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The opening poem read at our wedding nine years ago come June.

Best fetch yourself a hanky first.

Untitled
By Walt Whitman

I do not offer the old smooth prizes,
But offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is called riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve.
However sweet the laid-up stores,
However convenient the dwellings,
You shall not remain there.
However sheltered the port,
And however calm the waters,
You shall not anchor there.
However welcome the hospitality that welcomes you
You are permitted to receive it but a little while
Afoot and lighthearted, take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before you,
The long brown path before you,
leading wherever you choose.
Say only to one another:
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law:
Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

What, you wonder, is to blame for the paucity, the shortfall, the utter dearth of posts at Rod’s Alter Ego?

In a word: Work.

You see, whereas my former job permitted me time to ruminate during the day, my present one has my nose to the grindstone. So by the time I arrive home, scratch Harry (who was diagnosed with Lymphoma, btw) behind his ears, prepare and drink a stiff one, Happy Wife is coming through the door. We commence with discussing our day, and then it’s couch time, another glass or two, and before we know it it’s 9:30 and off to bed we go. Or at least she does, because come 5:30 am Harry needs his morning walk since I am no longer able to do it midday. Because: Work. Spotting a theme are you? I go to bed about 10:00 pm after getting Harry back inside the house. If these things are done out of order nighttime commotion can result.

This caught my eye a few weeks back. In particular:

We don’t fare much better with time to love. It takes time and experience to develop the wisdom and maturity to choose an appropriate partner and love him or her in a way that doesn’t make everyone miserable. Relationships need attention, and attention takes time. Children take lots of time too, and some reflection and experience, yet we are biologically made to bear children when we are young and unwise.

What then to call those of us who didn’t bear children when young (or ever), fortunately wise? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone tell me I was wise to not have children. Especially if the person had children of his or her own. Actually, I take that back. There was one person, a mother herself. She didn’t say it to my face, but many years ago during a rant against me in an email she’d sent to someone I knew, she barked that it was a damn good thing I never had children of my own because they would be totally f*cked up.

Well, gee, thanks Mom. Love you too.

If parents think that childless people must necessarily feel empty without children, as they would without their own children, that’s a mistake if you ask me. The feelings that arise from imagining that you don’t have something you in fact do have, versus the feelings that arise from not having the thing at all, are very different indeed. Consider: a person who imagines life without his right arm versus a real amputee. Maybe not the best comparison but you see my point.

Trust me parents, I have never felt incomplete because I don’t have children.

This relates to a pet peeve of mine. Caution: science ahead.

Evolutionary biologists tell us that the “purpose”[1] of evolution is reproductive success (as opposed to survival). All organisms, humans included, the theory holds, have been individually and “naturally selected” for the “purpose” of making more copies, more babies. Reproductively competent babies in particular. That’s what the author above meant when she wrote “we are biologically made to bear children.” The theory doesn’t only mean normal humans can bear children, as in we have the proper functioning biology to do so (sperm, eggs, uterus, etc.). No, the theory goes beyond that. Every gene, every cell, every organ, indeed an entire organism we are told exists for one and only one ultimate “purpose,” which is not survival — that’s old Darwinism — but reproductive success. The rest of life, we are sadly told by the theory, is nothing but a means to the ultimate goal of reproductive success.

Codswallop.

Lots of us are childless, often by choice if heterosexual, or because of sexual preference as with homosexuals. If every gene, cell, and organ in our bodies was supposedly naturally selected for no other “purpose” than the means to make (and nurture) babies, then why have so many of us not fulfilled that “purpose.” Can’t have it both ways if you ask me. And evidence exists indicating that the number of us who are childless by choice is growing, not shrinking. Plus the last time I looked more and more people are “coming out” every day.

Another snippet from the link:

Maybe the problem is not that we don’t have enough time but that we waste the time we have. Seneca famously thought this. (“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”) Most of us seem unable to refrain from “wasting” time. It is the rare person indeed who can be maximally efficient and productive. For the rest of us — that is, for almost all of us — Seneca’s advice about not wasting time seems true but useless.

Indeed. Which is why I adhere to Bonnie Raitt’s maxim: Life becomes more precious when there’s less of it to waste.

Gotta go. Lunchtime is over. Ugh.

[1] Purpose is put in quotes to indicate a matter of speaking. There is of course no real teleological purpose to evolution, i.e. no conscious intention.

When you play to avoid losing, expect to lose.

Fingers Crossed. Allegiance declared. Our front window:

I’ll have more here for you to ignore later. Been a busy week.

Je Suis Packers!

UPDATE: À Seattle!

A leisurely view of Mt. Alice. Looking down a desolate street near “downtown” Seward. A stone’s throw from our Nest down the beach.

Munificent, innit?

Clicking it makes it even more munificent. Although “more munificent” sounds redundant. Or at least piling on. If you’re already larger or more generous than normal, saying you’re more larger is just heaping on praise. That can too easily segue into gloating. And if you said most munificent, well, that doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s like somebody claiming, Look here — I found the largest integer! Uh huh, sure, until I add one to it. So more munificent? Okay, sure, but never most munificent.

With one exception: The latte I created for Happy Wife the other morning. It truly was most munificent.

Eggnog infused and nutmeg dusted and everything. We have this quirky ritual, Happy Wife & I do, where I am supposed to name each of my works of latte art. Can’t recall what I named this one. Although I remember she found it amusing.

Coldest day of the year so far. Big whoop, right? It’s only 1/5. Nothing like the cold the Midwest is getting, though. We’re still above zero in most of Anchorage but compared to the mild winter temperatures we’ve been having (30s), 3 feels punitive. Like being scolded to sit still and quiet on a hard church pew during a too-long sermon forced to wear pleated pants that are too small for you and riding up your butt on a glorious Sunday morning in July when all you really want to do is go outside and run and play. That kind of punitive.

Evidently, Harry could care less that it’s only 3^o outside. Anymore he lays out there for an hour or longer to the point where Happy Wife gets concerned he’s going to get hypothermia and won’t even be aware of it because of his cognitive decline. She has a point. I mean, it’s nothing at all for an Alaskan Husky to stay outside 24/7 when it’s well below zero. My brother-in-law has a dozen or more sled dogs that he and his wife care for in Fairbanks. Once when we visited them I noted that when the temperature was a mere -20^o, some of the dogs pulled the straw from inside their dog houses outside onto the frozen snow because it was “too warm” to sleep inside. But Harry is an Airedale. I’ve had five in my life, and while in my experience they’re good to about 10 above, any colder than that and they’re typically clawing at the door to come in. Not Harry. Not lately anyway. We have to tell him to come in for his own good. He’ll gets up and slowly amble toward the door, looking as rickety as the Tin Man in need of oil.

If you’re tired of seeing us I remind you the Interweb is vast. Plus, we’re not going to remain this pretty forever.

The powder blue mound oozing into the photo is a dog bed. One of several. There are days when it seems to me like we’re running a canine hostel here. The rug is from my parents. They bought it for me in Santa Fe almost fifteen years ago now. It’s gotten around — New Mexico –> Alaska –> Ohio –> Alaska. There’s a pad under it to make it cushy when you walk on it. Harry likes that. Our house is nicely decorated, thanks to Happy Wife. I’ve had almost no input in the decorating decisions around here. I’m not unhappy about that. If such things were left to me our house would be rather bland. The other day she came out of the crawl space with a souvenir I’d purchased about twenty years ago while on vacation in Roratonga (Cook Islands). I didn’t bring a lot of valuable stuff to our relationship; what there is of it is in the crawl space. So I like to joke anyway. In that way I think she felt sorry for me when she emerged from the hole in the floor, “Here,” she said, “maybe you’d like to put this somewhere?”

I didn’t want to offend her generosity of spirit, so I said, Okay, how about right there, on the ledge over the fireplace. It’s a small wood statue representing the god of fertility. Clearly, right? I mean if you can’t be fertile with that bugger what’s the point. Anyway, yes, over the fireplace will be fine, dear. Her face tightened, half dismay half pity, and then she wondered aloud if maybe I’d like put it some place less… you know, conspicuous, honey pie? No, I said, I think that will do just fine. And so there it stays, at least for the time being. Until I tire of it. No doubt I will, eventually. But I must say it matches the wood motif rather well, don’t you think?

We started Harry on Selegiline. In dogs, the drug is indicated to treat Cushings disease, but also has shown efficacy in treating symptoms of dementia. Or canine cognitive disorder. Or whine whine whine, it’s 4:30 am, would somebody please get out of bed come downstairs and let me outside. And then a half hour later let me back in?

Could take up to a month for the effect to be observed. How does it work? In the brain, Selegiline inhibits an enzyme that breaks down dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter required for proper communication (“signaling”) between neurons. (Kid’s still got it!). Inhibiting the enzyme that breaks down dopamine means there’s more dopamine left swirling around in Harry’s wetware, which means longer periods of proper neuronal signalling, which means — at least two sleep-deprived adoptive Uprights hope it means! — improved continuity of sleep for Harry At Night. And in turn the Uprights.

Even more so than in the hard sciences, in biology there is theory and there is practice. If you know what I mean. So now, we wait.

No, that’s not the light of the camera flash. The light is coming from inside him — flashes from the incessant electrical storm occurring inside his little canine brain. Emphasis little. What? I’m not kidding. I mean really, think about it, how big a brain does a pampered pooch need to get safely through his day? It’s not like he needs to scrounge in the wild to find his own food, fend off competitors and do the whole survival of the fittest crap. No. We buy his food for him. And then Happy Wife mixes it with something irresistibly tasty, like microwaved beef, or left over gravy from the Swedish meatballs, then she gets on her knees and hand feeds it to him. He doesn’t need to search for a safe place to sleep like other animals. No. We have dog beds on the floor for him to choose from, in different shapes and colors, and if either one doesn’t suit His Finickiness, well, there’s always the $700 arm chair. When he’s done with the food and poops out what’s left we pick it up by hand. After, of course, placing over the hand a plastic grocery bag, one you hope doesn’t have holes in it, plus, when necessary, kicking the little brown-black poohs to dislodge them from the frozen snow. I find that if you do that while wearing a soft-toed boot you can actually bruise a toe those buggers are frozen in so hard sometimes. As often as not we walk him on leash so he doesn’t wander off aimlessly into the woods like a demented old man who up and leaves the house when left unattended. Beyond its support for basic physiological functions, mainly eating and poohing, you wonder why Harry needs a brain at all anymore.

Once I start my new job (soon) Harry will no longer have the benefit of me being his daytime babysitter. So a woman named Desiree is stopping by Friday morning to “interview” us, and presumably Harry as well, to see if she will agree to stop by once or twice daily to attend to his needs. Desiree runs a pet sitting company here in town. We figure human contact once or twice a day oughta do it. That plus the Selegiline, to keep the “sky” in Harry’s little brain storm free, so that by the time Happy Wife and I arrive home from work, and later go to bed, he’s not still snappin’ & cracklin’ up there, if you know what I mean.

My rendition of the Cobb salad I made us last night, complete with homemade buttermilk dressing, pan-fried venison bacon (Andy!), Roma tomatoes, black beans, kernel corn, hard boiled egg, avocado, rotisserie chicken w/BBQ sauce all over romaine lettuce. Wine: Oregon Cabernet.

Or, maybe you would’ve preferred Happy Wife’s rendition: sans beans and corn, hold the BBQ sauce on chicken, add Alaska king crab. Wine: Viogner/Chenin Blanc.

More than fifty victims recipients of our annual newsletter this year, which is hot off the press this morning. For those of you looking in, as you breathlessly await the arrival of your very own copy of the 2014 Nibbles in your snail mail box, a little vignette therefrom to tide you over:

I even red eye corrected this. Well, at least one eye. When I went for two, Photoshop erred and added a black stipple to Happy Wife’s lower lip. This escaped my attention. When I submitted the photo for her review she asked, alarmingly, “Why do I have a melanoma on my lip!”

Oops. Ctrl-Z.

Which just shows to go ya, Photoshop can cause cancer.

Ice fog this morning. But a few more seconds of daylight today! Out of the seasonal trough we come, ready for what feels like a Sisyphean climb to summer solstice.

Listening to Christmas carols on Pandora this morning. “Round Yon Virgin?” There’s an oxymoron for ya. If you ask me anyway. Ask a master of ministerial matters, however, and you’d learn this:

Let’s back up. “Yon” actually has nothing to do with Mary’s youth. Rather it is a shortened form of “yonder,” as in “way over yonder.” “Round” is short for “around.” So the entire lyric is an abbreviated way of saying, “around yonder virgin,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you put it in context. The previous line is “all is calm, all is bright.” Put it all together and you get: “All is calm and bright around the virgin over there.”

If you say so, pal. Not the kind of atmosphere that attended any virgin I ever knew. And I knew at least one, in high school (I took her word for it). The atmosphere in the basement at the after-football-game party was anything but calm and bright once she showed up. More like frenzied and shadowy, what with all the attention she got from would-be suitors queuing up trying to snatch her away from the crowd to get her alone. I took her to the prom one year. I was the boyfriend, for a while, but being she was a year older than me, when she graduated and became a working girl and I was still a school boy that was the end of us. It wasn’t for lack of overtures on my part. I stalked her once. Showed up where she ate lunch during the week and spied her from the other side of the bar. Or I’d park a block away from where she lived and wait for her to come home. Just to see. Eventually, the last time I remember seeing her, I hounded her into coming as my date to a wedding reception. She was a real looker. I recall the raised eyebrows and elbow-jabs of approval from some of the guys at the bar. Drove her home that night and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Pretty sure she’s not a virgin anymore. She met some guy where she worked, agreed to marry him and off to Arizona they went. To raise a family, so I heard years later. If she Googles my name and clicks the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button she’ll land directly on this blog and recognize it was her I was talking about. One gander at Happy Wife and she’ll also discover, after all, I was the luckier one.