Elise Sereni Patkotak

I’m sitting in my office being a good little girl and working down my list of chores. It’s almost 4 PM. For the last half hour I’ve heard this knocking on the side of my house. Since the wind was blowing, I figured some branches were hitting the house. But the knocking seemed too regular and insistent and I wondered if someone was working on my house and I didn’t know about it.

I went to the door where I found three very irate Stellar Jays who had been going from upstairs to downstairs tapping on windows and doors to

…. I put the flannel sheets on my bed. Let the cold commence.

That whooshing sound you hear is Joe Miller furiously backpedaling from his extreme right positions in order to get somewhere near the middle before the election.

While I realize Mr. Miller would prefer we believe that the media has merely screwed up his message for their own nefarious purposes, the bottom line is that his primary campaign left a wealth of written and spoken material that would indicate otherwise. For those of us who thought the most fun of the senate campaign would be watching Mr. McAdams attempt to suck enough oxygen up to at least get a weekly mention

In a race in which Lisa Murkowski and Joe Miller are going toe to toe for the Republican vote in the US Senate race you have to know that Democrat Scott McAdams could run naked through downtown Anchorage and still not get front page coverage in the paper or on TV unless Lisa and Joe spent the day sleeping in.

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