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There’s a remnant of a typhoon swirling in the Gulf of Alaska bringing with it tropically warm, moist air. I don’t mind that so much, hell, given it’s October 28th 55^o feels like getting spoiled, just wish it wouldn’t bring it at 3 am in the morning at speeds > 90 MPH. It was about that time last night that I walked downstairs naked to investigate the noise on the deck; from our bedroom it sounded like the grill was taxiing for takeoff. It’s a special kind of vulnerability one feels when naked, trundling down stairs into the darkened spaces of the first floor, feeling for what is familiar by day but treacherous by night — chairs, bureaus, tables, jutting corners here and there — and trying to make out with half-opened eyes Harry’s form — where is he?, on his bed?, asleep on the chair?, stretched out on the floor where I don’t expect him? — hoping to avoid a calamitous fall on unprotected parts.

Just sayin’.

Saw the Packers bring down some serious whoop ass on the Viqueens last night. On the ground no less. Can’t recall the last time the Packers were a threat with the run game. Timely, too, given three of Arron Rodger’s top targets are injured. Looked like a playoff bound team to me last night, that’s for sure.

I can hardly talk about Sweat Pea. Yes, she’s recovering well, but that incision, my God, it must be 6-8 inches long, and the amount of fur that was shaved to do the surgery left most of her neck bare, so Happy Wife keeps it covered with a bandana (or two) and a bootie on her right paw to prevent her from scratching herself raw. That, and last night Happy Wife made salmon quiche cups to take to the vet staff this morning as a thank you for caring for Lucy. How sweet is that, you ask? Sure, super sweet, of course. However, let the record show that yours truly did not receive one — not even one — of those salmon quiche cups.

A news link caught my eye this morning: Will you have enough to retire? So I bit.

Inputs were simple, 1) current age and desired retirement age, 2) how much saved so far, 3) annual salary and 4) present savings rate.  I put in some numbers: 53 and 67, a million bucks, $185K/yr, and 20%. Result: Supposedly, we will need $3.9 million to retire, but with these numbers we will fall short, we will only have $3.2 million.

How can this be? $4 million to retire? Srsly? Divide by two (half to me, half to Happy Wife), and say we both live 20 years beyond retirement, that leaves $100K per year each of us can spend for 20 years. What’s the problem? I am quite sure that together we can subsist in our doddering years on far less than $16,800K/mo, no? And that doesn’t count interest on our savings, social security (no laughing), or our home equity (2), which, even by a conservative estimate should be significant by the time we retire. Phooey, I say, phooey.

Woke up and felt almost instantly like sitting this one out. The thought of Lucy in the O.R. for a third time in as many months left me wanting to retreat beneath the covers, snuggle up against Happy Wife — who was anything but this morning, understandably, for the same reason as me — and wish the day away. Eventually I caved, rolled out of bed and paused at the window to stare at the blackness outside. Some people think black represents the addition of all colors, I know I did. When I was a kid I once took a colored crayon from the box of 64 and scribbled on a sheet of paper, then took the next crayon and scribbled on top of the first scribble, and kept going like that until I’d used every crayon. The result wasn’t black, not exactly, but it sure as hell wasn’t white, the sum of all wavelengths of visible light, the color of purity, cleanliness, enlightenment. Black means portents and I wanted none of those this morning, so downstairs I went to throw on some lights.

By the time I’d made Happy Wife her latte — Egg Nog infused, it’s that time of year — and got her and Lucy out the door and on their way to the vet, the sun had fought back the dark to reveal a constipated sky, which, had it let loose and cried like I felt like doing, surely it would have come as snow. Snow white snow.

But it wasn’t to be, no white snow, not for us, not yet anyway. I settled into my morning, got some meaningful work done, then called a close colleague who lives in Cleveland. He told me it snowed there late last night/early this morning. He and I co-published a number of papers together back when I was in grad school, so earlier this year when I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book to be published by Springer next year, I thought I’d invite him to be a co-author. Reason being that we’d already written a book chapter together, a book that never did get published for reasons unrelated to our contribution, and so we figured we could re-purpose the effort for this book. That was back in June; the due date for our contribution is December 1st, something I was gently reminded of this morning by the book’s editor.

By then Harry was anxious for a walk. I gulped back the last of my second coffee, changed clothes, and together we piled into the car and drove to Kincaid Park to our usual trails, under the cover of bloated clouds, me with hands in pockets scuffing along, missing the company of Sweat Pea and wondering how she was faring.

Lucy’s having a third mast cell tumor removed in as many months on Thursday. Damn thing keeps coming back, in the same location no less, despite good surgical margins.

This girl’s a survivor though. No question about it.

Squirrel: (In sophisticated sotto voce — think Brian on Family Guy):

“Well, hello there. Admiring my exquisite tail are we?”

Me: “Dude, it looks kinda gay.”

Squirrel (think Richard Pryor): “Say what, MoFo?!”

 

A chilly, wet morning. A restless sky. Swollen clouds gray brown and roiling in mountain valleys, shrouding peaks. A morning to cinch your comfys tight, stoke the wood stove, wrap your hands around a steaming cup o’ coffee and stay inside.

So we didn’t.

On our beach walk we spotted a sucker hole or two open suddenly, then just as quickly close up again. Just like the rain, which came hard in sheets for a minute or less and then stopped in an instant, like the chorus howl of kennel dogs, whipped into a frenzy one moment, and then as if the lead dog stood atop his house and swiped a paw across his neck, stone silence.

Someone thought it was a fine morning to perch and survey the digs:

BIGGER.

Across Resurrection bay there, maybe 5-6 miles as the eagle flies, lies Spring Creek Correctional facility, a high security prison. Robert Hansen is there. If you haven’t seen The Frozen Ground I can recommend it. Possibly the only movie about something Alaskan where most of the movie was actually filmed in Alaska. Anchorage, in the case of this movie. Cage is pretty convincing as the state Trooper investigating the murders, and Cusack was well cast as Hansen.

Later, near Trail Lake, on the way back to Anchorage, the sky had become far less surly. Now we can clearly see what all the commotion was about high up in the clouds earlier in the day.

BIGGER.

Got up and going today earlier than usual. Happy Wife said, “I have to get to breast conference this morning.” Naturally, I thought, “Honey, you stay in bed, I’ll go in your stead.” nyuk nyuk. Didn’t say it out loud, the humor having long since run dry from overuse.

And so here I sit, in the kitchen, tapping away, awaiting inspiration. It’s dark outside and astronomers I’m told know why. Stinkin’ warm too — feels like an early day in May. Certain people claim they know why this is, too.

I was arguing on the internet again, this time about something I think know something about, what a rarity, right! Often I argue about things I know less about and I make mistakes but they say you aren’t learning unless you make mistakes so I’m not one to shy away from an exchange only because I’m less than optimally armed. Knowing I was intellectually well-armed this time around doesn’t mean learning was absent, it was just asymmetrical — I found myself in the role of teacher, or at least it felt that way to me.

The “discussion” was about the future, and revolved around a blogger’s contention that before too much longer, by extending a known current technology to guide a yet-to-be-demonstrated reproductive technology, parents of the future would be able to “pick ‘n choose” specific heritable traits they themselves express which they want their child to express — for example, say the wife is musically gifted and the husband is a good writer of fiction. Of course, like all people, our would-be parents have many other “traits” too — for the sake of example let’s say dad has a weak heart and mom suffers from a mild form of prospagnosia, she has some difficulty recognizing faces. Now, our would-be parents desperately want a little girl, and they want her to grow up to be a good musician like mom with an ear for good prose like dad, but at the same time, of course, they don’t want to endow the child any cardiac or neurological deficits.

Okay, so that’s the goal.

Now, to achieve this, the blogger described an approach he read about in a science fiction book. His idea was that if you have enough information of the kind that comes from modern-day genetic screens, a method that detects changes (“variants”) in a person’s genome that significantly associate with some trait, say musical ability in our example, why then we could use a future reproductive technology (see below) to make sure that good genetic variants make their way it into the child’s genome, and at the same time avoid any known bad variants from getting in, the ones that associate with bad traits, like a bad heart or face blindness. In this way, the blogger argued, the “Designer Child” grows up predisposed to becoming an harmonic flutist, say, and/or the next T.C. Boyle, possibly, with a sturdy heart and an un-compromised  faculty for recognizing friends and family.

Now to the future reproductive technology, this is the hard part so stay with me here, I’ll be brief. The technology would involve using the list of genetic variants screened for above, those that are significant for both good and bad traits, and use them to guide a selective screen of DNA in dad’s sperm and mom’s eggs, depending on who has which good/bad trait. The idea being to isolate into one sperm and one egg as many good DNA variants as possible and as few bad DNA variants as possible. Then take that one sperm and egg, let them fertilize, implant the zygote in mom’s uterus (I suppose), stand back and let nature take it from there leaving our would-be parents ample time to prepare for the baby shower.

What’s the problem you ask? Here are the problems. Note especially comments signed by yours truly (“RKN”).

Enjoy your day!

Earlier today, in the Chugach mountains in Anchorage. The usual suspects.

BIGGER.

You can smell it on her breath, hear it in her voice, her highest reaches gone white — Mother Nature.

Winter cometh.

Accordingly, I deconstructed and stowed all implements of lawn management in the shed. You’re on your own now lawn. Sleep sleep…

Still, yesterday it was 53^o, although mornings have the unmistakable chill to let you know change is a comin’.

And yes it’s Mother nature, you never hear Father nature. Why is this? Or, more curiously, why does this sexism persist in our metaphors, especially in an enlightened age when diaper changing stations are found in the Mens room? Not trying to short shrift Moms here mind you, only to acknowledge that Fathers do their share of coddling the youngsters too. In some species fathers do it all.

Consider the Emperor Penguin:

The dad penguin keeps the family’s eggs on his feet, covered with his feathers, for 60 days or more! Contact with the ice will result immediate death to any of the embryos. During this ordeal the male penguin eats absolutely no food. Once the chicks hatch, he feeds them with a substance he produces in his throat. The female returns once the eggs hatch and she takes over just some of the care.

Of the Siamese fighting fish (Betta):

The female Betta lays her eggs and the father catches them in his mouth and drops them into a nest he previously prepared. The male Betta then guards the nest and baby fish when they hatch.

Still unimpressed? Okay then, how about Father Seahorse:

The male sea horse may be the animal world’s most unusual dad. The male seahorse has a pouch where the female lays her eggs, literally impregnating him! The male has a placenta-like pouch that supplies nutrients and oxygen to the eggs. The father then looks after the eggs for about two months until they hatch and can leave the pouch. He continues to protect the young until they are able to live on their own.

So, the next time you raise your glass o’ lemonade — spiked or not 😉 — skyward acknowledging a beautiful day, consider a paternal salutation: Thank you, Father.

Martin Short pre-party @ Subzero lounge. Gave the pic a noir look ‘n feel in Photoshop, but it made me look like someone who’d fallen asleep in a tanning tube. Happy Wife was stunning, as usual.

I had no idea before the show that Martin Short was 63. He was impressively acrobatic on stage for a 63 yr-old I must say, jumping on and off a piano at various times during the show. His performance consisted of stand-up comedy, amusing song ‘n dance, and a reprise of some of his SNL characters, vignettes of which were shown on screen during character transitions. Happy Wife thought these were the funniest parts of the show. While I kindof agree with her, I can truly appreciate a performer who travels from city to city, getting on stage each night to keep expectant audiences amused for ninety minutes or more. That can’t be easy or free of its own kind of tedium, especially for a 63 yr-old. I thought the funniest part of the show was when he transformed into Jiminy Glick, a character I’d never heard of, and “interviewed” our local weatherlady.

Jiminy interviews Tom Hanks:

I am infrequently asked — especially this time of year, Fall — “The drive to your “Nest” near Seward must be beautiful. Can you describe it?”

Not really. Especially yesterday, it was so indescribably pretty you wanted to stop and applaud for nature.

So instead of a description, a dash cam. Cheesy and a bit amateurish due to rotation & compression en-route to Utoob, but I trust my reverence for this place was not lost in translation.

Somewhere south of Turnagain Pass, headed south. The wavy margins of the video are in no way reflective of the videographer’s state of mind at the time!

~20 miles north of Seward. The lightness of Bryan Ferry’s voice together with the serenity of the mountains, why, it was like a well-paired wine with a gourmet dinner.