Northern Noise

So this is the weekend of the 6 year olds Halloween jokes. His favorite: What's in a ghost's nose? Boooooogers. Closely followed by: Why do ghosts like winter? They get to wear their booooooots. Other favorites I've heard (and heard again, and again) What's a witch's favorite subject in school? Spelling! and What kind of witch lives at the beach? A sand-witch! Better than some he's told.....

Today was an interesting day in terms of the future. I was sitting waiting for Bob to finish getting his sinuses sucked out, and one of my former students came to see me in his scrubs. He's finishing his OB rotation before heading to Whitefish, MT for his next rotation. He was a totally great kid in high school, he's probably a great doctor, but it's weird to think of him delivering babies. I've had former students as my dental assistant, giving me shots, and I've had a former student cut my hair. I've had former students come to brag about how great they're doing, and how they make more money than me. I had a former student share his views on Dante and I've had former students recommend good music and good books. Today I also read about a former student who used a gun to break into a hotel room over drugs and ended up shot and in the hospital. He was a gifted poet, and a hell of a creative soul, but I can't say I'm too surprised to read abo

So it's a typical morning and I'm fooling around on the computer while the dogs lay around and do nothing. In fact, one of them was snoring. Suddenly the interview on The World moves into the Ecuadorian street and dogs are barking in the background. My 3 lazy dogs all jump up, ears on the alert and begin to run around the house searching for the offending canines. They're barking and growling and running from the kitchen window to the patio window and back. But no invading dogs are found. The oldest (and wisest) dog figured the threat was minor, and lay back down. The middle dog seems to be getting it as well. He's just sitting in the middle of the living room watching as the puppy continues to run back and forth and back and forth. It's been a few minutes since the sound of barking dogs filtered over the airwaves. Dog 2 is lying down again, and Dog 3 seems to be realizing that whatever she heard isn't here any more. She's still on alert but is quiet

Since we moved into this house, we have had unwelcome visitors each fall. They're small and disgusting, can squeeze through the smallest holes, and cause general distress. The first year we were here, we were naive and unknowing. One morning Bob went to put on his boots and found they were full of dogfood. It was odd, but he dumped them out and went on his merry way. Over the next week, there were several more mornings when he found dogfood in his boots, and I even found some in my boots too. We figured it was either the dog going crazy, or the children being funny. So we scolded the girls, dumped out the dogfood and kept on trucking. That weekend I went to clean and vacuum and discovered several stashes of dogfood, with various other additions - popcorn, old cereal, cracker crumbs. It still didn't occur to me that we were infested; I thought we were just an unusually sloppy family. And so it went until one morning when Bob and I both found boots full of chow and hollered

Okay, so tonight my family is subject to the grand experiment. First, the background.... As a child growing up in Kenai, Alaska, in the 1970's, fresh & fancy food wasn't always available for affordable. Most families used powered milk, the only tomatoes we saw were canned, and my grandmother used to mail us nuts and chocolate chips and the like for holiday baking. As such, we ate lots of fish and moose. And created meals with what was available and cheap. Enter the can of cream of mushroom soup. As I look through the old church cookbooks, there's a can of some sort of soup in almost every recipe. It's how the casserole was made, yes? So last night I found myself with leftover rice and also discovered a bag of hamburger meat in the fridge. What to do? Somewhere from the recipe box of my mind I remembered a recipe that my mom used to make with regularity. I always liked it, I think. So tonight, my family gets to try a real, down home hotdish treat. Here's t

"It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave." ~Ed Abbey Things that make me laugh just thinking about them: 1) When Jed was barely 4, he (as always) ran around the house naked. On this particular evening he kept running from the kitchen to the heater and back. Finally I asked him, " What are you doing? " to which he replied " Warming up my little guys. " " What! " I said, thinking that euphemism was not age appropriate. " My pirates ," he explained, holding up two small plastic men. Oooohhhhh. 2) When Ali was 3 or 4 she suddenly got a conspiratorial look on her face at the dinner table. Leaning towards her father and me she said, " I learned the difference in boys and girls today. " " Oh ?" her dad replied. " Yes ," she nodded, quite seriously, " Boys have beards and girls have chins. " 3) My mother was always a bit slo

Today I'm really missing my dad. I think it's because we're having such beautiful fall weather, although, that doesn't really make sense because I think of my dad as more of a winter guy, at least in his younger days. I could get all metaphorical about fall, about how this year the warmth and sunshine seem to be hanging on longer than expected and are all the more beautiful because I know they'll soon be gone, replaced by dark and cold. But I think that really it's because I remember a few years when my dad let me skip school to go silver fishing on the Kenai River with him. Summertime on the Kenai River is rather crazy. Guides, tourists, locals - all in pursuit of the mighty salmon. Plus, for young people who lived there, summer was a chance to earn some dough. Several years I worked mulitple jobs, making the most money at the cannery, but a few years working literally from 7 am to 2 am, five days a week. Ahhh, money was good. Summer on the Kenai also mea

So we got the yearly Halloween costume. It's always a balance of ordering early enough (if we're ordering) so that it gets here in time, and not so early that it's destroyed or worn out before the actual event. This year, it got here waaay early. So at first my husband says, "We'll just put it away until the Halloween carnival." Ha! Like that will work, I thought to myself (knowing after 14 years that actually saying that out loud would probably not be the best idea). So, as the wise mother knows after the repetition, with variations, of the question, "Can I just try on the helmet / gloves/ goggles?" The costume is down and in full play. My role in this entire situation is to make sure the boy understands that, if this costume should befall a tragedy, we're not purchasing a new one. I don't really like store-bought costumes anyways, although it's always a losing battle at my house when I suggest we just invent something. (Secretl

When I was little I wanted to grow up and be a vampire. (I guess that's not too strange, my brother in law wanted to grow up and be a totem pole....) On the back of the bathroom door was this strange pattern in the wood. To me, it looked like a vampire. I pointed it out to my brother the last time I was there - it's the last door to be replaced in what is now his house. He said he had never noticed it before. How could he not?? We had a vampire in our bathroom. I liked that vampires lived on blood. They needed life blood to live but were not alive. Even as a kid, I was into irony. They stayed up all night. I liked that too. I was a vampire for Halloween almost every year (except for the disaster of the Queen of Hearts, but my therapist says its best to forget that one....) Vampires are "in" right now - books like Twilight and the Vampire Diaries and the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries, movies and tv shows based upon those books are everywhere. Bob and I have

Last night I dreamed of college. I don't know if it's because my oldest is there now, figuring it all out, or because it the 10 year span of school was a big chunk of my life. So this morning I woke up thinking about it all. For me, college was a collage of experience. I started off on one academic path, quickly chose another, and finally took the quickest trail to the finish line. I experimented with relationships, monogamy, serial monogamy, non-monogamy, and everything else I could find. I created friendships, misplaced them, destroyed them, nurtured them and just ignored them. I read books that challenged everything I believed, everything I thought I knew and broke me down into nothingness. I questioned everything and everyone, burned the proverbial bridges and plunged myself into solitude for months on end. At the end of it all, the person who had been forged was strong and I liked her. So here I am in my year of reflection and the lines of Eliot come to mind, "

Yesterday I blogged about Morgan's words on fragile thoughts, explosive ideas, and reading. These ideas keep rolling around in my mind as I try to clarify and study them from all sides, all perspectives. This is my year of "provocation and privacy." This is my year to make some sense of it all. In this quest, I find myself thinking constantly, rolling around those fragile thoughts. I think about identity, of faith, of how we define ourselves, of work, of love. I think about acceptance, and social validation of self. I think about how my stress and health affects my family. I think about the world, of justice and tragedy. I think about the politicians, the media who preach a doctrine based on lies, hate and fear. I wonder, truly perplexed, about the people who believe it, who seem to need to believe it. I wonder if living deliberately is even possible. I wonder if it can only lead to unhappiness, to internal dischord. I wonder why I need it so. I go to bed at

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy." ~Edward P. Morgan I love this quote. It validates my thoughts on writing, and on reading. The separation of author and speaker, of theme and subject, of belief and ideal. Our world doesn't allow for enough time to think, let alone enough time to process thought. We try on identities in our modern world, we change our hair color, names, styles, jobs, spouses yet we seem intolerant of trying on beliefs or exploration of ideas. People who do are "flighty" or worse yet labeled hypocrites. And the irony is that this world is constantly presenting so many fragile thoughts, so many explosive ideas. One doesn't even need to watch the news, read a paper, or even read a book to discover them. They're

Some days are gray days, even when it's sunny outside. Today is one of those days. I don't know what exactly makes it a gray day. Some combination of having a cold, being generally out of sorts, and cold stillness outside. I don't like gray days because they present two options. The first being climbing into bed and hiding out. The second is to chin up and carry on, pretending it's not a gray day. Nothing feels comfortable and a looming sense of gloom fills the house on a gray day. The dogs seem to know it too; they're unusually subdued and follow me from room to room, plopping down on the floor with a sigh only to get up and move again. A cup of tea tastes better than coffee on a gray day. Apple tea, with honey warms as much with its smell as its temperature. I hold it in my hand and let the heat soak into me, even though I'm not cold. I drink one cup, and then another. It fills the time on a day like this. I'm not necessarily unhappy on a gray