Columns 2014

Why is it, despite the fact that I haven’t worked in an office or for anyone but myself for almost 15 years, that I find Monday mornings so hard on getting my motor started? I mean, if I didn’t have a calendar in front of me or friends who worked, I wouldn’t even know what day it was. Yet on Monday mornings, rolling out of bed is more of a chore than any other day of the week.

The holiday season is here. It used to be three separate occasions – Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Now it’s one long sprint to the finish. Those campaign ads will rapidly be replaced with ads suggesting your family cannot possibly have a good holiday unless you spend yourself into near bankruptcy.

I liked it better when these holidays were each their distinct own moment. But now Thanksgiving seems to be but a way station on the road to the exorbitant spending that occurs in an orgy of frantic shopping and leaves most people with that regretful hangover of surfeit physical

This is my last column before the general election. Can I get a “Hallelujah”? In just one week the positively depressing, ugly, noisy campaigns of truthiness will be over. I already voted. Whereas just a short week ago I felt at least a slight twinge of guilt when I walked from my mailbox straight to my recycle bin with all the political mailers, now I do so with a completely clear conscience.

I recently spoke with a friend who explained that he was not voting for anyone this year. I was shocked, as I knew him to be a conscientious

They sat across from me at dinner. It was my treat to celebrate their wedding. Their smiling picture, in which they held out their hands with the wedding bands showing, had appeared on the front page of the ADN the day after the ban on gay marriage was overturned in Alaska. They hadn’t planned on becoming the face of gay marriage here but the quirks of fate had made it so. They were the first to apply for a license in Barrow and, when the three-day wait period was waived, the first to marry.

Whether or not their marriage will

Last week, a young man named Peter John Henry was charged as an adult with the murder of his foster father Marvell Johnson. Henry is 16 years old. Marvell was 64. Two lives ended prematurely, one in death and the other in what almost surely will be a very long prison sentence if convicted. What makes this sad situation even more tragic is that Henry was a foster child. Johnson was one of those silent heroes in our community, a foster parent trying to give children with less than a good start in life a chance to heal and achieve

Have had free wifi In all the hotels we’ve visited in both Portugal and Spain. That’s the good news. Bad news is that I’ve become spoiled by fast connect times. Here, where the living is not as rushed as in America, you get a lot of time to contemplate life while waiting for your e-mail to load, assuming it actually loads and doesn’t just drop your halfway through the process. But that’s okay too because then you have the perfect excuse to just go back to your main goal of rereading all of the Harry Potter books before the vacation

Let’s check in on the progress women are making in the world today. According to some, we no longer have any reason to complain. We have, in fact, become such “nazi-feminists” that men can no longer be men. You know, like in the good old days.  Of course, that would be the good old days for men, not necessarily women. So let’s see how we’re progressing in the early years of the 21st century.

Let’s start with the rate at which men murder women in Alaska. That would be two times the national average. Once again, Alaska’s number one, though

As the referendum on legalizing marijuana grows closer, there are many discussions that need to happen about the pros and cons of the issue. But the suggestion that having a discussion with your children about legalized pot is unknown territory puzzles me.  I can tell you unequivocally what my parents would have said to me because it would be the same thing they said to me about alcohol. Until I was 21, it was illegal for me to indulge. If I did, then my mother assured me she would send me to Kingdom Come. I wasn’t sure where that was

I was thinking about Labor Day and that got me to thinking about labor which segued off to a woman in labor which brings me to my current topic – women having babies to replace the babies taken away by the state or tribe because they are not capable of providing a child with basic safety, nourishment and support.

For those of you who have never been involved in the field of child protection, the laws that govern it can be pretty weird sometimes. Replacement babies are a classic example. Here’s the way it often goes. If a state social

I was recently invited to a Pioneers in Health Care in Alaska event. I suppose it was inevitable that at some point someone would call me a pioneer. That didn’t stop me from feeling forty more gray hairs popping out of my head or my neck’s turkey waddle from shaking even harder. Then I stopped to think for a moment and the picture of the young woman who first came to Alaska and got involved in health care delivery in remote locations popped into my head. I realized she looked a whole lot younger than the person staring out at