Musings of an old man

Marie Mallory said:
Glad you had a nice visit, and happy late birthday to your wife.
Do you plan to retire in Alaska?
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Don't yet know where we will end up @Marie Mallory. I have been long retired, but wife has retired from everything but the church job. I always say we never agree on anything and that includes where we live. When I was the sole provider, I decided where we will live, but I always considered the family. Now it is just two of us, and we have kids and grand kids in the lower 48. Youngest son thinks we should move to Arizona since he likes to visit there and needs a place to stay:). Wife wants to be close to grandkids, but 9 of the live in Alaska, 13 in Washington state, and one in San Diego with great grandson. Not easy to pick a place. We both like North Carolina and Florida, but Florida seems to be getting very crowded. I like East Texas, but my wife has never been there. East Tennessee is nice as well. So many choices.... It will ultimately be decided by our health I reckon.
 
My wife got her new sewing machine and seems to be loving it so far. It has features she has never dealt with before, so it is taking her a while to figure everything out. It is so much quieter than her other machines that I can hardly tell when it is running. It also cost more than her other 5 machines put together:)

I began bringing planting stuff in from the barn to thaw out and be washed. I have a bale of potting mix in one of the woodsheds, but I have to wade through the snow to get to it with the sled. My two youngest sons who were here for wife's birthday left my snow machine a good ways away through the snow. At 30 and 35 they have no trouble dealing with a few feet of snow, but this old man struggles. I would normally just ride it over with the sled and get the planting mix, but the small sled on foot might be easier now. I will have to get the machine going to get to the big greenhouse or put snowshoes on and they are a big hassle at my age.

We have begun losing chickens. We don't have many, but I found one that appeared to be ill a couple days ago. I brought her into the garage and she has been in for a couple days. She seems to be recovering. so she will go back out today if she is still better. I found another dead when I went to feed and collect eggs yesterday, so some of our older hens may be succumbing to the prolonged cold. The two affected are over 6 years old, but they were still laying, so it is sad to lose them. They are both red sex-linked, and were prolific laying birds. Perhaps their time has just run out.
 
You certainly can't fault those hens for dying at 6 years old, even though that cross is long lived. It is amazing they were still laying with any efficiency, at that age. I like the Red SXL's. Great dual purpose birds. Very popular around here, for the free range brown egg market. The roosters make good capons and old hens great stewing birds.

I buy eggs from a local free range farm and no more than I use, it would be foolish for me to have chickens. The same with having a garden here. We have so many small farms that have stands in the season or you can harvest the produce yourself and save money, that it would cost me more for water, than they charge. Also ever since they started treating our water, tomatoes don't do well and don't taste good. Hot peppers and squash seem to do good, but tomatoes and melons don't compare to the farm ones with ditch irrigation from mountain reservoirs.
 
I broke down and got a new phone yesterday. The tech who helped me was a 49 year old woman who moved here from California 4 years ago when California was apparently ending the shutdown. I told her I was old and she told me she was young and still struggled with technology. I guess she considered being 49 with grandchildren to be young??? When she moved here, she moved to Fairbanks and got a second master's degree there, but decided that was entirely too cold, so she moved to Anchorage and bought a condo. That is too noisy, so she bought a "fixer upper mobile home" outside Wasilla. She is now living in the condo in Anchorage while supposedly fixing up the trailer that she plans to be her permanent home. She has a 50-mile commute to her job. She has never lived in a remote/rural place, and has no clue how a well water system works (I didn't ask about her septic). She has electricity to her trailer, but plans on putting in a solar system. I reminded her that solar doesn't work well in the winter here when it is dark for 70% of the time, and while it works okay in summer, who needs it when the sun is shining much of the time and no real heat or A/C or even lights are needed...I guess to charge her phone and perhaps make coffee.

Anyway, This poor woman has two Master's (the one she got here was something about how immigration affects the climate or something. I didn't ask about the one she got in California) and works in a phone store with a 50-mile commute to work in some crazy weather. She knows very little about living here and reminds me a bit of Kim, the woman whose story I related on the old SOC who moved here from Texas where she had lived her entire life and never experienced winter. Kim and her new husband moved here to "fulfill a dream" and made a series of bad decisions that ruined her life and led eventually to her husband's suicide and her temporary move to the Caribbean, before she moved back and remained in the "city". I have no idea what happened to Kim after her move back, but Kristi (the phone tech) seems to be traveling something of the same road.
 
We have had a busy week so far despite the cold. An old friend of my wife's from the "goat days" on Sunday. She was in Palmer from Juneau to pick up a truck for someone that was dropping it off in Wasilla and called to ask us to dinner. Man, that woman could talk. I don't think she was quiet for ten minutes the entire evening. Anyway, she was picking up the truck to drive to the ferry in Haines and take a 4-hour ferry ride into Juneau as there are no roads into the state capital. Monday was Garden Club day and planning for the spring plant sale. Tuesday was Senior shopping day, wife had church, then off to a greenhouse to pick up 8 bales of planting mix. My truck is out of commission and it is too cold to fix it since the truck won't fit into the garage, so daughter-in-law agreed to pick them up in her stretch Tahoe for us. This morning I had a VA appointment to get new hearing aids fitted and they have made a tremendous difference so far, then off to Anchorage airport to pick up a globetrotting nurse friend as she was returning from Antarctica where she was cruising in a small boat with 4 passengers and 3 crew. She and another nurse friend are off to Africa at thee end of next week, so today's arrival has just a week or so to recover from her trip[ down south before her next trip south in another direction. I am a bit envious but my wife is not a big traveler except to visit family.
 
Warmer today--up to 21 F. It is supposed to snow and it just started. My wife's late winter project is to organize all the old photo prints she has accumulated over the years. She is trying to make scrapbooks of sorts for each of our children. When we moved here from the bush, we began publishing a Christmas newsletter in a newspaper format with each family member writing a column outlining the happenings of the past year. Sometimes there were assignments since we homeschooled for so many years and sometimes we let the kids choose their topics. She is including copies of the old newsletters with each notebook, at least while the respective child was still living here. A few years have gotten lost; 2017 and 2018 were apparently lost when we lost our computer in the earthquake. They may be backed up somewhere on a flash drive that I haven't found yet. Anyway, reading those has brought back to mind the bad as well as the good years. 1996 was a bad year with a daughter's injury on a dogsled and a wildfire that nearly took our home, but we had our last "surprise" child that year as well and he has been "mostly" a blessing for the past 30 years. 2006 was another bad year when our eldest granddaughter nearly died of cancer, and my wife's best friend DID succumb to breast cancer, and a daughter and family left Alaska--that probably saved granddaughter's life as if she were here when diagnosed, she would've died. Children's Hospital in Seattle saved her life. I tried to get wife's friend to go to Seattle for treatment but she refused and died as a result.

All those years and all those memories--both good and bad. Anyone else do anything like that?
 
The closest I did to something like that is with my camera I have taken thousands of pictures, both negative and digital. once photos became digital I would take just about every occasion and every opportunity to take photographs of my family and friends. I would spend time cropping the photos, cleaning them up, and then make DVDs out of them. I would select the background music, titles, and create a slideshow. Depending what the subject was determined how many people I thought might like a copy of this DVD I would provide it to them.

For example for my cousin's 80th birthday I took hundreds of pictures and made about 55 DVD copies that I sent to all the guests.

I also would take old photos and digitize them and make DVDs out of them for family. The best part is I would invite all the family that's represented in the DVD for a showing at my house so we can all witness the first viewing together and it always turns out to be a lot of fun.

Photography has always been a hobby of mine since I was 9 years old.
 
Don Alaska said:
We have had a busy week so far despite the cold. An old friend of my wife's from the "goat days" on Sunday. She was in Palmer from Juneau to pick up a truck for someone that was dropping it off in Wasilla and called to ask us to dinner. Man, that woman could talk. I don't think she was quiet for ten minutes the entire evening. Anyway, she was picking up the truck to drive to the ferry in Haines and take a 4-hour ferry ride into Juneau as there are no roads into the state capital. Monday was Garden Club day and planning for the spring plant sale. Tuesday was Senior shopping day, wife had church, then off to a greenhouse to pick up 8 bales of planting mix. My truck is out of commission and it is too cold to fix it since the truck won't fit into the garage, so daughter-in-law agreed to pick them up in her stretch Tahoe for us. This morning I had a VA appointment to get new hearing aids fitted and they have made a tremendous difference so far, then off to Anchorage airport to pick up a globetrotting nurse friend as she was returning from Antarctica where she was cruising in a small boat with 4 passengers and 3 crew. She and another nurse friend are off to Africa at thee end of next week, so today's arrival has just a week or so to recover from her trip[ down south before her next trip south in another direction. I am a bit envious but my wife is not a big traveler except to visit family.
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Thank you for your amazing update, Don! I cannot imagine a four-hour ferry ride!
 
The name "Ferry" doesn't do it Justice! It looks more like a short Cruise! I was picturing something much smaller.
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"The ferry from Bellingham, Washington, to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, is the longest route in the Alaska Marine Highway System (AMHS), spanning more than 3,500 miles of coastline. Operated by the State of Alaska, this ferry network connects over 30 coastal communities and is designated as a National Scenic Byway and All-American Road."
 
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Joe Riley said:
The name "Ferry" doesn't do it Justice! It looks more like a short Cruise! I was picturing something much smaller.
images


"The ferry from Bellingham, Washington, to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, is the longest route in the Alaska Marine Highway System (AMHS), spanning more than 3,500 miles of coastline. Operated by the State of Alaska, this ferry network connects over 30 coastal communities and is designated as a National Scenic Byway and All-American Road."
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Yeah, it is more like a primitive cruise.

This is the biggest "ship" I think

1773595144862.png
 
Yesterday wife and I went to the friend's place who has the orchard to get some scion wood for grafting onto exiting trees when things get warmer. He had run his snowblower around the orchard fences and between the trees for pathways. He told me he cleaned around the fences on the outside to keep the moose from getting over the fences. He only has 12-foot fences and if the snow gets dep and hard the moose can jump over. We shared homemade chocolate candy, apple pie and ice cream. along with delicious coffee. They are out oldest friends here I think that we have been in constant contact with. They have been married around 50 years too, and, although they only had three kids, they have 15 grandchildren I think, most of whom are in Fairbanks. The hubby was our boys' scoutmaster and is still involved with Trail Life at 75 years old.

I got scion wood from 5 different types of apples, so we'll see how it goes when it gets a bit warmer. Then temperature was in the 20s F. but the wind was brisk, and there were a few drifts here and there to make walking difficult. I am still doing planting into soil blocks, but I put the basil into regular 6-pack containers, as it seems to do better than the small soil blocks. I started 144 basil plants of 11 different types. I also planted Brussels sprouts and today may be sage and other miscellaneous stuff. Cabbage will start later this week.
 
Marie Miller said:
Try a sunset in Oklahoma when it looks simply fake.
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I would love it! As a working guitarist in a band traveling across country almost 20 years, I have seen some amazing sunsets. However, in spite of my love for mountain sunsets, a sunset on the plains is (in my opinion) also very good as if you're in the right place, you can get a Big Sky sunset that is just as good as a sunset as one in Montana because you can see more of it. I have said for many years that a beautiful sunset is a way that God is an amazing artist. There is no AI in God.

This is one of the few photos I have, that was simply named "Midwest US Sunset", so it could be anywhere in the plains states.

Midwest Sunset.png
 
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