Mountains and Islands

Meet Finn.  He is the adorable mascot of a shop called Suzi's Woollies in downtown Anchorage.  I just couldn't resist shooting his picture, especially since he was so kind as to pose for me.  Here on the island, I'm already back to work at the winery.  With one employee out on short paternity leave and another who up and quit, the place is limping along with a skeleton crew.  I'm picking up extra shifts this week. With any luck, they will need me less next week.  I have oodles of reading and writing to do.  Power was out for two hours this morning.  We were forced to process our sales transactions manually at the winery.  It's amazing how technology spoils you.  Wouldn't you know it, we were actually busy early on, so I was writing receipts like a maniac.  Amazingly, they were all accurate. My arithmetic and hand calculated tax matched the computer-register when the power came on and I could actually enter them into the system.  Thank you to the sisters at Queen...

It's funny how you can feel nostalgic about a place after just a short time there.  Of course, it's rarely just the place that tugs at your heartstrings.  It's the memory of the people you knew and the experiences you had.  I have great affection for Los Angeles, despite the fact that it is, for most intents and purposes, one giant, exhaust-shrouded, sun-scorched, cement covered mass of urban confusion.  How could such a place make a person feel all warm and fuzzy?  But it does.  I also love the tiny town of Solvang , San Francisco, Denver, Gunnison of course and, harking way back, Portland.   Hilo gives me a little tingle every time I emerge from the airplane and into the warm, damp air, where it smells like flowers and coconut oil and the sea.  I discovered some feelings of nostalgia for the University of Anchorage campus today.  That surprised me.  After all, wasn't I just put through the ringer here, sleep deprived, brain tissue soaked and then wrung out like a w...

Moose, mountains and moo cows.  I've seen some!   Yay !  I was getting nervous that there was nothing more than ugly buildings and pretty trees in Alaska and that all those majestic peaks and  grand rivers were a myth perpetuated by the Chamber of Commerce.  Today a small group of ready-to-get-off-this-campus-no-matter-whats climbed into a mini-bus and headed for the hills.  Our first stop was a sustainable farm owned by Alaska Pacific University and operated by a small family who, if you like building and growing stuff, landed the perfect jobs for themselves.  It was cold and raining, but that did not dampen our enthusiasm for this outing. We spent some time in a toasty yurt, warmed by a crackling wood stove.  There, we ate box lunches (mine was a ham and cheese croissant ), listened to the merits of sustainable agriculture and a little poetry.  Then we meandered around - though no for long - before shuttling off to a place called Hatcher Pass.  At the summit, there's an old ...

Today I was workshopped .  That's what they call it around here when it is your piece of writing that's being shredded to pieces.  Actually, it's a very good, constructive process and as a new writer I found it extremely helpful.  Yes, you heard me right.  Or read me right, anyway.  I'm a new writer.  New to fiction, anyway.  I've never had any formal creative writing instruction.  It's all been academic and journalistic.  This is different.  Yesterday, I attended a presentation on a form of Poetry called Ghazal .  It is a poetic form of Arabic origins, but became popular all over the middle east over many centuries and eventually throughout western Europe.  Like many formal, poetic forms, it mandates certain parameters. Each Ghazal begins with a lament.  Each two-line stanza must stand alone.  There is a specific rhyming scheme with the last word or several words matching in each stanza.  Finally, Ghazal requires the author of the poem to include his or her n...

Here I sit in the West Residence Hall at the University of Alaska Anchorage.   Rainforest blog, you say?  Well, a girl's gotta get off the rock sometimes.  I guess I've been off the rock more times in the past few years than most get off in a lifetime.  Hey...it's kept me sane. After just over a day in the beautiful city of Seattle with my most fantastic of friends Gail and Janine, I found my way through the air to the last frontier.  We had a short but pleasant visit in Seattle.  Janine is training to hike Mt. Whitney so we walked.  And walked.  And walked some more.  As we walked after dinner on a quest to find the shore of Lake Union, we happened upon a Mexican restaurant.  It's not where we ate.  But the fact that we found it right when we did was truly a miracle.  I had eaten a few too many Ranier cherries at the Pike St. Market earlier that day and it was just then, at that very moment in time that they decided to kick and do their colon blowing thing.  So I jus...

It's three days and counting until the big adventure to Alaska and my immersion into the land of graduate school. I am excited about the trip but reluctant, as always, to leave my furry babies, especially Crawford. I know Ron will take good care of them, but I still worry. I think I inherited that worry gene from my grandmother. She was the best worrier I ever knew. I hope July fourth was a fun one for all of you out there in cyber-land . I worked a sweaty day at the winery. It was a holiday, however, so I earned time-and-a-half for my trouble. Cha-ching ! Doc was not so thrilled with the festivities Friday night. When he heard the neighbors' firecrackers, he insisted on sitting in my lap, putting his paws on my shoulders and burrowing his head in my chest. Poor baby boy. Poor enormous, heavy baby boy. He just couldn't get close enough. Lucy sat on the end of the couch with us for awhile. Whenever she heard the sound of a bottle rocket - that tell-tale whist...

I called Advocats , as promised, where a representative referred me to a woman in Mountain View, who in turn referred me to another woman in Volcano. This woman's name, if you can believe it, is Cat Killum . No lie. Anyway, Cat is a very compassionate person who cares for the critters. She runs a cat shelter at her house. This woman know all about the cat family at the transfer station. She was elated with my call, because she's never gotten a message regarding the cats in which the caller actually offered to help her. She told me she is already feeding the cats. There are, in fact 12 living there that she knows of at this particular dump, along with two very shy dogs. She does not feed them near the dumpsters where people can see her, the food or the animals. She asked me not to feed them there, either. She had very good reasons. Cat explained that if people see food, they know that some one's feeding the animals and view it as a good place to dump their own u...