Elise Sereni Patkotak

Actually, I’m assuming it would be a tree were it not for the thorough trimming it gets each year from the moose who camp on my lawn all winter. But despite that, it has apparently put out a purple flower. A birch flower. I thought something had gotten into the middle of the bush and started growing but my savvy neighbor Harry brought me a picture from the Internet showing a birch flower.

So the way it goes in my yard, if I pay any attention at all to you, you wither and die or grow long and scraggly. But

With each price increase for checking luggage, people work even harder to shove two weeks worth of necessities into two carry on bags, only one of which can even be laughingly referred to as a purse or similar personal item. By the time some of these people load themselves on the plane, there is more weight in the overhead compartments than in the seats below them.

So here’s my suggestion. We already have lost all civility, comfort and compassion that airlines and their in-flight personnel may ever have been inclined to show. That we are nothing more than cattle to

I don’t care if Al Gore is having an affair. I don’t care if Bristol and Levi ever get together again. I don’t care who has or doesn’t have Tiger Woods’ son. I don’t care who Bill Clinton is doing this week in his mile high club. I don’t care if Rush Limbaugh married some woman twenty years his junior. I don’t care!  I actually have my own life. I find it much more interesting than theirs.  Dear god… whatever happened to the concept of privacy?

Out of the clear blue, my African Gray parrot Abdul has started yelling, “Woodie, woodie, woodie, wooooo!” with great emphasis on the last woo. I have no idea where he ever heard anything like that or why it is suddenly his favorite phrase. But instead of being greeted in the morning with “Good morning. I love you. Give me a kiss”… which used to be his regular morning routine… I am greeted with a phrase that makes me look around for a dozen clowns in a tiny car driving towards my coffee pot.

Life is never dull with birds around.

Back in the day, a young man who would one day be president wrote… or had ghost written, depending on whom you believe… a book entitled “Profiles in Courage”. JFK’s book detailed decisions made by brave men who knew they were putting their political future on the line for a principle in which they believed. 

If that book were written about Alaskan politicians today, I don’t know if we’d find enough material to even call it “Profile in Courage”.

Political opportunism and pandering has reached such an unprecedented depth in our public life that we don’t even blink when our

Is it too soon to admit I miss the cold weather and am absolutely through with bugs and mosquitoes for the year? All I want to do is slip under a blanket and cover my head until the fall when the leaves turn, the mosquitoes go away and I no longer have to worry about finding a bug crawling in my shower in the morning.

There are some body parts that are simply never going to look attractive on anyone unless sculpted by Michaelangelo. I leave you to figure out which they are.

Remember when you used to have friends? Now you have a social network. I don’t know about you, but that simply sounds boring and somewhat painful to me.

The state of Alaska asked me to participate in a video about underage drinking. They told me I’d just be doing a voice over where I’d read my column about the Barrow girls basketball starters who were suspended for drinking. So I showed up with no make up, in a t-shirt with a blue denim Bally shirt blowing in the breeze over it and my hair four hours away from my hairdresser’s appointment and guess what… that’s right. Marian is in heaven spinning because her little girl is now captured forever on camera with no makeup, a t-shirt and hair