Lost in a Haze of Daylight Induced Frolicking

And We Haven't Even Started Fishing Yet

Have you noticed that many of your favorite Alaskan blogs, not to imply that this is indeed one of them, have been a bit thin lately?

Most of us, I'd guess, have been burning brightly of late, cramming house/cabin related projects, garden work and as much quality time (read: outdoor with friends and beer) as we can into our short little season known as summer. As I explained to a recent transplant and Alaskan-in-training, you don't want to be regretting how you spent your summer a few months from now when the temperatures have dropped and the daylight dwindled. Nope, time to embrace the daylight and the manic affective disorder.

I'm so M.A.D. stricken that I haven't even been tempted to go off when Sarah Palin says something truly stupid:

America is digging a deeper hole, and how are we paying for this government largesse? We're borrowing from China, and when you consider that now we own 60 percent of General Motors or the U.S. government does, consider, but who is the U.S. government becoming more and more indebted to? It's China. So that leaves you to have to ask who really is going to own our car industry in America?

Where to start? I mean, given her obvious ambitions to higher office outside of Alaska, she must have some handlers by now. Either they are dumb as posts, too, or perhaps they don't read either. Psst! Guys - start doing something other than watch FoxNews. There's a whole world out there online. Start here.

I had the great good fun to attend a Goldstream Valley party the other night. It had the requisites: fire, beer, tons of potluck food, interesting people, beer, and a blue-tarp-as-rain-shelter with a spruce pole post that was tied off to all the trees around it. (There really is no end to the usefulness of a blue tarp, is there?) Lot of little kids running around, but strangely, no dogs, which is pretty much an unheard of occurance.

There were many highlights to the evening, including my conversation with an end-of-the-roader who kept announcing during breaks in the conversation that Obama was running the country into the ground. After imparting his plan to survive the coming collapse of near civilization as we know it (the plan is your basic stockpile food and weapons type plan) I went back to the main conversation by the fire. Somehow, all the guys had gravitated over to the forge (ya know, where people make stuff out of metal) leaving the remaining women and end-of-the-roader, who was by that time fixed in place by intoxication. Don't worry, he wasn't driving home.

Somehow, and I could not have predicted this, our conversation frightened our end-of-the-roader so much that he left after announcing that:

1. We scared him.
2. He would never reveal anything we had said.
3. He had never been married and never intended to try that state.