Elise Sereni Patkotak

I like to think of my dog as The Mad Ratter.  Since he is not especially effective as a guard dog, I figure his ratting ability justifies the gazillion dollars in treats, toys and grooming I spend on him each year.

I guess, to be perfectly fair to him, he is somewhat effective as a watchdog in that he will bark at every leaf as it falls off the trees. But his bark is such that all but the truly dense immediately know the sound is being made by a little ankle nipper.

I’d like to give him credit for

It was one of those messages you live for as a GAL. Kids whose lives seemed destined to be lives of sadness and neglect getting a second chance, living with a family that allows them to dream and creates a world for them in which their dreams just may come true.

The message said, “The kids are growing like weeds!  They’re both about 40 inches tall.  They don’t look anything like toddlers at all anymore.  Mikey has decided he wants us all to live in Kentucky with my mom and youngest sister.  He wants to have 5 black horses and

In a recent letter to the editor in this section of the newspaper, one of our readers complained about the trains in Anchorage.  He ended his letter with the question, “Aren’t the rest of you in west and southwest Anchorage getting tired of this noise by the trains through out the night?” The noise he was referring to was the train whistle.

As one resident of south Anchorage who lives very near a train crossing, I can only respond, no.  I am not at all tired of those train whistles. I don’t think I will ever tire of them.

Train

For those of you who still don’t believe the rich inhabit a different world, from you and me, let me try to persuade you with a list of some of the things that Tyco former chief executive officer L. Dennis Kozlowski had the company buy him.

For starts, there was the $17,000 traveling toilet box.  Now, I’m not even sure what this is.  Is it a toilette box for women’s skin care products?  Or is it really a travelling toilet box? Perhaps they bought this for him to use at long board meetings so he would not have to mingle

Ah, hay fever.  Ah-choo.  Yes, it’s that time of the year again.  Only after 30 years in Barrow, I’d almost forgotten what it was like.  I can only guess that no self-respecting pollen would travel that far north for the singular purpose of annoying me.  Or maybe my body just never recognized North Slope pollen as pollen.  It certainly took it forever to recognize a North Slope summer as a summer.

Whatever the reason, I had 30 good, hay fever free years when I could go outside in the fall and not be felled by multiple sneezes that literally took

As part of my ongoing effort to not gain my age in weight annually, I recently have taken to trying hypnosis.  Every night I faithfully put on earphones and listen to the tape of a man telling me all kinds of wonderful things about the self-control I have lurking in my subconscious.  Apparently it can’t fight its way through the crowd screaming for sugar free cookies long enough to be heard.  But this tape swears it will eventually bring it to the forefront of my mind.

Until then, I spend about 20 minutes each night going into somewhat of a

Kids killing other kids.  It makes headlines in every state in the union.  Alaska has no exclusive on this problem. Wherever we go, these problems follow us because they are basically the problems of dysfunctional families.

I’m not trying to blame every family that ever had a kid go bad. Sometimes kids from relatively good families take a sudden left turn in life and end up on the wrong side of everything their parents stand for or taught them.  But they are the exception.  The general rule is that kids who kill come from backgrounds that lay the seeds for

I grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey in the days before gambling legally dominated the political scene.  I make the distinction of “legally” because illegal gaming, as well as prostitution and other nefarious enterprises, always dominated the Atlantic City political landscape.

As a child, I defined politics as follows. The pope ruled the world, the president helped the pope by ruling in America and Hap Farley ruled in Atlantic County. Atlantic City did have a mayor.  In fact, it was the same mayor for most of my childhood. At some point in the 1980s, Atlantic City held the dubious

I learned my first lesson in the cold hard realities of life when I was about 10 or 11 years old.  I saw an ad that said if I wanted to be a writer, I should send a sample of my writing to them and a “famous writer” would personally evaluate it for me absolutely free of charge. I couldn’t believe it.  A FAMOUS WRITER was going to read what I wrote and tell me whether it was good or not.  And for free.

I dashed off a story and sent it in quite sure that the next thing to

Yet another unruly member of the air travelling public has been brought to court and pled guilty.  Justice has been done, the people on the flight to Japan were only about 3 hours late to their destination and the man convicted of causing the inconvenience may yet be made to pay for the $10,000 worth of fuel that the plane had to dump to safely land here.

At the very end of the article about this passenger was a sentence that stated that almost all cases of air rage involve alcohol. 

May I just say “DUH!”?

Many years ago, I