It's Been a (Persistently) Cold Winter

At right, Mac the Dog models the very latest in frost bite protection

Not that I am whingeing or anything, but this winter has been cold in a stubborn sort of way. Since the Great Winter Rain of Thanksgiving, we have had very few days above - 15 , and quite a number of days in the -30 to -40 range.

I knew it was a bad time to go Outside and leave the house and critters, but circumstances were such that I had little choice (no, this was not a trip to white beaches and turquoise seas). Despite the best and valiant efforts of the neighbors who tend to my place when I travel, I returned to frozen drains and frozen dogs.

The drains, although somewhat expensive to thaw, were at least remedied within 24 hours, and I now have a fully functioning system, albeit with a cracked 2-inch pipe from washing machine to main drain, but since I live in a post 'n pad simple box - with all of its pipes insulated and accessible under the house - this is a relatively inexpensive summertime fix. In the meantime, grey water leaks out when I do laundry and harmlessly forms a glacier on the gravel pad.

The frost-bitten dog is proving to be more challenging, however. In 20+ years of having sled and other assorted dogs, all of whom have lived outside when I travel, I never had a dog get frost bite, not even on their most sensitive naughty bits.

Until now. Inexplicably, upon arrival home, I found Mac the Dog with an alarming frost- bitten patch the size of a quarter on his side: fur gone, big necrotic cratered patch. And it's been growing daily.

Well, the obvious solution is to keep the dog indoors, and yes, he is indoors as much as possible, but this is a dog that drinks water by the buckets, and needs complete (and I mean complete) privacy in order to do his business. In his simple doggie brain, this translates into: "I can barely pee on a leash, and I most certainly cannot poop on a leash." Without the freedom to bury himself deep in the woods and deep in the snow, he really cant do anything at all. He also requires at least five to ten minutes of twirling in circles before he can settle down to toilet.

Ten to 15 minutes at minus 30, with no fur over a frost-bitten patch equals more dead skin and no healing. After two days of trying to protect it with salve and such like, the quarter has grown to a fifty-cent piece. And the side of a dog is proving to be a tricky place to affix any type of bandage, medication or cold protection.

The polar-fleece dog coat? Ripped off in minutes and left in the snow somewhere.

The vet-wrap rib-cage vest over salve, cotton balls, gauze and adhesive tape? Scratched off within 30 seconds, and half ingested, before I had even returned the vet items to their box.

So, this morning, I devised the frost-bite singlet, as modeled above. First, three layers of polar fleece protecting the frost bite - affixed with duct tape to the surrounding fur - then, the T-shirt, to prevent scratching and chewing, and to provide additional warmth. I am hoping the legs of the T-shirt, and the snug fit by additional application of duct tape will prevent him from wiggling out of the garment.

He's on a half-hour trial out in the dog pen now - as the coming week has meetings and other work-related obligations that will require him to be outside (although in a dog house with lots of straw) for some portion of the day. But in the wee hours of the morning I awake with visions of out-of-control lesions eating into the ribcage of Mac the Dog.

Who would have thought that a completely frozen drain system would prove to be easier to fix than a frost-bitten dog? Yet another thing learned*.

* along with the valuable arctic plumbing fact that while a steady drip through water pipes prevents freeze-up, a steady trickle, as from a toilet tank that was stealthily running, into a drain creates freeze-up. Lo, for the price of a $2o replacement toilet valve, there went $400 in thawing costs.

On the DC Street Beat

Call me stupid, but I just don't get the British reference....

...So much for any hope of a return to civil discourse

An Engineering Track They Don't Talk About at University

My dad was an architect, and quite a few skyscraper office buildings in a major US city incorporate his designs and his work. So I grew up looking at buildings and wondering about those who design and build them, as well as engaging in ruminations about what our modern collection of architecture - that which does not collapse due to shoddy design and materials (think McMansions here) - will tell those who follow us. Will the buildings which survive be architectural masterpieces on par with a Chartre or a Notre Dame, or will they be Olive Trees and Micky D's?

Speaking of which, when I have been inside one I have often wondered about the architects who design fast food restaurants. Are they people who managed the technical principles of architecture, but lacked all sense of aesthetics and design, or are they those that just barely made it through school? Maybe there is a lot of money to be had in designing these plastic representations of uber-America, or maybe there is just some bizarre satisfaction gained in creating big happy face clowns and kitschy roof tops.

Along that same drift of thinking - what about people who design vibrators, such as the Wascally Wabbit (tm) (it's water proof!)?? And how that little bunny gazes adoringly at the robust penis representation. The rabbit - so often referenced in the America sexual vernacular: they screwed like bunnies, the rabbit died, Hugh and his bunnies.... It's hard not to giggle at the Wascally Wabbit; oh Elmer, how did it come to this??

It takes some calculations, not to mention a whole bunch of metal ball bearings, to get that Wascally Wabbit rotating with all the insouciance of a young Lolita twirling a hula-hoop. Not to mention that the bunny ears are designed to flitter at a high rate of speed for extra oooumph.

Behold, the evolved, engineered vibrator, behind which there must be a mechanical engineer. True, one with a sense of humor (and not much color sense - why purple? why not purple?), but an engineer none-the-less, one could imagine. Harder to imagine, though, is the career path which led to such a point. It doesn't seem likely that vibrator design is one of those things that they, well, touch upon in engineering school.

But someone has to do it. And do it with flare. Carved dildos were found in ancient Roman excavations - will Wascally Wabbit and its kin be among our artifacts found by distant descendants? If so, they will perhaps notice the persistent use of sappy happy clown faces (with a twinge of the demonic) memorialized on scales large and small - from Ronald McDonald to the happy little munchkin grinning from under his penis cap on the Wascally Wabbit...

Little Penis Man: with the weirdly truncated arms

Miller's Magical Mystery Tour

Poor Joe. Looks like he is running out of straws to grasp in his efforts to prove that no, really, he did win the senatorial election. Thus, in the spirit of Christmas, I offer a few more that he might want to consider including in his lawsuit(s).

1) It's all Wikileaks' fault: Really Joe, you did get the majority of votes, but Alaska's electronic ballot boxes were commandeered by Julian Assange and his merry band of cyberpunks, who erased votes cast for you (sorta kinda like what you did with your work emails). It's all part of the vast leftist conspiracy to take over the world that you and Sarah are so valiantly battling.

2) Little green men are responsible: As those familiar with Roswell and other alien sightings will tell you, Joe, its gotta be illegal aliens - whether terrestrial or extra. Remember a couple years back, there was that weird light that was seen in the sky near Tok? It must have been a saucer full of little green men who have been in hiding ever since, and somehow used their superior technology to queer the election results. Demand a hand recount, Joe!

3) It's climate change: Don't really know how to work that one into the lawsuit, Joe, but since climate change gets blamed for everything nowadays, how could you let this one pass? And since you obviously have your own unique interpretations of the law, arguing that climate change adversely affected your senatorial chances should present no challenge at all to you.

4) It's the fluoride: We've all been told that fluoridated water strengthens teeth and helps prevent childhood cavities, but it's a front, a sham. In reality, fluoridated water is being used to brainwash us, thereby preventing many, many people from being able to fully comprehend your stellar qualifications for the senate seat. Who knew that your greatest allies in this brave battle might just turn out to be Fluoride Free Fairbanks?

5) It's Obama's fault: Enuff said.

Freezing rain has turned Fairbanks into a NO DRIVE zone

How bad are the roads, you ask? So slick that a Subaru with winter tires going 15 miles per hour can't come to a stop.

My first sign to turn around and not even attempt Ballaine Hill was sliding across Ballaine Road as I  made a low-speed right turn on to it.  But no, I thought driving cautiously and slow might be alright.

My second sign to turn around and not try Ballaine Hill, even slowly, came before the crest of the hill, when I asked a woman pulled over on the should if she needed a lift.  Her car couldn't make it up the hill, she said, so she had called for a lift home.

By the time I noticed and paid attention to the third sign not to attempt Ballaine Hill even at a near crawl -- the third sign being all the other vehicles off the road below me -- I was already sliding downhill, ABS fluttering away, into the opposite lane of traffic, trying to gain some control over my direction and not slide into any of the other cars off the road.  This was all happening very slowly, mind you, but that was little comfort.

Visualize, for a moment, a curling stone.  You know how it comes to a slow, graceful spiral as it nears the end of the lane?  That was my trusty, sure-footed little Soob. By sheer luck and maybe some decent steering, the Soob gently nosed into a mini snow berm on the shoulder. On my side of the road.  Facing downhill. In theory, I could have tried to get down the hill.  Problem was, there was no guarantee I wouldn't hit all the other cars half-in/half-out of the lane.  And there was no guarantee I wouldn't end up spiraling into the opposite lane of traffic again.  Which was a far sight better than most of the other 8-10 vehicles off the road around me.  Most are going to require tow trucks which are going to be hard to come by today.

I managed to get all of the Soob on to the shoulder and walked back home on the snowmachine trail by the side of the road.  As I was walking I watched two cars crest the hill going way too fast, lose control and almost hit the Soob and vehicles coming up from the other side.  

The Tea Party: Party of the Petulant

Joe reminds me of nothing so much as of a red-faced toddler drumming his heels on the floor and beating his sweaty little fists on the coffee table because he didnt get to eat the whole box of Sugar Bombs. With a poopy diaper to further enrage the lil' tyke.

Palin and Miller (aka Neo-Palin) have got that lower-lip pout down cold. When things don't turn out like the reality TV script said they would (whadda ya mean it takes more than 5" F**K Me heels and an up-do to win the vice-presidency???) , well these two do know how to pitch a royal fit.

Another "P" word: Paranoid. Party of the Paranoid, but we've known that for a long, long time. Voter fraud, conspiracy? Yeah right, Joe, gimme some of what you been smoking.

Because one thing is for sure - Joe's cognitive functions are a bit mussed up. He can't do maths to - well - win a Senate seat. Because, news flash Joe - winning the primary by just a couple of thousand votes when only about 28% (if that) of the electorate actually bothered to vote does not a path to the Senate ensure.

While it doesn't look like Joe is going to find out what moose-hunting along the Beltway is like, he is about to find out what eating crow is like.

And surprise, Miller is going to file yet ANOTHER lawsuit

It appears that the Miller campaign has been turning over a few rocks lately, looking for the worst possible examples of lower life form to add to Miller's Sturmabteilung. Witness the addition of Floyd Brown, the man responsible for one of the worst examples of racebaiting I've yet witnessed.

I'm sure Karl Rove will turn up sometime soon.

But in the meantime, peoples, I highly recommend the political shorts put together by Alaska Robotics. I missed them prior to the election while in my work-induced funk.

Every vote counts, unless of course, your intent was to vote for someone other than Joe Miller

Why are we surprised?  Has not the bar been set, nay, buried beneath a two-foot berm by our own two  million dollar hockey mom?  This is Alaska politics now, like our sad, dysfunctional national scene.

And, clearly, this is all the federal government's fault.

If they'd just eradicated any vestigial foreign-ness stemming from the Murkowski family's origins at Ellis Island, back when Lisa's great-grandfather emigrated to this country to something very patriotic and American-sounding like, say, Smith, we wouldn't be in this mess.  I'll bet the Democrats were in charge back then, too, allowing Poles to come over with their difficultly spelled names all willy-nilly taking away those low-paying jobs that our great-grandfathers wouldn't deign to do. 

Try it.

S-m-i-t-h.

Easy!  Got it on the first go!

As opposed to Murkowsky  Murcowsky  Mirkowski  Murkowski.


Came the news that Miller and that bunch of Outside wackos, aka the Tea Party, are suing to make make any misspelling of 'Murkowski' not count.  From the ADN:

"Miller is asking a judge to stop the state from making a judgment on a voter's intentions if the voter wrote in something other than "Murkowski" or "Lisa Murkowski." State law allows no leeway for other spellings, his lawsuit says."

What if a voter wrote in 'Lisa Ann Murkowski'? Or 'Lisa A. Murkowski'? And how shocking that Joe Miller, lawyer and ex-magistrate -- who made such an enduringly positive impression on his peers that word is that the magistrate's association spurned his campaign's request for an endorsement prior to the election -- has pursued this further.  I'm seriously suprised surprised.

Better yet is Miller's argument that minor misspellings, may, in fact, be 'protest' votes.  Frankly, I think one could make the case that a huge number of voters, hundreds even, intended to vote a protest vote and accidentally spelled the name correctly.

So there I was in the ballot box, so I misspelled it just to make some weird point that I don't understand but sounded really good when I heard it on talk radio... and I -- dang it -- what was that again ? Murkowsky  Murcowsky  Mirkowski  Murkowski. Oh, shit!  I think I voted for Lisa Murkowski!

Really, I am shocked that he hasn't started challenging correctly-spelled versions of the name on the grounds that they were cast, actually, by voters whose intent was to misspell it.   It is entirely possible that 98% of those write in votes were cast by people in protest and they spelled the damned name right!  My god!  How will we ever know? 

S-m-i-t-h.

Sayonara, Mike!

The voter booting of the uber-grinch, Mike Kelly, can't go unremarked by this blog, where once, in more optimistic times, we blogged regularly and even posted a pic of Mike being burned in effigy. The near-win of Karl Kassel (losing by only seven votes) the last time Mean Mike was up for re-election was painful, but finally the screw has turned.

I could scarce believe it when I woke to otherwise very dismal election news last Wednesday. Could it be that the district 'Dweller and I live in is finally tipping to the more liberal side? Probably not - since our district has led in Joe Miller votes - both in the primary and in the main election. More likely, the late-in-the-day campaign that highlighted Mike's dismal record against organized labor and domestic violence did the trick. Whatever it was, I am grateful. Enjoy retirement Mike, and please, stay out of politics in the future!

So, yeah, as this country continues slouching on its path to government-as-reality-TV, there has been little to celebrate. Still at least two of the three Sarah Clones got a righteous shellacking (although Bachmann is still alive and kicking and as mentally incontinent as ever) and Alaska didnt wake up to the news that Unsavory Joe is our senator (y-e-t). Of course, he is doing everything he can to totally muck up and delay the ballot-counting process, but then could we expect anything less from such as he?

Criminy. Never did I think that one day I would write on this blog that I miss the days of Ted, Frank ( M-U-R-K-O-W-S-K-I), and all the rest of the corrupt bastards. True, they were less than forthright with their constituents, but by gawd, at least they were old school politics.

Yeah, even Don Young is looking better and better. Sure, he is still a foul-mouthed ass, but nothing like Tea Partiers and Joe Miller to make him look more like Robert Byrd every day.

They had C street smarts (even if sometimes they were too smart for their own good), they knew their facts and if at times they twisted information to suit their own purposes, at least it was clear that they were doing so for a reason other than pure babbling ignorance.

They were arrogant, but theirs was an arrogance born of ability, intellect (OK, maybe not in the case of Frank or Don) and experience. It was not the insanely annoying petty arrogance of Palin and her spawn who take no care to hide the fact that they just don't give a shit about accuracy, fairness, common decency, or truth, because none of that matters to the Legions of Christ when they are inspired by the Spirit, or mama grizzlies or whatever. Or, more accurately, are engaging in the magical thinking that, as any licensed psychologist will point out, goes along with extreme dysfunction. As in Michele Bachmann's case: if she says it costs 200 million a day for Obama to visit India, then it does, because she said so, and that makes it so (and ain't nobody going to prove her wrong).

On the other hand, her suggestion that Obama and entourage "visit" India via videoconference makes a weird sort of twisted sense. In this digitally-crazed age, people like Bachmann are where they are primarily because they reign within a pixellated realm fabricated by cable TV, Twitter and Facebook.

On a completely unrelated topic - 'Dweller and I have been AWOL due to a combination of anomie (the shrill onslaught of the Palin Pods has put the muscle on us) and too much going on in work and personal life.

Maybe I will start blogging about chickens again: they continue to be a constant source of entertainment and useful instructors in the nuances of human behavior in these dark days (and I am not referring solely to the solar cycle)....

The feng-shui is very very very good

....along with other daily marginalia, like the profound relaxation and enjoyment I have been garnering from my new wood-fired sauna, which I hocked my truck to have built. But it was worth it - a balm for the soul in during bleak times.....maybe Obama should try one.

Mike Huckabee Might of Called Me...

But I wouldn't necessarily know if he did this past primary. You see, my cordless phone battery finally gasped its last. Judging from the on-line reviews of my particular Panasonic phone model, I have nothing to complain about (and I am not). I got over five years of charging on that battery - and most of the reviews cited the crap battery performance of no more than two years as their chief plaint.

Nor did the battery over-heat or burst into flames.

But, it finally just wouldn't hold a charge for very long outside of its cradle. So, tired of the incessant little beeping noise it made when I was on a call, I decided to replace it.

Not so easy. Because in this throw-away society, my five-year old Panasonic phone was absolutely Jurassic. I didn't even bother with the store of its original provenance, I went directly to the website. Where it was indeed confirmed that neither my phone model nor its battery still existed.

At this point, the first notion of replacing the thing flitted into my consciousness (what would a new phone cost? About 40$?), but I like the phone and it does its job. So, I called tech help to find a replacement battery. That took roughly 10 minutes, as I was routed first through all the menu options, and then shunted off to a call center that I strongly suspect was in the North Atlantic - like maybe Ireland - aren't call centers there booming the Irish economy?

It took quite a bit longer for the very polite gentleman to discover what battery # would work in my archaic phone - but to his credit he persevered and did not suggest I buy a new Panasonic phone. But, as this was the tech help center, not a purchasing center, the polite man, apologizing profusely, suggested the Panasonic web store.

Beep, beep, beep.

On to the web (now 20 minutes into the enterprise), but among all the various batteries available for web sales (at least 15), the one I needed did not have a little "purchase" radio button; instead I was instructed to call yet another 1-800 #.

Beep, beep, beep.

The wall of phones at Freddie's floated before my eyes.

I fought off the siren call of easy come/easy go, and gamely called the battery supply call center. And reached, I am quite sure, Bengaluru or some other mega-call center city in India. The extremely long relay time between our call and response and the very measured careful English with just a hint of melody of yet another incredibly polite man sort of gave that away.

I then embarked on a 35 minute ordeal of purchasing the battery - all while the beep, beep, beeping of my dying battery became more urgent and more desperately pitched. The suspense was palatable. Would I be able to complete the transaction (in which this very polite gentleman confirmed and reconfirmed each piece of information collected two to five times before completely satisfied) before my battery totally died?

Further, as the mere task of purchasing a replacement battery had now eaten over an hour of my time, with no real guarantee that I would complete the order and my objective, the lure of a new phone was becoming almost too much to ignore any longer. Not more than a few times during the agonizing process did I almost click the disconnect button. That plus the fact that it cost me $35 to get my new battery, by the time the shipping was factored in.

But, it just stuck in my craw to toss a perfectly good piece of equipment simply because nowadays something that is older than two years is considered fit only for the landfill.

So, I dug my heels in, and two days ago, my new battery arrived. I admit I was pretty much convinced that when I plugged the battery into my phone, it would explode. But it didn't. And my phone works, and it doesn't beep, and if Mike Huckabee calls again, I am ready.