This was my e-mail to friends on Tuesday. Happily, it turns out to all have been worthwhile because Blondie is better!  Yea!

OK, I’ve had the day from hell with my dog and it isn’t over yet. I am just now sitting down to answer my morning e-mail and Blondie is on her bed behind my desk howling at… well, nothing.
Got up at 6 AM, never my favorite time of day, and a friend came over who could drive in the dark to get her to the vet’s first thing for her anesthesia so they could x-ray her nose because, let’s face it, what else do I have to spend my money on. Got to the vet’s only to find out I’d written down 7 AM when I meant 7:30 AM. They weren’t even open yet. So we got coffee, brought her back at 7:30 and then I came home, cleaned and fed my seven birds and ran out to Bird TLC for my Tuesday shift. We ended up very busy, had to put an eagle down, convince a very recalcitrant tundra swan to not stand on the wood and exercise a raven whose right wing is frozen due to surgery. The raven was, like the swan, distinctly unamused. Then just as I was leaving we got a mallard in with a broken pelvis that had to be settled in. Got home, vet called to say they were going to have to take out two teeth which may be causing her sinus problem AND do a cell biopsy on some swelling at the tip of her nose where the bone and cartilage meet… kaching, kaching!… and that I needed soft food for her. Ran out and tried to get everything I needed to make her comfortable… and got me a Costco sized bottle of tequila… and by the time I got home, they called for me to go get her. Drove through rush hour traffic to pick her up and was halfway to the clinic when I realized it was getting really dark, so I rushed the vet through his explanation of her meds and bolted. I was waiting at the light a block from the clinic when I see this crazy man in shirt sleeves leaping snow drifts and waving frantically at me. It was my vet. I had forgotten her antibiotics. Meanwhile, Blondie peed in the car on the way home so I’m now washing the blankets and sheets that make up her bed in the car. And she’s totally goofy the way old people can get when they’ve had strong drugs. She alternates between howling on her bed and getting up and going into the hallway to look for me while I scream her name from behind her so she can see I’m still sitting at my desk.
And on that note, I’m going to go upstairs and start drinking.
Tomorrow will be a better day. And if it isn’t, I have lots of tequila.

Whether or not Jerry Prevo broke the law with his church’s property tax exemptions is perhaps not as important as the fact that it all just feels sleazy. Churches shouldn’t feel sleazy. Given what most churches preach, they should be so far from the line separating legal from illegal that there is no doubt whatsoever that they are upright and honorable. Trying to get as close to that line as possible without going over it, while shifting a financial burden to those who perhaps can least afford it, is simply not something churches should do.

It’s like the New Gingrich conundrum. Here’s a man vying for the Republican presidential nomination who is spraining his entire body with his attempts to turn as far right as possible. Here is a man expounding on the virtues of “traditional” marriage while married to his former mistress for whom he left his other former mistress.
Gingrich has not broken any laws. He got divorced from his first wife before he married his second one. He allegedly offered his second wife the option of an open marriage before divorcing her to marry his current wife. All very legal. And all very sleazy given his stance that traditional marriages are the bedrock of our society. One wonders which of his three marriages is the traditional one.
Conservative voters have apparently found a way to hold their noses at the smells emanating from Gingrich’s private life and vote for him anyway. As long as you always marry someone of the opposite sex, you can seemingly have as many marriages as you want without ever denigrating the tradition you supposedly hold dear.
So the issue I have with Newt and Prevo is not that they broke any laws.  (Actually, Prevo may have but we don’t know for sure yet.) No, the issue I have with them is the stench emanating from the less than honorable way they seem to conduct themselves.
If the standard is “What Would Jesus Do?”, then I have to think that Jesus would have at least waited until wife number one was out of the hospital from her cancer surgery and wife number two had time to absorb the news about the chronic disease with which she’d just be diagnosed before announcing he was leaving them. I’m going to go out on a limb and further suggest that Jesus would have remembered his statement about rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Whenever there was even the smallest doubt about the legality of an exemption, I think he would have chosen to pay.
If you hold yourself out to be a moral arbiter in your community, then it just makes sense that you should live you life as much as possible above reproach. You should not skirt the edges of the law but should make every effort to stay totally clear of those edges. And if you purport to uphold the sanctity of what you view as a traditional marriage, you should probably make some effort to not discard your wives the way you discard an old sock that you no longer find functional.
We live in a world full of moral ambiguities. Those who would represent moral constants to us have some responsibility to live up to those morals. “Do what I say and not what I do” didn’t work when we were children and doesn’t work now.
If Jerry Prevo can manipulate the law and his connections to avoid paying taxes on properties that seemingly only qualify as exempt based on a very interesting interpretation of the law, then the example he gives of being a good steward and moral man becomes murky. You see the line in the sand and then watch him inch as close to it as possible without, hopefully, putting his toe over it. Pride in being a moral person is replaced by pride in how well he can scam the system.
And if you claim to uphold the Christian interpretation of traditional marriage by trying to have as many of them as possible in your lifetime, you have to expect that some people are going to look at the partner they have lived with and loved for the past 40 years but couldn’t marry and wonder how you get to define what marriage really is.

The good… the sun is returning and shinning brightly.
The bad… the sun is returning and shinning brightly on all the dust I couldn’t see during the winter when it was dark.

I understand about cheating in a relationship. It happens. But how the hell did those women look at Newt Gingrich and think, “I gotta have me some of that!”

Went to Target and walked the entire width and breath of the store twice before finding someone to help me. They eventually led me to what was left of the As Seen On TV section. No pajama jeans. But…
While having my hair done my hairdresser said she’d seen them in Fred Meyers. So I went over there and once again did about two miles of searching up and down every aisle until some kind store person rescued me and brought me to the tiny section of what was left of their As Seen On TV section. They had some pajama jeans left but none in my size. Only small sizes were left because, quite frankly, small size people don’t need to wear pajama jeans.
But now I’m a woman on a mission and will be searching online for my very own pajama jeans.
BTW.... I don’t watch TV commercials since, for the most part, I only watch TV that I’ve taped so I can fast forward through the commercials. Looking at some of the items in the As Seen On TV section gave me a whole new sense of wonder and fear at America’s capacity to be entranced by anything anyone tells them is new and shiny and great. I can’t believe some of that crap actually sells. Not that pajama jeans are crap. Oh no. They are the exception to the rule.

Write in Steven Colbert. He’s is at least as intelligent as any current candidate from any party and probably smarter than most. Lisa won a senate seat on a write in vote. I say we elect Steven Colbert the same way.

So I’m sitting in a dental chair… right off not one of my favorite moments in life… and the very nice young man who claims to be old enough to have graduated from dental school and done a root canal on me last year asks how the tooth feels. I tell him that I barely remember having the root canal and have had no pain or any problems since he did it. He allows as how I was pretty drugged when my friend drove me to the appointment saying, “You’re of that generation that doesn’t like to come to dentists because we used to hurt people so much… you know, my grandmother’s generation.”
He’s lucky that when I left that room he was still able to reproduce if he so desired. It took a lot of restraint on the part of this “grandmother” to not permanently damage his crotch.
It may be true… I may have passed from being his mother’s generation to being his grandmother’s generation. But that sure doesn’t make it any pleasanter to hear.

I tried using pill pockets for the liquid meds my dog was taking but even the biggest pocket held very little liquid before overflowing. I would have had to give her a bag of them for each dose… though, I should add, they are a marvel for administering pills. My dogs especially love the duck flavored ones.
I tried the syringe and squirting it down her throat. That’s how I ended up with a pink and white kitchen where once it had only been white. I have to admit I’m in awe of just how long I could hold her mouth shut and she could keep from swallowing so that the minute I let go for fear she was going to die from holding her breath, she was able to explode the medicine across the kitchen floor.
The good and bad news is that the medicine didn’t help so I don’t have to give it to her anymore.
There is nothing like matching wills with your dog to teach you humility.

I love snow. It’s one of the reasons I moved to Alaska. I love snow and cold much more than I ever loved sun and sand. This makes me a bit of an oddball in a family where temperatures dipping below 60 F, except for a select few weeks in January and February, are considered a sign of the apocalypse.

When I was young, the colder it got, the happier I got. Barrow would hit twenty below and I’d feel my blood starting to churn at the thought of a brisk walk across the lower lagoon where the wind chill would drop the temperature like a rock.
My friend Elaine and I walked our dogs every day no matter what the conditions were unless we were facing a total white out or a chill factor below 30 below. Our dogs frequently tried to drag us back to the car long before she and I were ready to come in from the cold. I can still picture my miniature schnauzer Mr. T trying to run in front of cars coming down Fresh Water Lake Road to beg for a ride so he wouldn’t have to walk with the crazy ladies anymore.
Ah youth. The great thing about it is that we never think it will end.  But it does. And one day you go out into 10 below weather and it occurs to you that it’s cold out.  Really cold out. So cold out that you finally agree with your dog that you shouldn’t be out in it. And no matter how many layers of clothes you put on, you can’t help but still feel the cold. Welcome to not youth.
I used to greet snow with the same enthusiasm I greeted frigid temperatures. Did a blizzard close Fresh Water Lake Road because of huge snowdrifts? Not a problem. Elaine and I would just climb them laughing. The dogs would stand at the bottom of the drift with a look that said they’d be there when we returned.
I think I can honestly say that this winter in Anchorage has stripped me of some of the joy I once felt when it snowed. I long for a walk with the dog that isn’t a challenge of narrowed streets and impassable walkways. I want to go out and not need 30 minutes for dressing beforehand and another 30 minutes of removing fifteen layers plus cleats afterwards.
A very wonderful young man came over to my house on the day before the latest Snowmageddon and shoveled off my back deck. I had made some attempts to keep it clear so I could get to my bird feeders but had clearly lost the battle. I was afraid if I didn’t get the accumulated snow shoveled off before the next dump, the deck would collapse and take the back of my house with it.
What had seemed a daunting task to me took Paul about 20 minutes. Ah youth. As a friend from Barrow pointed out to me later, Paul is now the age I was when I first moved north. He has the enthusiasm and sheer exhilaration at overcoming whatever nature throws at him that I once had. The next day, after a night of snow, I tried to clear off what had fallen while it was light and fluffy.  I’ll be seeing my chiropractor in the very near future to correct that mistaken enthusiasm.
I still love this state beyond anything that can be reasonably explained. Saying to the world that I’m an Alaskan is a source of great pride for me. We are a state in which extremes are the norm and surviving all nature can throw at us gives us our bragging rights. I have to guess that the people of Cordova who have survived this winter’s snowy onslaught will be telling tales of it to their children and grandchildren for generations to come. And with each telling, the drifts will be just a bit higher.
So despite the obstacles snow now seems to throw in my way, I’m not going anywhere. My friends just have to keep raising wonderful young men who will shovel a not young lady’s deck with a grin and a hug to keep her warm.
If only 10 below were not colder now than in my youth.

It occurs to me that Joe Paterno is most probably Catholic. If not, he must at least be able to read. Or have ears to hear TV and radio broadcasts.  So if his excuse for letting his staff screw little kids while doing nothing is that he didn’t even know about that stuff or what he should do… well, it seems to me that a decade of headlines above the fold concerning Catholic priests and little boys should have perhaps given him at least a little hint. Don’t cha think....?

So I’m weaning Blondie off the prednisone because I hate what it’s doing to her. I found a decongestant I could give her safely through an online vet website. But getting a dog to take 12.5 ml of a liquid that dog does not want to take is not an easy task. Our first attempt yesterday resulted in red sticky stuff spread over my entire kitchen and dog and me. Then I tried to drip it into bread and cover the bread with peanut butter. It’s amazing how she can get all the peanut butter off without ever touching the medicine soaked bread. Now I’m trying to wrap the soaked bread in raw hamburger.
Sigh… If you have ANY helpful suggestions, I am so very open to hear them right now.

He’d never heard of man rape? What the hell planet was he living on? Did he never turn on the TV or radio or read a newspaper other than the sports section? And it is bull crap that he was just of a different generation that did not know these things existed. The current generation did not suddenly produce perverts and all past generations had none of them.
Joe Paterno was told that a child was being molested. He told someone else and then went on with his life. Too bad the kids his staff member raped couldn’t do the same so easily.
Joe Paterno wanted to protect his lucrative job and continue to get all the adulation offered to him by people for whom sports and god exist on the same plane. He clearly was willing to look the other way in order to keep that going.
Shame on him. Shame. Shame. Shame.

See, as my mother might say, I still have the brains god born me with. I didn’t even try to take a walk with Blondie when all the snow fell on Thursday. And Blondie, god bless her, is so even more out of it now that she’s on all that prednisone that she doesn’t give a hoot on a good day.
I went to wrestle my trash and recycle can from the end of my driveway through the snow and into the garage. She followed me as far as the garage and just stood there looking out as I went down the driveway. She never even tried to stick her head out the door. By the time I’d gotten the two cans in and swept the snow back out, she was standing on the step leading to the inside door with her nose pressed up against it to try and get it to open.
She’s no fool!

My dog like to deposit her poop in a variety of spots in the yard. She never goes out and just stops in one place. I don’t know why. But answering nature’s call means making many circuits of the yard, sniffing carefully and then make partial deposits in a lot of places.  However, this is the year of snowpocalypse in Anchorage. She goes into the yard and once she gets beyond the protective ceiling of the second floor deck, she is in snow up to her shoulders. Still, the instinct for multiple deposits is strong. Since she can’t go far, she nows makes circles in the small protected area under the deck. It’s as though she has some inner sense of how far she has to go and before she can make each deposit. And she’s going to go that far even if she’s getting nowhere but merely repeating her steps over and over and over.... As I stand watching her do this at 2 AM, I have to control the urge to open the door and scream, “For god’s sake, you’ve circled that area ten times. Now just poop and get the hell in here.”
But she’s old, on a lot of medication and needs my patience and understanding… even if it is 2 AM.

... when you wake up in the morning and are happy that you only feel tired and not sick and tired.