December 19

It is 9:30 am and cold and still outside.  Christmas lights are on in the neighborhood  looking festive and cheery in the blue twilit sky.  Soon we will be turning the corner into summer, gaining 5 or 10 seconds of daylight each day.  The full eclipse of the moon is tomorrow night and we should be able to see part of it.

Yesterday I finished our Christmas shopping.  I have always found it very awkward that this time of year should be so extremely busy when in fact it is a time to go inwards, conserve energy, and re-charge for the busy summer season.  There doesn’t seem to be any way around it however. 

Buffy and I headed downtown.  There were huge traffic jams everywhere including the entrance to Costco where traffic backed up for a couple blocks.  Sarah Palin (the quitter) was there to push her newest book.  The management had gone so far as to rent port-a-potties in case people wanted to camp out the night before but turnout was smaller than projected. 

We went downtown to Side Street for coffee.  I met Deb, co-owner and wife of the artist George.  I can tell that will be my favorite coffee place in ANC.  Then we joined Crystal at the Den’aina Center (northern Athabascan word meaning ‘the people’) to browse the big Native crafts fair.  It was terrific, I thought, with vendors hawking everything from honey and beeswax, qiviut (underhair of the musk ox) scarves, booster fund raisers, ulu knives, unique jewelry, and a whole lot more.  I found a source for local honey and beeswax and Matanuska Maid eggnog and cheese the Irish one might like, among other Christmas treasures.

Ken Lisbourne’s artwork booth was my favorite.  Crystal, who knows him well, introduced us.  This Point Hope Inupiat chooses very personal subjects depicting traditional Inupiat life, each with a story.  If pressed, it would be hard to choose a favorite watercolor, but one especially is really powerful.  A bowhead lies on the beach next to the people of the village of Cape Thompson, all dead.  The contrast between  dead people wearing cheerful, colorful parkas, was so striking, we had to ask him the back story and later I did some Internet research.  Dan O’Neill in his book The Firecracker Boys, has this to say:

In 1958, Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, unveiled his plan to detonate six nuclear bombs off the Alaskan coast to create a new harbor. However, the plan was blocked by a handful of Eskimos and biologists, who succeeded in preventing massive nuclear devastation potentially far greater than that of the Chernobyl blast. An unprecedented account of one of the most shocking chapters of the Nuclear Age.

Kenny was only ten at the time but he remembers it vividly.  Apparently there is talk of a movie about this near-catastrophic event.

Speaking of movies, Jon Voight is in town filming a thriller.  There were pictures in Anchorage Daily News including one of a local seven-year-old lying in the snow.  It has been very cold this week and I can imagine how uncomfortable everybody was.

I have begun getting the voice back in shape using the Richard Miller exercises which always work for me.  It was not pretty but not as bad as I expected.  I haven’t really sung since June and with a voice as big as mine, it takes a while to get going!  Buffy says she could hear a few curse words coming through the door!  One thing with singing is you can’t skip any of the steps and you can’t over-practice in the beginning, even if you have a Type A personality.  The voice just stops working around the breaks and then just stops working completely!