Month: June 2015

If you had asked her forty years ago, “Can you imagine that someday you’ll be walking a beach in Alaska, on summer solstice, carrying dog poop, fishing line, and an empty can of Miller High Life inside a discarded plastic grocery bag?”

Well.

Sometimes, dreams come true

Mercifully cooler today. We slept together in the same bed! I felt like I had to learn everything all over again.

After a restful night of sleep we awoke, had coffee together on the deck — a soft boiled egg and muffin (me) — and then we rolled up our sleeves and completed laying the new floor in the guest house.

Supposed to be in the seventies again next week, near eighty in Anchorage.

…

The tragedy in Charleston. It doesn’t seem right to me to say nothing about it. Which might be interpreted by some as a kind of acquiescence, that tragedies like this will continue to happen from time to time and there’s really nothing more politicians can do about it. On the other hand, it peeves me to see the mainstream media thrust the mic in the face of every politician to goad them into saying something about it, and then grade the responses by depth of grief, or imbecility. For what purpose?

We live in a dangerous world. I wish it weren’t so. But it is. Everyday and everywhere be vigilant, careful, and selective of who you trust. What else can any one person do?

Her hair was wet because she’d just run through the sprinkler. At night she’s back to sleeping in the tent in the backyard to escape the heat in our second floor bedroom. There are forest fires burning north and south of us. Lowes and Home Depot have sold out of fans. Downtown, men stand on street corners prophesying The End of Times.

Tourists are puzzled. They step off the buses, some wearing coats — coats mind you! — and wonder why us locals appear so Woeful. “It’s summer,” they shrug, “supposed to be warm.” They don’t understand. What they want is tax-free Moose Poop jewelry. Their names appear on cards dangling from lanyards slung around their necks. This is so the tour guide can spot them more easily when it’s time to hurry them back onto the bus. And for the shop-owners, too:

“Evelyn is it, from Indiana?…yes Evelyn, I can assure you, all our turds come from 100%, purely grass-fed Moose — right here in Alaska!”

Ka-ching.

I take it all in while eating a polish sausage topped with grilled onions, seated on the rim of a concrete planter outside the Public Lands Information building. Just watchin’ ’em go by.

I never tire of seeing the tourists. To live and work in a place so many people can’t wait to experience, some for the first time — priceless.

Low 80s the past couple days. Forecast is for it to continue the next two, then cool down into the mid 70s as the month draws to a close. I just now kissed Happy Wife goodnight before she headed off to her cocoon of coolness in a swale of grass in the backyard. By the time it’s cool enough for her to return to the bedroom, sleeping together will seem new again. Some things are worth the wait.

Happy Wife and I slogged up to Marmot Overlook to glimpse Exit Glacier. Aptly named. One thousand feet Up in 1.2 miles. 74 degrees. 82 by Tuesday if the forecasters are to be believed.

Our Anniversary today. Nine years ago We began like this

Never before have I been married nine years, far less nine consecutive years. Our immediate goal is ten, and then ten more, and so on, until death do us part. I could lie and tell you every step of the trail hasn’t been rich and wonderful. If there were days when it was otherwise I can’t recall them. Or I don’t see the point.

Doesn’t mean every day has been Amarone and Cherries. Take for instance today. We both took the day off. Happy Wife (HW) because of a concern over waves of pain in her gut, which defied a simple diagnosis. Me, because, well… In Health And Sickness. I first called to make an appointment with our Primary Care Physician. She was out, and her partners were already booked the entire day. Then Happy Wife calls another office. They said, “We don’t make same day appointments for new patients.” Then she tried to leverage her influence in the medical community to pry her way into a same day appointment at some other office. No sympathy. Fine. So we went to a Doc ‘n The Box, where they welcome walk-ins. A PA looked her over and said, “There’s a bug going around, symptoms vary, but that’s probably what ails you. I can order you an Ultrasound if you think it may be a Zebra; your call.”

Happy Wife declined. We left and went to breakfast where we discussed the likelihood this really was nothing but a GI bug. I’ll tell you this much, HW is not alarmist. Not in all the ten years I’ve known her. If there’s a concept of an inverse hypochondriac, she’s its avatar. To take off work and make a doctor’s appointment, it meant she thought this was different. For now we’re accepting it probably is a nothing more than a nasty GI bug that will eventually run its course. As I write her episodes of discomfort haven’t disappeared , but they haven’t worsened either.

This past weekend we took an impromptu mini vacation and drove north. We left Thursday late afternoon after work and overnighted at a nice lodge in Talkeetna. On Friday we continued north to Cantwell, where we turned east onto the Denali highway, a 135 mile dirt road (actually, the last 20 miles are paved) which is closed in winter but passable in summer. At the mid point we overnighted at Alpine Creek lodge. Pretty primitive place, but the proprietors and their guests were awful nice. One of the tires on the Suabaru was flat by the time we finally made it. The road is notorious for being brutal on tires. Turns out there were two punctures in the same tire. One guest loaned me a tire plug kit, another had a mini air compressor, thankfully. If not for that we would’ve had to limp out the next morning on a limited use spare with 50 miles of gravel ahead of us and the three other tires showing their age. And virtually no services for the next 120 miles or so, save McClarens at mile 42, which we discovered when we stopped there offers basic tire repair service. (I wonder why). No matter, the plugs held all the way back to Anchorage, ~250 miles.

A few pics from the trip (embiggening enabled)

~11:00 PM at Alpine Creek. Bandit, the cutest Jack Russell you can imagine, atop the proprietor’s lap, keeping watch

Happy Toes on the deck of our cabin at Sheep Mountain Lodge. 69 degrees at 10:00 PM. Living is easy

See what I mean? Imagine Nine straight years of this