Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

 Well, somehow we made it through another Christmas. I have to admit, this one wasn't too painful. The kids did a lot of the work as far as cooking and whatnot. My oldest daughter Jen and her youngest daughter Kaylahni came up. They were supposed to be arriving within a few hours of each other at the Anchorage airport, but Kaylahni,s plane was delayed due to weather, so she didn't come in until the next day. Fortunately we didn't have to make a second trip to the airport. When we were going there to pick up Jen, we were amazed at how poorly the streets were cleared of snow in Anchorage. Several times we were traveling in the far right lane of the three lane street when the lane just about disappeared because they didn't remove the snow. I was watching people walking on the sidewalks, but the sidewalks hadn't been shoveled, even at the crosswalks. It was pretty pathetic. I think though, that it's become indicative of what is happening in this country now. Too man...

  I mentioned in my last post that I would possibly write about the time I went to the Everglades and was chased by an alligator, and so I will. You might be wondering why I'm posting a picture of a large coho salmon if I'm writing about the Everglades. Well, I don't have any pictures of Largemouth bass nor do I have any of alligators, so I'm substituting this salmon which was bit in half by a salmon shark several years ago. When Jan and I were living in Key West, there wasn't much money to do anything. We were living in the poverty level because the military didn't pay much at the time. It's not like it is now. In any event, one form of free entertainment was to go fishing. There were many nights where we ate supper and then went down to the White Street pier to fish for the little grunts or whatever kind of fish there were there. None of the ones we caught there were very big and it was a bit of a disappointment. Although I had discovered that the canals h...

  With each passing day, I'm reminded that I won't be around forever. I don't know when my time will come, hopefully not too soon, but one day it will come and aside from any money that I'll hopefully be able to pass down to my kids, I'd like to pass down some memories. Sometimes when certain of my children are here, we discuss things from our past, but I don't think I've ever really mentioned much about the time that Jan and I spent at Key West Florida. When I graduated from Radarman "A" school in July of 1972, I was assigned to work aboard an old WWII radar escort ship called the Kretchmer. It was home ported in Key West. Unfortunately I had to wait to catch up to the ship, as it was in the North Atlantic. I spent a few weeks at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, mainly cleaning barracks and doing a few stints on burial detail. That was kind of fun. The burial detail that is. At least it got me out of the barracks.  I caught up to the ship in South...

  I saw a T-shirt with this saying the other day. It kind of sums up how I feel some days. I know that I'm 70, and I feel like I'm 80, and I probably look like I'm 90 but I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that I'm an odd, old fart. I don't know how it happened, except that I wake up every day and the calendar has changed. I go in and do my thing in the morning,  and look in the mirror and wonder who the hell is staring back at me. The hair on top of my head is getting pretty thin, but the hair on my ears and eyebrows is as thick as a briar patch. I have to keep my eyebrows trimmed to keep them from poking me in the eye when I 'm driving. The ear hair just looks plain ridiculous. What is the purpose of it? Women don't have ear hair. I think my ears and nose are growing too. I remember seeing old guys when I was a kid and they kind of looked like Dumbo. Just having bigger ears doesn't mean you can hear better. It might be all the hair clo...

                      Jan and I went shopping at the beginning of the week. We wanted to fill a couple of boxes for Samaritan's Purse's Operation Christmas Child. It's an annual event designed to send boxes overseas to various countries to children who normally would never celebrate Christmas. It's an opportunity to share some of the blessings that we've enjoyed because we were fortunate enough to be born in this country. There is a list of suggested items to send, and there are also labels designating the gender of the child and the general age group. I chose the ten to fourteen year old group because I think they have a tendency to be neglected. I believe a lot of people want to buy something for the little kids, which is great also, but regardless of your age, it's nice to be remembered. We bought everything we needed at Wal-Mart. They have pretty good prices and a decent selection. We both bought an assortment of schoo...

  I went to the local Three Bears Market today. I don't normally shop there, even though it's the closest store to the house. The prices are much higher usually than at Wal-Mart or even Fred Meyers, depending on what you're buying. If you just want a candy bar or some soda, it's not a big deal. However, if you're shopping for a weeks worth of groceries, you might consider going the extra mile, or ten miles in my case, and shop at Wal-Mart. The money saved can be substantial.  One thing I do buy at Three Bears is gasoline. It's usually competitively priced, and if I'm on the way to the post office anyway, I just stop and fill up. Yesterday I was going to get gas at a different Three Bears location, but the cars were stacked up three and four deep, so I thought I'd wait. Today I went to the gas station and was surprised to see that the gas was less than $5.00 a gallon. In fact I think I paid $4.89 a gallon. For some reason I was happy to pay it. That is, u...

I was sitting in bed several nights ago and was thinking about a conversation that I'd had with one of my Fan Story friends, Yvonne. Before you get any wrong ideas, she's in her eighties I believe, and the friendship is strictly platonic. I've made a number of friends on Fan Story, in a lmost every case because I like the way they write and we usually share the same values.  Yvonne and I had discussed how much fun it would be to actually have a face to face conversation with our various friends on F/S and the words to a poem kind of started coming together. Though I'm not a poet, I thought I would share this with you. Can I come for a visit for a short bit of time? I think it would be lovely, I would think it sublime I'd drive down your street and stop at your home I'd check out the neighborhood and let my eyes roam Next door is your neighbor whom you don't really like His brat of a kid chased your cat with his bike I don't like him either though I reall...

       I mentioned in my last post that I would write a little more about our trip down to Homer. It was really a fun trip, although we weren't there all that long. One of the highlights was dropping in to the Bear Creek Winery. Though I guess you could go there and whine if you want to, something that I'm very good at, it's an even better place to go if you want to try some local wine. Honestly, I'm not a big drinker of wine. It always looks so good, and it's made from fruit, which I like a lot, but the flavor isn't enough to make me want to go out and buy bottles of the stuff usually. However, there are exceptions to every rule, and for whatever reason, the wine that I tried at Bear Creek Winery was rather appealing. Before we went inside, we took a little trip around the gardens. Because it was September, most of the flowers had gone by the wayside, although there were still a few blooming, and the grounds were beautiful. I imagine if you decided to tour the ...

 This past weekend Jan and I and my daughter Autumn and her husband Aaron took a little trip down to the Kenai Peninsula to Homer. The town bills itself as the halibut fishing capital of the world. They may be, I don't know. I didn't go there to try out the halibut fishing.  The trip down was breathtaking, with the fall colors, which were primarily yellow, were on display and around every bend we were greeted with a delightful new scene. The traffic, while more than I care for, wasn't all that bad. In fact after we got out of Anchorage we didn't really run into too much until we turned onto the road that led down to the Kenai. We passed several glacier fed rivers with their blue green water rushing by and multiple rafts of fishermen making their way down, I guess in the hopes of catching a sockeye or coho salmon. Like many coastal towns, Homer is a fishing town and supports a good fleet of gillnet, seine, and charter boats. Noticeably missing were the trolling poles and...

  I recently returned from an extended period of time away from home. I was down in Hoonah working on the boat and fishing. I left Wasilla on June 11, and didn't return until September 3. To say that it was a long time to be gone would be an understatement. Before I left Hoonah last year, I contacted a fellow who shrink wraps boats with a heavy plastic wrap. I spoken to several people who had the process done and they seemed to be happy with it. I left in September last year, and sometime in October he got the job done. Unfortunately, he didn't bother to mention that it would be advantageous to have a fan on and a window open to allow the moisture to dissipate. Never having gone through the procedure before, I didn't know what to expect.  When I returned to Hoonah, I saw that the covering was intact and given the fact that last winter was especially wet and snowy, I was delighted that I had decided to get the boat shrink-wrapped, that is until I opened the door. From floor ...

   We're living in unprecedented times in this country. We applaud people who are breaking the law and demonize those who try to uphold it. Most of the kids graduating have trouble doing the most elementary math, like making change at a register. Many of them are so socially awkward that they can't even hold a conversation face to face, it all has to be via a phone or computer. Church attendance is at it's lowest point in this country, but violence is at an all time high. See any correlation? When there is a mass shooting, as happened recently in both Buffalo New York and in Texas, there is an outcry for gun control. I understand, what happened is tragic. However, over the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago there were something like thirty shootings and I can't recall how many dead. This goes on every week. Where is the outrage at that? What happened to the BLM movement when black men are killing other black men on the streets of the windy city, or L A or New York City?  A...

  Well, I was sifting through some of the pictures that I have in my file, looking for something to write about. I actually was going to go out and take a picture of some of my gardening stuff, since it's that time of year, but my camera crapped the bed so to speak. Actually, it was just  a matter of having to charge the battery, but that takes hours, and I don't want to wait that long, so I'm settling for a picture of a bottle of hot sauce called Ass Blaster. One of the kids thought I would enjoy it, and gave it to me for Christmas some years back. If you're reading this, whoever sent it, don't be offended, but I gave it away. I did hang on to  the box though.  Do you see the picture of the underwater volcano? I think if I had partaken of the aforementioned hot sauce, that probably would have been an accurate portrayal of my nether regions. I like Pace Picante sauce. It adds a little flavor to different dishes. Cha Cha potatoes comes to mind. They are mashed potato...

 Does anyone remember the Sci-fi movie from 1958 titled The Blob? To this day I still remember it. It was about some gelatinous glob of goo that fell from outer space and engulfed everyone it encountered. It had no real shape, just kind of round and red and gooey and it had the ability to come up through the drains of bathtubs and even through transistor radios or under doors. It moved painfully slow, so I don't know why it managed to catch so many people off guard, but it did. It probably would have had a heyday at a nursing home. I was six years old at the time that the movie came out, and for reasons beyond me, my dad thought it would be a good idea to take me and my older brother to the drive-in movie to watch it. Forget going to watch Bambi or some kids show.  I was terrified of the bathtub for several weeks, certain that the blob would come through the drain and eat me when I was distracted by my toys. I  kept a close watch on the transistor radio on the kitchen cou...

I recently read this delightful poem on Fan Story, a writing website. This poem is by my friend Adonna, Marie Gipe. She's an exceptionally talented writer, and had penned a vast array of wonderful poems. If you should enjoy this poem, she has a book available on Amazon titled - Songs Before Dawn . It's filled with all manner of great poems. I've never cared for poetry before, but after reading various offerings from some of the poets on FS, I've found a new appreciation for poetry, something  even I am surprised by. I hope you enjoy this.                     Hidden Treasure  -  by Adonna Marie Gipe                            A young girl named Angela, quiet and slight,                       lay down in her bedroom to ponder her plight.              ...