I miss you already.

Alaska. Gosh.

Bartholomew:

Saga of a Bold Monkey

Toot Toot! All Aboard the Tofu Express!

Making hippie slop for wraps for tomorrow (and potentially the next day).

Nom nom nom!

Sammich!

Having a little open faced sandwich for lunch. Tofu, zucchini, spinach, hummus, sourdough, a pickle, and ONIONS!

Avocado Toast

Confidential to W: I think your overall assessment is jaded, BUT: there IS avocado toast in Anchoragua!

Alaskans are:

Continued from page 3.

Indeed.

Retro GARDENING PORN!

Some classic Alaska gardening porn. Damn, I miss being able to garden in Alaska.

Cabbage in raised bed. The chunk in the trash can is because I had to thin out the bed.

 I mean, this is how stuff grew inside, for crying out loud.

The herb garden raised bed in the front yard.

Various stuff in another raised bed in the front yard, including lettuce, which

big dumb overgrown cows like this one sauntering along at the top of our driveway liked to snack on, which is why I built the hinged cage to protect it. Sure, they could pretty easily tear it off if they wanted, but they had pretty limited attention spans and didn't bother.

food porn, SPECIAL EDITION: VINTAGE!

Going through an external hard drive, and came across some cool VINTAGE food porn! Yay!

This is a bigass pan of potatoes, tofu, peppers, and ONIONS that I made for a camping trip that my brother S and his son D and I did in Alaska in summer 2008. It was delicious. Bears visited the cabin next to Eklutna Lake. I fell and got hurt riding my bike back to the car with the kid trailer for more firewood. I got towed by a guy on his four wheeler, got the firewood, rode back the approximately 2 miles, bleeding heavily, and S did excellent brother care: he found the vodka.


Here's a closeup of the potatoes, tofu, onions, and peppers. It was good stuff.

This is our grill in Anchorage with tofu steaks and seitan steaks. Yum.

This is that dinner, plated, with vegan creamed spinach and sauteed mushrooms.


This is a delicious fried tofu hot salad, with careful presentation. I have absolutely no idea when it's from.

Island time

Here's the view from our hotel room window:

Yes, life is good. I'm going to spend much of the day exploring happy hours in Waikiki.

Since I'm five hours earlier than EST, I'm streaming one of my old public radio stations: KSKA. I was amused to hear the temperature forecast and current temp rundown for various locations in Anchoragua, none of them above 5 degrees fahrenheit, and 15 degrees below zero for East Anchorage. It's currently 81 in Honolulu.

Wonder how it is in the F-B-X... oh, -25! Maybe my friends are too busy huddled by the heater to e-mail or respond to text. Oh, btw, know that if any of you ever do text me, I have a new number I need you to use for texting (yay for google voice!) Email me for details.

More about voting

To any of my readers who think I post too much food porn and bike porn, here's the third post in a row about politics and voting.

The summary: voting thoughtfully takes a long time. With the exception of taking the time to write the previous post to Lesil, I have been doing nothing but researching and voting for the last five hours. Yes, really. Researching the judges took the longest, and this is something that as an attorney, at that an attorney licensed in Alaska, I take very seriously.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of judges standing for retention are, in fact, retained, but I still voted my conscience after careful consideration of every one. Since I've been pretty clear in previous posts about who I'm voting for, I decided to post photos of my completed ballot for the Nov 2, 2010 Alaska general election:

Front (offices and bond issues)

Rear (judges)

I decided I couldn't vote for Bob Buch

And, okay, just so you don't feel like I'm totally neglecting the bike porn, here's a shot with all five of our current bikes in it:

The Franchise, and Alaska politic

No, not like opening up a Subway, but rather the right to vote. It's something I take really seriously, and I'm sitting here exercising it (I vote absentee in Alaska.) It regularly takes me several hours to vote, since I research every single race, every ballot measure, every bond, every judge up for retention. As I acknowledged to J2 in an email, this is arguably a sillyass waste of time, but I can't feel good about voting any other way.

My current conundrum: the options for the US Senate race are just abysmal. While I appreciate the diligent work the so-called Tea Party is doing to destroy the GOP, I'm obviously not voting for a Tea Party candidate, so Joe Miller is out. I do find it amusing that Miller was disciplined in writing for ethics violations in 2008 when he was the Fairbanks North Star Borough's part-time attorney. While Miller fans might try to claim that it's a partisan hatchet job, the guy making this public, the former borough mayor, isn't a massive Lisa Murkowski fan: "Whitaker has a long and mixed history with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is running a write-in campaign after Miller beat her in the Republican primary this summer. They served in the state Legislature together but Whitaker publicly complained of nepotism when Murkowski was appointed to the U.S. Senate by her father, then-Gov. Frank Murkowski."

To paraphrase Utah Phillips, "talking to a conservative is like talking to your refrigerator… you know, the light goes on, the light goes off, it’s not going to do anything that isn’t built into it" so Lisa Murkowski's amusing write-in campaign is out.

Who does that leave me? A whack job libertarian named Frederick "David" Hasse (the name in quotes is from the official election pamphlet from the State of Alaska, not my own embellishment.) Why is he a whackjob, you ask? Let's start with hypothetical question #3 in his official candidate statement: "Do you know [...] What the "New World Order" is about?" Somewhat inexplicable for a Libertarian is his #1 plan for the "People's Bailout": "Nationalize the Federal Reserve and place it under Congressional control." Okay, let's move on.

One of the only things I can say for Tim Carter, a retired optometrist from Florida, is that he lives in a ski condo in the shadow of a nice ski resort. He has lived in Alaska for less time (3 years) than I have, but did manage to work the words "Alaska" and "Alaskan" into his official candidate statement 14 times. (Confidential to Tim: "neverstop" is actually two words.)

Non-affiliated Ted Gianoutsos only uses "Alaska" and variants thereof seven times in his official candidate statement, which seems to be running against Frank Murkowski as much as Lisa: "father-daughter" shows up five times. Notwithstanding the opening exhortation in his candidate statement, "Elect me, and YOU win!" this guy = FAIL.

How about the Democratic candidate, a marginally qualified small town mayor? (Will Alaskans never learn our lesson on that?) Scott McAdams is the somewhat bumbling mayor of Sitka, which at population ~8,986, is the fourth most populated city in Alaska. (Yes, really.) To once again call up the memory of Utah Phillips, "Working for the Democratic Party now that’s kind of like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic..." Indeed. McAdams wants to destroy the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is aggressively pro-war and pro-Afghanistan war, and generally, I just disagree with almost every one of his positions. I mean, this is really the Democratic candidate? It seems that one of the only things he and I agree on is abortion, though his own statement on ""Individual Liberty" is the political equivalent of mumbling with your mouth full of peanut butter and Wonder Bread, which forced me to google him specifically for a position on abortion. He does manage variants of Alaska and Alaskan a whopping 15 times, but he has lived in the Last Frontier for 19 years, so he's a little more justified than Carter in his pandering.

So I'm left with: nobody. I can't decide who to write-in, and I simply cannot, as a matter of personal morality, vote for someone I genuinely don't want to in office. And I don't want Scott McAdams in office. I guess I'm going to leave it blank. To continue with my theme of paraphrasing musicians, here's a little Rush: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Not similarly problematic is the governor's race: I'm actually fine with voting for Ethan Berkowitz, who I have met and spoken with in person at some length. Unfortunately, I agree wholeheartedly with the analysis of Ivan Moore, a local politcal pollster:

"Ethan’s a very smart and capable guy, but [voters] don’t know the man. He’s a personally private person and very few people really know what he’s about, what makes him tick, and what he’s done in his life. The reason they don’t know it is because Ethan hasn’t told us. For years now, he’s shied away from that critical aspect of political life, the telling of his story, and the creation and maintenance of a personal bond with voters. Instead, we get the quips and the gimmicks, and his opponents defining him instead."

I know the man a little (though not nearly as well as a friend of mine does), but Moore is, tragically, correct: he largely lets his opponents define him. This is especially sad when the opponent is a boob, as Don Young is and was in 2008, or a machine tool and corporate lobbyist whore, as Sean Parnell is. (Let's be real: Parnell is really only gubnuh because a certain Tina Fey lookalike is chronically unable to not quit her jobs.)

On a related note, here is some awesome reading on Alaska's somewhat strange gubernatorial succession procedures. I'm particularly fond of the following quotes:
"The Palin administration is a clown car."
"...there have been [Alaska] Cabinet officers in the past who should not be running a hot dog stand, much less standing in line to take the helm of the U.S.S. Alaska."
"Besides, face it, there are only so many Wasilla High School graduates to go around."

Sometimes, I just adore the Daiy News. Few other papers have the cajones to publish snark on the level of Paul Jenkins, who regularly refers to Palin in ways like "our former half governor" and "Demi-Gov".

Ahhhh, Alaska. Sometimes I miss you. Okay, back to the electoral salt mines.

Snowzippa?

Unfortunately, all the cool snow disaster names seem to be taken this season: Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, Snowzilla, Snowapalooza, Snow... WAIT! SNOWAPALOOZA! I hereby claim that for the 1-3" Metro Atlanta is forecast to get today, leading to the winter storm warning currently in effect. I'm supposed to participate in a conference call today at noon: given recent ATL snow closings, I'm willing to predict the likelihood that it'll be postponed at around 50/50.

One of the more irritating parts about the storms are the asinine letters that NPR reads during All Things Considered. You know the genre: "I lived through the blizzard of 19**, blah blah blah, and this is nothing..." "Here in [Insert Midwestern State] you know what we call three feet? A dusting. Har har har..." "Waaaaaa, I *hate* New York City's law requiring me to clear the sidewalk in front of my property..."

And the story today on Morning Edition, with people feeling all virtuous about their snow clearing because it's a neighborhood competition? Whatever. Clear it because it's a nice thing to do for the people who live in your city/town/suburb, or leave it there, but clearing to keep up with the Joneses? Just keep out the gigantic fiberglass Santa and his light-outline reindeer all year, and save yourself the physical labor.

Even better is the occasion bringing out the climate-change-denial troglodytes, including Sean Hannity and James Inhofe. These guys are so breathtakingly stupid, you almost wonder if political satirists miss W anymore.

Now, since all the cool kids are doing it, here's my little snow reminiscence: In Anchorage, we regularly cleared our immense driveway for a couple hours, then went across the road to clear our nearest neighbor's driveway. This is when he didn't beat us out there: many, many mornings after a storm, our late-septuagenarian neighbor would be out there and half his driveway done when we woke up and looked out the window, his hand-knitted scarf flapping in the wind. He then had the time to come over and chat and bitch about the muni snowplows pushing up berms from the road into his newly cleared driveway. Ahhh, Alaska: how I don't miss clearing your snow.