Gullible bares all...

Weapons of mass mess and destruction....

Quickly now, before I change my mind and decide to spare myself the embarassment, I am posting these pictures to show what happens when the muse comes for an extended visit. As you can see, my loft is not bright yellow, as it appeared to be in previous pictures.

The two openings look out over the living room. The vertical black thing is the stovepipe from the wood stove down below. In the foreground sits the Kodak Carousel projector, still right where I'd used it a couple months ago to sort a ba-billion slides.

The above photo shows the command center in its usual state of perpetual disarray.
I call it "Katrina's Home Page," and I don't mean it fondly. Yes, that's a game of Spider Solitaire on the monitor. Medium difficulty, two suits of cards. Note Pablo's proximity to the command center. That makes it easier for him to spread feathers and sunflower seed hulls all over my desk.

There is one spot that's relatively tidy: it's the Heat Surge electric heater I recently installed in place of a gas heater that wouldn't work in this location. Worked fine in the shop, but not here. I suspect it has something to do with it being vented under a four foot roof overhang. My theory is that the exhaust swirls around under the overhang, the sensor detects carbon monoxide, and the safety shuts off the gas valve.

On the heater's mantle--oh, yes, "made by the Amish," though I question why the Amish are making mantles for ELECTRIC heaters--are three birch bark baskets. Above that, waiting to be properly framed, is an authentic Aboriginal painting that covers the place in the wall where the gas heater stovepipe penetrated. The painting's design depicts a watering hole in Australia's Outback, and men hunting kangaroo. I bought it for $50 from a colorfully-dressed, barefoot Aboriginal woman in the Outback near Alice Springs. I still remember her eyes--bottomless and fathomless.

To the right, in front of the window seat, there is a folding table covered with the remnants of projects started and interrupted. The gray box is a portable filing drawer that contains most of the chapters for the Alzheimer's book-in-progress, as does the other plastic box on the window seat. On the rest of the table is a dry erase board that I've been using to diagram and structure a story I'm writing for the Mystery Wrting class I'm taking online.

In the right center of this photo are the stairs that lead down to the rest of the house. Snaking up those stairs is the hose for the central vacuum system, dropped in place several days ago when I realized that a quick lick and a promise around Pablo's perch just wasn't going to cut it.

And here he is--the lord and master of the loft. Today he's in a good mood. He's recoved from the trauma of being placed in the stainless steel kitchen sink and given a shower. Even his battered feathers look nice. This is the peaceful, friendly version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The towel is to provide more surface room for him to perch, as well as make the perch softer. He doesn't fall too often from this arrangement, but when he does, feathers and seeds go flying. The ragged thing hanging down from is perch is the previously-destroyed towel.

Parrots don't eat grit, and have no saliva. About half-way up that strong upper mandible is a spot almost like the underside of a shelf. When eating, they use the sharp lower mandible to slice, crush, and grind food against that tiny spot, which is why they make such a mess when eating nuts and the like. Pablo will leave a circle of "nutdust" around him. Oftentimes food will become impacted against that notch, and parrots will chew on things to "clean" it, things like the towel, peanut shells, napkins, wood, anything they can find. My husband used to give Pablo toothpicks.

Okay, I've bared it all. Enough stalling around. Back to cleaning up this mess. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll be able to show you some "after" pictures. Oh, wait. "Desperate Housewives" is on tonight...

(I've tried four times to edit this post so there is space between paragraphs, but this site refuses to allow that today. I'll try again later. In the meantime, sorry about that.)

more from Potter Marsh...

Who's having more fun? This little girl dreaming of running a sixteen dog team in the Iditarod some day, or the folks in those multi-million dollar mansions up on the foothills of the Chugach Range?

Stopping for a chat ....

In the summer months, this marsh is where Canada geese, ducks of many varieties and seagulls hatch and rear their young. The only and only highway south of Anchorage runs immediately along the marsh, and I can attest that it's mighty hard to keep your eyes on the road.

this afternoon at Potter Marsh

I drove into Anchorage mid-afternoon today and when I reached the outskirts at Potter Marsh, I saw dozens and dozens of people doing what it takes to "survive" Alaskan winters. Skaters, very young hockey players, even a guy on a bicycle were enjoying what winter has to offer.

Dogs were everywhere, having way more fun than their people.

Mama was taking a young 'un for a skate...

This little guy thought he was at least as big as that retriever than had just run by. His owner was reminding him that he was just a little dog.

The Times They are a-Changing…

I’m telling you, there are going to be some changes around here, or else. Much like our forefathers sent a message to King George in England about his onerous taxation policies in the New World and had their own version of afternoon tea, I’m about to challenge the authority and confront some vexing policies in this dictatorship.

Don’t agree that this is a dictatorship? You think that no person is legally subservient to another? I beg to differ. The restrictions under which I live are far more inflexible than the constraints of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Let’s take the first two amendments to the Bill of Rights:

“Congress shall make no law….abridging the freedom of speech….or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” Yeah, right. Oh, I can say anything at any time I want, except when I'm talking on the telephone or when there are friends visiting. Then I can guarantee there is no speaking without abridgement, or assembling with any scintilla of peace.

And the second amendment:

“…the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Oh, you bet. If you want to keep your arms around this place, you better not bare them! Shouldn’t that be “bear,” you ask? No, I used the correct homophone. Let me elaborate: under certain circumstances, walking around my house with bare arms will result in severe bodily harm.

And those circumstances? Unrelenting enforcement of the dress code in this house, a code that has become alarmingly narrow and limiting. As far as I’m concerned, it’s time to throw off the mantle of oppression and strike a blow for freedom. Pablo the Parrot is going to have to learn who the boss is in this household!

I recall twenty years ago when the dress code established by Pablo was restricted to Carhart clothing and ball caps. My husband used to wear ball caps all the time, and if Pablo saw him so attired, the parrot’s anger would last for days. Of course, Pablo hated my husband back then so it was hard to tell if Pablo’s screaming was directed at the man or the cap. After Pablo suddenly decided he liked my husband and not me, we knew for sure that the screaming had to do with the cap.

“He doesn’t want anyone having a bigger beak than his,” said my husband in what I considered–but never voiced–a typical male deduction regarding size. I thought the parrot probably had been teased by someone wearing a cap, taking the typical female path of attributing bad behavior to emotional trauma. We’ll never know for sure because Pablo doesn’t deign to discuss it. He just screams.

As for Carhart clothing, those tough, insulated, rip-resistant brown jackets, bibs, and coveralls, I know exactly why Pablo hates them. When Pablo is throwing a tantrum about not getting his way, I don my Carhart jacket, along with a pair of leather welder’s gloves, and I am protected from that perilous beak of his.

As the years passed, the dress code became more restrictive and came to include any piece of clothing that hinted we were not staying home that day. As long as I was dressed in jeans and tee shirts, a truce reigned in the house. As long as my husband took off the ball cap out of sight downstairs, that tenuous peace endured. Occasionally the bird would see him out in the yard and wearing a ball cap, and punishment would be exacted. After my husband died, Pablo became even more narrow in how he interpreted the dress code.

Here is the repressive dress code under which I labor today:

1) I am allowed to wear only one pair of jeans—the baggy ones with the tear in the left knee, a result of close encounters of the chain saw type. These are my work jeans and they generally mean I’m staying home. Shorts are allowed, subdued colors only.

2) All bright colors are verboten. I am allowed only tee shirts in drab and muted shades of green, brown, blue, and gray. Gray is the optimum color. Black is not allowed. Red is akin to wearing Carharts AND a ball cap. Absolutely nothing dressy is tolerated. Have I made clothing purchase decisions based on this narrow interpretation? Yes. Many.

3) Jackets and sweatshirts are not permitted. No long-sleeved shirts are allowed. I found this out recently when I donned a long-sleeved gray thermal shirt because the temperature in my house was sixty-two degrees and the wood stove was struggling to warm even itself.

Enough! I’ve had it! It’s time to negate tyranny. I’m weary of living with the constant threat of attack. I’d toss all his sunflower seeds in the pond out back, but it’s frozen solid and the effect would be impotent.

As I sit writing this, wearing the baggy jeans with the rip in the left knee and the gray tee shirt with its miniscule design in brown, I have devised a shrewd and subversive plan: I’m putting the long-sleeved thermal shirt back in the closet.



-30-

And just what do you think you're wearing? Long sleeves are not permitted. You know that. (note how he has crouched, ready to spring)

I can't believe you're actually daring to wear that! I've told you before! (his body language and raised feathers show ire, and he is complaining vocally

You make me so mad, I could scream!!! (and so he does. Loudly! Constantly! Note the blazing orange eyes with the pupils constricted to a pinpoint.))

I want to bite something!!! (he is shreading the towel wrapped around his perch. I liken this to sharpening his sword. )
And don't try sneaking up behind me either! (Interesting photo. He almost appears to be a hologram.)

In that last picture, you can see why I tolerate this little dictator. He is thirty-six years old and finds it difficult to stay top-side on his perch. He falls frequently, battering his beautiful feathers against the bars of his cage. I wrapped a towel around the round perch of his stand where he sits and keeps me company in my loft. It is soft under his feet, and allows more surface for his balance.

Oddly, when I placed a piece of towel on the perch in his cage, he refused to have anything to do with it, and would not go near it. Go figure.

I apologize for the lack of quality in these photos. My good camera is in the hospital and I didn't know there was a "fluorescent lighting" mode on the camera I'm using. My loft is NOT bright yellow. I blame that on the compact fluorescent blubs I recently installed. I also decided to spare myself the danger of donning the offending garment and re-taking the pictures.

today's sonata...

Today's Alpenglow sonata is in pink and gray:

With a seamless transition to "Moon" Indigo...

rhapsody in blue...

I spent part of today sniveling and whining and wishing I were in Mazatlan with my friends, eating totilla chips and guacamole, and washing it down with Pacifico. I even sent an e-mail to that effect to one of them. Following more than a week of temperatures in the single digits, but on the top side of zero, we finally got some warmer temps and several inches of snow.

After working and playing at the computer, and pretty much wasting a few hours, I debated between dragging out the snow blower for its maiden voyage this season, or a more expedient method of dealing with five or six inches of snow. I opted for expedient: I drove my truck up and down the driveway a number of times, packing down the few inches of wet snow. At the top of the long drive, where the state highway plows filled the upper twenty feet with snow from the pavement, I pushed the heavy snow into the ditch with a snow scoop.

Then it was back to working and playing at the computer, with Pablo the parrot keeping me company. Darkness comes early now that we're off daylight savings time. Plus, we're losing almost five and a half minutes of daylight a day. Because this valley is ringed with mountains in the four thousand foot range, we lose direct sunlight entirely from mid-November until mid-February.

After fooling around wasting more time, and accomplishing little except for a lesson in advance file management for Word 2007, I decided to go downstairs and watch the five o'clock news. As I stood up from my chair, I was treated to a rhapsody in blue outside my loft window:
A few minutes later it was too late as darkness embraced the forest once again.


You just can't see anything like this in Mexico....

thoughts on the day after...

Gullible admits she is politically cluelesss, so forgive as she offers this:

Thoughts on the day after...

I’ll say this right up front: I didn’t vote for him. At my age, and especially in these economically disastrous times, comfortable old shoes are less risky than new. As I watch my small stock portfolio shrink to a mere shadow of its former self, I am stuck in the old behavior pattern of “riding it out.” When I think of the insidious zealots who threaten our safety, I look to a warrior with experience. And so I took a pen and filled in the oval next to the familiar.

Paradoxically what I feel the day after the election, though, is quite familiar also I had the same feeling in November of 1960. That election was my first as an eighteen-year-old. It was also the first time Alaskans were eligible to vote in a national election, as it had gained statehood only the year before. I don’t remember where my polling place was, though I suspect it was at a nearby school where I had attended sixth grade. I have voted in so many elections since that first one, I have no distinct memory of the physical act of marking my choice on the ballot.

What I do have though, are emotions as indelible as Terrell Owens’ Sharpie autograph on a football. The cultural revolution that began when Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock around the Clock” blasted out of radios everywhere, and gained unstoppable momentum when our parents were treated to the shocking display of Elvis shaking his pelvis (made all the more delightful to us because of their shock), came to full bloom when this country elected its first Roman Catholic president. Despite the dire warnings of those who said electing John Fitzgerald Kennedy would subjugate our country to the Pope and the Vatican, the Irish Democrat from Boston was elected over Richard Nixon.

It was the beginning of national change. Gone were the old gray-haired politicians reiterating party platforms—except for Lyndon Johnson, the powerful Senate Majority Leader who was Kennedy’s vice president and who successfully landed several states. Instead, America elected the handsome young Senator who offered change from the stagnation of the Eisenhower years and vowed that the U.S. would catch and pass the Soviet Union, both militarily and economically. Cold War tensions were stretched to the breaking point, and American faced a desperate situation.

Nixon, on the other side, promised to continue the peace and prosperity that the country had experienced under Eisenhower’s terms. He represented the comfortable old shoes of that race. This was a decade before his personal flaws would bring about his worst defeat, as sure as any antagonist in any novel is destroyed by his own failings.

“Ask not,” said Kennedy, “what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” With those words and many more in his eloquent inaugural, Kennedy called the country to service. His words were heard by a generation that responded, much as their parents had responded two decades before when bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor. The Peace Corps was born., and many more young people found employment in national and state parks, placing country first. Young people connected with this charismatic man, adored his wife and young family, and felt a visceral participation in what had been an exclusive men’s club of government.

But verbal eloquence and skilled oratory do not a leader make. Kennedy had to prove himself, and history has shown how the man once considered “too young and inexperienced” was able to rise above politics and become that leader. By leading with strength through the Civil Rights movement, Kennedy inspired a nation to better itself and made possible what happened yesterday—the election of the first African-American to its highest office.

As for our newly-elected president, also a charismatic man with verbal eloquence and skilled oratory, he, too, is considered “too young and inexperienced.” His past and present associations with extreme radicals and anti-America blatherskites, those who represent the antithesis of how I perceive this country, is worrisome. His skimpy record leads one to think he is a party hack without the political courage to challenge his fellow Democrats and bring about the changes he has promised.

I watched as the television cameras panned the faces of the crowd in that Chicago park last night, and I saw many things. I saw tears in many eyes. I saw over-whelming emotion on faces of color. I saw eyes that glistened with a messianic fervor. I saw joy. I saw hope. I saw pride in the outcome of a battle well fought. And, I saw the connection of a young generation to a new and promising leader.

I struggled with my decision. I wanted to believe. I wanted another leader with the potential to do what Kennedy did for my generation. I wanted my country to be righted and set on a new track. I wanted its reputation restored around the world. By voting for John McCain, I chose the comfortable old shoes, and it brought home to me how difficult a decision my parents and their parents faced in 1960.

As I listened to McCain’s concession speech, I had tears running down my face. Not because my choice had not prevailed, but because of the man’s character. His speech, given at what was a most difficult time for him, was the epitome of grace and class. His promise to work with his successful opponent rang true. If character can be the measure of a man’s potential, what an outstanding president he would have been.

As for Barack Obama, I am more than willing to follow as he leads us towards the promised land. I want to wallow in the aura of hope. I want to rejoice in the promise of change for the better. I want him to rise above the constraints of his political party and lead with wisdom and universal cooperation. I want to believe he is not a charlatan, as he has been called, but a man of destiny. I want him to fulfill the dreams of his supporters by being the leader they think they see in him.

As I said earlier, verbal eloquence and skilled oratory do not a leader make, but they can inspire and motivate and revitalize. Perhaps that will prove to be the magic of Obama. If the people of America believe they are being led by a man of great promise and potential and ability to make this nation better, those very people will make it happen.

Yes, we can.