argument over the Islamic Center proposed near Ground Zero seems to center on the theory that Muslims should be sensitive to how sacred Americans consider the area.

Aside from the fact that many Muslims are Americans, following this logic would dictate all buildings in which a Catholic priest works or lives should be no closer than… what, three blocks from a school? Five blocks? A mile?

Yes, I know all priests aren’t pedophiles but then, all Muslims aren’t terrorists either. It’s about being sensitive.

It goes without saying that Germans can’t build anything near a Jewish school or synagogue

As I walked out of Costco with four tubes of gigantic sized Sensodyne, I found myself thinking of a Golden Girls episode where Sophia buys a case of toothbrushes from a big warehouse store and justifies it by announcing that god wouldn’t let her die if she still had a case of toothbrushes to use up.

I hope god is listening because it’s going to take one helluva long time to use up this Sensodyne.

In my youth, I spent many hours on the Washington Mall protesting the Vietnam War and poverty or screaming for everyone to have civil rights. And now The Daily Show will have a rally for sanity on that same mall on Oct. 30 with a competing rally sponsored by the Colbert Report to keep fear in our national dialog. And I find myself saddened beyond belief that I can’t be there for both those rallies. I never get to go to the really good stuff!

So I got another unwanted telephone book dumped on my porch today. When I called to have it removed by the company that distributed it, Local Pages of Alaska (situated, oddly enough, in Utah), they told me to just put it in recycle as they had no way to pick it up. Strange, isn’t it, that they have a way to come up on my property without an invitation to drop off another waste of trees that could be cleansing our air with good oxygen but they have no way to make the return trip to pick it up. If

Did you see the article earlier this week about the Dutch pulling a pilot off a Delta flight because his blood alcohol level was slightly above the allowable amount? You know what makes me nervous about that? What makes me nervous is that there IS an allowable amount of alcohol in a pilot’s system. Is it really too much to ask that they not drink at all before a flight?