Sunday, March 31, 2013

Easter has come and almost gone.  Our Sacrament service today featured three speakers who did a wonderful job of explaining the atonement and what happens when we die as well as inspirational songs. For our combined adult meeting I had asked my friend, Val Christensen  to give us more understanding of the atonement of Jesus Christ.  Sharing his knowledge and testimony invited the Spirit, and he recommended two books that I also endorse: The Continuous Atonement by Brad Wilcox and Believing Christ by Stephen E. Robinson.  Both books have brought me closer to the Spirit and helped me live a happier life.

  After meetings, I came home and hid the 59 Easter eggs that Beverly had baked and dyed last night.  I hid them all outside around the house and the day was glorious; blue sky and warm sunshine.  The older kids found most, of course, but as I meandered through the obstacles I had hidden the eggs around with the 3 and 4 year-olds, there were plenty the older kids had missed so everyone got to find some eggs.  Hiding eggs in the soft snow is pretty easy.  You can hide them in plain sight with only a peek showing through the rim of snow around the  neck of the egg.  Only colored eggs need apply.

Between the lamb and ham, potatoes and salads, fruits and homemade ice cream and carrot cake, I won’t need to eat for a couple of days. Having our family around us is always special, and knowing they can be with us forever makes this day in particular special.

…….Incidently, if you want to know what happens to us-our mortal remains-when we die, I recommend the book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach.  It is fascinating and, I believe, her best work.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Easter brings many different feelings and memories.  Our celebration has a theme similar to Christmas; the atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Of course Christmas is namely about His birth and Easter is about His mortal death and resurrection, but in the main, the important thing they both teach us is how we are to live (putting God and others before ourselves) and how the sacrifice of the Son of God makes it possible for each of us to return to our Heavenly Father.  That said and understood, the societal and family traditions that grow up around the holidays make them both special and memorable for most of us.  As children, the Easter tradition was for us to find, in the morning, an Easter basket with candy and a hunt for the eggs we had decorated the day before.  I don’t really think we kids ever bought into the idea of a rabbit hiding the eggs, but the family fun of finding them was a highlight of growing up.  As our children came along, we largely perpetuated the same tradition. Our kids searched for eggs all over our homes, and there was a lot of variety because we lived in 14 different homes as our children were raised.  Now we watch to see what part of the tradition our children carry on with their children.  Tomorrow Easter dinner for the families of two of our kids will be in our home and we plan to hold our own egg hunt indoors and out (even though it is snowing this afternoon), and if that warps their family tradition or creates a new one, we will have to wait and see.  Either way, making happy family memories is our goal and they are really the only worthwhile things they will have to take with them from childhood.   Happy Easter!

Friday, March 29, 2013

I am a sucker for computer paraphernalia.  My first computer was a cobbled-together Japanese version of an Apple II+ that I bought in the Akihabara electronics district in Tokyo when we were stationed at Camp Zama in 1982.  I joined the computer club on post and was amazed by the club computer that could play the same games that the console models played in the arcades all over Japan.  With a little tutelage from some of the more experienced members, I bought my computer which did little else than run Applesoft Basic on our television.  The first real program I got was Apple Panic, a game that loaded from a cassette recorder into the computer’s 64 KB memory through the audio input, similar to the way an acoustic modem used to work.  5 1/4” floppy drives were the next addition.  The floppy disks held 100 kilobytes and cost about $4.00 a piece. They would hold a program on each side.  A few years before when I was in my residency at Ft. Benning, the wife of one of the dentists offered to “word-process” our research papers for us for $30, but I typed mine on an IBM Selectric in the office of the hospital clinic not really understanding the benefits of word processing.  When I got my own computer, I could word process by myself and I used the CPM version of Wordstar for many years after that. A green-screen monitor and then a 9” color monitor were the subsequent additions, followed by an Epson dot-matrix printer.  There was perhaps $2000 tied up in all that archaic equipment that by today’s standards was prehistoric.  I didn’t even have a hard drive until I junked my Apple in favor of an IBM compatible 386 machine in 1992.  I now sit surrounded by terabytes of storage, unfathomably fast computers, multi-gigabye thumb drives and digital everything, wireless this and Bluetooth that.  Processing speed, memory capacity, and pixels in digital cameras are increasing at exponential rates making what will exist in 10 years almost unimaginable.  We have reason to worry about many aspects of the future, but the changes we will see here can’t help but be exciting.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

I remember as a child, looking forward to the 2 or 3 magazines my parents subscribed to.  Good Housekeeping, Popular Mechanics, and as a young child, the Saturday Evening Post.  I looked forward to them because they sometimes contained coupons I could turn into cash, as one of my income streams.  Today, magazines have proliferated to the point that they have become ubiquitous. Many, maybe most, are chiefly advertising vehicles with a few articles thrown in to keep the readers interest.  Reader’s Digest was one of my favorites, and I remember seeing vast shelves sagging under the weight of decades past in others homes.  Any issue could be pulled out at random and capture attention for an hour.  Today’s RD is a frustration to read between the comparative paucity of articles and the abundance of advertising.  My office receives subscriptions of little-known magazines for free without having requested them in hopes that the idle parents will succumb to the ads.  I have a weakness for woodworking and construction magazines, but find I seldom have the time to read them, preferring instead electronic fare in the same subject line.  Magazines have never been easier to produce with computer graphics and digital photography and photo-quality printing.  And apparently eager advertisers.  This explains the glut.  There are literally thousands of magazines to choose from with what appears to be a dwindling readership.  Newsweek gave up on it’s print edition several months ago, and I suspect that the trend among “serious” magazines will continue in that direction, while the coffee table supply will become even more like advertising circulars.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

A visit to the optometrist is something I usually look forward to.  I made that visit a week ago and I wasn't disappointed.  He always has such nice things to say, like,"There are people who would kill to see like you can."  How could I be disappointed with a verdict like that?  Because I can't see!  OK, I don't need glasses for distance vision, and even for near vision; only if I want to see something closer than the length of my arm.  When I was a kid, I didn't get the joke, "I don't need stronger glasses, just longer arms."  Now I get it. I went through several years of reading glasses, but there comes a point when you can no longer stand looking for one of the 23 pairs lying around the house and you just want something better.  Presbyopia he said.  The gel in your eyeballs is thicker and the focusing muscles can't change the eye's shape as well as they used to. Reading is out of focus, like looking through water, blurry and indistinct.  The alternative to reading glasses is progressive lenses, like bifocals without the line.  The top, for me, has no prescription and the “sweet spot” has the reading lens.  You just don’t take them off so you don’t lose them, and they are always there allowing you to read without putting on the glasses you can’t find.  This sounds like whining to those who have had to wear glasses for their whole lives.  And it is. 

For a little clarity.......

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

One of the great losses to the retail panorama of Anchorage was Liquidation World.  Liquidation World is a Canadian company with only a few retail locations in the USA.  Other than stores scattered over Canada, a lone store remains in Spokane, WA, and I’m sure the Spokanish aren’t even appreciative.  As the name implies, Liquidation World liquidates all kinds of retail merchandise from furniture to hardware to clothing and food.  They always had the best deals and variety on picture frames and paint.  I bought my wallet at LW.  Actually, I liked the wallet so much that I bought 2 identical exemplars at the same time for $4.00 each, and I wish I had bought 10.  My last wallet is wearing thin.  It has that old-leather smell and the perfect display of credit card and ID slots on both sides and enough room for bills in the billfold section. It sags to the sides these days and has a small hole in the fold.  Even the lining is getting tired.  It may not last through the end of the decade.  I have looked for a comparable model and have failed to find one, even at 10 times the price.  A lifetime of regret can follow an unfulfilled opportunity.

Monday, March 25, 2013

This July will mark complete our 20^th year of living in Alaska.  At what point you are no longer considered a cheechako, I’m not sure, but I think we are getting close.  The weather and the scenery are the two favorite topics of conversation of outsiders, along with the length of the days, the fishing, and the animals.  And maybe Sarah Palin.  Today, the weather dominates our thoughts.  Each year when winter seems that it blown it’s last frigid breath, we get a final lesson.  A foot or so of snow in one storm is traditional in late March or early April.  The weather prophets are predicting 12-18 inches and we are at about 3 or 4 so far, but it is finally snowing quite resolutely.  The flakes have been about the size of the ground oatmeal I put in my cookie dough last night, and it  takes a lot of them to amass inches.  But there are a lot of them, so I guess we will see.  

Sunday, March 24, 2013

I’ve heard fog compared to pea soup and always thought it peculiar because fog is ethereally white, not green.  The thickness is the comparator, I suppose, and not the color but the vision of green fog doesn’t leave my imagining.  As we look out tonight toward Anchorage, Beverly gives us verbal updates…..Anchorage is gone….Eagle river is dimming….only the lights of Skyline are left….we are all alone in the world.  This happens often, and I never tire of having the rest of the world screened out while we are left in our mountain fortress in the clouds or sometimes, above the clouds.  That really is the most beautiful; luxuriating in the sun with the cloud’s ceiling below us, seeing not another human or habitation.  Some might say we are spoiled at times.  We are.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

I opened my eyes this morning to the shadows of broken light creeping in the window; light broken by feathery shapes drifting past the source of the light.  The curtains are pulled on all but one window, and it took me a while to realize that snow was falling.  We've had two weeks of beautiful sunshine, misplaced from it’s normal time slot in January, and yet we’re glad it came.  You see, January is known for its beautiful clear days and it cold and crisp nights.  This year we call that March.  March days are like hot taffy pulled at both ends, lengthening into picturesque sweetness, striped with snow and sun and springtime play.  March days make me alive again; the rebirth of ambition flooding over me while the snow is still too deep to make me serious about accomplishing anything productive.  Time to play.

Friday, March 22, 2013

This morning I could smell and even taste, a buttery raisin-oatmeal cookie.  Now actually smelling or tasting were really beyond the reaches of the possible because I can still only partly breathe a oozy bit through one nostril, but the taste/smell thing happens in the olfactory lobe of the brain which has already stored the experience, so I didn’t really need to recreate it to relive it.  But that spicy just-baked odor of cinnamon and nutmeg and brown sugar and oatmeal blended with butter and eggs and flour put my craving into overdrive.  I had recently seen a recipe that I was able to find without too much difficulty, and as I read the instruction, I could tell that the creator was much fussier than I.  I mean, “Grease a single cookie sheet and place it in the middle of the oven with the temperature at 350.”  I guess the oven needs to get in the mood with a dry run before it gets the chance to actually bake a cookie.  Anyway, even in my still olfactorally-compromised condition, I mixed together the ingredients  (Peculiar-no nutmeg…..) , and baked the cookies (two trays at once) and they emerged from the oven a beautiful golden brown.  I could hardly wait for a bite.  Good.  But when your sensory apparatus is burdened with the sequellae of disease, stick with the cookies in your brain.  The ones in your mouth are bound to be a disappointment.

OK.  I don't blog much.  I am therefore at least temporarily repurposing my blog.  The ordeal of coming up with pictures and text and editing them into place was more than I could whip myself to do.  After all, there was undoubtedly something more important to do.....like do you know that we are on Season 9 of Grey's Anatomy?

Anyway, I began reading a book the other day about writing.  The book advised sitting down each morning and writing for 10 minutes.  No more.  I thought that anyone could write for 10 minutes.  Another author was telling someone how to write a novel.  He said, "Write a page a day.  In a year you have a book."  I'm going for the 10 minute solution for now.

Anyway, to have a place to keep this journal, what better place than my blog?????OK, well it's not too private and now I'm writing for an audience instead of just me.  But what the heck.....So,

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Head pounding like an internal, syncopated drum.  When I went to bed, I imagined I had taken enough meds to get me through the night, but 4AM came anyway, and when the sign-off last night was almost midnight, not much healing was happening.  Expansion in my brain can’t be a good thing.  Messy.  It  would just be messy if I started to leak, and yet leaking would be better than keeping the pressure bottled up inside. Not leaking of CSF or blood; just a little every-day mucous.  It is amazing how much we make and don’t even know it.  Between head and throat and lungs and gut and even the colon and rectum, there has to be a gallon a day.  And today, my whole gallon is in my maxillary sinuses.  The ache is in back of my neck and on top of my head, but the special pressure is in the sinuses….like the old joke about the guy with big lips  having a  tattoo  on the inside; Inflate to 30 pounds.” Or maybe Goldie Hawn.  Someone stuck the hose in  and connected it up, but forgot to stop at 30 pounds…and that has me wondering, what is the maximum?  40? 50? 79?  I don’t know, but like I said, if it were to feel better, it would be messy.