Elise Sereni Patkotak

As always, leaving Barrow is hard. It was 50 below with windchill and I felt SOOOO at home in that.  The ocean ice was brilliantly white, the tundra seamlessly melted into it, the air was frigid, the people were warm…really, what’s not to like.  No wonder I made it my home for almost 30 years.  And my little Greta has grown up into such a wonderful young lady.  Instead of me driving her around, she drove me around. I borrowed her car and she cooked dinner.  WOW.  LIfe really does have some great and unexpected rewards.

Going home for a few days. Back to Barrow where winter knows how to be winter.  Back to the arctic air that invigorates me in ways I can’t fully explain.  It’s like I’m breathing right again when I get my first hit of that cold air.  My animals will be with my regular housesitter who treats them so well.  All of us who own animals probably have a person like this, a person we trust our precious creatures to who cares for them in our absence so that we don’t have to worry and can just enjoy ourselves.  Over the

It’s 10 AM. I’ve already spilled a bowl full of birdie kibble upstairs. Came down to deal with the foster birds, tripped and upended some nasty looking water on the floor. I wrote a long e-mail only to be disconnected by my computer or my e-mail provider before I hit the send button.I hope this is not a sign of things to come today.  I think I’ll go get a latte and try to calm down and contemplate life on a different plane…say, one headed for England.

Well, here’s an unexpected benefit to my website. I get lots of comments from people that are just fun to read…even if some of them are friends who are even weirder than I am….and you know who I’m talking about, Jim.

So I have reluctantly been dragged into the last frontier on the Internet.  At least, this is the last frontier for me.  If I go any further, I’m pretty sure my head will explode.  Either that, or I’ll have to deliberately forget all the lines of “The Raven” that I so painstakingly memorized in my dorky youth in order to make room for more codes and passwords and access numbers and online names. 

The good news, of course, is that I can now never forget my great-grandmother’s maiden name because if I do I will forever be locked out of

I have become my father.  I found myself sitting at the computer planning meals almost a month in advance with one of my lunch buddies.  I can picture my father sitting in the living room after dinner asking my mother what she wanted for dinner the next night and her look of exasperation at the idea that she already needed to be planning the next meal when the one she just ate had not yet been digested.

Need I really say more. My waist, what little of it I can still find, contiues to rise like an old man’s pants. My pants, on the other hand, are designed to stop somewhere around where my hips used to be before they decided to migrate south towards my knees.

I now know why my grandmother wore one rather shapeless black dress from her widowhood till she died. It was just easier. And the support knee highs didn’t show. And she never had to worry that when she raised her arms, her butt crack would show at a time when

Are you like me?  Are you glad the Olympics have ended?  I was absolutely exhausted from all that armchair athletics I was doing. I’ll need at least two weeks of sleep to catch my breath before I can even think of starting to prepare for the summer Olympics in two years.