Elise Sereni Patkotak

This year is Barbie’s fiftieth anniversary. Talk about a role model!  As a girl, I assumed that when I developed breasts, I would also develop a 10-inch waist to match. Didn’t happen. At fifty, her breasts remain upright and perky while mine started heading south two minutes after I hit the half century mark.

I was never a doll girl.  My mother tried. She bought me all kinds of dolls. We found them moldy and rotting in the back room of our old store when mom died. Some had heads. Some didn’t. Some had odd pieces of clothing clinging to

$63,000 and some change. That’s apparently the going rate for dinner with our lovely gal, temporary Sal. Wow!

I found myself wondering whom I would pay $63,000 to have dinner with and realized that the list was extremely limited even if, in my daydream, I allowed myself to have millions and millions in disposable income. I found myself thinking that maybe if Todd served dinner in little tighty-whiteys I might consider putting out maybe $5000 just because he’s kind of hot in a very Alaskan dorky way.  But $63,000 – even if Sarah was serving it in her tighty-whiteys it

I thought I’d try to see just how comfortable the jays who come to my porch for peanuts are. I usually put the peanuts out and then sit in a chair on the other side of the porch while they dive in. But last night I stood there with peanuts in my hand. Once before they had come to my hand, grabbed a peanut and then flew off. This time, one of them was bold enough to grab a peanut, toss it in his beak enough to satisfy him that this was not the one he wanted, drop it back

Well, I know now who Kanye West is.  I am not impressed. His momma should have taught him better manners.

For those of you in the Anchorage area, I’ll be at Title Wave Books from 1 to 3 today signing my book. Come on by and say hi.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… if god had meant women to wear shoes with pointed toes and four inch heels he would have given us much bigger arches and made out toes come to a point.  And no, I did not buy a pair of shoes. I was, thankfully, born without the shoe fetish that every woman on TV and in the movies seems to have. But I was in a mall for a few minutes today and passed a store with shoes in the window and wanted to run in and scream that god never

Winter has officially arrived.

Summer is over. Fall/winter has arrived. And the political season commences a full year before the elections.  Sigh… it was so nice to have nine months unencumbered by screaming political ads, gazillion political mailings and polls that aren’t really polls but just want to push you to vote a certain way by implying that the opponent eats little babies with a glass of chianti.