Just for balance

Not too long ago I was training a newly hired kid just out of college how to do my job posting news to a website. In the course of the evening he intimated and all but said he was surprised to see someone “um, your age” who was computer literate. I looked at him silently for a moment with mock shock showing on my face. Then very carefully and slowly so the message came through loud and clear, I said, “Who do you think invented them?”

But that was just background. Yesterday I went to a Home Depot to buy a couple of gardening tools and a watering can. When I couldn’t find one, I asked the young lady working there where I might find a watering can. “What’s that?” she asked. This woman works in the gardening department, is there to assist customers and had no clue what a watering can is. I described one. Think right now, if you had to describe something as common and universal as a watering can, could you do it clearly? After my bumbled description, I mean watering cans are a given, something you automatically know what it is without ever in your life having to actually describe one, she still didn’t know and actually had to call someone. Here’s how important watering cans are these days. They were on the third shelf up, yes, I had to climb shelves (past maybe 10 different kinds of hose reels) to get at them, and neither of these young, spry, (don’t you just love the word “spry”?) people could take the time to come with me. Then I had to use one of the tools in my hand to reach the can I wanted and drag it to where I could grab it. There was so much dust on it, it must have been there since the place opened. And then it cost $25. I should have charged them an unstocking fee.

Looking at the generation gap from the other side, now, I am a little dismayed. These people are going to take over the world someday? I suppose living in the sub arctic a kid can grow up without ever seeing a watering can, but wow wasn’t there one in Mr. Macgregor’s garden? In the Child’s Garden of Verses? Somewhere in a book?

Now happily at home with my gold-plated hard-fought-for watering can, I actually have something to water.

Last week I bought some plants including a lilac bush. (I may have bought the wrong kind. A woman at work who knows about these things told me there is only one kind the moose won’t eat.) But then I put on my facebook page that I had bought a lilac bush. Despite all the new ads that say use of the word is wrong, I looked at that sentence on line and decided hmmm that looks awfully gay. So I added that I had also bought a Jeep. Just for balance you know. And I did. but, it was all part of a master plan.

A year ago when gasoline prices were up around $4.50, I got the idea that it might be smart to buy one of the new efficient hybrids for my 80-mile commute, and then a small pickup or Jeep or something to use on weekends for bush trips and hauling my trailer and that sort of thing. So a little more than a week ago I had some extra time in Anchorage and wandered into the Honda dealer. (Why Honda is another story.) Sooooo, Now I own a Honda Insight which gets me to work at an average 47 miles per gallon, and a Jeep which mostly sits in the yard anxiously waiting for a good Bush adventure.

And for proof just look at the picture.... that is my new lilac bush along with my new (actually used) Jeep just for the balance of it all.

Some nights the news business is not all that much fun

This isn’t my usual kind of post but when you work in the news business sometimes a story comes across your screen that affects your sensibilities. For months there has been a series of advertisements running on television. They show a man’s face, one that is benign, friendly, even fatherly. But the voice over is something like: “I am your coach. your uncle, your friend and you trust me with your kids.” The eventual message is that anyone and usually someone you know can be a child molester.

The ad is infuriating. It only serves to make kids and their parents distrust EVERYONE. A few years ago I was president of a Little League and one of my duties every year was to run a check of every volunteer, even the ones who didn’t come in contact with the kids through the state’s sex offender database and a make a check of criminal convictions. I hated that and I hated that I had to do it and I hated that I knew it was necessary in today’s world. Still, knowing that, I find the ads offensive and the amount of distrust raised especially when the chance that it will happen is fairly slim despite all the publicity. We have to protect every child but do we have to distrust every adult? An awful lot of wonderful volunteers are going to start backing off from the work and I wouldn’t blame them.

I remember a time when my son was about 3. During some event he ran into the girls’ room at the school. I started in after him then realized I had better not do that. Then this girl came down the hall. She might have been in fifth or sixth grade. Without thinking I grabbed her by the shoulders and started asking her to go in and find my son. Then I saw the abject fear in her eyes. And I could almost hear her parents telling her to be careful of strangers. I let go and backed away immediately and then apologetically in a much more calming voice explained the situation. I felt so much better when I saw her relax and then she went and extracted my son from the lavatory. Whew.

So with this intense dislike for the growing public distrust of coaches and teachers and anyone else who works with kids, I edited two stories tonight. In one a teacher at a private Christian school, who also was a youth mentor and a sports coach, was arrested and charged with 14 felony counts of molesting a 14 year old boy. In the second story, two women now in their late 20s and early 30s had to testify at a trial that they were molested by a man who was one’s stepfather and the boyfriend of the other’s mother. The mother died as a drug addict and had blamed the girl when she brought the subject up originally. But it was the trusted teacher who got to me. How can we defend kids from these totally evil predators without treating every coach, every teacher, everyone who ever works with kids with extreme suspicion.

And, how can you not be suspicious when stories like those two come along? We have just been through several years of so many stories of catholic priests molesting kids in Bush villages that when the lawsuits eventually came out it forced the diocese in Fairbanks into bankruptcy.

Obviously there are no easy answers, but there have to be people a child and a parent can trust, and there are many more of them who can be trusted than there are molesters.

It's official

OK, we can start now. All the elements are finally in place and the spring/summer is officially under way. Today the swans showed up on the pond and that was the last piece. Of course there was one thing missing, but that is always missing. To top it off there was a bear snuffling through the brush not too far away. And, there was daylight at midnight. Can there be any doubt now?

And then it rained …

… and now I have 14, count them 14 cubic yards of Matanuska Valley MUD.

Hooray hooray the fourteenth of May …

… road weight limits were lifted today. And, I now have 14, count them, 14, cubic yards of the Matanuska Valley's finest garden blend topsoil, the very topsoil that lured so many Minnesota farmers north in the 1930s to colonize this valley and make a living tilling this very soil. And, it has come to this, I am now tilling the Matanuska soil too, in preparation for planting. I feel a kinship with those hardy escapees from the Great Depression. Hmmmm. , am i dealing with a new Depression and is all this effort a reflexive response to declining economy, back to the soil, more free vegetables. So far my free vegetables have cost about $430 and I haven't even planted anything yet. So, now after three weeks of hot weather and no progress, i can now fill in my little log garden and see what I can make grow in this famous dirt. There is just one problem. The whole pile has to be moved from here to over there. Now, remember that personals ad? "Alaska man seeks woman with chainsaw … ?" Slight change: Alaska man NOW seeks woman with small tractor. Send pic of tractor. And, soon!

A brief history of what Matanuska Valley farming and colonists are all about

It’s plot, there has to be a plot

Paranoia rears its ugly head in the form of another ugly natural form, the moose. It does take a moose to appreciate the beauty of another moose, although many of us enjoy seeing them, except maybe in the middle of a two-lane curvy road in the dark when we are doing almost 60.

The plot is I have gotten the idea moose are really aiming at me and in a suicidal manner. I mean I have lived in Alaska for 35 years. For 30 of those years I never even came close to hitting one on the road. But in the past five I have hit two (in reality, the second one hit me) had two incredibly close calls including one last night. And several other encounters that could have been close or worse. It is like the whole population woke up and discovered, hey. here’s this guy we haven’t even scared yet -- and the onslaught began.

Last night roaring down the two-lane next to the mountain a moose burst up out of a deep ditch and onto the roadway heading across. In the brief instant I saw him I could tell it was going to keep coming whether it saw me or not. It was like I am bigger than you so I am going to cross the road. It was so close there was no time to hit the horn, just the brakes and one thing about anti-lock brakes is they don’t stop you fast enough on dry pavement. Anyway I have no idea how I missed this guy. I am sure the top of the car passed right under his chin. By the time I could check the rear view mirror he had disappeared into the darkness.

One more close call, and it started the thought process of them actually aiming at me, moose standing by the side of the road waiting in ambush. Guy lives here that long and thinks he is going to get away with it.

Then I had to think. Of the 35 years, I didn’t own a car for 11 of them and beyond that for another 14 I lived in one of the few parts of Alaska where there aren’t any moose. So really, there have only been about 10 years where I was exposed and only five of those that I did any lengthy commuting.

So, the final conclusion? Paranoia, at least in this case is fiction. No plot. Just recent maximum exposure. So, maybe it is time to recognize it and slow down and forget daydreaming on the highway.

But just let one of them wander into my new garden and we’ll see who discovers someone is plotting against them.

Did you miss me, baby, did you really?

It’s been a while and we have a lot to go over so we’d better get started. First of all, yesterday was Green Day, one of the best days of the year in Alaska. Once winter begins to release its grip, all the deciduous trees take on a skeletal look, all brown and twigs. This goes on for weeks and then one day, all the trees at once blossom with green leaf sprouts. It happens in one day and that day was yesterday. We have been having quite a heat wave.

Temperatures have been in the 60s and even 70s for more than a week now, very unseasonable for this time of year. I have been snowed on in the middle of May so this came as a total surprise. This was funny. The Bureau of Land Management people who care about these things reported one day they expected a mild wildfire season because it will be a cool and wet summer. That was the first day the temperature hit 70. Don’t those people even look out the window?

So, this happened too. I was backing in toward the door with a load of drywall. Yes. only I would find pleasant warm weather the time to refinish a bathroom. I spent two days indoors hanging drywall and a tub surround instead of doing something outdoors. Anyway I was backing in and about to pull forward again to straighten out the trailer when something fell out of the big cottonwood next to the driveway. At first I thought it might be a leaf but it had landed kind of heavy for that. Then it started moving a little. It was right in front of the trailer tire so I would have killed whatever it was and stopped. Then a squirrel came racing down the tree, ran over to it, picked it up in its mouth and headed off for the back yard. It had been a baby squirrel, almost hairless that had fallen out of the tree. Now, I don’t like squirrels, but I am still glad I didn’t run over it.

Despite the race into spring I haven’t seen the bloom of porcupines yet and the swans have not come back to the pond, either. As a matter of fact farmers are saying the geese aren’t back yet either and that worries them about a late, cold summer. Then, I saw two Canada geese yesterday right where Fred used to greet me last year, so only swans to come.

We had another cantaloupe moon last week but this time, underneath it, even at midnight, there was a line of daylight left on the horizon. Tonight there was even a little pink in that line of daylight.

That gets us back a couple of weeks to when I got a wild hair one day and stared a little decorative garden in front of the house. Got some ground contact timbers and framed it up and then called to get some topsoil, Problem is, springtime the roads only allow trucks half their axle weight, so no one is delivering yet. But I did have a nice talk with the woman who runs a nursery down the street.

Before that a couple of weeks I went with my son to Cleveland to see a Cavaliers game. That was fun but I do belong in Alaska.

Besides all that, dealing with the demise of the newspaper business has been a bit depressing. I don’t see much future for us, but I have to wonder what happens when they are gone? Like them or hate them, they are still the only source that is in any way trustworthy to watch the world and report on it. Who do we trust when they are gone? Keith Olberman? Bill O’Reilly? Aryanna Huffington? Any old blogger who comes along? Thomas Jefferson said once given a choice of government without newspapers or newspapers without government he would choose the latter. We may not even get the choice. Might have some new pictures in the near future and am feeling a little more like writing these days so watch this space carefully. Oh and I did hear a good joke last night.

This is a dumb person joke. We used to be able to say blonde, or Pollack or something but now it is just a dumb person. Substitute your favorite for dumb person if you like.

So, this dumb person is sitting at a table with a bunch of pieces laid out and is staring at a box.

A friend comes in and asks what is going on. The dumb person says I am trying to do this jigsaw puzzle and it is supposed to look like a rooster.

The friend looks everything over and says I don’t see how you are going to get a rooster out of that.

The dumb person says, I don’t even see where to start.

To which the friend says, “Why don’t you just put the corn flakes back in the box and we’ll go do something else.”

OK, well that should have you caught up to a certain extent. I feel like a bowl of cereal.