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One book too many

There are thousands of biographies of Abraham Lincoln and yet it still feels as though we have barely scratched the surface of the intricacies that created him.

We now have two biographies of Sarah Palin and it feels as though the subject is thoroughly exhausted.

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Phone trees

I got a call from a company that apparently has some deal with my health insurer to provide me with my prescriptions at no co-pay. Needless to say, they are a mail order company. As attractive as it was to have no co-pay, I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it because it would mean the loss of yet one more person to person interaction and the addition of yet one more phone tree to my life. I just couldn’t handle that. I like the personal contact. I like that they know me. I like that they are more than

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He’s here

Joseph Patrick Kanayurak Stuermer joined our world at 2:37 AM on 2/19 weighing in at 7.5 pounds and 19 inches long. Mom and baby doing fine. Old aunt who didn’t get back to her house to go to sleep until 4 AM may never recover unless she can find a way to sleep 24 hours straight.

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Columns 2009

Hugh..urp!…Hefner, the result of untreated venereal disease?

I was channel surfing the other night when I came upon Hugh Hefner and some young blond women promoting a show in which they appear. As best I could tell from the few moments that I sat there watching with my mouth agape and all belief in human intelligence suspended, this show was about those very young women being that very old man’s girlfriends.

The young ladies in question were about what you’d expect.  They couldn’t successfully fill out an application for Hooters but they are qualified to be Hefner’s special friends. They spent most of their airtime exhaling these

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I guess Wilson is acclimating

When my foster bird Wilson, a beautiful conure, first came here, he would get hysterical if he saw a moose in the yard and start screaming at the top of his lungs.This morning, I went to his cage to get the old food and water out and there was a moose standing not half an inch from the window his cage is next to. He didn’t make a sound. Just stared at the moose and then went back to ringing his bell which is what he does when he thinks his meal is late. So either he has come to

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Why I should never be asked to appear in public

So I was heading off to a charity luncheon where I volunteer as a waitress. I put on the nicest pair of pants I have only to notice a coffee stain on the pant leg. So I tried to wipe it off using a wet kleenix. That left crumbs of white lint on my pants and a big wet stain. So I tried to blow dry the wet spot. When it dried, I found out that what I’d done was create an even bigger, albeit lighter, stain. So I changed to my next best pair of pants. Then I let

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Oh the red, red robins

On any given morning, I get up, open the curtains on my back door to the porch and there are easily thirty or more robins sitting in the three trees behind my house waiting for breakfast. Did I miss something here? Aren’t robins supposed to be the first birds of spring? What the hell are they doing in the trees behind my house in Alaska, in the winter, with the temps hovering at 0 to 10 degrees F? And can I afford over $100 a week in bird food to keep them from creating an Alfred Hitchcock scene when I

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A Valentine to Blue

Everyone wants to believe that their pet is the best…the smartest, the handsomest, the fastest….whatever. This is my Valentine to Blue to let her know that I love her anyway.

See, her buddy Blondie got impatient to come in one day and pushed in the bottom metal panel on the outside back door. Seems she once lived in a home where pushing on the door caused it to open and she figured if she just kept pushing, this one would open too. So I removed the metal panel until winter ends and I can work on the metal in less

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Some days are just like that

I am so tired of fighting my weight and my blood sugar and worrying about what I eat and what part of it is going to probably kill me…somedays I just want to say, screw it! I’ll eat what I want, when I want and die whenever the hell it happens.

Then on other days I want to live long enough to spend all the money I’ve saved.

Then I think about that and realize that I could go through my savings in about three weeks without breaking a sweat. Which, since I’m not an eager shopper, says a lot

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