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An epic snowfall at our Nest last night. We woke to 18 inches, possibly more, and it was still falling. Pretty, yes – who doesn’t delight in a winter wonderland – but 75′ of driveway covered in thigh-high drifts between the Subaru and the road did not counsel merriment. After three coffees and a hearty breakfast I got after it. The one shovel we keep down there was like a child’s toy against the berm the plow had left us. We’d heard it earlier, lumbering down the beach road while we were still in bed. Must’ve been 8 AM or so. Happy Wife jumped up and threw on a light to let the plow guy know we were there, so that he might lift his shovel as a courtesy as he passed by our driveway? Wah wah wah….

Like many things, shoveling seems futile at first, yet if you keep plugging away eventually you realize, “I can do this.” Or throw a hernia, or suffer a heart attack.

When we’d arrived the day before we found the water lines frozen, except one. A roaring fire in the wood stove, a space heater in the crawl space, and a couple hours later all was forgotten. I’d promised Happy Wife she’d have a hot shower before bed, and made good on that with minutes to spare. The Black Dog was unmoved by the snow avalanching off the metal roof. About every hour or so we heard it, a thunderous slide of a few hundred pounds or more. Didn’t keep us from sleeping like dead people through the night, though.

After shoveling, we we’re on the road early back to Anchorage. Around Moose Pass it was hard to make out where the road was. The snow was falling really hard there and the few plows out couldn’t keep up. We pressed on, albeit slowly. About five miles north of Moose Pass the snow had stopped but the road was still sketchy. To make it worse, blowing snow, low clouds, and intermittent ice fog reduced visibility. Some fun! We’d be driving along and all of sudden, Blam!, there’d be a car or truck right in front us. Couldn’t see it, of course, being the entire back of the car was plastered thick with snow.

Finally, we made it back to Anchorage and what’s this? – it’s snowing! And not softly. Pulled into the driveway (barely) to find 12-18″! Happy Wife grabbed the shovel this time and said, “I got this.” “Don’t you dare try to shovel all that yourself young lady,” I said. She wasn’t out there ten minutes when our neighbor rolled over on his four-wheeler with attached plow and did us right. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s getting a handsome gift certificate to Butcher Block 9.

Go Packers!

Over 50 holiday newsletter recipients victims this year. For those of you not on the list, here was the parting glam shot

Just so you know it’s not glam 24/7 around here

That was taken seconds before the start of the Packer’s evisceration of the Giants, or was the Lions? Whatev. On to Dallas!

Forty degrees, gray, and raining. Not the Christmas in Seward we’d hoped for. Between here and Anchorage it’s another story, biblical inches of snow with howling wind, not expected to clear until tomorrow, so we’re staying put down here, even though a simple walk down the beach this morning was thwarted by ice. Even The Dog was doing The Penguin walk.

Inside, we enjoyed a more traditional Christmas, a tree with a modest apron of modest gifts and a not-too-spicy Alaskan shrimp cocktail

I got a super comfy acrylic knit hat, cycling accouterments, a gift card to spin classes (have I mentioned I’m leading another bike tour in Alaska in ’17?), a coffee mug to remind me I’m the youngest of three children, a bottle of my favorite wine from Chateau St. Jean, Cinq Cepages (thank you Sistah!), and a box of Queen Anne cherries, these last two ostensibly to share with Happy Wife. Emphasis on ostensibly. She got slippers, a dress (one she likes!), a pastry piping bag with an assortment of tips, a recipe hook, and shoes (she needs).

Almost forgot, I also got a bottle of wicked good gin. We arrived at Our Nest Friday night to find the gin bottle nearly empty. Sensing my lament, and to lift my spirits (ha ha) HW said, “You want one of your gifts early?”

“Under the circumstances I’m hardly feeling cheery right now, Dear.”

Voila – Lament Crusher!

 

No difficulty seeing him in the snow. We finally got some. After two almost snowless winters it’s good to see it back. If for no other reason than it brightens up the landscape, but of course skiers love it too. Which is fine, so long as they don’t go off on me when they spot me and The Dog on their groomed trails. A freshly combed trail is to a skier what a glass pool is to a high diver. I get it. I try to stay on the multi-use trails most of the time. But in the few instances when I don’t, for instance when we’re forced off a side trail onto the groomed corduroy by an angry moose, or circumstances of the day require I shortcut back to the car, I don’t want to be berated by an apoplectic skier who thinks just because there’s snow on the trails they are suddenly — and legally — for skiers only. They aren’t. I steer clear of groomed trails as a courtesy to skiers. As a protest sign I once saw posted at the trailhead correctly noted: 12 months of taxes, 12 months of access.

The opinions of this blogger are his and his alone, especially as his Happy Wife is an avid skate skier. (Thankfully, a reasonably minded one, sympathetic to the plights of Dog Walkers).

Lot’s going on lately, not all of which I care to share with you, and not because it’s not good, it is, but I don’t want to jinx the outcome I want by talking about it. And no, I’m not opening a Pot store.

Adding to our seasonal woes of dark and cold, the State is now officially in a recession

“I about cried when I first saw the data — it was shocking,” said Caroline Schultz, an economist with the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development who worked on the report. She described Alaska’s current economic state as a “recession.”

How touching, an economist in tears. In my experience the best ones are coldly logical and stoic. If a grim analysis is all it takes to make you cry, maybe seek other work? In any case, no matter. I first moved here in ’89 when the State was in the trough of a pretty bad recession. For largely the same reason, too — a very low price for a barrel of oil. It rose again briefly in ’90, dipped and stayed low the following ten years, then began climbing again pretty steadily, until it was all Wine & Chocolates again (and free Halibut Charters 🙂 ) for a pretty long time. Until now

Hard to predict what that graph will look like ten years out.

So we (HW & I) have had to cut back. To wit: while traveling recently I had to stoop to ordering an anonymous bottle of Barolo for dinner.

Nothing pains me more than a look of shame on HW’s face

Somebody creeps too close to my Key Lime Pie. Good way to lose a finger.

Best use of leftover turkey yet – enchiladas!

Quite the gemish aren’t we

Descendants of immigrants, all of us.

I still say the best definition of him I’ve ever read is demagogue

dem·a·gogue
/ˈdeməˌɡäɡ/
noun
a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

Seriously, has the man made a single rational argument for any issue/policy/idea whatsoever? I grant you he’s anti-establishment. I grant you Clinton was pro-establishment. I even grant you Johnson and Stein were snowballs in Hell. But good grief…

Other than that a fine trip to Wisconsin!

Brother & me with Dad (guess who voted for who)

Happy Wife at MKE, prior to departure, needily looking for the lounge, as we are wont to do

With the niece who knows me only as Urod

Note the crazy man behind us, Andy the fiancée, as if he were merely a face in the Houdini poster. Speaking of whom

Erik Weisz was born in Budapest to a Jewish family. His parents were Rabbi Mayer Sámuel Weisz (1829–1892) and Cecília Steiner (1841–1913). Houdini was one of seven children: Herman M. (1863–1885) who was Houdini’s half-brother, by Rabbi Weisz’s first marriage; Nathan J. (1870–1927); Gottfried William (1872–1925); Theodore (1876–1945); Leopold D. (1879–1962); and Carrie Gladys (1882–1959), who was left almost blind after a childhood accident.

Weisz arrived in the United States on July 3, 1878, on the SS Fresia with his mother (who was pregnant) and his four brothers. The family changed their name to the German spelling Weiss, and Erik became Ehrich. The family lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father served as Rabbi of the Zion Reform Jewish Congregation.

According to the 1880 census, the family lived on Appleton Street. On June 6, 1882, Rabbi Weiss became an American citizen. Losing his tenure at Zion in 1887, Rabbi Weiss moved with Ehrich to New York City, where they lived in a boarding house on East 79th Street. He was joined by the rest of the family once Rabbi Weiss found permanent housing. As a child, Ehrich Weiss took several jobs, making his public début as a 9-year-old trapeze artist, calling himself “Ehrich, the Prince of the Air”. He was also a champion cross country runner in his youth. When Weiss became a professional magician he began calling himself “Harry Houdini”, after the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, after reading Robert-Houdin’s autobiography in 1890. Weiss incorrectly believed that an i at the end of a name meant “like” in French. In later life, Houdini claimed that the first part of his new name, Harry, was an homage to Harry Kellar, whom he also admired.

Damn immigrants.

I am White.

I am 56 years old.

I am married to a White woman.

We both have full time jobs.

My parents, both White, love us (Hi Mom & Dad!).

Our siblings and extended families love us; there is no family strife.

We (Wife & I) split our time between our two homes.

Between us we have six college degrees.

We have two cars, free and clear.

We do not have cancer (so far as I know).

We do not suffer from depression.

We have health insurance.

For the most part we’re healthy (knock wood).

We love each other.

We have never cheated on each other.

We are not addicted to drugs.

We’ve never been to prison.

We don’t live in a food desert.

We pay our bills, have retirement savings, and some money leftover.

We are, for the most part, law abiding.

Most of our friends are White.

Most of our colleagues are White.

For certain Social Justice Warriors these and other features of our lives may be the effects of White Privilege, which Peggy McIntosh described as

an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious

and goes on to claim is kind of like

an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks

So if I understand Ms. McIntosh correctly, for the past 56 years, throughout every achievement, disappointment, celebration and time of despair, I’ve possessed and been unburdened by an unseen, unearned bag of assets which have endowed me with a special privilege, all because I’m White. Further, were I to remark, “Gee, it certainly hasn’t felt that way to me,” the Social Justice Warrior would be quick to react, “But of course – that’s because you’re White!”

What do you call something that can’t be seen, can’t possibly be felt by one who possesses it, yet gets you labeled a denier if you doubt it’s real?

…

Moving right along to another day in our ridiculously Privileged White lives, frolicing along as we go beneath a weightless bag of unseen, unearned assets… (puhleez)

A stern wind out of the north pushed us south along the beach today. An incessant wind that let birds fly in place. Pretty chilly, too, but nothing a warm jacket couldn’t fend off. It is October after all. We had the beach to ourselves. The Dog found a dinosaur-sized bone and wouldn’t give it up. He carried it high and proudly all the way home, even into the house where we discovered it stank something fierce. My gross anatomy isn’t all that great, but Happy Wife was pretty sure it was a ball ‘n socket joint from the hip of a moose. Probably some dude had dragged it to the beach to butcher it?

Spent most of the past week listening to evidence of wrongdoing by my fellow Alaskans. All of it criminal, but some cases were worse (far worse) than others. That’s about as much as I’m legally permitted to say about the experience. I’ve got two more weeks of service, one each in November and December. At first being a juror was kind of interesting, but as you might imagine there’s a lot of tedium as well. Plus, my employer pays my salary only for the first forty hours of service. After that I have to spend vacation (if I have it), or take time without pay. I was told but cannot confirm that Federal grand jury service goes six months contiguous (I’m on State grand jury). Not that you serve eight hours of every day during that time, but that you have to be available if called. I don’t know how your average person can survive that, being away from work and other responsibilities for that long, and without salary.

Worse, I’m told even if you have White Privilege^® you’re not excused from service. So what good is it?

I didn’t become precocious until well into my forties. Some people snicker, “Yeah, well, don’t confuse late onset precocity with being a slow learner.” It’s true I learn slowly but I swear I understand things now that it takes the average person eighty years or more to fully grasp. This puts me at a great advantage, as you might imagine.

What a Fall we’re having! Warmer than usual, but then this is hardly a surprise anymore. Still, the changes in the plant world proceed more or less on schedule. The trees have mostly shed their leaves, the grass has gone dormant, the sour odor of high bush cranberry suffuses the air in the park where I like to walk The Dog. His name is Chester but we recently added a middle name. We now call him Chester Lebron, a kind of paean to the man himself, Lebron James, who is a very class act if you ask me. Yes, he endorsed Clinton, but when you consider the alternative…

One thing I will miss that Fall dissolves is Dahlias. I’m not alone

I was selected to serve on the Grand Jury. I’ve been cautioned by others who’ve served in the past to expect to hear evidence of truly awful (criminal) activities going out there. We live our lives in a kind of cocoon don’t we? Daily unaware of the villainy going on around us. At least I am. Serving on a Grand Jury I’m told will instantly dissolve that innocence. We’re going to hear about the worst of the worst and asked to judge if the prosecution has amassed sufficient evidence to haul the suspected perps into court. In this way, the Grand Jury is a check against the State indicting citizens on flimsy evidence. That’s all well and good. But if I hear any cases involving animal cruelty I swear I’m going to go apoplectic. Screw the trial, get a rope.

HW is off to another conference next week, this one in Seattle. I hope she has time to stop in at the Dahlia Lounge, not only for its name, but for a Blueberry Mule

vodka, blueberry shrub, lime, ginger beer

I know, right.

Chester-Lebron and I will stay behind and hold down the fort, go for our walks, pull in the garden hoses, break down and stow the lawn mower and other sundries of a season past. It won’t be long now.

On Saturday, I was just working away when all of a sudden what should appear

Breakfast! A soft-boiled egg (fresh from the market), a slice of bread (half jelly, half butter), a sliced Clementine, and a cup of (100%) juice. Plate included, the food weighed more than the new laptop – 1.9 pounds!

Post-breakfast we took advantage of a sensational late summer, early fall day (hard to say which), and took the Dog for a hike in the mountains

After that we tended to our ablutions in preparation for an evening at the Champagne Pops. A fund raiser for the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra

Where certain of our table mates briefly Karoke’d to La Kisha (a top 4 finisher on American Idol) beltin’ out a fine rendition of a Diana Ross classic. Wait for it…