April 2013

Drove up to Glen Alps with the dogs yesterday. Ten minutes from home. Happy Wife wanted to check on the snow condition for crust skiing, which was evidently superb, I’m sure I heard the word divine used. She’s headed back there today with Lucy. Lacking grace on skis, both Harry and I will go elsewhere in the mountains for a hearty walk. Another sensational bluesky day today, like yesterday:

BIGGER.

See that saddle-shaped pass way back there? That’s Powerline Pass. By late spring most of the snow here will have melted, although in a typical year some will linger at the top of the pass through June, but only a little, and then you can mountain bike from where Happy Wife is standing all the way back to the pass, do a hike-a-bike over the top (it’s pretty steep), and then descend the backside of the mountain on a very fun (though partly treacherous) trail that eventually spills out on the highway about 20 miles south of Anchorage. Hard core dudes ride the road back to Anchorage, as a friend and I did years ago. Dumpy old men in their 50s opt for a bar stool at the Brown Bear saloon and congratulate themselves behind a beer or three while they wait for a spouse to arrive with the car.

Found an old photograph of me and my good friend Fritz the day we did that ride together. Must be at least twenty years ago now. We were just starting up toward the pass on the hike-a-bike, kicking toe holds in the snow as we went. Funny, I was sportin’ a cookie duster back then. He and I did some fun rides together in those days. I very much wish he hadn’t died in ’01, shortly after reinventing himself and earning his MD in his fifties. Back then he and I were geophysicists with BIG oil. I remember being pretty incredulous when he told me he’d decided to go to medical school, “Who goes back to school in their forties?”

BIGGER.

I’ll staple the photo back on the wall in the garage where I found it, I like to look at it from time to time when I’m futzing around out there. It has always been this way, memory fastens us to the past and the future unfurls unknown.

I saw my cardiologist this past week and received a summary report of my visit, which included my BMI (Body Mass Index). According to a reputable web site I am an overweight American. Barely, but still above the normal range. I entered Happy Wife’s height and weight into the calculator at the site and discovered her BMI is in the normal range. But that set me to thinking — she and I, qua married couple, really function as a single unit. So I added our heights and weights together and entered these values in the calculator. Voilà — as a couple our BMI is below normal! The output said the ideal weight for an eleven foot seven inch individual (couple really) is 508-684 pounds.

Say hello to a guilt free weekend of eating and drinking!

Left a comment at Lileks place last week. Attached a photo of our backyard. The snow is in retreat for sure, but the freeze thaw cycle had created rows of snow and ice chevrons, jutting up from frozen ground like angry hackles on the back of some primordial beast. I did this as a gesture of northern solidarity, to assure him eventually winter would leave Minneapolis alone, and we Alaskans understood the pangs of snow in April. An empathy for the still frozen. There exist so many things in modernity to hold our attention, yet still the whims of the season have power to stir our laments.

It cuts both ways. I stepped outside our master bedroom door with coffee in hand, expecting the chill of a late April morn, and instead was surprised by the warmth of the sun that had hours earlier breached the mountains like a kiss in a bluebird sky:

BIGGER.

It felt like triumph over long odds, survival, “We’ve made it through another winter!” Birds of every kind reported from tree branches, a light breeze wafted the first scents of spring, and somewhere, way out there, beneath the still surface of Resurrection Bay, I imagined I sensed the collective arousal of expectant salmon. The first drink of coffee tasted better somehow, the call from Happy Wife in the kitchen downstairs — “Breakfast is ready” — sounded even cheerier than usual. Yes, you think, this is what blessed means.

Even the dogs were exaggeratedly pleased:

BIGGER.

Reading a book by Oliver Sacks, MD: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Kindle version. Can’t say I like the prose style, but the case histories of his patients with severe neurological disorders, especially the symptoms they present with, are fascinating.

One in particular involved a patient who was blind. But there was nothing wrong this patient’s eyes or any part of the visual transduction system, the system that converts images to electrical signals and sends them to the brain. All of that was perfectly intact in this patient. Instead, this patient had a large lesion in a specific part of her brain that normally resolves these signals (occipital lobe), and consequently she literally could not “see” anything.

In another example, the basis of the book title, Dr. Sack’s was examining a man — a talented musician, teacher, and otherwise “normal” — who had slowly lost his ability to recognize faces (a disorder known as prosopagnosia). This was followed by him seeing faces everywhere, in places where there were no faces (on an umbrella for instance), and eventually he started showing symptoms of more general agnosia, the inability to recognize common objects. At one point during the exam this man had removed his shoe for some test Dr. Sacks wanted to perform. When Dr. Sacks told the man he could put his shoe back on, instead of reaching for his shoe the man grabbed his foot and seemed perplexed when he couldn’t put his own foot on his foot. Shortly after that when the exam was over, and the man and his wife (also in the exam room) were getting ready to leave, the man searched the room for his hat and mistook his wife’s head for his hat — he literally grabbed her head and tried to lift it off her body and put it on his head! What I found fascinating was that in spite of his mental deficit this man was otherwise normal. He was an accomplished music teacher at the local university, a job he kept because he was good at it, not out of any sense of charity. Dr. Sacks wondered how this man could be independent in his daily life — eating, bathing, dressing, etc.. His wife’s reply was that so long as he did these things while singing (apparently he sang songs while doing almost everything), he was fine, but the second he stopped signing, even lightly, his activity came to a full stop; he’d become completely bewildered because suddenly he could no longer recognize anything, even his own clothes.

Now, there were certain times during my misdirected youth — close your eyes Mom — when I saw things that weren’t really there, but I have never, ever mistook Happy Wife’s head for a hat.

Comment problem fixed.

Carry on.

Sensational view from my window seat on the slow descent to Anchorage of what I believe is the confluence of Harriman fiord and Barry arm. Don’t know the names of the glaciers to the north. I know, my bad, we may have been instructed by this time to turn off every electronic device with an on/off switch. Couldn’t resist.

BIGGER.

Later on the descent a view of the back (eastern) side of the Chugach mountains.

BIGGER.

Permit me a complaint about motion activated dispensers in airport bathrooms. Another example of purpose lost to good intention.

You see, planes, airports, and travelers are crawling with bacteria and viruses. The purpose of soap and water is to rid these disease vectors from my hands, not possible if the damn water will not come forth from any of the motion-activated faucets in the Men’s room, despite repeated waving of said hands in front of sensors: “Hello, soapy hands here. Any day now.”

Inevitably, moving to basin #2, having lost patience with the dysfunctional faucet in basin #1, in fact causes the faucet in basin #1 to come on! Have you experienced this? Quickly dashing back to faucet #1 causes it to shut off. Then you see a person at basin #3 merrily washing his hands, and when he departs you dash to faucet #3 in effect causing it — you got it — to shut off!

By now only a pointless volume of soap remains on your hands, so you wave them beneath the sensor on soap dispenser #3. Like the faucets this proves futile. In the meantime, you see someone satisfyingly washing their hands in basin #1. You can’t avoid the feeling it’s personal.

Eventually, you find a miserly faucet that works, dispensing just enough water to moisten one half of one side of one hand, leaving it coated with a sticky emulsion well short of your lathery goal. Nevertheless, you rub your hands together with futile vigor. It’s time to rinse. Copy/paste unfulfilled entreaties to stubborn faucets until, finally, one relents and dispenses one palmful of cold water. You concede defeat. It’s almost over. You walk to the paper dispenser which happens to be mounted rather high on the wall, such that by reaching one’s hands up to activate the motion detector the meager water left on your hands begins to slowly run down your arms inside your shirt sleeves. Isn’t that special!

But wait, here comes a single sheet of one-ply paper — six by eight inches. You quickly tear it at the perforation, not daring to risk the time required for sensor reset and more hand waving for additional sheets. Touching only one hand the tiny sheet becomes instantly sodden. By now most of the water has drained to your elbows anyway, so you dry with your shirt sleeves. You crumble the sheet of sodden paper into a ball the size of a nose booger, toss it in the general direction of the trash can burgeoning with other waste, but alas, it’s a rim shot, and falls to the floor.

Leaving the bathroom you open the door with the handle (crawling with disease vectors) pleased with yourself for having incrementally saved earth’s finite resources.

I’ll be in Boston next week, and blogging infrequently if at all. Our company and academic liaison was selected to present a paper at a conference, and we’ll have our shingle out on the exhibition floor in the commercial space. Stop by and say hi you, whoever you might be reading this. All that plus a few meetings with candidate clients will make for a fast-paced and very busy week. “How will I survive without your blogging?!” you ask? There there now, I’ll be back on Friday. In the meantime, enjoy a walk down memory lane. That’s what that search bar over there on the right is for.

It will be nice to see Spring! See, just yesterday we got hammered with an unseasonal snowfall — unseasonal even for us really. And the weatherlady said maybe more on the way. Where would the credibility of forecasters be absent the safety of probability. Weather isn’t true until it arrives, before that it’s merely a likelihood. Before this snowfall it was bluesky for a week and well into the 40s. Qua Alaskan, I should have known better than to get too excited.

Beautiful before the storm came, though! Happy Wife and Harry take a break near the Hope cutoff, during the drive to our Nest on the beach in Seward this past weekend:

BIGGER.

I feel like this could be a long post. Only nine words in and I can’t be sure, but I feel a buildup inside me, the same feeling of urgency to expel one has after four Americanos (Venti) riding in a car on the interstate and the road sign says: Next services, 25 miles.

Why the buildup? Been grant writing again is why, revising really, which takes the concerted focus of every neuron and synapse I have left. Talk to me when I’m in grant writing mode and my reply, assuming I could muster one, would be like Jabberwocky. Think Joe Biden on the campaign stump. Needless to say blogging stops until the grant gets submitted. Tomorrow!

Let’s begin with the weather! Bluesky lately and warm, that is warm in the sense we living here at 61° north in late March mean warm. Which is not what most anybody else in America would call warm; they may be generous and say warm-er or less cold or okay but room for improvement, but not warm like an Alaskan means warm: “43°! No way! Shut up! That’s awesome. Let’s go crust skiing in shorts and tank top!“

A moose was struck by a car and eventually killed by a state trooper the other morning. Not a hundred feet from our house. I was still in bed, Happy Wife tending to her morning ablutions, when I heard two loud cracks one right after the other. My first guess was gun reports, so I ignored ’em — irreconcilable differences at the neighbor house, maybe. Harry heard it too, he went off with a few dozen throaty barks stopping only after I shouted at him, Dude, Chill! For some reason he responds to Dude. A few minutes later I was hop-stepping downstairs, simultaneously (and unwisely) trying to thread my legs into my morning comfys, when I  looked out the front window and saw the traffic in the street had slowed, and then I saw the moose lying in the left lane, barely alive, a miniature fog rising from its nostrils. The two loud cracks I’d heard earlier were moose bone breaking against glass ‘n steel.

I walked back upstairs to notify Happy Wife, who was crestfallen at the news, and then back downstairs to the front window. By then a trooper was standing over the moose, gun pointed, another trooper farther down the road waving his arms to halt traffic, and then two reports from a handgun in close succession. .45 cal, possibly .44 mag.

Less than a half hour later the moose was removed, perhaps by the moose salvage people. A sad fate to contemplate, really, one minute you’re struggling to sustain 1500+ pounds during the wee days of Spring subsisting on frozen twigs and buds, and the next you’re in pieces somebody’s freezer.