Elise Sereni Patkotak

Another state senator indicted. It’s like they are all sitting on a fence and the Feds are just picking them off one by one.  This week was Senator Cowdery’s turn.  Do we dare hope that next week or soon thereafter our favorite son will make the headlines?

A friend found a play pen for my birds at a garage sale. It looked perfect.  It’s up on a tall stand, has wheels, is all metal and looked as though there was no way to climb off it. It took my African Gray Abdul about ten minutes to conquer it. He climbed to the edge, swung his body down while clinging to the metal tray, got his body going in a swinging motion and managed to swing to the legs of the stand, slid down the leg and was whistling merrily on this way to the computer wires under

Maybe it’s just me, but when I go to the store to buy apples and find them boxed with a label that reads, “Food grade shellac” as the ingredient keeping them bright and shiny, I get nervous.  Is shellac really meant to be food grade? And what exactly does that mean? And how much food grade shellac can I eat before my stomach lining starts to get all hard and shiny bright? Until I feel much, much better about eating shellac, I think I’ll just stick to apples with food grade cannuba wax which, at least, is a natural product

Bird TLC is the wild bird rehab center where I volunteer. It is one of the best things about my life.  The owls and eagles and magpies and ravens and robins and…well, you get the picture. Who could not love working with these critters and helping them survive illness and injury. Especially when the injury is so often caused by humans who cut down trees with nests or let their cats go loose or hunt with lead shot that poisons birds who eat from the area or think the earth is their garbage can so they can drop all the

Lest there be any doubt about which is the more intelligent species, let me explain to you how Blue trained me without my ever noticing.  I put Blue out in the yard. Blue barks at someone or something threatening that’s going by…oh, say a butterfly or a baby carriage…and I jump up and make her come in because she forgets to stop barking and it quickly gets annoying.  I mean, it’s one thing to alert me to danger. But it’s just pathetic when ten minutes later she’s still barking, the initial cause of her barking having long past. She seems

For all us seniors groaning about the fiasco that is medicare payments, due to be cut because of the seemingly total incompetence of our current congress, I can only say, please give the poor bastards a break. They did manage to finally pass a bill that provides our military and veterans with what they have the right to expect after putting their lives on the line for our country.  You can’t expect a group with such a limited interest in our welfare (as opposed, say, to their re-election) to actually be able to pass TWO sensible bills in the same

Treat yourself to something unique and beautiful and save the hassle of shopping during the Christmas rush. Go to http://www.nuna-inua.com and check out the amazing Native art shown there.  This site was created by a student at Ilisagvik College in Barrow, Alaska. It doesn’t get more authentic than this.

ACS contacted me in response to my rant about the number of phone books delivered to Anchorage homes each year to let me know that their phone book is available on disk if you ask for it. They still haven’t answered my question as to why this information is not widely promulgated or why a consumer couldn’t opt out of the paper version and just have a disk mailed to them. This disk would be a lot more environmentally friendly if it meant not finding a stack of phone books on your porch. Getting them both seems to be over

In honor of America and everything she has stood for up until the Current Occupiers took office, I think everyone should take a moment today to face towards Washington, DC and extend their middle finger. Now THAT’S American!