I am an unabashed child of the sixties. I marched. I chanted. I tried to levitate the Pentagon and shake all the bad out of it while on a particularly fun acid excursion. Women had dreams for their future that had nothing to do with the way things were done. How big were those dreams, you ask? Well, we actually fought for women to not only have ownership and control of their body but to be able to get a credit card without their father or husband’s approval. Women wanted their place in the world and would no longer have Continue reading →
Duct tape fixes
I recently caused a friend to almost spit food out her nose while laughing after I told her how I fixed my cabinet knobs. For context, I arrived here 50 years ago and was part of the Alaska that couldn’t always get what it needed to fix stuff. So, ingenuity was a prized quality to have when you needed to get your skidoo going again while you were on the tundra in 40 below weather with just duct tape and hope.
(By the way, as an Alaskan who likes to avoid unnecessary conflict, I will be spelling it as “duct” Continue reading →
Maybe I’m the only one
When I saw Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris sitting together behind Biden at the State of the Union address, it brought tears to my eyes. I grew up in a world where women couldn’t open a bank account without a man’s approval. And now one man was standing there with his back protected by two of the baddest ass women in this world.
It’s a day I never thought would happen. And if it did happen, I assumed I’d be long dead. But with two women in charge, I finally have some hope that we really can right this ship Continue reading →
Back in the day
Back in the day, when I was young and somewhat up on the latest electronic trends, my mother asked me to help her sisters, my aunts, learn how to work the new fangled VCRs which had just arrived on the market. In case you don’t remember this, the instructions that came with them could be rather confusing. So my aunts all got VCRs that just sat there, as did my mother’s. But one day while on a visit to the family home, my mother asked me to help her with it. I took the instructions and rewrote them in very Continue reading →
Just Lisa
Remember that time when almost all of us actually learned to spell Murkowski? Ah, good times. Well, they are returning. Only this time with a rival candidate who hasn’t lived in Alaska all that long and who had to have the government pay to move her here or she might not have come. So I think we can all admit that we have some issues to raise with Lisa’s new opponent for the Republican nomination to the US Senate.
Oh yeah, remember when we all learned to spell Lisa? Good times.
If I am understanding this situation correctly, the Republican Continue reading →
Pandemic ending
While this pandemic is hardly over, for many of us it is at least finally starting to end. This means that those of us (me) who are totally vaccinated can now go back out and enjoy some level of what once counted as normal life.
I actually went to a restaurant where a waiter filled my water glass and asked if there was anything else he could get me. After an extremely long year, I was finally being waited on again. And the food that came to the table was fresh and hot – not warm and in a bag, Continue reading →
Mask reveal
Once the worse of the pandemic passed, some friends and I started to gather weekly to laugh, eat and amuse each other. It was just like before the pandemic but not quite because it was happening in a big empty room in my house that allowed for safe distancing. Also, everyone brought snacks individually wrapped so we could eat and visit – our two favorite things in the whole world.
Because we are all of a certain age, we received our covid vaccinations around the same time and so hit the two weeks past the second shot stage all at Continue reading →
The first time
The first time my sister and I went to China was 1983 or so. China was still in the depths of the Mao philosophy. Everyone rode bikes and wore dull, grey or dark green Mao pajama outfits.
Of all the things that I remember from that trip, one of the things that has always stayed with me was our official Chinese guide’s description of employment in China. He said there was no such thing as unemployment there. There was only “job waiting”.
Some years later when we went to Tibet, we were made to take an official Chinese guide with Continue reading →