Biking For Veggies Gets Me Into Police Blockade

 It's Thursday.  The Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service of the Catholic Social Services in Anchorage has a farm - Grow North Farm - where I subscribe for weekly veggie pickups over the summer.  It's about 7.4 km or or a bit over 9 miles round trip.  I can do much of it on wooded bike paths.  But eventually I get to a quiet residential street in Airport Heights.  

My first hint was a police car a block to the east.  But then as I headed down the street there were more police cars.  Lots of them.  My first reaction was a bad crash, but I'm on a bike and I can go around on the sidewalk if necessary.  But then I got within about 20 feet of the cars and police behind them, yelling at someone I couldn't see.  But I could see that at least one officer had a gun pointed over the car.  As regular readers of this blog probably know, guns are not a fascination of mine.  But one of the benefits of blogging is that I learn new things.  Here's an image of shotguns I got when I googled 'police guns'.  What I saw most resembled one of the circled guns, probably the bottom one, because he was holding it and I saw that box magazine as well.  (Based on the pictures and interactive description from here.)  Of course, I'm just guessing from my brief look and googling now.  

I realized quickly that if the police had guns pointing further down the street, over their cars, that there was someone down there who might start shooting toward the police, near where I was.  (There are fairly regular reports in the newspaper of Anchorage police involved in a shoot out.)  Rather than pull out my camera and try to catch this dramatic scene, I turned my bike around and headed back, turned the corner and tried the next street over, which got me to DeBarr.  From DeBarr and Airport Heights, I took this picture while waiting for the light to change.  I never heard any shots fired.

I originally encountered one set of police coming from the south.  Now I'm looking south from two blocks to the north.  So there were police on both ends of the street.  

I carried on toward Grow North Farm.  It seemed bizarre that cars and people were carrying on normally so close to this dramatic scene, without even knowing that something was happening.  

On my way back everything on that block was back to normal.  Not a sign that anything had happened.  It was like a movie set had packed up and gone home. (I grew up in LA where there were movie shoots all over.)  But I don't know that a movie set would have cleaned up as well.  

At home I unloaded the veggie haul.  Today's selection was:

• Rainbow Chard/ Collard Greens

• Mizuna

• Cilantro

• And a choose-two grab bag of: Kohlrabi, Cucumbers, Zucchini, Salad Mix, Hot Peppers, Tarragon, and Oregano

From the grab-bag, I chose Kohlrabi and Cucumbers.

I played around a bit with the Curves on my photo program to offer you this somewhat alien looking kohlrabi.

As a bonus, we got to pick out a peony.  This one made it in pretty good shape sticking out of my backpack on the ride home.  

To Chicago, Habrae, Hidden Lake, And Reza's

We're in Chicago with old, old friends.  Actually they aren't older than we are, but we've known them for a long time.  

We thought it would be easy getting here on a non-stop flight out of Anchorage.  For the non-stop route, we were willing to fly overnight.  In the end, after lots of to-ing and fro-ing (one hour delay, get on plane, taxi from gate, sit on tarmac, return to gate, need to fix some mechanical issue,  some people want to get off because they've already missed their Chicago connections, then everyone told to get off, then several new estimated departure times, then four hours from original flight time, the flight is cancelled) we were quickly put on a 5am flight to Seattle with a tight connection to a Chicago flight, which we made.  And later we got an email with a $200 credit for each of us on future Alaska Airlines flights.  For people who were soured by Alaska Airlines because of these delays, it's a bittersweet reward.  But for people dependent on Alaska Airlines like we are, it's a decent apology gift.  

But our friends were patient on their end and got us to a great Thai restaurant in Oak Park for dinner and home to crash.  

We shared sticky rice and mango for dessert.

Thursday they took us to Hidden Lake.  It's in DuPage County and abuts the Arboretum.  

They were trying to get us somewhere that got us into woods without too many urban distractions.  

And they did a pretty good job.  The trees are so different from Anchorage trees.  No spruce, no birch, no cottonwood.  Not sure what they all were, but it felt exotic to this Alaskan.  It seemed there were some maples.  Probably in the arboretum there would have been labels, but we just wanted to walk around and enjoy.  A few trees are just beginning to turn, but barely.  Temps in the low 70s.  And lots of birds, but for the most part not easy to catch with the camera.  I think the one below is a flicker, but I'm not completely sure.  

Lots of late flowers like this clover.

But there is a villain in this story.  

These are the same white flowers, but they weren't quite in focus so I played with Curves to get this version.  

And then we lucked out on dinner.  We'd passed a sign for Reza's on the way.  Sounded like a Middle Eastern place.  Even better, it turned out to be Persian and we had a delicious dinner with an accommodating waiter, and lots to take home for lunch today.  This one was a chicken kabob.  

Trust, Draft 4, And Tulips

 Ida Partenza has been hired by Andrew Bevel in Hernan Diaz' Trust to write down his autobiography as he dictates.  But she's also supposed to put it in order, clean it up, and embellish where necessary.  At their second session, when she gives Bevel what she's written, he's not satisfied.  

"You do take faithful notes.  The facts are, in essence, there.  A few things ought to be emended.  We'll get to that.  The problem is that this doesn't reflect me."

She's not sure what to do.  She decides to read autobiographies of some great men to see what they 'sound' like. 

"If Bevel's own voice, transcribed without embellishment or modification, was not enough, I would make a new one for him out of all those other voices. . . Because thanks to my wild and uncompromisingly disorganized approach, the books started to merge into one another.  What was individual about each man - Carnegie's self serving sanctimoniousness, Grant's essential decency, Ford's matter-of-fact pragmatism, Coolidge's rhetorical thrift and so on - yielded what I thought at the time, they all had in common:  they all believed, without any sort of doubt that they deserved to be heard, that their words ought to be heard, that the narratives of their faultless lives must be heard.  They all had the same unwavering certainty my father had.  And I understood this was the certainty that Bevel wants on the page."

We probably have a few too many politicians like this.  

My book club's next book

The discussion of how to organize the anecdotes Bevel's was telling her also reminded me of the chapter I'd read yesterday in John McPhee's Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process where he discusses the difficulties he's had starting out on long articles about individuals.   

"To prepare a profile of an individual, the reporting endeavor looks something like this:

 

           o

   o               o 

o         x          o

   o               o

           o

 

"The x is the person you are principally going to talk to, spend tie with, observe, and write about.  The o's  represent peripheral interviews with people who can shed light on the life and career of x - her friends, or his mother, old teachers, teammates, colleagues, employees, enemies, anybody at all, the more the better.  Cumulatively, the o's provide triangulation - a way of checking facts one against another, and of eliminating apocrypha." 

I miss not writing more posts like this.  We've had three young sisters staying with us this week.  They grew up in Alaska and moved out of state about five years ago and this has been their first trip back.  What fun we've had.  

I'm almost up to 200 km for this summer's biking.  And enjoying all the green stuff that's pushing out of the earth.  

By the way, Trust, is one of two fiction Pulitzer Prize winners this year.  The other one, Barbara Kingsolver's Deadly Copperfield is the book club's August pick.  

Random Shots San Francisco

 

Prickly pear foot.

Went to the Castro to buy a friend a rainbow flag.

Someone chalked a memorial to their grandfather on the garage door.

One architectural feature I began to notice I've finally got a name for - quoins.  Lots of the San Francisco buildings have them.  They seem to be both structural and decorative.  In the picture they are the lighter color pieces on the corners.  

I first started to notice them (first you see something, but don't consciously register them and then you do) on a bright blue house I put up in a previous post.  I don't usually post the same picture twice, but I think it's appropriate here.  

On this house, because of the starkly contrasting colors, they really stand out.  And while some go around the corners, others seem mainly decorative.  

Look closely for the hummingbird.

Waiting for the bus.

Cymbidium seem to do alright in San Francisco.  From Orchidweb:

"While these orchids can be cultured successfully indoors, Cymbidium benefit tremendously from growing outdoors between May to early October. In late summer and early fall, night temperatures that fall below 58°F (15°F) initiate the development of flower spikes. Keep in mind, these are not frost-tolerant plants, and should not be exposed to temperatures below 35°F (2°C)"

Other Avenues is a worker owned coop grocery in San Francisco with a small woke book section.  

I ended up buying two bars of soap which caused TSA to pull my roller bag aside and look for the suspicious blocks.  

I'm pretty sure this is an aeonium arboreum.  These plants are very popular in San Francisco.  

Stepping Back In Time

 Flying from Anchorage to Seattle in October is like stepping back in time.  The flowers are still blooming profusely and it's light at 7am.

We're here helping out with child care and food prep and other such chores while my son-in-law is out of town for work, so my daughter can concentrate on her own work.

The last two days, J managed to get out of bed early enough to walk our granddaughter to school.  Today she got to sleep in while I was up at 6:45am.  

Once getting out of bed is accomplished, it is pure pleasure to walk with Z to school.  

Only a few late and hardy bloomers were still smiling in Anchorage when we left, that's not the case down here.  (We hear it snowed after we left.)  While I'm pretty sure the ones above are hydrangea, I'm not sure what the ones below are.  But their dainty beauty helps lift my heart so beset with human failures.  

My granddaughter took the picture below.  Since it's her shot, I didn't crop it, and she's in school now so she's not here to make it look the way she wants.  Perhaps she'll want to make an adjustment later.  

Too Much To Think About, So Relax A Bit With Nature

 

The liatris is blooming as it usually does this time of the summer.

I haven't dabbled in dahlias for a long time.  This one plant zoomed up about five feet with a stem at least an inch of diameter.  All the others are between one and two feet high with no blossoms.  I have no clue why.  I would assume it has to do with the soil, but this one is in a pot with two others that have done nothing much.  

And, with the rain that we've been having this August, the mushrooms are popping up everywhere.

Even on gray, rainy days the bike trails (this one through UAA) are beautiful and refreshing.  Though on this stretch it would be nice if the huge bulges were smoothed out.  Someone has marked them with blue paint, but four to six inch humps at the bottom of a hill are more excitement than I need.  

Am I stretching the nature theme here?  The eggs we buy at the market are hardly natural.  The peaches may be a bit more so. Probably not.  The bananas? Don't really know.  But the raspberries are from the back yard and get nothing but compost and water.  

Jacob asked in the comments in the last post about whether the US was headed for another civil war.  I'm thinking about that.  We probably need to consider the concept of civil war beyond the US Civil War.  At this point I doubt we'll have a civil war in the last US Civil War style.  The split among people is not nearly as regional, and from what I can tell, the craziness has been stoked a lot by Russian compromised politicians and social media bots that whip up extremist fervor.  More like, if democracy is defeated, it will come from the long term Conservative campaigns (Kochs, Federalist Society, wealthy) to capture the courts and local and state governments in order to gerrymander elections to keep Republicans in control in states, and to have enough influence on redistricting to skew Congressional elections to the right.  The Senate, because every state has two Senators, is already skewed to the right.

"In the incoming Senate, Democratic senators will represent at least 20,314,962 more people than their Republican counterparts — and that’s if we assume that Republicans win both runoff elections in Georgia. If the two Georgia seats go to the Democrats, the Senate will be split 50-50, but the Democratic half will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half."

That's from a November 2020 Vox article. 

Everyone Needs A Break - Peonies Are Starting To Bloom At The Alaska Botanical Garden

The early peonies are blooming - some finishing.  Others are still at the bud stage.  And there are two other flowers included in the mix.   

That's all.