Elise Sereni Patkotak

What will all those charities do when we use the US mail so infrequently that they can no longer send pages of address labels as free gifts for your donation? More importantly, what will I do with the thousands of labels I have so carefully stored away for years?

I’m tired of staring at the dead and empty plant pots lined up on the side of my house. I’m going to go buy plants, stick them in the pots, put them where the sun should be and figure if they are true Alaskans, they’ll survive until the sun actually appears.

It amazes me that we are willing to put millions into building more prisons but balk at putting a few thousand into programs that lessen the need for those prisons. Perhaps it’s because prisons are built for a concrete population. Putting money into helping foster kids make better choices as adults is more nebulous. We can’t know how many of them will make good choices and not end up in our penal system.

That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t give them the best chance possible. If we don’t want to do it because it is the right thing to

The weather clearly is not going to cooperate so I planted the damn strawberries and they are on their own to deal with Mother Nature.

On a good note, I found a big old earthworm when I dug down to plant the strawberry mass of entangled whatever it was and I’m pretty sure that’s a good sign. Now I just have to make sure that no one throws poison on my lawn or garden… though I wonder if you can call it a garden if the only thing in it is a nest of strawberry roots.

Blue wakes up reluctantly and moves slowly off her pillow. She gets to the top of the stairs and peers down. For reasons she can’t comprehend, Blondie and I are down there waiting for her to come. I call her again, very loudly, and she puts her foot tentatively on the top step as though waiting for me to say “I jokes” so she can go back to bed. I, meanwhile, working on the assumption that she has started her descent to go out one last time before bed, head to the back door with Blondie.

Blondie goes out. Blue

They sit lonely and alone in a bag on my desk waiting for Anchorage to decide summer is here and the weather gets warm enough to put them in the ground. My hopes for my very own strawberries grows dimmer with each cold day. that passes.

Blue goes out for her final ablution of the night.  She meets both her needs and as she rises from the second, I expect to see her scrape her paws backwards based on some primeval memory of covering the scent. But tonight she is just not in the mood to succumb to that primitive urge. So she scrapes her right back foot only. One scrape through the mud and then her leg freezes in a pose, as straight back and away from her body as her old age can manage. She holds the pose for a second, disdain for such

Given what seems to be the slow death of letter writing and paying bills by mailing them in, I have to wonder what all those organizations are going to do that send you a “gift” with their solicitation in the form of return address labels.

… is Justin Beaver and why won’t people on TV stop talking about him? Unless, of course, he’s recently created a successful blueprint for peace in the mideast.

In the best of times, which would be a time without war, being a military spouse is a challenge. You move a lot and you spend more time than you could possibly have imagined being a single parent.  It is not a calling for the faint of heart.

I just spent a few days with a military wife whose husband is on his third deployment in as many years. She is raising two small boys by herself for the next few months. But thanks to the advances of modern technology, her husband gets to be an active father in his