Elise Sereni Patkotak

I think one of my dogs might be a digger. The snow has melted in the back yard finally and I ventured out to peek around the side to see how my little flower garden area had weathered winter and moose feet.  Seems the moose feet weren’t the problem.  The holes where plants used to spend the winter sleeping till spring might be.  Hmmmm….could this be why Blondie disappears around the corner when I let her out and takes what seems to be an inordinate amount of time to do her business?  Thank god she’s not bright enough to tunnel

I guess you never realize how odd your little household sounds till you hear the silence at the other end of the line as you describe it to a potential house sitter.

Here’s the height of incivility.  Be talking on the phone with someone, hear their other phone start ringing, and suddenly realize they have answered the other phone and are no longer listening to you. I can only assume they were hoping the other person would provide them with more meaningful amusement.  How rude. Cell phones have destroyed what little polite society was left to us after the last century.

When you have pets in your life, it is never dull. Just watching them and trying to figure out what’s going on in their minds at any given moment is fascinating.

This morning, Blue was lying at her usual spot by my feet and Blondie was lying in her usual spot on the now snow free deck. Blondie has claimed the deck all for herself. It’s dry, warm, and since it’s on the second floor, she can see everything going on in the streets and yards around her. Something startled her out of her snooze and she started barking. Blue,

And with all love and respect, Phil, I do want to emphasize the older.  Happy Birthday! May you be older than me for the rest of our lives.

If I want to be optimistic, I think that new life forms lurking in the muck of an Alaskan breakup could potentially hold the cure for multiple currently incurable diseases. If I’m being pessimistic, I thik that the muck of breakup contains life forms that will overwhelm us and take over the world. On some days, I don’t view that as a bad thing.

Alaskan winters are like childbirth. This came to me as I slogged through the mud and muck of breakup. By the end of each winter, Alaskans are wondering how they will ever face another and begin to think about moving out. It’s just like a mother giving birth who wonders why she ever thought it was a good idea and swears she’ll never do it again. But then she sees her baby, has that fog of amnesia fill her brain and voila! she has another baby. And so we Alaskans, after a summer of rainy, cold and foggy weather, develop

I’m afraid I’ll have the cataract surgery and finally be able to see without gauzy clouds in front of my eyes and the first time I look in the bathroom mirror after the surgery, I’ll run screaming from the room in horror at the old face I can finally see looking back at me.

My mom’s mom died when I was only about nine years old. All my memories of her and her home involve opera on the radio in the background. I guess for an Italian immigrant at that time, opera was the popular music of the day on the radio. Certainly my grandmother would not have ever gotten into rock and roll. Even Sinatra probably came across as a bit unseemly to her.

So now I am trying to learn to appreciate opera by putting the TV on to the all-opera-all-the-time channel for my birds during the day. I don’t know if