Friday, September 20, 2013 at 8:47AM 
I am at Abby's Home Cooking and I just ordered breakfast – ham, eggs over easy, hashbrowns and multi-grain toast. For those of you who do not recognize it, the scrimshaw above me that says "Abby's" on it is done on baleen – bowhead baleen.
Thursday, September 19, 2013 at 8:11PM 
As usual, the moment I entered the house, Jim popped up to greet me. He went a little crazy, scolded me pretty good for having been gone so long, and even hopped up onto my shoulders and rode around there for a while.
Thursday, September 19, 2013 at 7:40PM 
I usually call Margie the moment the wheels hit the runway, but I couldn't because my battery was dead. When she is babysitting, as she was today, she sometimes does not leave the blue house until I call and that is usually just about right. But I'm usually on Alaska Airlines and it takes longer to get your bags from Alaska than from the smaller commuter flight, Era. When I reached the baggage claim area, I looked out to the curbside, but Margie was nowhere to be seen.
i found an outlet and plugged my phone in. It seemed to take forever to get a charge. It felt like maybe 10 minutes. Then I called her and it turned out she had been there all the time, just parked a little further upstream out of my sight.
It was sunny and warm in Anchorage: 51°. All the fall colors were present, but were not fully dominant the way I had expected them to be. There was still a significant amount of green in the leafy trees. It all felt so stunningly strange. We were almost out of gas, but we had enough to get to Eagle River so we stopped at the ER Carr's, got a one dollar per gallon discount and gassed up.
Afterward, we pulled into the drive through line of the Eagle River Taco Bell. It felt so very strange to look at that line of cars ahead of me that I retrieved my phone from the car charger, framed a picture of the waiting vehicles and decided to make that my "back on the ground" picture. It was okay, but I thought, "I need a person in here for perspective." No sooner had the thought passed through my brain than this gentleman stepped in front of me, headed for his car.
I ordered a Cheese Quesadilla, a Chicken Burrito Supreme with green sauce and a medium Pepsi, light on ice. Margie had two Taco Supremes and a medium Diet Pepsi, also light on ice.
Thursday, September 19, 2013 at 6:29PM 
Kumi, left, and I spoke no words to each other until the airplane neared Denali. "I never get tired of seeing the mountain," she stated. I told her I never get tired of seeing it, either.
I suddenly felt a little self-conscious, because I knew the aroma of camp and whale oil was still heavy in my jacket. She didn't mind. "We're all Alaskans," she said.
Kumi was born and raised in Japan, where she met her American husband when he was serving in the Navy. They lived in San Diego and the Lower 48 for awhile, but weren't really happy down there. One day, he showed her a picture of Alaska and commented on how beautiful it was. He told her he would like to live there, but asked how she felt about that. She told him they ought to go ahead and give it a try. If they didn't like it, they could always leave.
They have lived here for two years now and Kumi says Alaska is the only place she wants to live. She works as a tour guide now, but I didn't quite get the details of her guiding straight. I believe many of the people she takes touring are Japanese, but when we got off the plane there were lots of friendly non-Japanese saying goodbye to her, too.
Masami sat across the aisle to the right. I did not get a chance to talk to Masami at all, so I know nothing about her story, other than that she was traveling with Kumi and they both spoke Japanese.
Thursday, September 19, 2013 at 4:02PM 
Battery at six percent - and I did get to charge it for about ten minutes in Fairbanks.…
Actually I wrote the above sentence well over an hour ago. My battery did in fact die while I was still on the plane, so I am way behind on this blog. Anyway you can see how different the propeller looks when the iPhone is held vertically, as opposed to horizontally. I don't know why.
