The Anchorage Bike Trails Restore Me

 Writing on politics these days can get one down.  But riding on Anchorage bike trails can restore one's sense of well  being.  Here are some pictures from the last couple of weeks.  

Campbell Creek reflecting the afternoon sun. 

 

A grebe in Westchester Lagoon

A moose off in the distance.  We're about 1/4 mile from a major road in Anchorage.  But on the bike trail, at times like this I feel like I'm in the middle of the wilderness

New goslings huddle at AM<C campus ( in the lower right.}

The path through the University of Alaska Anchorage

Headed home near Valley of the Moon park about 10 pm.  

For most people dandelions are weeds, but close up, they are amazing.  

On the Campbell Creek trail just west of the Seward Highway.  This is the kind of traffic blockage I don't mind.  

This spot at Goose Lake is always changing and most always spectacular.  

Fresh Greens In Anchorage

 An acquaintance told me about Anchorage Greens.  It's sort of near the Campbell Creek south bike trail, so on my way back, after the moose, and after the Taku Lake, I took the exit to Taku Elementary and on to Old Seward.

Getting across Old Seward on the bike took a while.  It's between Old and New Seward.  This unique food store is on 1207 E. 73rd (but it doesn't go through to Old Seward, so you have to take 72nd.)

(The sun made a few brief appearances yesterday.  You can see the bit of blue sky.  Windy too.)

Inside is a green paradise.  

Here's the hydroponic growing room

And here's Aiden, who also grows mushrooms.  

The link to their site gives more info.

What's Keeping Me From Blogging?

So much . . .

Weekly trips to pick up our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) [It's a USDA website so go quick before the regime either takes it down because it's too 'woke' or it crashes from neglect or incompetence.]

They use salt - some Alaska salt - and mix it with things for use in cooking, eating, and making your house smell better, like in the simmer pots.  

I've highlighted soap artist (seriously, what she does is art!)  Kit before.  She showed me a prototype of a soap she's working on that will have a Rorschach test on it.  I asked if there are psychiatrist interpretations included.  Those, she assured me, would cost a lot more.  Learn more at MirthAlaska.com. 

There was a long line at the WIC table.  This market is in the lowest income area of Anchorage and the Grow North Farm here - sponsored by RAIS (Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service), a part of Catholic Social Services - is an urban farm worked by refugees.  

It was gray and threatening, but not raining all that day, but it finally came down on the ride home.  It was so light it really only got my clothes slightly damp.  And my odometer with drops.

I've gone past my 1600 km goal for the summer - one reason I guess I haven't blogged as much.  All that biking along Anchorage's green bike paths has been good for my physical and mental health during this disastrous time in US history.  

The picture below was on an earlier ride on the Campbell Creek south trail.  And I'm delaying today's ride to get this post up.

The mushroom isn't connected to anything else in this post, but of course mushrooms and fungus in general are connected to everything underground.  You can't really tell but this one was five or six inches across.  Growing right next to the compost pile.  

  
                                                                      

Again, a somewhat random picture here.  Walking down the steps after a routine doctor visit at Providence, I was greeted with the lovely sounds of live piano music.  The acoustics in the huge atrium entrance are great and the notes pulled me over to listen to the end and thank the musician.

Our power, phone/internet went out during the windstorm a week ago Friday.  This downed cottonwood was the culprit.  Chugach Electric had the power back on the next morning when we woke up.  Alaska Communications took until Tuesday or Wednesday to come out and then they didn't have the equipment to fix it right, so while the phone line and internet are back on, the wire is lying on the ground and about two feet off the ground in some places I have to walk.  In what world is that acceptable?  Alaska Communications is so terrible!  The techs I have to call now and then and those who come out to the house are generally very good.  It's just the management that has promised me fiber every summer since 2023 and not delivered that pisses me off.  And the website that has the circle of death spinning hopelessly when I try to pay online, and then they charge me a %25 late fee because I couldn't pay online.  With no grace period.  None.  Visa emails me three days before to remind me to pay my bill.  ACS emails three days after it's due to say, "We screwed you again."  I'm ready to cut that cord forever.  

Got that off my chest.  

Our neighbor did hook us up to his power with a series of extension cords to power the refrigerator since we didn't know how long it was going to take to get the power back.  We decided to go to Queen of Sheba for dinner that night.  Here's David, the owner and chef, chatting with us after our meal.  

Ethiopian food is truly special and delicious.  Anchorage folks, go eat there and keep them in business.  The prices are reasonable for this day and age.  

It's between Northern Lights and Benson - on Dawson.  

So, probably this should have been three or four blog post spread over the week.  

But I'm not done.  I've been reading several books at once, but I'll just highlight Caraval.  This was a recommendation from my 12 year old granddaughter.  When I told her I was number 25 on the waiting list at Loussac Library, she said, "I told you that you'll never get it."

But I got an email saying it was mine to pick up.  I understand why people read it.  Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger of sorts.  And I think the author has synesthesia, because every feeling is associated with a color, some vibrating.  Lots more descriptions of odors than you normally see too.  And I don't think Nancy Drew ever had chills from the touch of a young man's bare chest leaning against her. 

I'd say this teen fiction is the gateway drug to adult romance fiction.  

Moving along - I'm still overwhelmed with the barrage of outrageous statements and actions spewing from the White House.  Here are a few images that I've saved as I try to find new ways to ask my junior US Senator how long he thinks he can wade in this filth before he is sucked under completely.  He gleefully points at what he sees as 'wins' for Alaska, while the president tramples the constitution by kidnapping people off the streets, invading US cities with our military, ignoring judge's orders, bombing boaters in international waters, gerrymandering Texas to squeeze out Democratic house seats, and on and on and on.  I didn't even mention Epstein.  And Dan Sullivan turns a blind eye to all of that in exchange for some oil drilling permits.  

My previous post was on the normalization of the word normalization.  Nothing could illustrate that point better than this post by His Travesty.   

What previous president could have done something like this and not been impeached?  Some say it's just 'a humorous bit' but I did a paper on government humor once.  What I learned was that government humor that is self deprecating is fine, but government humor that punches down is NOT fine.  

And then his Vice Travesty defends another military operation off the coast of Venezuela:

Has anyone seen any evidence that these are cartel members (just like we haven't seen any evidence that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of Tren de Aragua gang)?

I copied this one for Labor Day.  We're back to the time when business owners could call on the government to bring in troops to break up labor unions.  And when I say 'break up' I mean that literally.  But they stood in solidarity until they won their rights which have benefited most of us.  (You know, 40 day weeks, paid overtime, health benefits, the right to grieve bad treatment, etc.)  We have to be as brave and persistent now to prevent what's happening today.  

I don't believe ignorance is greater now than it was.  But the propaganda forces of the fascists have powerfully taken advantage of that ignorance, and the latent fears of white America.  They've taken all the damage to the working classes done by exporting jobs and increasing the income gap and blamed it on Black people and immigrants.  

 I remember when the first polio vaccines became available and we got poked at school.  My small pox vaccine scar no longer really shows, but I was inoculated.  

Public health programs have saved more lives than medical treatment of individuals.   As I look for good links to explain the importance of public health to society, I see that some of the most important public health initiatives - clean water and sewage systems - are so taken for granted that they aren't even mentioned.  But we haven't always had clean water and sewage systems.  And parts of the world still don't have them.  

President Nixon famously had an enemies list.  But no president has ever, so blatantly used the powers of the federal government to go after his perceived enemies.  The president is publicly telling the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute people who oppose him.  And as a blogger, I found this cartoon a bit close to home.  

I tell myself I'm just a tiny voice out in the wilderness and they have much bigger targets than me.  But I also notice that Google says my recent posts have way more hits that I usually get.  Stat Counter has always shown far fewer hits than Google, but they also track individual visitors.  I can't tell if I really have more hits or whether there are more bots.  In times past when there were lots more hits, it looked like someone scraping my blog for content, and more recently for AI.  But when that happens you can see a single user going to thirty or more different pages per day.  So many hits on a single page is different.  

In any case, I want people to stay strong and be engaged in fighting this regime to preserve our democracy (not to mention our health and economy and general well being.)  Do what you can.  And take breaks to laugh, enjoy nature, good friends.   Find like minded people.  And know your rights.  

And a teaser for a post I hope to put up this week.  

From Animalspot.net

ICE-Free Refugee Day Celebration (And More)

RAIS (Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services) is among the groups that help folks under the umbrella of Catholic Social Services in Anchorage,  (I'd also say I've never seen a trace of proselytizing  in any of the RAIS activities.)

Yesterday, Thursday, June 26, was the first day of their summer CSA program pick up.  That's Community Supported Agriculture - a program where consumers pay farmers upfront and then pick up fresh vegetables every week.  In Alaska, that is necessarily limited to summer.  

I first learned and blogged the term CSA in March 2009 when I was a volunteer with an NGO (non-governmental organization, what we call non-profit) in Chiangmai, Thailand.  Here's that post which talks about CSAs in general and what was happening in Chiangmai specifically.  

Because it was the first day of Grow North Farm's 2025 CSA distribution there was also a celebration for World Refugee day. with music, dancing, art activities, and food from around the world. (That sentence was more or less lifted and edited from the email I got from RAIS.

For the rest of the summer, in addition to the subscribers picking up their veggies, there will be booths where other refugee farmers will be selling their crops.  Here's a blog post from 2022 showing you the variety of things for sale. It's always colorful and people are often wearing the clothing they would wear in their original countries.  There are also people selling baked goods.  The one that captured me last summer - the Egyptian Kitchen - won't be here this summer.  They are in Egypt until fall.  Lots of folks will miss their incredible home made cookies.  

Yesterday, I only saw a couple of tents where people were selling veggies and preserved food.  Most of the booths were services available in Anchorage.  The library was there - my mind's going blank - and there were a number of groups with various arts and crafts activities for kids.  

I spent more time at the Choosing Our Roots table, because it was a group I knew nothing about.  This is Adam in the photo.  He's head of the Board of Directors.  Later, the Executive Director Chami joined us.  Basically this groups helps queer youth find housing and get their feet on the ground.  They work with various groups including Alaska Housing, Alaska Children's Trust, Covenant House, and RAIS.

'Youth' means about 15 to 25.  Chami said she herself had been homeless with a baby and worked herself out of that situation and is now a social worker (I'm pretty sure that's what she said) and a licensed therapist (I'm sure she said that).  So she can counsel these youth with first hand experience of what they are going through.  

This was a very colorful (in the literal sense of that word) event and a photographer's buffet.  Except it wasn't.  Many of the people, for cultural reasons, do not want to be photographed.  

And as the title hints, two different people I mentioned this event to responded, "So ICE will be there?"

So no, I don't want to give ICE any assistance in identifying potential targets.  

I took only a few pictures.  Of course I should have taken pictures of the vegetables, but I wasn't thinking.  We got, as our CSA email listed:  

• Radish
• Spinach
• Sorrel
• Bok Choi
• Either Chamsur or Arugula

Don't know what Chamsur is?  Well, the RAIS email tells us not only what it is, but also how to use it.

"Chamsur is the Nepalese word for Garden Cress - a green which is popular in mountainous regions of Nepal and Afghanistan. Nepalese farmers brought seeds to Fresh International Gardens to experiment with growing Chamsur in Alaska - it proved to be well suited to Anchorage and has grown at the farm every year since! 

Include garden cress in any soup, salad, or sandwich for a tangy flavor. The taste is very similar to that of arugula, so it works great in any wraps, sandwiches, or salads! Add this Green Salad with Garden Cress to your list of tasty summer salads! Or use both your spinach and chamsur in this Chamsur Palungo recipe."

Don't know what to do with sorrel?  Another hint from the email:

"Sorrel is another tangy green, bright and lemony and makes a lovely Ukrainian Sorrel Soup - perfect for a rainy summer day."

I did take a few pictures and I've smudged out the faces of kids and people who might not want ICE to know they were there.  

And if ICE was there, they were unmasked and unarmed and just chilling with everyone else.  Here are a couple of pictures.  

I'm trying folks.  I've got pieces of about five posts that haven't been posted.  So many other things are luring me from the blog.  

I'm trying to decide if I really want to duplicate last summer's 1000 miles (1600+ kilometers) of biking.  I'm at 740k so far.  (That's slightly ahead of last summer.  But there were bike-able days in March this year, and last year I was biking hard the second half of the summer.)

I'm doing Duolingo Turkish everyday.  Sometimes I feel like it's hopeless because it's focused on everything but my speaking.  And while I'm gathering vocabulary and a loose understanding of the grammar (and all the fascinating but maddening suffixes which change tense, change who is acting, indicate coming and going, and many other conditions), I don't think I can actually use it to make oral conversation.  Speaking uses other muscles and parts of the brain than reading, writing, and even listening.  But Turkey is the last place on my list of places I promised myself I'd go to another time.  I passed it up while I was a student in Germany and decided more time in Greece for then, and Istanbul later.  Later is going to be never if I don't do it soon.  

And now I'm taking letters every Monday afternoon to my two Senators and my member of Congress.  I'm trying to find different ways to try to break through to them.  But I do believe that numbers matter to legislators, so I encourage others in Anchorage to join the group.  Just go to their offices (510 L Street for the Senators, 6th and 7th floors, and half a block away (1016 W Sixth Ave Suite #406) between 4pm and 5pm on Mondays.  There's no formal gathering, just people coming and going.  And if you miss a week or two, not a problem.  But I am getting to know the staff.  Begich has a second office in Fairbanks.  And Murkowski and Sullivan offices in Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, Matsu, Soldotna.  So you folks can also make weekly drop-offs.  

Biking gives me a chance to see what's new and changing in Anchorage, so I have pics on some of those things to put up.  I did post about the closing of Lake Otis at 42nd.  Lake Otis is back working, but work on 42nd continues.

There's somebody working on an ordinance to change local Anchorage elections to ranked choice voting (the State has that, though Republicans are trying again to do away with it) and I'm trying to get more info on who is doing this and how it's going.  I know an Assembly committee had it on their agenda this week.  This would be a great improvement.  

Frustration with Democratic establishment and their problems with the bright young, articulate, members of their party, culminating, most recently, with the Islamaphobic responses to Mamdani's apparent primary win in New York.  For example. Christopher Bouzy, the creator of Twitter alternative Spoutible, writes, "Democratic Leadership Told Rep. Jasmine Crockett She's Too Black and Too Loud."

Gardening and regularly visiting the Alaska Botanical Garden as part of one of my bike routes.  

Don't despair.  Find beauty every day.  Get outside and move your body.  (The biking and gardening) Find good folks to be around.  Find ways to resist.  

There are organizations offering lists of ways to fight back daily.  Taking action is the best antidote for hopelessness.  Here are two that send me regular (not daily) emails with list of ways I can resist:

Peoples Action Institute  

The Digital Drumbeat

Michael O'Calahan, Anchorage Man Way Ahead of His Time, Leaves Us

First, thanks to Barbara Brown, another Anchorage resident who's moved to Portland, for alerting me to this story.  

I'm not going to write much here.  You can check the links for details.  

O'Calahan's causes - helping the homeless, giving away fish and other foods, promoting bike riding - all seem to be attempts to get people to become aware of the waste and callousness of our ruthless consumerism.  Ride a bike, help the poor, you don't need to be rich to be happy.  

Here's a 2020 ADN article about O'Calahan and his contributions to our city.

Here's a the announcement from Oregon Public Radio Barbara sent me from 

"2024 Portland mayoral candidate killed in MAX train crash

Eighty-one-year-old Michael O’Callaghan (pictured), who ran for Portland mayor last year, died Wednesday after being struck by a TriMet MAX light rail train while riding a bicycle in Southeast Portland. Investigators said O’Callaghan was traveling northbound on Southeast 8th Avenue from Southeast Division Street Wednesday afternoon when he encountered lowered railroad safety arms and traffic. He was a sixth-generation Otregonian and a self-taught lawyer who ran on improving Portland’s homelessness, safety and housing issues. (OPB staff)"  There's more here.  

He showed us you could live an impactful life off the financial treadmill.  He had spiritual wealth, and could see things most of us can't see.  Without him, there is less sparkle in the world.

Rewind - Grandkids Were In Town

 I've got six post started from the press club.  My SF grandkids and their parents were here last week.  The world social, political, legal, and economic foundations are being multiple times daily by the current US president.  

With the press club posts, I took notes here (on Blogspot), but it didn't seem right to just post notes, yet there were so many panels that I didn't really have time to do the panelists or my readers right, so they are just dangling there as 'drafts.'  

While most Anchorage bowl snow was gone when the grandkids arrived, we did find some puddles sealed in sheets of ice, which they had a great time breaking and then holding large pieces.  They also liked bouncing sticks off of a still mostly frozen Goose Lake on bike ride to Goose Lake. Then on along 

Northern Lights, the back of APU, and home.  I knew my grandson would be fine - because he and I did a long bike ride in SF last year.  But my granddaughter was also a champ.  I'd warned them there might be some snow still on the trail, but by it was all gone, which disappointed my grandson.  But he found dirt path that went off into the woods and still had some snow.  And off he went.  (He's 10 and she's 8.)

We also made it to the bead shop in the Golden Donut mall at Lake Otis and Tutor.  There are all kinds of beads and other string able objects like porcupine quills.

At the west end of the mall is the Stars of Alaska Rock Shop.  I'd put it on the list of places to take visitors to Anchorage.  

It's a crazy crowded shop full of, rocks, of course, but also fossils, and amazing things.  

How about a mosasaurus skull.  Actually, I don't think that was for sale.

Owner Martin Warfield was unpacking a new shipment of Amonites - 'an extinct cephalopod mollusk' - that lived 280 million years ago.

Here's a closer look at a half of one.  

  Another big hit was Bosco's, Anchorage's really good comic, games, sports cards, etc. shop.  As was Title Wave used book store.  

And Wild Scoops Ice Cream shop.  

  

And a hike at McHugh Creek.

We saw the eagle on our hike.  

So that's some of what's been going on.  Other silly problems, like not having a port in my newish (late last summer) MacBook Air for my SD card from my telephoto lens.  Which I corrected today.  But that's why I never got up a picture of the April 5 Anchorage demonstration against the Trump administration.  But now that I have the card reader, I may put some up.  It was crowded.  

And I'm still working with my 3rd grader every day as a volunteer at my local elementary school.  He's doing well.  And I've got 200 km on my bike since we got back in March.  So I'm keeping busy.  

1400 Cloudy Kilometers And A Very Short Pencil

Friday I passed the 1400 kilometer mark on my bike since April. According to Google that's 869.9197 miles.  That's more than I did last summer or the summer before.  And it's only early September.  200 more kilometers shouldn't be an issue.  1600 would be, well I was thinking 1000 miles, but since I had the conversion table up, I checked.  It's only 994.2 miles.  Google says I need to go 1609 km to get to 1000 miles.  But that's doable too.  

While that may seem like a lot (I hope it does), in perspective it's not that much for a whole summer.  Kristen Faulkner, of Homer, Alaska, won the Olympic road bike race. 

She rode 158 km (98 miles) in "a fraction under four hours."  That's more than a tenth of my summer production in four hours!  Even accounting for the fact that getting to and from the bike trail includes some stop signs and traffic lights, and the bike trail requires some slowing down for walkers, dogs, and occasionally moose, and that she's to a bike much more suited to going fast . . . well you get the idea.  My 1400 km is good exercise, but nothing sensational.  

I did see an obituary today for a man older than I am.  He died after an ebike accident on the Bird to Gird route.  Mine is not an ebike. 

You can watch Faulkner below.  [It seems you have to click the link and watch it on YouTube, not here.]

In recent weeks there have been lots of cloudy, even rainy, days.  But most days had times when biking was good and the sun even made appearances.  

I've mentioned in an earlier post that I'm back in the third grade - as a volunteer.  I don't want to say much about that, because the privacy of the kids is a paramount concern.  I do want to say that working with these kids is pure joy.  And given the education cuts in the State budget, the kids and their teachers need all the help they can get.  

I'd call out to any retired teachers to volunteer.  But also to people who weren't teachers, but also just people who are good with kids.  I contacted the school first and they told me to fill out a volunteer form on the Anchorage School District website.  Figure out what skills you have to offer.  Just being a caring person. who's willing to follow the lead of the classroom teacher, is all you need.  Sometimes I'm walking around and just watching kids doing their work and helping out if they have trouble.  Sometimes I've been given a group of kids and listen as they read from their reading lesson book.  Sometimes I spend more time with one kid who needs extra attention.  You can work out how much time to spend - from an hour a week on up - with your local school.  

I imagine that there are people who would cause the teacher more grief than having no one helping.  But most people can do this.  I guess my superpower here is that I remember being a kid - especially things I got in trouble for, or would have if I'd been caught.  I remember what I was thinking.  Like during nap time in pre-school when I couldn't sleep.  There was a finger-sized hole in the paint on the wall next to my cot.  This was thick greenish (in my memory anyway) that bulged a bit from the wall.  By the time nap time was over, the hole was much, much bigger and Aunty Helen (the pre-school owner) was not happy with me.  But it wasn't malicious.  It was just curiosity.  So when kids are curious, I'm much more understanding than Aunty Helen was. (Actually, she and I were generally good friends.)

So while I don't want to say too much specific, I can show you this picture of one kid's pencil.  While I'd like to say it's a sign of thrift, I think it's more about the kids' general fascination with pencil sharpeners, both manual and electric.