Resinating digits

"No way... I can't believe I missed that." J stated matter of factly as the three of us hovered over the morbid find. He scanned his hand across the asphalt and magically invoked a sprig of alder to inspect it further. The dried white tip of the finger bone was bleached by the sea, with slivers of sinewed flesh barely holding an oval of fingernail. A small remnant of skin pulled taut and dried reminded me of walking the beach after spawning and seeing the dead humpies lying in the sun.

"I'd guess it was a right pinky by the angle." He picked it up by the bone end, his other hand produced a ziploc bag expertly snapped open with a flick of the wrist, and dropped it in as if he'd been CSI unit trained or something.

He hadn't been trained in anything more than his own form of amateur taxidermy, which mostly consisted of a series of small insects. Kodiak really isn't the hotbed for etymological discoveries, aside from some monster brown spiders that appear in sinks and bathtubs in the spring, not much exists larger than a dime... but he had a pretty good collection of what you could find. Little tiny resin cubes of black beetles, snout beetles, creepy sand fleas, moths, an inchworm, a ladybug and the biggest of all a monster dragonfly sat in a row on a shelf above his desk. We used to tease him incessantly, but being J, you couldn't really tell if he even caught you were talking to him most of the time.

His family moved in to town from Chiniak, when we were in the fourth grade. His dad had a job with fish and wildlife and spent most of his time outside with the fish and wildlife, so we rarely saw him. His mom was a toss-back from the 60s, and as their first child, she named him J, just J, "There was something cosmic about the letter..." she'd say.

He resembled closely Moose from the Archie comics, or Dauber from Coach for a more recent reference. Large, oaf-like, and blond, he didn't get picked on much because of his size... even if he was a little slow on the banter. (He says that happened when he got hit in the head by a block when the crane slipped a couple years back... me and Four remembered him from elementary school however, and not much had changed.)

He is a gentle giant though, the only time we've ever seen him get really fired up was after he'd had one too many harassing substitutes freshman year. Each year it was the same drill the first day of roll call, he expected it... "J, no it doesn't stand for anything. Just J." Mid-year a vicious cold had traveled around the teacher's lounge and sent our English teacher home for a week, the third sub was this mousy brown haired lady who other than her wardrobe didn't seem much older than the girls in the class. She pushed her thick brown owl-like rims up and down when she hit his name, and asked "J... now what does that stand for?"

"Nothing. It's just J," droned J.

"James, Joseph, Jack, John, Jacob?" the sub listed off in a Rapunzel-like lilt.

"No. It's just J," he replied irritated.

"Jebadiah, Jeremy, Jason, Jermain?" she continued, "Johan..."

"J. It is just J.... Just Fucking J." he stood, hit the desktop and clattered back down in an earthquake.

A silence rippled through the room at the shock, as the mousy sub shrunk below the lectern. The quiet was quickly followed by a volley of people chanting "Fucking J", Four and I laughed ourselves out of our seats and somehow into in-school suspension that day.

"So F-ing J, what are you going to do with the finger, shouldn't we take it to the cops?" I asked.

"Nah," said Four, "people lose fingers here all the time, I'd bet they'd just toss it in a pile with all the other lost and found stuff. Let's see if we can find where it came from ourselves."

So as we parted that evening, J took the finger back to his desk, painted it with a resin lacquer to seal it, propped it into place with pins and poured it into its own cube cast.

Back to blogland / a commercial break

I'll get back to a continuation of my saga eventually, now that all my people have left and I can actually sit at my own computer for five minutes. For now a few thoughts on the topic of health care.

With people fired up on both ends of the spectrum, pros and cons and propagandist statements, I'm pretty much lost as to what the plan they are debating over is anymore. Like any committee based creation, you are almost guaranteed to have a hodgepodge of extra sticky notes upon sticky notes with people's special interest addendums and some interesting experimental guesses to work from. I tried to read the thing, but wow, there is a reason I never went into law or politics. I wonder if the people responsible for voting on the bill made it past the table of contents?

Of course after I watched Michael Moore's Sicko, I was all for a universal healthcare plan, or moving to Canada if it came down to it. That is until I reminded myself that using only a few examples can skew the results. (More appropriately one of SO's friends' link made the actual reminder:)


Likelihood is the actual bill will get stomped down before it clears the system, and not much really will change, which isn't really a great thing. Change is needed for a majority of people, I'd think, few people are happy with their current care. What we really need is to find a single supergenius and give them the chore to come up with a perfect plan.

Universal health might not be the correct direction (and yes I realize that isn't really on the table right now). The best opposition for it was the fact that when people are given things for free, they take advantage of it. Free becomes Cheap.

Makes me wonder, despite the extrapolating a small data set part of it, whether the people using the ANCSA started non-profits (like KANA) as their primary healthcare provider are happy with the service they receive as a mini-universal system - or whether they run into the same nightmares of waitlisting services, and delayed surgeries that they mention happen in England and Canada.

It would be utopian if we could follow in a path of medical service where you don't get charged 15000 for a small procedure... if we received free preventative health care, and free preventative dental. For example: I don't mind paying for the fault of my own neglect, but I could have gotten that cavity filled and gotten a decent flouride treatment if I wasn't capped on my family dental plan and couldn't afford the visit at the time. Now I have to shell out $800 out of pocket just for the crown. My own fault, my own neglect... if the money hadn't been on the table, I'd have dragged myself in there.

Well back to my regular non-programming....

Bucket butts and the finger

Looking up from my station at the corner of the lot, the sun had burned off most of the fog bank and was sneaking through a ray or two on to the blacktop. Instantly it seemed we were being enveloped by some spiritual realm, the wet ground drifting smoke from the underworld, and bald eagles flocking to the trees at the top of the hill. It was all a beautiful and surreal moment, bucked by the slap in the face of a slight breeze wafting the scent of BioDry. There's nothing like the smell of rotten fish guts in the morning.

Four's grandfather was the person responsible for teaching us anything we needed to know about anything. He was a short and solid Native man with only small spears of white sticking out of his shock of wild straight hair. His brown hands were working-man weathered, thick and callused, but surprisingly nimble when it came to detail work, like tying flies or crafting sculptures out of driftwood and beachcombing flotsam. His patience was extraordinary as he taught us how to tie and tighten a clove hitch, measure within a millimeter by eye, and keep the same strand of twine rolling the length of the patch.

For small repairs, we'd just crawl around on our knees to dart in a knot or two within the mesh. For more time consuming repairs, or to relieve knees and backs, Gramps built this easel-like structure to hang sections of net on and we'd sit on overturned buckets for hours. When you'd finally rise, you could still feel the bucket ring embedded into your flesh. "Bucket Butt!" was the interjection shouted quite often as the either affliction struck, or someone just needed a break.

(I wonder if the street musicians in the city with drumsticks performing tribal beats while using the same white buckets have or suffer from the same term. If ever I go back there, and see them, I'll have to remember to ask.)

"Bucket Butt!" shouted Four, as he meandered over to the net tote. "Might as well pull the end of this out anyway."

He grabbed the tote that had maybe 30 feet left of gillnet within it and pulled it backwards. Reaching the dirty plastic bottom, he set the tote aside and inspected for any damaged pieces. This part was pretty clean as far as repairs go, the ends seem to get less battle scars, the exact middle is where the majority of holes appear. No one has been able to explain to me why that is. Scanning over the segment, pulling out pieces of sea debris, leaves and whatever else settled to the bottom of the tote, Four shouted to us excitedly, "whoa... check this out!!"

Dashing quickly over the three of us hover in a circle around Four's find. "So what," says J, "just a chunk of fish spine."

"Nope," Four states in a matter-of-fact tone, "what we have here is not a fish spine, fish don't have fingernails."

Cloud City Dock

It had been an extraordinarily sun-drenched week, and overnight the sea vs. air temp flipped causing a thick gray blanket of mist to blank out everything past a few yards. Me, J and Four cruised past Deadman's on the way to town in Four's K-town mobile. You could see the pavement slipping through the floorboard, and occasionally small pieces of corroded steel would take their final flying leap, trailing behind us a dusty explosion. The only thing keeping our feet from recreating the Flintstone's ride was a vintage vinyl floormat, one of those with the overly perky playmate showing off her assets. Staring down I was almost sure she winked at me.

Scanning the horizon, if you hadn't traveled that route a million and a half times, you wouldn't know the bay and mountainous coastline across it even existed. To me it looked more like we were approaching Cloud City and Lando would be greeting us soon. But no such luck, Four flicked his blinker and took a right, landing at the City Dock, way too early in the morning. Even the one seagull that was pacing the pilings didn't seem quite awake in the eerily quiet fog.

Four's given name is actually Thorton Tortelsen. We both attended Main Elementary as kids, and he was a little later than most in the ability to produce the sound "th". Due to his speech impediment when introducing himself, Thor became Four for life. His parents own a small seiner that when fishing is good pays the bills, but otherwise is a purchased full-time job without benefits. Often the neighborhood children would be roped into deckhand grunt labor or any task that required little or no pay. My penchant for pretending to be pirate hoisted me into indentured slavery some summers. Pirates smell like herring you know.

Straddling bracings in the truck bed are two plastic totes containing some old gill nets. This is the first year Four purchased his own subsistence license and was hoping to take the skiff out and drop a few sets - enough to brine and smoke a freezer full of Reds. Unfortunately no one knows how long these nets have been in the garage and what decaying treasures may have been buried amid the coiled line. J suggested, "by the weight of it there's probably a body," as he struggled to slither the tote to tailgate.

"Guess we'll find out soon enough," said Four, lifting the end cork and lead line with some grimy gloves and walking backwards as click, clock, click the white oval corks tapped over the plastic edge and tumbled down just to be dragged across the empty asphalt lot.

Net mending on a rather blustery day

A kelp-ridden grid was splayed across the grass, and occasionally staked to keep everything in place. It seemed as if we were trying to keep the undead from escaping the ash and topsoil, but more mundanely some idiot (or in this case "idiotrix") decided to drag the gillnet across an outcropping of barnacle-encrusted rocks.

The damage really wasn't any more severe than being visited by the Rottweilers of the Sea, but from one end to the other we were going to have to perform the ritual of netmending, one that created Ground Hog's Day-ja-vu and repetitive stress injury nightmares.

For most of the morning, me and J crawled around on our hands and knees hunched over opposite ends with a rhythmic unwind, unwind, spin, twist, flip, tighten. Normally we'd be jamming out to Ministry with Ziploc-waterproofed I-Pods, or hurling insults back and forth - but the island weather wasn't in a kind and cooperative mood today. There were winds gusting at what I'm sure was 70 miles per hour, giant raindrops in a showerhead downpour that changed directions randomly. I'd bet God was up there with one of those adjustable flow heads giggling each time the little spiders fought to stand straight and then he pelted them in the other direction by switching it to pulse.

It was a good thing I hadn't buried my raingear in the closet of doom, (although I did get beaned on the head by an errant halibut rod while extracting it). It had been years since life stapled me to the shore, and other than a skiff ride or two for out-of-towners, I'd managed to duck out of subsistence service as well. There really hadn't been much use for a brilliant orange pantsuit with matching cloak, I think the look would be considered overkill for a run-to-your-car drizzle. Pulling the canvas-backed hood over my head I'm hit with the scent of escaping polypropylene fumes, and reeled right back to a stop on memory lane.

I have always found the power of olfactory-driven memories fascinating. One sniff and you are sitting right behind that pungently cologned classmate, or hugging your grandma, or getting dipped headfirst into the water next to the bilge line. The raingear had me spinning tangents.

I'll have to elaborate next time, for now I'm headed back out to weave and bob invisible line before it gets any darker... or any of the Zombies start escaping the mud like the suicidal earthworms on the sidewalk.

The "it is not a windmill" debate

What landscape structure has giant arms that spin in the wind like a pinwheel? Ask anyone they'll answer windmill, however, I keep getting corrected on the fact that what is up on top of Pillar is not technically a windmill.

My neighbor, Mr. Smug-pants was trying to inform me that it is in fact a wind turbine, as a windmill is only for grinding grain. So I took him for his word until I decided to finally look it up for a better explanation and ha ha Mr. Smug-pants wasn't entirely correct.

According to the world's most accurate internet encyclopedia... (does sic mean sarcasm intended? if so sic)... a windmill is a wind turbine, but a wind turbine isn't a windmill. No wonder I have recurring SAT question nightmares.

A wind turbine is a rotating machine which converts the kinetic energy in wind into mechanical energy. If the mechanical energy is used directly by machinery, such as a pump or grinding stones, the machine is usually called a windmill. If the mechanical energy is then converted to electricity, the machine is called a wind generator, wind power unit (WPU), or wind energy converter (WEC).

So what we have on top of Pillar as a whole machine would not be a windmill, as there isn't a Little Red Hen grainery or water tower on the side of the mountain. It contains a wind turbine, but would be classified as one of the three bolded terms from the quote. I'm not sure which one KEA prefers, but I like wind energy converter. Of course this is new terminology, as it says in the windmill article, the wind turbine title is 'recent', so I guess if you are over a certain age your ability to call it a windmill is grandfathered in.

Here's my wikipedia links if you really wanted to know: wind turbine, windmill

I also had another laugh at myself as we headed out to White Sands on the 4th of July, as we turned the corner I was startled with a thought of "oh wow, they put them out here too?". Luckily I caught myself before I spoke remembering, although yes it seems like we've been driving straight, this is the backside of the mountain. It was not like I didn't know that, we've ATV'd to end of the road parties many a time in high school revelry... just caught me off guard... there hasn't always been such an obvious landscape reminder there.

A video in honor of windmills dedicated to Mr. Smug-pants:

It is Friday isn't it?

I'm brain-numb, not the good I just hoovered a Glacier Mocha from Island Espresso kind either.

Has anyone else noticed how oddly long this week was? Was it a stretch in the space time continuum mixed with nearing Summer Solstice and being trapped between the line painter and the traffic cones, or what?

I keep catching myself doing a doubletake at the spikes sticking out of Pillar. Those props have some massively impressive wingspans. Although, I still think it looks like pieces of the Iron Giant have taken residence up there. I'm just waiting for it to up and walk away one day.

I've had to look twice several times at those owls they have perched all over the Kasheveroff building. Someone was telling me a story about having those at a cannery too, to keep the seagulls off the dock, only they apparently only worked in the dark - so you could hear the owl hooting through the night but the seagulls by that time were sleeping.

Now that I've wiped away a few more moments from the clock it doesn't seem to have ticked past as quickly as I thought it would. It truly is the week that would not end.

facespacebook tweeting and empty caloric value prayers

I was hovering over S.O.'s shoulder and their interesting dissection of classmates from every clique and posse in KHS. My friends list isn't quite as diverse, a couple of college buddies, a couple of family members, couple of work buddies, most just like me, occasional lurkers, but not really 'in-to-it' per se. I enjoy seeing the occasional status update, when someone is doing something especially adventurous, or remotely entertaining, but wow. . . . S.O.'s peeps are, are... hmm, remarkably, I don't even have a word for it.

The one that tipped the cow posts multiple status updates all asking for people to pray for her for one thing or another. I'm all for praying for people if they are sick, dying, needing a miracle... but it seems trite to pray for someone that they make it out of StarBucks with their triple non-fat latte moccacina. If there truly is someone listening, why would anyone want to waste a wishful thought on making it through a soccer game and a ballet recital all in one night? Sure, pray they make it safely, but don't pray for the strength to sit through the events. Although in hindsight, maybe neither were particularly talented, which I guess qualifies as prayer-worthy if it was torturous, but somehow I find that unlikely.

Promoting Nutrisweet prayers gives me all the more reason to avoid religion. I'll stick with my Magic 8 Ball, Birthday Candle, and Shooting-Star wishes. Save the prayer lines for the protesters in Iran, the flight crew whose pilot died in the air, the will to make the best decisions we can with the information we have...

On other absurd news. Did you see PETA is getting all riled up about Obama killing a fly? No chopsticks involved, but it was a pretty good move.

Nixed the rainbow ponies.

I got burned out on the color green on my profile. Of course I am reveling in its appearance outside from neon spruce tips to the unfurling alder leaves. Kodiak on the brink of green is a wonderful place to be. Yep, I'm high on the happy pill of a sunny day. Well, until I have to pull out the lawn dinosaur, but even the thought of the chore seems pleasant today.

Maybe not pleasant enough to leave the profile with rainbow ponies on it though. My dear friend "e" knows her way around that code jibberish, so when I asked her to upgrade me to a new hue, I should have known what to expect. Nice. Sorry, I couldn't bring myself to leave it that way. "e" says she'll update it eventually, but wanted to go outside and play today. Oh well, I can't blame her.

I was actually wishing I could trade places with a flag man today, they seemed to be having so much fun, or just were happy being busy flag people. They have some pretty neat toys crawling the streets. I like the new groove they've got for the yellow lines to get installed, I wonder if they are filling in the paint, or if it is a reflective material that is embedded in it?

Got paused by a flagman by McDonald's where I'm guessing they are fixing a water main or something and noticed a new green and white striped building is appearing next to Cy's. I'm told it is going to be a coffee / gift shop. Right now, I'm wondering why they chose design inspiration from a tube of Aquafresh.

Well, hopefully someone e-mails me if my profile all of the sudden has a kitten or Numa-Numa guy theme this evening. I'm wary now I've left my password in the hands of someone with the feverish desire to pick on me.

Reason free from passion

I got sucked into a Law & Order rerun, not so much watching it but contemplating the premise of passion. Part of my nature is to try to remember to look at things diversely, to accept that there can be multiple truths, and often there just isn't a right answer. Yes'm that thought is a bit profound to be pulling out of a court drama, but, all the good seasons ended and it was that or "So you want to be a crappy reality TV star stranded on an island"?

Being too fractured on the whole opinion issue puts me at odds with embracing any particular facet of religion, politics, or unending bureaucracy. (Although, I do have a slight leaning on the side of lame regarding Scientology-mostly because I couldn't accept Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt after that whole 'you're being glib' diatribe. Way to ruin a perfectly cool movie.) Unless there is a path of obvious choice, what drives one down one route or another other than passion?

It is another one of those words that can be contained in too many sentences, landing in cliche-ja-vu, because I've already written this before, or read it... multiple times. (I'm thinking this is why I don't post very often, there is so much information rattling around that it is starting to feel like it has all been said before.) But the fact that passion keeps calling attention to itself, must mean that part of life needs some tweaking into shape.

So, how to do that? Guess thinking of a few inspirational people and strolling back through history's heroes get me by for now. I'm thinking of the passion of the inventors and creators of the technology that I so embrace and admonish, the passion of our forefathers ditching the U.K. to homestead in freedom, the soldiers and men of honor who serve and protect, hand in hand with the takers-on of causes. They all have in common a certainty, a drive toward the direction that in hindside seems so obvious, but must have taken a thousand upstream moments.

This makes me think of impossible New Year's resolutions, and incomprehensively unattainable goals. That, and the ultimate question, "So, how do you eat an entire cow?". My answer: one bite at a time, as long as you aren't vegetarian or allergic to beef, or a cannabalistic cow, then I guess you'll have to get someone else to eat the cow for you, or compost it, since it is already dead - and isn't that the goal to have some good come out of it - even if it is just some really fertilized radishes?

I guess I do have a passion... for nonsense.

Oh Magic 8 Ball... will it rain on Crab Fest?

It keeps telling me "Ask Again Later". So, while waiting for "later" and making it look like I'm actually doing some important statistical data research by having Excel open whenever my boss wanders past. This should appease our curiosity slightly more than the old magic 8 ball (which I included at the bottom of the post if you want to see if it gives you anything better.

Click to enlarge the graph and you can see the high and low temperature and the amount of precipitation from 1980-2008. There does seem to be a slight pattern to it lately, every third year since 97 has been warm with no rain, and since the hottest crab Crab Fest since 1980 was in 2006 add three more years, statistically we're due for some sun at least. The precipitation and temps are averaged the span of the festival, so it doesn't account for rainy parade day and then the rest of it sunny. Interesting to see it was mild and slightly rainy through most of the 80s, and hit some sweet spikes in '93, '97, the year 2000 and '02.

Dang... now the boss is looking over my shoulders and realizing what I've been wasting my afternoon on. Good thing it piqued their interest too... otherwise I'd be in big trouble. I swear I was just learning how to make charts in Excel boss.

A disturbance in the force

My powers of observation are weakening, it took me until reading Ish's post to notice the Petro Sign in its digital glory. I didn't have any particular reaction to that one way or another at the time, but after a few drives through, I'm realizing it doesn't look like Kodiak on that block anymore.

It is as if someone grabbed a section of Anchorage and dropped it off at the end of Mill Bay. (An aside, while rescuing a lost cruise ship passenger they asked "why the heck do you have an upper and lower Mill Bay?" Someone once told me the roads were all moved after the tsunami, but I'm guessing that road and where it meets both Rezanof and Mill Bay have been there forever, named for their ultimate destination: one block from Mill Bay. Other than that all I could do was shrug.) Anyway, with signage and pretty buildings and landscaping and franchises, by bringing someone back from the past and just standing there, I doubt they'd be able to guess where they were. Well, as long as your back was to Fir Terrace—that still looks roughly the same. All we need is a digital billboard right there on the corner where all the sandwich boards are for, we'll have Times Square K-town style.

The thought both makes me lament the passage of time, and the banes of technology. How interesting that conversation would be with the aformentioned time traveler though. After we reminisced that that area was all trees and swampland not too long ago, he'd ask me how my day was. I'd have to say "Hold on, I have to go AFK". He'd ask, "Is that a one or a two?". Then I'd go on to tell him I've been getting flamed with spam all day, and got hit with a Trojan. He'd ask, "Is that from Monty Python?". Then I'd rattle off a bunch of jargonic acronyms that the teens use for texting. "Texting? is that like putting your finger in the typewriter?".

Sweet progress.

Carpe Porcus

Seize the pork, or something close to that—as the nearest to Latin I have ever mastered was Pig Latin, which inadvertently makes too much sense in that statement.

The pork I am referring to, if you haven't had any mass media influx lately, Swine Flu. It is the latest round of pandemic potential influenza, getting every network fired and riled up with Chicken Little ferocity. As if we didn't have enough to worry about, as if there weren't enough things out there just waiting to take us to meet our own politic of worms, just pin the pig right on the top of it.

My initial thought is we are fairly screwed if a super-bug comes along. With the unknown damage vaccinations and processed food chemicals have wreaked, environmental toxins, bleaching and hand-sanitizing more than a obsessive compulsive germaphobe... I wonder if our immune systems are any better suited to handle a true outbreak than they were in 1890.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-vaccination by any means. I'm just not so certain that is the best tactic to fight some of these diseases. I liken it to computer viruses, you know they are out there, you take precautions to prevent infecting yourself by safe-surfing practices, and anti-virus software. The thing about anti-virus software though, is an exploit must be entered into the particular program's database in order for it to see it. You could have four different products running and still one Trojan horse could sneak past the wall. What would be more beneficial is if there was a method to create a super-immune system. Rather than taxing and compromising already bombarded immunities by giving it a little infection so it knows how to fight it, wouldn't it be better to train the machine to memorize what belongs, and eradicate immediately what doesn't? (Either that or as S.O. keeps telling me, we should all become Apples.)

It is amazing that science and technology have come so far, but is still swaddled in infancy. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know anything.

Now that we're in glacial retreat...

Do you think that Gabrielle's holiday banner will come down this year? We had a pool running to see who could guess when it would come off the wall by the Asian Grocery last year, but it never happened. Must be one of those things where it has been there so long you don't notice that it is there.

Sweet, I got dislike mail!

Way back when, I was forced to make a gmail account in order to sign up for the blog, but it isn't a primary, secondary, tertiary or octoplanary (I made that up) address, so I have rarely logged in.

I accidentally stumbled across that inbox on my home portal last evening, and to my surprise there were a few messages from months and months ago. Awesome that someone felt passionate enough about being forced to read my blather to actually write a note asking me why I bother. The answer being, obviously from my sporadic posting, I really don't bother. I could respond with a "why lame writers write even when their writing is lame" solilique, but that's been overdone as much as a forensic science series on cable.

The other flame mail was more entertaining. Apparently, I'm a male chauvanist. I didn't realize that my sarcastic/sardonic id portrayed that. That title is purely laughable if only you knew past the serifs on the screen, besides, I practice Equal Opportunity Vexation. It doesn't matter the shell, the idiotic are idiotic.

-------------

On other things of interest, the kidlings and I have been enjoying watching the construction on the new Police Station. Those were some pretty tall footings they had to pound down through the gravel. The machine made it look like they were just shoving toothpicks in the mud, but significantly louder. Passing by a few times I've caught a glimpse of the Chief at a crawl in the other direction checking out the progress. It must be so exciting for him to see something finally happening after all of the work it took to get to that point.

The new pool building is coming along nicely too, that green sealing stuff they have on it is such a perfect horrible hue - so bad it is awesome. It will get covered up eventually, but we need more obnoxious purple and... wait, we already have a purple building, I forgot.

Well, back to the grindstone, happy that I finally don't have to be out shoveling snow.

We're the ones that made you.

Well, I can't say that rap as a genre makes it to the top of my internal playlist. (Unless we are reminiscing Young MC or Sir Mix-A-Lot... got to love those buttermilk biscuits.) I do have respect for the creatively exploitative though. Case in point, Eminem - Slim Shady's newest video We Made You. It features Bret Michaels, Kim Kardashian's butt, a Vulcan, Polar Bears and a bikini-clad Palindrone.

I find it perplexing that the rest of the U.S. is still remotely intrigued by our own Arctic Vanilla Ice. The point was that we made these caricatures of people as they are displayed in the media. Just by mentioning names it adds another blip into the subliminal pixels that keep getting dropped in the midst of things that hold slightly more importance.

What those things are of course I choose not to dwell on. I'm as infected as the next person, somehow, I want to know that the Paps flashes tripped out Madge's horse, or that Matthew likes to canoe skate with an unleashed dog. I am not proud of this, and wish I could turn it off...

Do you think there is a twelve step program?

You're on Notice

Get your own: http://www.shipbrook.com/onnotice/

So I see on NOAA's weather website Kodiak has turned orange. This means it is a blizzard watch, Friday a.m. to Friday evening. So to honor the great Steven Colbert, (and because I'm sick as fu** of f***ing snow), SNOW... You're on Notice. Also on notice... anything to do with snow, blizzards, snow removal. You get it.

ALSO ON NOTICE:

I try and flip channels when commercials come on, and have perfected the skill of multiple channel viewing, however, every time I switch the station lately, I'm on the same Yaz commercial, birth control that helps alleviate Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. I am tired of thinking of women completely freaking out with hormonal imbalances, it is bringing up repressed memories of one of my friends mothers who had the power to desimate you in one bark. I still step lightly.

Adam Lambert annoys me. But then I'm not really a fan of much musical theater outside of Rocky Horror or Little Shop. He is a good singer if you like the whole screaming high pitched Aerosmith crap... but there is something slightly black-polished-nails-on-a-chalkboard about it. I've had to forceably swipe the remote a few times to escape the AI torture.

Headline News, or any of the news channels for that matter, for media hyping the President's security and showing on the cool map thingy all the locations where he would be, and when he was arriving there. Is it me, or is that poor security handling? It is no different when they are having Olympics or something and saying how secure it is, and how no terrorists can get in to deploy a bomb. Just draw a red X and say hey terrorist, if you haven't thought of it before we mentioned it... attack here.

So those are my on notices for the day. I left the Bears there for Steven, they don't really bother me so much.... except for the fact we still don't have any dumpsters in our neighborhood.

Equinoxially challenged.

Been stuck in the black hole between seasons here, where although the world seems to keep rotating, nothing personally inspirational or locally provocative seems to clear the filter of the bubble. I'm probably suffering for the lack of experiencing nature, breaking one of Deepak Chopra's Seven Laws of Spiritual Success, so it is a good thing that we should be seeing some Kodiak t-shirt weather here soon.

Did catch an interesting story from KMXT earlier, about the ghost at the Baranov museum. It's a bit light on anecdotal evidence, but I'm certain there are plenty more tales of people being spooked. Really old buildings seem to invoke the paranormal intution in people, probably more on the projecting side of things, but it makes for some great entertainment.

I spent some time in an old house on the other side of the Russian Orthodox church, which has long since been torn down and replaced. There was something about the old creaky building next to a graveyard with thick lead paint and windows that rattled with the breeze because it faced the channel that kept me on high alert. Now that I think about it, it was probably more carbon monoxide poisoning.

Should get Paranormal State to bring out their thermal scanners and EMF meters and scan some local places. I can't think of any others besides the old D house and the big bunker right now. But then that might just call the paranormal's attention to us. Our Alutiiq ancestors were fairly superstitious and believed whistling conjured the spirit world, and someone once told me a story of swarms of black flies coming out of nowhere at a dig... so I guess we'd better be careful what we look for.

When is Easter anyway?

I'm not that much of a holiday follower, unless the shopping facilities remind of of the fact. Baskets and marshmallow peeps are apparently overflowing at the wall-e-world, we dashed past the other evening long enough to set some animatronics in action and spy a mildly disturbing Easter basket collection.

For a religious holiday marking the last supper and Jesus' death, who gives their kid an easter basket containing an arsenal of toy weapons? Obviously someone who has stripped the religion out of the holiday and replaced it with a bunny... who happens to be destined for a stewpot. Kiwww the waabbbiit, kiwww the waabbbitt.

As a kid it never really meant anything more than the last snowstorm of the season. It was inevitable the egg hunt was made slightly more difficult by a foot of snow burying them, with a few colorful surprises appearing on the lawn after the meltdown.

The glint of sun the past few days has reminded me that there might be a spring, I might be able to feel my toes again, or touch them again for that matter after I pull the bicycle out for my post season weight shed. There's nothing like a little vitamin D to boost the mood.

Maybe we need to dose the water with some D. Maybe if the country pulls out of their collective seasonal affective disorder, we will start seeing recovery. Either that or it's wabbit hunting season for us all.

Whoo hoo... I'm filler!

I can't say that is the first time I've been mentioned on page 1 of the Mirror, but yes, the first time for my feeble attempt at being a blogger. There are many much more qualified Kodiak blogosphere candidates, so my guess is that since no one has openly suspected I am me, it bears slightly more credence than if I was posting under my given name. That, and they needed to fill that sidebar column with something. Gotta love the slow news day.

Props to the Great and Powerful Ishter for holding down the fort and actually consistently posting. I've got to say, he is the Blogger King.

Speaking of forts, snowsuits were donned and I am writing this while waiting for one snowsuit to get un-donned so a kidling can pee. There is something about a snowsuit zipper that seems to trigger neurons that fire the bladder alarm, maybe it is a Pavlovian response to being trapped in down. We are heading out to make use of this white stuff that will probably be slush tomorrow. Kid one has planned a fortress, but I'm guessing it will end up either as two giant snowballs that will live in our yard until the next complete thaw, or a few mounds of snow that are used as a slushball barricade. I'm already stocked with a shield, seniority seems to call for insubordinace of the sneaking snowball to the head kind.

Zipped and buttoned, we're going outside to get cold and wet!

If you want to get plastered:

I realized a new drinking game this morning. Take a drink every time the new White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says "Um" or "Ah". Poor guy would have you under the table in no time flat. Not that I could be masterful at that job, or have any interest in public speaking whatsoever, but when you get your focus stuck on an Umanaher it seems to take over the ability to actually hear what they are saying.

Sounds like time for Toastmasters!

Umanaher : (noun) A person who pauses between thoughts, and sometimes mid-sentence, during public speaking with the vocalization sounds of um (UH-MMM) or ah (AWE).

Nope... didn't drop off the face of the earth.

Pretty darn near though. Since GCI was nice and bumped my cable package to include the 100s channels, I've been sucked into the vortex - a conductor waving my baton at seemingly infinite channel selections. I haven't exactly been able to escape.

What have I paused on lately? I've expanded my vocabulary for hypochondria by watching Mystery diagnosis and anything on Discovery Health, and also been trapped by the Green Channel, the Science Channel, another History Channel, MTV2, among a glut of reality TV garbage and guilty pleasures.

Yes, I saw part of American Idol, pretending to be under duress. Secretly I enjoy watching the delusion of American society paraded so fanatically, but don't tell anyone. I will be mocked until the cows come home, and considering we have a no livestock rule in town, that will be a very very long time.

I also caught a repeat of South Park the other day, the one about the election. I truly admire the guys who created that show for their ability to come up with some of the most absurd plotlines that have a valid political statement. Palin was awesome as the one of the henchmen of a plot to steal the Hope diamond, I loved that her accent was switched to British when she was out of public eye, plus they had her updo illustrated perfectly. They pegged McCain's likeness, but Obama's characature was a little strange, he looked like a cross between Bill Cosby and Count Chocula.

Yeah, I live an exciting life. Been a little more boring since they banned myspace, facebook, and youtube at work... I just realized I could still login in here, so maybe I'll be back sooner than later.