Wasps, Jays, Aurora, Friends, Alaska's Future

One downside to the warmer summer we've experienced, is the increased number of wasps.  To the point where we've had to take our outdoor dinner on the deck inside. 




These two appear to be yellow jackets, though earlier we had less articulated bugs.

I talked to an exterminator who wanted to make sure they weren't honey bees, in which case we should contact a bee keeper, since honey bee populations are crashing around the world.  But these aren't.  And wasps eat insect pests, though apparently yellow jackets eat dead insects.  The Idaho Extension Service has a very thorough description of yellow jackets, wasps, and hornets in Idaho.

In this case, I put out some pieces of smoked salmon which got them still enough to shoot, but even so, I'm not pleased with the shots.

Just recently, we've discovered that we aren't the only ones in town with more and peskier wasps in their backyards.  And as the climate changes continue, I suspect we'll be getting a lot more insects who weren't comfortable here when the weather was colder.





We also have a Steller Jay who's been visiting the deck.  He's been around for a while, but when we got back from Portland, he was downright aggressive.  When he saw me in the kitchen, he flew up against the kitchen window.  It turned out our house sitter had fed him.  While it's nice to see birds close up, I'm not a bird feeder.  If they can't survive here naturally - particularly over the winter - then they should go south rather than get dependent on people feeding them.  Though I know I'm in a minority on this point.

And Saturday night, I finally looked at Twitter after a couple of weeks of not having time to get around to it.  AuroraNotify was reporting sun activity and you could watch reports of great aurora activity moving west around the world - in the north and the south.  It was a bit after midnight and I went out onto the deck.

WOW!  I was blown away by these bright thrusts of light shooting down at me in the small window of open space to the sky from out deck.  But it quickly evaporated and by the time I got a camera there was nothing that spectacular left.  But there was plenty of faint to moderate green activity across the sky.  I was able to get quick google help when I wanted to take pictures of a lunar eclipse, but similar help for capturing auroras - while there - hasn't been as helpful.  This picture is from my little Canon Powershot.  You can barely see the green glow. 

Click for better version of aurora

We've had a bit of time to catch up with friends, but we're headed south again.  We bought tickets for trips to visit my mom while there were lower than normal fares.  Even though my mom passed away in July, there's still a lot of work to do cleaning up.  We're also combining the trips to see grandkids.  (And their parents too, of course.)

Unfortunately that means I'll miss this talk at ISER.    But I'll be able to go to the public talk Sept. 19. 

Moving Our Conversation Forward:

Alaska’s Fiscal and Economic Future

Gunnar Knapp

Director and Professor of Economics, ISER
and
Cliff Groh
Chair, Alaska Common Ground

Alaska’s state government has operated mainly on oil revenues since the 1980s. But now lower oil prices and falling oil production have hit Alaska hard, leaving the state government with a $3 billion hole in its annual budget. And Alaska’s economy will also face big challenges, because it relies so much on state spending.

ISER and Alaska Common Ground are sponsoring a free public forum on Alaska’s fiscal and economic future on September 19 (information about the forum). But in advance of that forum, Gunnar Knapp, ISER’s director, and Cliff Groh, the chair of Alaska Common Ground, will talk at ISER, previewing some of the material they plan to present. They will encourage those at the talk to ask questions and offer suggestions for improvement.

Please join us—and remember that ISER is now at 1901 Bragaw Street, between Northern Lights and DeBarr Road. Parking is still free. Call 786-7710 if you need directions. 

When: Thursday, August 27, 12 to 1

Where: ISER Conference Room
Third Floor, 1901 Bragaw Street, Suite 301

Theodore Bikel Is Gone

When I got to Germany in 1964 for a year at the University of Göttingen, I had a number of record albums, including one with Guela Gill and Theodore Bikel.  During that year I became good friends with a married doctoral student and his wife who lived in the student housing I was assigned to.  When Jurgen heard the Bikel album he went crazy.  He loved it and we played it over and over again.  And, of course, I left the album with them when i went back home.

Years later when we visited Jurgen and Inge, Jurgen had gotten every album Bikel had ever put out and could sing all the songs - particularly those in Yiddish.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I learn about Bikel's death today.  But like my mom, he was in his 90s and has had a good life. 

Here's the only Youtube I could find of a song from my old album.  It's been forever since I heard this.  It's in Spanish, not Yiddish.



[sorry, this is another reposting because Feedburner didn't pick the original up]

Jonathan's Lemon Tree

We drove out to San Bernadino the other day to visit former Alaskans Jonathan and Mary Anderson.  Jonathan's now chair of the public administration department at Cal State San Bernadino.

Here's Jonathan picking us some lemons from his very loaded lemon tree.  Their house is on land that long ago was a lemon grove and the neighborhood has lots of citrus trees.

This is their orange tree.  And no, that isn't snow.  It's white rocks.  But they had had a freeze the night before, and Jonathan thought we needed to go for a drive up to the mountains - a quick half hour up to about 4500 feet above sea level.

Southern California isn't always clear.  Sometimes it's just moisture from the ocean and other times it's smog.  It seemed to be a combination of both.

He found us some snow.

There wasn't much to see in the arboretum at this time.

Headed back home.

Happy Birthday To Ropi, And Alex

And everyone else who shares a July 24 birthday.

This image comes originally from a wonderful painting by Andrew Glass.

"An extra huzzah to Penny Simon for her friendship and expertise at getting me to do things I don't want to do"

This gem of a thank you comes on the sixth page of Erik Larson's Sources and Acknowledgments in Garden of the Wild Beasts which I finally finished this morning.

I don't know about others, but I sure could use someone like Penny to get me to do the things I don't want to do. 

It's a burden people shouldn't have to bear alone.  My wife does this sometimes, but someone other than a spouse, who doesn't have so many other responsibilities, would be helpful. 

May everyone have such a friend.  

(Just out of curiosity, I googled Penny Simon.  She's Larson's publicist at Random House.)

Alaskan Log Dream Home

When we first got to Anchorage 35 years ago, log homes were the hot item.  Genuine Alaskan.   They had character and were the image of real Alaska.

 We have good friends who live in a beautiful log home he built long ago on the hillside.  There are a couple of acres of land.  These folks owned a commercial greenhouse for a while and the grounds are beautiful.  They were having moose problems - eating some of their special trees and plants - so they built an eight foot fence around the whole property!

Their kids moved south and grandma wants to spend more time near the grandchildren.  So they've put the house on the market.

You'd think a place like this would be snapped up, but it hasn't sold.

part of yard from garaage

My theory is this:  This is a unique house.  It's not the typical cookie cutter home with  granite counters in a neighborhood full similar homes right next door.  Instead it's a one of a kind home on a secluded piece of Alaska heaven right in town.

Well, it's about ten miles out of downtown.  And people might perceive it as way out of town.  But I biked there last week (mostly uphill from near the University) in 40 minutes on Lake Otis.  Driving back a couple of weeks before took 12 minutes (I was timing it.)  So it's not really that far out.

Kitchen behind books

Back to my theory.  It's a unique and wonderful house, but not for everyone.  It's priced higher than your average Anchorage home (they lowered it to somewhat over $500,000) and probably people looking at that price range want something more luxurious.  And younger people looking for a house like this might be looking in a lower price range.


But somewhere out there is someone for whom this is the perfect home.  Someone who can afford it and can appreciate and take care of it.  But that family just doesn't know it's there.  Maybe they aren't actively looking.

It's also a lot of land with beautiful flower beds and a lot of lawn.  What I really like is that while gardens are spectacular, they don't have that  artificial look that look like someone worked hard to copy some garden magazine look.  Rather it's a more an artist's love that created flower beds and lawn that blend easily into the natural Alaskan birch habitat.  It takes work to keep things up.  So it will take a family willing to do the work or able to hire someone to help out.  I know the present owners, who put a lot of love into this property, would be willing consultants to the folks that move in.

Back of the house

Garage

Along with the house comes the two car garage,













and another building that's a studio/office on its own  (no bathroom or running water in there.)

To the left is the studio/office.  The main house is on the right.  In the middle, in the distance, is another small log cabin out in the yard. 

I was standing above the garage when I took this shot.  It was about 9:00pm at the end of July.

Just off the living room

This is one of many flower beds with hardy perennials.

This rock wall is between the house and the large circular driveway that goes around the studio/office and to the remote control gate.

 

I'm not in the real estate business, and I don't put ads up here.  I think of this more as a public service - a way to help connect the right family to a piece of Anchorage that really should be preserved. 

Some of these pictures are mine.  The better shots, mostly ones with black borders (and both interiors), were taken by Dave M. Davis Photography for a realtor.

If anyone is interested, you can email me here and I'll pass it on.
[UPDATE October 11, 2014:  As of the end of September, this house has a new owner.]

Malaria - Clever Animation Video Particularly For Tomás

My friend Tomás is a Spanish artist who does great work in various media including cartoons and video.  I think he'll really like this video. 

But so should the rest of you.  This is very clever and original.  I'm not even sure how to describe it. 



Thanks to Five Feet Long and Luminous where I ran across it.

Fluffy White Cat

Xiongxiong is our friends' senior catizen. A Chinese immigrant to the US.

Lost Tooth

I was visiting friends on the way home from getting some errands done the other day when the youngest daughter suddenly said she lost a tooth. 

It's been a while since I was around when a tooth was lost.  But I'd been thinking about this milestone, because just a couple days before, while cleaning the garage - yes, that's still happening - I came across our kids' tooth fairy pillow case.  My wife says she thinks that Auntie Esther made it.   The tooth pocket  is at that little rectangle at the bottom with Bambi on it. 

June Ends, July Begins - Cottonwood, Construction, Contentment

 A breeze blew the cottonwood seeds from our big tree in the afternoon.  Fortunately, we don't have cottonwood allergies.  (For a lot more on cottonwood, here's an old post on this untapped Alaska resource.)

Later we went got onto the Seward Highway at Tudor.  The highway is being widened and the four bridges over Campbell Creek are going to be raised and a real bike trail constructed under the roads (including the frontage roads on each side.)
This is the on-ramp merging into the highway.

We had dinner with old friends who moved to New Zealand but are back in town visiting.  They are staying above Potter Marsh and the time flew as we talked about many things.  It was after midnight as we went home and I stopped for this view of Turnagain Arm, Potter Marsh, and Mt. Susitna.

Portland Wedding - Kennedy School, All Saints Parish, Two Brothers, and Pearson Air Museum

We're in Portland for a wedding.  Wednesday I got a call asking if I would serve as the best man.  I've known M for over 30 years and we're the kind of friends who may not talk often, but when we're together it's like we haven't been apart.  We went to his first wedding in Anchorage many years ago.  When I had sabbatical in Portland for 6 months in 2003-2004, we spent time with M and his wife who was seriously ill with cancer and needed dialysis. 

We've had several other trips to the Portland area in the last five years and stayed at M's place.  One time he banged on our door about 10am and said, Hey, Alaskans, get up and see what's on TV.  It was McCain announcing Palin as his VP choice. 

Jordan Room at the Kennedy School

So, when his original best man was unable to come at the last minute, I said yes.  M said that the other guy had even written a speech.  So I said to be sure to send it to me.  (It served me well.  Thanks Reb.)  And M told us we should be at the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner Friday.  Unfortunately, we weren't due in until 4:40 and the rehearsal was scheduled at 4 with the dinner at 6 at the Kennedy School.  I just assumed the Kennedy School was a Catholic School that was big enough to have rooms where for events like this dinner.

Kennedy School Hallway

We got to Portland half-hour late.  We checked in bags - something we almost never do, but we got so much mileage last year that we qualify for free bags and we'll be in LA a while and we had gifts to pack.  Fortunately as I headed for the rental car J said, don't we have luggage to pick up?  Well, the Kennedy School isn't far from the airport and we arrived at this jammed parking lot about 6:20pm.  There was a parking attendant who said we could park in one section if we were staying at the hotel.  Hotel?  At a high school?  We found a parking place and walked in.  There was a bar near the entrance.  What kind of school is this?  We wandered the halls til we found the front desk and where we were supposed to be.  The Jordan room.  We passed some restaurants and other parties.  We got to the Jordan room.  There were only a few people there.  The rehearsal had run late. 

It turns out the Kennedy School is an old Portland Elementary School that had closed down and was bought and converted into an entertainment place, but as you can see, the blackboards are still up in the rooms.  With chalk. 


From the Kennedy school website:

Since its 1915 opening, this historic elementary school has been a beloved fixture of its Northeast Portland neighborhood. McMenamins renovated the once-abandoned scholastic gem and turned it into Portland's most unique hotel. Here you'll find 35 comfy guestrooms fashioned from former classrooms (complete with original chalkboards and cloakrooms, private baths and telephones), a restaurant, multiple small bars, a movie theater, soaking pool, gift shop and a brewery (just wait until the principal hears about this!). Extensive original artwork and historical photographs cover the walls, ceilings, doorways and hallways.

Fascinating example of recycling.  I enjoyed having my brain teased like that.





Today we went to All Saints Parish for the wedding mass at 1:30.   I wasn't the only one whose flights didn't get them to the rehearsal dinner and I'd had detailed instructions on what was going to happen and what I was supposed to do and it went off well.  If I messed up, no one said anything to me about it.  I didn't lose the rings.  (The seven year old had one tied onto a pillow, but the priest said that children were less predictable than adults.)

And after the wedding was over, the sun even came out and brightened the stained glass windows. 

The wedding had been at 1:30 and we hadn't had lunch so on the way home as we passed Two Brothers Grill - a Croatian restaurant - we decided this looked like a good place to eat.  It was.  And this being Portland, they even had a vegetarian section on the menu.  J ordered some Turkish coffee along with her meal.  






I had the vegetarian stuffed cabbage with corn meal. 



And we had time to stop at the hotel and get ready for the party at the Pearson Air Museum in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River.  About ten minutes from our hotel in NW Portland. 


The museum is in what we were told is the oldest still standing hangars in the US.  I couldn't find that on the Fort Vancouver website, but there was this (and more):

"Vancouver's Pearson Field is one of the nation's oldest operating airfields. Aviation first came to Vancouver in 1905, when Lincoln Beachey flew from Portland in a lighter than air craft and landed on the polo field at the Vancouver Army Barracks. Continuous fixed wing aviation made its debut in 1911, and the facility, dedicated as Pearson Field in 1925, played host to a number of aviation milestones over the years. It remains to this day a busy general aviation airport. The Pearson Air Museum and its Murdock Aviation Center are part of Fort Vancouver National Site."

The reception was a lot of fun and the kids had plenty of space to run around and to make and fly paper airplanes.  I met a lot of interesting people including a former Peace Corps volunteer (one of only a few groups in Yemen), a former special ed teacher, a former Attorney General of Oregon, and a Chinese calligrapher to name just a few.

And while I thought the cake looked like it was cardboard, it was a delicious combo of white and chocolate.  


A long and eventful 24 hours.  And the start of what I expect will be an interesting and happy marriage.

Mrs. Nash Gets a Baby In Seattle Because Folks In Anchorage Wouldn't Give Her a White Baby

The title summarizes one of the stories Mrs. Nash tells on a tape my daughter made before Mrs. Nash died. There are a number of interesting bits of Anchorage history on the short audio tape below.

Mrs. Mildred Nash was our neighbor for over 25 years. It would be more accurate to say that we were her neighbor, since she'd lived in this neighborhood 20 years before we moved in. When our house, our side of the street, was still woods. I don't even know if our street was even here. I wrote about Mrs. Nash recently because the ally across the street was made into a street and called Mildred Place.

Today, November 25, is her birthday.  This seems like a good time to post the audio my daughter made with Mrs. Nash.

[Note, it might take a while - it took me a few minutes - for this to upload, but read something else and come back to it.]

If I close my eyes and listen to the tape, it's like Mrs. Nash is here in the room with me. And you can catch the infectious love of life in her voice. She was about 86 and dying with cancer when this recorded. But you wouldn't know it.   If you want to get a little boost today, listen to a truly at-peace woman thinking back on her life.  And hear the story about how she had to go to Seattle to adopt her son, because they didn't have black babies and they weren't going to give her a white one.



I should note it would also be my mother-in-law's birthday today. In one of those strange coincidences in life, her name was also Mildred.  Happy Birthday to both my Mildreds.

Giving the Gift of Alaska - To Seward On A Black And White Day

We met Moshe at Congregation Beth Sholom Sunday where he gave a talk about how his community of Jews in Ethiopia walked for three weeks through Ethiopia to Sudan where they were in a refugee camp for 2 years before being able to complete their trip to Israel.  He's in Anchorage because of the PACT (Parents and Children Together)  program - which helps Ethiopian Jews get pre-school preparation to be ready for school.  Moshe himself benefited from this and is now a PACT coordinator in his town.  He was here, in part, to thank the people of Anchorage who have contributed to make this program possible.  He mentioned after the talk that he very much wanted to see a glacier and we offered to help him find a glacier Monday.

See the whole strip at REOiv

We decided to try for Exit Glacier and left in a light snow.  The day reminded me of one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.  Here are the key two panels from it.




                                                                                                                                                   Well, our world Monday was back in those old days when you could use color film, but the world itself was still black and white with only a few traces of the early colors showing.

Even without color, the drive to Seward is spectacular and our guest bubbled over with delight.  Sharing Alaska is such an easy gift to give. 

The roads were a bit tricky - and the drivers were getting used to the second day of snow.  And the clouds were really low as we left Anchorage.  Turnagain Arm was better, and things improved a bit as we went over Turnagain Pass.  Eventually, we saw our first hint of sun after the Hope turnoff. 

We took the turnoff to Exit Glacier, but didn't get very far and the road was closed.  That would have been a much longer walk than we were prepared for, especially in several inches of fresh snow.

So back to the main road and into Seward.  A stop at the harbor.

Then lunch at the Apollo.  (There was color still inside.)











Then off to Lowell Point to do a little beach walk on the world famous white 'sand' beach.

(Didn't I say up top this was a black and white day?)










We decided there had to be a lot of fish in this location.  Gulls were predominant, but there were cormorants and what appeared to be loons as well.

Then to the southern shore of Kenai Lake at Primrose campground.  We could see sun on the distant mountains.

And Moshe got a spectacular shot of a bald eagle that flew low over us before taking a tree top perch.  He was rightfully proud of the picture and I'll put it up when he sends it to me.  [UPDATE Dec. 26: I posted the eagle pictures here, but forgot to add a link here.]
 

A short walk through the woods from the Primerose campground trail in the fresh snow.  The trees seemed to be dancing.

A little reflected sun and even some blue sky on the way back. 

And then off to Portage to see if we can find some glacier.  You could see about 30 feet out into the fogged in lake.  So we took the trail to Byron Glacier.  It was after 6pm and the sun had set and the snow was coming down thick.  I hadn't been to Byron in many years.  There isn't much left.  But there was an ice cave on the lower right side of the dark front of the ice and other glacial shapes in the oncoming evening light and falling snow.

It was still not quite dark when we got back to the car.  But once the car lights were on, it was, for all intents, dark out.  And on the highway back, the snow was blowing hard toward us.  Reflected in the headlights, it made it really hard to figure out where the road was.  The rumble strips were great, but it wasn't easy to tell if you were too far to the left or the right.

I didn't quite get it from the back seat, but this does give you the sense of how hard it was to orient to the road.  For once, the headlights of oncoming cars were helpful.

I hope there weren't too many typos.  I'm tired.