Great Day

Wow, what a day here in Anchorage! The Arctic Blast has been keeping a stranglehold on springtime, but finally the bubble went busted. So everybody seems to be in better spirits. Honestly, I didn’t get accosted when trying to cross Tudor on a bike, by irate drivers. Good thing the DMV doesn’t use that little sign that reads, “Yield To Pedestrians In Crosswalk” as the vision test qualifier, by God the streets would be vacant of licensed drivers! And today the weather was such that it allowed the thermometer to reach 60 degrees? Wow. Mark Twain would have been proud as young kids braved the now unfrozen ponds and free-flowing streams around town, to play out Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fantasies. I even saw a few adults enjoying some rafting about Goose Lake, on a floating platform that had escaped its anchor over the winter. And birds and waterfowl were everywhere. An eagle soared above in the blue of space, testifying that this magnificent bird owns the ether. Plovers, along with many other shorebirds stopping in Anchorage for a migratory break, raced along the shorelines. Cranes and geese showed off in the skies, arriving back once again to this place we call home. Robins sang out mating tunes and swallows frolicked about, the rays of the long awaited sun highlighting this birds fanciful reflective like wings - a discotheque display. I found myself humming “Homeward Bound”. Over at the Goose, grills gave off that pleasant odor of blacked hot dogs while an old beat up Rambler’s radio blasted out a great Sly Stone summertime tune, “Hot fun in the Summertime, Oh yeh”. People wore smiles here, there and everywhere. Hey, a Kool-aid stand! Harleys roared by as did motor homes and vehicles pulling fishing boats. This is what Alaska is all about. We wade through the winter season putting up with cabin fever, maybe getting in a little skiing and lots of beer drinking, but it is the springtime that enlightens us to get the smiles out of hibernation. And you could tell that people were upbeat, as we had made it through yet another winter. People were smiling so much it appeared as if laughter was at height. Talk about a laugh. Did you get a glimpse of that show on the Discovery Channel, called “Alaskan Experience”? It is what makes Alaska look like a fool hardy place of danger. I guess this is one of the newest reality shows to hit the crap networks. It is about a bunch of non-Alaskans who think they have the guts to stick it out in the wilderness. It is pathetic and the only thing it can do is place laughter upon this great place of ours. Idiotic it is. Sorry, I went off subject. Again, it was a great day here in Anchorage. Until, until, those Wild Man trucks started deploying all those orange signs that indicates traffic patterns are about to get confusing if not impossible to find your way out of a subdivision. Realityreal©, I was stuck in my own subdivision! Around and around I went, getting dizzy. It was good for a buzz if nothing else. So I returned home and grabbed the bike. See, this way I could sneak through the road detour police. Does it really take a week just to paint lines on the road? Oh, this is a DOT funded project so it means no accountability with time or “your” money! Anyway, soon I was away from the maddening crowd of commuters bent on once again loosing the battle to road construction delays. Ah such a beautiful day it was. Until the weather started changing. Really, the winds started picking up when I was down towards downtown. It was the accompanying noise that warned my senses that this was not a “Chinook” but more likely a man-made invasion of the weather. It meant training exercise time for the Raptors! Talk about Raptors, along the new “Elmore” there exists these signs about wildlife viewing, those brown binocular signs you usually see along the Turnagain. But where the hell is this wildlife in the “Big Wild Life”? I know I am not supposed to use the “Big Wild” without permission, but I also like to practice my 1st Amendment Rights. Anyway, I saw a few tourists down along the new “Elmore”. It is easy to tell tourists, as they are not used to the weather, so must dress as if it is January. I am glad they come prepared, as to buy crap clothing from the Saturday market just makes a bunch of lawyers rich and supports child slave labor in China. What ever happened to that polar bear and made in Alaska? Extinct? Maybe that is the reason for the endangered species thing on the “white” bear. Anyway, the tourists had this fancy camera equipment set-up because it sounded like “Raptors” on the loose. They must have been birders. It was the hats that gave it away. So they were hanging out to get a glimpse of what was making all the racket. I hated to tell them that it was that squawking mechanical bird that Chugach Electric has stationed at the electric substation! To keep “real” birds away from the high-voltage stuff. Poor tourists, waiting for nothing. Anyway, the real Raptors were going out in full force over at Elmendorf Air Force Base. It was ruining the so far enjoyable day. Really, the sounds from the thrusters and accompanying air force was enough to commence vibrating the air around me. It was causing unpleasant wind like patterns. The geese on the Park strip went scared and headed south? Little kids started crying, as if their first experience with Armageddon. And tourists on 4th Avenue went confused when buildings started shaking, earthquake! Do you realize that for one solo dog-fight training mission it takes the equivalent of what a well paid oil worker pays in yearly income tax, just for fuel. Hey, oil reached $134.00 a barrel the same day oil executives were investigated “under oath” up on the Hill. Anyway, the military birds should be grounded, as to fight a war with high oil prices is not worth it in my book. Waste like this is strangling the economy. Look, I can get by on $10.00 a day for food. That amounts to about 300 dollars a month for a family of 2 adults, wine and beer included. But then there is the house payment that surpasses the food bill by at least another thousand dollars, just so I can have a shelter to enjoy my 300 dollars of food. And then there are the heating and electric bills, which is also surpassing the food bill, just so I can have warmth to enjoy that 300 dollars of food. There is something wrong when so much of our disposable income is used for shelter, cell-phones, cable TV and other electronic crap. We need to get back to the basics, like good roads and I would love to see a moratorium on road construction, say every other year we ban it, except for minor repairs. Think about it, no orange signs, no delays, roads no longer littered with asphalt crap thrown all over the place with no concerns that this stuff contains oily residue and when loose can make it into the rivers, lakes and streams. There will come a day when kids are not allowed to venture out into the local waters, due road construction pollution. Sorry Mark. Anyway, the Raptors have taken off, good tidings for the time being. And the fake winds have died down, so people are once again enjoying themselves instead of running for cover. Hey, I was down at Resolution Park just in time to watch the empty coal cars of the Alaska Railroad come to life, as it is a seasonal thing. See, this railroad can’t make ends meet, so it continues to be subsidized by Uncle Pork. So that is why this time of year you will see the daily procession of empty coal cars running between Anchorage and Seward, just to log time to get Uncle Sam to cut a check. And today there were other empty cars included in this 83-car train ride. Sure enough, “Alaska Agriculture – Serving Alaska and the World”. Now the paint was pretty worm, or it may have been the first pass at a new coat of paint. See, if old it was probably a remnant of the Delta Barley project bust-boom project. That’s correct, bust before boom. See, that was a failed project to begin with. But we went ahead and spent a bunch of money anyway, to provide an infrastructure to support the barley when no barley would ever grow in amounts strong enough to support an industry. We get on to these agricultural project kicks about every ten years. So that train car may have been in efforts for the newest bust-boom project – blueberries! That project died a long time ago, but the boom continues somewhat, from pork to support some fly by night operation that wants to sell Alaskan berries for medicinal purposes. Anyway, we did enjoy a few good days, until the MOSQUIOTOES found out that there was something to look forward too. See, it has been proven that high blood pressure gives off a signal that the “squiots” can pick up. And with the Wild Man going wild with road construction, the blood pressure is arising. Just look at the bottle-neck that the “new” Elmore has started. Realityreal©, the one lane leading onto the Elmore from Tudor gets backed up for miles, thus cutting down Tudor to one lane. Do people get paid for designing crap like this? Hey, bike riding has one advantage, one gets to see all the fun things to laugh about. And what’s realityreal© great, it is close to Memorial Day weekend, when this city gets real enjoyable as the road crews get furloughed and I can get a real buzz on beer instead of a dizzy spell buzz when trying to find the way out of my subdivision. Alaska, we’re there, sometimes!

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