BUSH DIARY SEPTEMBER 1999

BUSH DIARY SEPTEMBER 1999:

9-1:  Foggy, foggy, foggy:  I had a bad feeling about making the flight and the fog got worse and the flight was cancelled.

9-2  Try again. Went smoothly. Husband picked me up in Northbend/CoosBay airport, we picked up the kitties and then Tim had an eye appointment. He now requires reading glasses.

Saturday we went shopping and purchased a television.  While we don't yet have cable, we hooked up enough stuff to watch "Hook".  

I rebooked my flight to Seattle for Saturday and Tim took me and the kitties to the airport.  These two are going to be adopted by one of the maintenance guys and his wife who is a nurse.  I will take them to work and they can get acquainted.

The Women's Weekend consisted of Mom, four daughters and one niece.  It was a hoot. We had breakfast at the Space Needle.  Carla said we could tell the tourists from locals because all of the locals were concentrating on menu selections and visiting.  The view?  Took a look and yep lots of tourist gazing.

 Then we took the Bellingham ferry which took a hour.  One of the toilets was clogged and being aired out by a very highpower fan.  

We came back via the Tacoma Narrow bridge.  I had been across before but I do not remember, it was in 1950.  They were driving a brand new 1950 Studebaker and Mom brought her very first pair of nylon stockings.  

We had supper and consumed a bottle of cousin Ron's "La Crema". 

Flight back was good until Fairbanks, flight cancelled due to weather so over nighted at a place that took pets. Got the kitties delivered to Becky their new Mom.  They have settled in nicely she has renamed them Tigger and Pooh.  Cute.

That is all for September and from the looks of things I have no entries for October or November.

I remember packing and mailing lots of boxes as well as having a yard sale.  I sold every thing that was not nailed down.  I made over 800 dollars, which paid for the moving by mail effort.  Yay!!

I sold my gorgeous fox fur hat to one of the Taxi guys for 50 bucks.

G'night folks.

BUSH DIARY AUGUST 1999

BUSH DIARY AUGUST 1999:

8-1:  I just watched pay per view of Cirque Du Soleil.  Wow!  All acrobatic acts with a few clowns thrown in here and there.  The lady who danced on the silk was spectacular.  

I read a book that involved a much put upon heroine who was always being bested by her rival in school, boys etc.  They visit in the other woman's home who disappears after eating a piece of ancient fruit cake.  The heroin thinks she may have poisoned the woman.  She stammers so much and starts winking uncontrollably at the interviewing officer.  It was much funnier than I can relate here.  It was a short story by Judith O'brien entitled "Across A Crowded Room".  I'm sure it is available SOMEwhere.

8-5: Good gawd?  Temperature climbed to 74 degrees.  This is HOT for Barrow.  ASNA declared a "weather" holiday for the last two hours of the day, ASNA office onlyl. awwwwww jeez.

8-7: Got right lower molar drilled and filled.  Erk.  Mouth numb.  Chewing on tinfoil feeling lasted two days.

8-8:  There was sign on Pharmacy door that said "Closed".  Their license lapsed.  No one had renewed the license. It was a case of "I thought you did it".

Had a storm related power failure at work, got quite dark inside when the emergency power kicked on we were pleased to note one of the overhead lights kicked on as well.  Now medical records was no longer darker that inside a cow's stomach.  

The phones were not hooked into the UPS but they had a neat reboot feature.  Lights blinked sequentially faster and faster until they rest and began working.

It has been storming and raining like crazy for the last two days, wind driven rain has penetrated the hallway door at home and soaked the carpet about two feet inside the door. It got chilly and I actually cranked up the heat in the apartment. 

I had a very strange dream. I was shopping for a pocket so I could store the penis which I was carrying about.  ummmmm.

G'night August.

BUSH DIARY JULY 1999

BUSH DIARY JULY 1999:

Saturday the 4th, getting ready to fly out this evening.
Well that was a fun little trip.  First thing we did was go buy a new fridge at Shcroader and Son's.  Had to load it in through the sun room door.  Carolyn said the property manager was always replacing the fridge.  Oh yeah? Bet they weren't new.  

I found ten old Hot Wheels under the old fridge. I have scrubbed them up to Anthony to play with.

We went to the Sawdust theater here in Coquille.  It is an old fashion melodrama entitled "Mail Order Bride or Lured to a Villains' Lair". Lots of singing, dancing, audience participation and free popcorn. 

Had to depart all too soon. I was getting Bailey ready to move to Barrow. Got her vaccinated.  She did not mind car travel, but  plane travel?  Ugh!  The normally 51 minute flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks was accomplished in 41 minutes.  The captain hurried God Bless him.

Met Gwen at the airpotr and she began bonding with Bailey immediately.  Gwen has two cats at home, Luke and Davy. She reported the next day that they were giving her baths and sunning in the window.

While in Coquille I was prompted to write a song.  I emailed a copy to Phil.

(2019 I reread the song and only included third verse here and this is admittedly pretty creaking composition wise)

Dad Wore Steel Toes Work Boots.  R. Alden
THIRD VERSE:
When Dad was young and wicked he pulled a prank or two
One involved a neighbors's bull and a barn roof with a view
It seems the farmer was surprised to see his favorite bull
resting up among the starts without politics or pull
The farmer had todo his best to get old Buford down
The lads who pulled this off laid low and did not go to town.
REFRAIN: 
Dad wore steel toed work boots and Mom wrote all the checks
Dad taught us how play Pinochle even double deck
Mom liked to play Scrabble and beat us black and blue
There were always skillets full of "Thousand Mile Stew".

Back to work July 12, very  busy, only Monica and me were there pulling charts, answering the phones and questions.

7-16: Lovely day of rain, sounds great and smells wonderful. Except for the puddles.

One of the big wigs from ANMC came up for planning for the new hospital. He was here when this hospital was first built.  There was no Vet back  then and he remembered performing spaying and neutering in room six in outpatient.  Um good practice doc
.
Telephone system update:  It will have voice mail  woo hoo! And be Y2K compliant. The speaker phones are actually quite decent.

Very calorie packed day.  Lots of people with birthday and leaving Barrow, cakes, ice cream, and potluck with my favorite Pansit!!

Blue Cross rep speech.  Same old.  We still cannot use local pharmacy.  Must make arrangements to have scrip written and mail it to the lower where ever.  Once established can order online.

7-21: House dream.

Woke up to NPR recounting the funeral for JFK Jr, wife and sister-in-law.  So much potential gone.

7-25:  Two walrus pups were captured this week.  They were apparently orphaned and had imprinted on the tugboat ferrying sand from the dredge to the beach.  So Fish and Game captured them and took them to the Vet Clinic.  They were fed walrus chow and perked up enough for a healthy transfer to Point Defiance Zoo in Washington State.  Of course the local news guy was there interviewing everyone. In the background you could hear the walrus pups barking back and forth with some dogs.

That's enough about animal life for June.

G'night folks.

BUSH DIARY JUNE 1999

BUSH DIARY JUNE 1999:

House dream.

Memorial Day: Slept in until 7 am and got up and got the wash started downstairs ad finished by 9 and spent the day goofing off.

Tuesday:  Took me until noon to get the census completed for the previous four days. Constant interruptions.  Monica called to say that she would be i on the evening flight as she had a five hour layover in Anchorage.  Go shopping!

Sat 6-5:  3:45 am could not sleep.  Got up to enjoy the midnight sun.  It was rather bright after being cloudy all week.  

I am keeping to my schedule of moving by mail.  I packaged up my very large cooper angel which I purchased in Sonoma a couple of years ago.  It is an awkward size but I left one of the boxes flattened, wrapped said angel in a towel, shoe horned it into the package slant wise and taped everything shut.  Hope post office does not treat like Frisbee.

6-6: Woke up from cop dream.  I had a suspect in handcuffs but he escaped.   Then there was a traffic accident with lots of stuff scattered all over.

Weirdness at work:  Things have finally come to a head over our "rogue" doctor, Dr. Grace S.  She who prescribed the outdated morphine.  And ably abetted by the boyfriend hospital CEO.  Dr S essentially dismissed all OB services by the Public Health Nurses but they just kept on making appointments, did not stop seeing OB patients.  One of the big wigs came up from ANMC and was carefully escorted around by Dr S and he left on the plane unenlighted. Except Dr Perez was on the same flight and he enlightened the ANMC big wig of all of the goings on.  As a result Dr. S is on administrative leave and CEO is on vacation.  It was getting so bad that nurses were leaving left and right. They have been assured by the powers  that no nurse lost their license from working in Barrow.

6-13: Crud have a couple dental things to have done, one is to have a tooth pulled and a wisdom tooth to be looked at.  Make appointment. Open wide!

Dream:  Visiting where I lived in Emmett.  Met a classmate who I did not remember.  

Book report:  The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. by Sharyn McCrumb.  This was one written in the mid 80's and has the usual characters.  Nora Bonesteel is an older woman who has the sight.  I learned that the Appalachians had so many chestnut trees that cattle browsed on the fallen nuts.  Then a fungus imported by the New York Botanical Gardens got loose in the 1930's and killed most of the chestnut trees in America.  I have been told that the smell of wet chestnut trees in the fall is wonderful.

Next trip out is to Coquille over Labor Day weekend.  I will spend a couple days in Seattle and all the girls in the family will run around and have fun.

Looks like personnel will be thin in medical records this week everybody is gone for all sorts of reasons.  I guess I will spread out and make a crowd.  One of the ways to get extra bodies is to accept responsibility for student summer hires.  Ugh!  It takes about three days just to get their attention.

Okay time to put June to bed.

G'night folks.

BUSH DIARY MAY 1999

BUSH DIARY MAY 1999:

Book Report: Memoirs of A Geisha.  by Arthur Golden.  Wonderful book.  Forwarded it to Mom for belated Mother's Day Gift.  The story is about a nine year old girl who is sold to a geisha house for 175 yen in 1921.  She ultimately lives long enough to own a two floors of a building in New York City.  The writing is poetic and I loved the descriptions of the kimono's and the difficulty of getting dressed in them.  Update:  Mom liked it until she realized it was fiction.

I ordered a CD of Joe Williams.  I like the song "When Did You Leave Heaven". Yummy.  This had been delayed in a bundle of "X" mail which had stuff from March through May.  Ooh handy.

News at work:  Our wonderful Pharmacist Christian Duruji has submitted his resignation. He and family may move to Fairbanks.  We are back to the TDY situation which is iffy at best.

News from Coquille.  Tim has been hired at a local radio station on Sundays to learn the ropes and help produce a show called "Flashback".  He is looking forward to it very much.  His first paycheck bounced and he had to tussle with accounting to get it straightened out as well as the bank fees.  Hmmm.

Tim sent pictures of the kittens two weeks old and not much to look at. Boja has been allowed to get acquainted and she is unimpressed.

One of the kittens is spoken for up here and I will be bringing back a kitty.  There are not many kittens here as all the queens get spayed as quickly as possible.

Breakup is in full swing here.  Water trucks are going about keeping the dusty roads sprinkled. 

Whaling successfully concluded. Barrow was allotted 22 strikes, they landed and butchered eighteen Bowhead whale.  The big news up were was the MaCaw tribe in Washington who struck and killed their first whale in 70 years.

Price shocker of the week:  This is a very strange item and few people buy it unless they have a dog yard.  Bale of straw has been sitting there in AC for quite some time and the price is $26.50 per bale.  Sign says Hay but I was born in farm country and I sez it is straw.

Thursday/Friday:  Monica, Jessie and Jinky were all gone so I was only me and on other lady in the department.  Ugh!!

Stay in Barrow or not? I am debating.  Now have house payments.  Unsure of job prospects in Coquille.  Most of my jobs have lasted an average of eight years.  This is year nine for me.  Of course I would just go to work one day and get handed a pink slip which happens a lot. 

Well, as Scarlet O'Hara liked to say, "I'll worry about that tomorrow". That girl could compartmentalize.  

G'night folks.

BUSH DIARY APRIL 1999

BUSH DIARY APRIL 1999:

4-5:  Tim's sister called wanting to let him know that his brother, Paul, had been admitted to the hospital in Portland with a massive heart attack.  Got in contact with Tim on the computer and the drove early the next morning to Albany and rode with Carolyn to Pendleton.  They stayed overnight and by the time they got to Pendleton, Betty called and told them that Paul had died after being transferred for an attempt at open heart surgery. Tim just called from there this evening.  He has not been close with his brother  for some time but it is a troublesome time for the family.

I also received word at work that John Morrow the former SSMH hospital administrator had died April 8 while ANMC in Anchorage.  He was only 52 but he was overweight and his life style was um, ah, indulgent shall we say.  He was a very nice man, a sharp administrator. I am glad he got to have a couple years of relaxation in Barrow. 

Monica is back from Florida and Monday we will all play catch up.

Recap of ten days in Oregon April 1999.  I flew to North Bend and was med by huggy hubby Tim.  We rested one day and drove 12 hours to Emmett, we overnighted at Mom's house.  

She gave up her bed for us and Tim was appalled that the hostess would give up her bed.  I finally talked him into sleeping with me in her bed with much spluttering of "That's not right, I wasn't raised that way".  G-night hon.

We picked up a U- haul truck the smallest one but it was far too large for what we were hauling.  We took a day bed, Mom's old Sears table which she had refinished about 25 years ago, a farm auction treasure.  It is nice, has four chairs and three leaves. Also packed up four storage bins of assorted stuff including angel collection.  

I also got Grandma Horn's old butter churn with paddle.  I remember her telling me that churning butter was like "marking time".  I was never quite sure what that meant other than it was boring.  It now sits in the front hallway and serves as umbrella stand and loose change holder.  

We got all that packed up and we drove back another 12 hours to Coquille and O joy of joy, hit rush hour traffic in Portland and it took us 45 minutes to drive the 205. Ugh.

We got all that stuff unloaded.  Tim turned in the U-Haul and the buggers would not give back the 80 dollar security deposit because we had driven FOUR MILES OVER our estimated mileage from Emmett to Coquille.  Bastids!! Mom and I played Scrabble a lot.

Charles, Leslie, Anthony and Jasper (the Dalmatian) drove up about noon Friday and we talked them into ditching their motel reservations and the kids took the north bedroom.  

Charles is too long for a Queen so we plumped up the mattress pad with blankies and he slept on the floor.  Anthony can get into anything.  He is tall enough to get the door to the attic open and we have to get locks for several things before Christmas, the door and the laundry chute.
We had a nice visit with them and they called when they stopped in Shasta and emailed us when the got to Sonoma.  All went well.

We went shopping at Schroeder's and Sons.  I spotted a pair of matched little sofa's sleepers and I asked for a cash discount if I took both of them.  So the lady knocked off a hundred bucks.  

During that time we managed to get the queen sized mattress shoved up the stairs and I am very happy to announce that we have beds upstairs in the bedrooms and couches downstairs in the living room. 

Mom to to see the kitty Tim decided to adopt. She is a young female and quite pregnant so there will be kittens soon.  She purrs like crazy.  Her name is Jubilee.

Our oven works. Mom and I gave it quite  a work out with making tamale pie and pesto and pasta and other stuff.  Also gave the horrible metal sink a work out as well as the washer dryer. I washed everything that have mailed down and just had a blast being domestic.  Even chatted with our neighbors.

I had used one of my Alaska Airline tickets to book a flight for mom so she took an airplane ride home.
  
Tim took me to the airport Wednesday for the 6 pm flight and everything went smoothly.  Got into Anchorage and overnighted at the Sheraton.  I attended the State Medical Record meeting and was given the Distinguished Member award.  Thank you.  You get stuff like that if you are not distinguished so much but that you performed a job for several years that no one else wanted to do.  Yep, volunteering is a good thing.  Looks swell on the resume.

Got back on 5-1 so time to close April, g'night folks.

CLASS ASSIGNMENT APRIL 1999

STORY TIME:  

To give a little back ground.  I have been taking a semester of Gothic Literature.  One of the assignments was to choose one of the books we had read and to write a sequel.  I chose Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  

This was written during a summer in the Alps 1818 and the weather was abysmal. The suggestion was made that each of the folks present write a ghost story.  

She was only 18 or so at the time.  She was extremely well educated. Her mother was a famous Women's' Rights person who had written something on the order "Justification of the Rights of Women".  Revolutionary work and very upsetting to the powerful mainly men who had total ownership of their wives and could do with them as they wished.  The following is what is wrote for the assignment April 1999.

BIG MAN  R. Alden

The hunting party found a large unconscious man lying on an ice floe.  They saw that he had burned his hands and that his face had been badly stitched together in places. 

 The men talked among themselves and decided to take the big man with them and see if he would live or die.  The hunters put him in the umiak and began paddling west.  The man eventually awoke enough to understand that he must eat the raw seal meat or perish.  So he ate the seal meat and the oil spread on his burns and gradually healed them.

The hunters paddled hard and sang songs and taught the man their words by pointing or demonstrating what the words meant.  The man learned quickly and was soon thanking the hunters for sharing their meat with him.

  Before long he was able to take part in the paddling of the boat.  Occasionally they would stop on a large ice floe and hunt for more seal.  One time a polar bear stalked them and tried to take the dead seal from them until the big man roared so fiercely that the bear was scared away.  The hunters called him Big Man after that.

After many days they arrived at the place the hunters called home.  It was a small village and everyone was very happy to see the hunters and made many exclamations over the big man that they brought back.  

During the long trip the Big Man had time to think and decided that perhaps was not done with man.  He decided to make his home with the people who he had come to admire and live.  More importantly, the people seemed to accept Big Man for what he was, a man, if a bit larger than usual.  No one seemed to mind his scars, many of the hunters bore scars of their own. 

The children loved Big Man because he was so tall.  They would clamber up his legs and on top of his shoulders to be able to see very far in the summer. It took many of the children to topple him to the ground in a wrestling match.  Though he did struggle as hard as he might have.

Many years passed peacefully. Big Man became a valued member of the village.  He became a skilled hunter and gatherer.  He favored gathering berries and roots in the summer. The elder women taught him to recognize important plants fur curing various sicknesses.  The people came to trust Big Man's wisdom and he was content.

In the simple ways of the people, he took a wife, once she had made him aware that she was attracted to him.  His wife was happy with him and in time they had twelve children. The first five were named Victor, William, Justine, Elizabeth and Henry.  He took his wife's advice for the names of the rest of the children.

When Big Man died he had twenty-five grandchildren and five great grand-children, all of whom were a little taller than average and very, very strong
.
When Big Man died he was buried in the sky, they had saved several whale ribs and were able to construct a suitable bier. He had made baskets of baleen and several small ivory carvings. Most mysterious of all his belongs was a leather bound book.  The book contained his writings and many drawings.  These were left with him as well.  

Many years went by and the village was eventually abandoned.

White man's civilization came to the area a hundred years later. Scientists and anthropologists came to study the archeology site.  

Big Man's collapsed sky burial was found and his belongings catalogued and the book was filed under the description: leather bound journal labeled "Frankenstein, V", where is remains carefully filed away in the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska. 

 One of the anthropologist's notes from that period  report the body of a well preserved large man wrapped in furs, his teeth were good and he had black hair.  The autopsy findings noted many healed scars and theorized that the man had suffered these injuries and survived well into old age tended by members of a surprisingly caring society and extended family.

Addendum:  My professor, Mr. Turner, said he thought the first line sounded like the beginning of a joke i.e. "A Rabbi, a minister and a priest were all on an ice floe.."  He also thought the idea was original in that Frankenstein's monster found acceptance among the Inupiat.  He also suggested a bit more back plot to explain how he came to be alone on the ice.  And it would be helpful for the reader to have read the original Frankenstein.  I agree.

THE END