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This Russian Orthodox church sits up on the hill in the middle of town and is surrounded by trees and salmonberry bushes. I drew it with ink and then shaded it with the remains of the grey pen I liberated from Will Kirkby (chamonkee). The name 'Seldovia' comes from the Russian word for herring, and fishing is still the town's main industry.



Seldovia goes all out on Independence Day. We started the day with the firemen making pancakes for the whole town in their fire engine garage, then a parade, then lots of games and booths and things. I went around a took photos, mostly of the parade, lots of interesting faces.









I think the guy in the pink shirt is one of the town's former mayors. He makes good pancakes.


Stuart impressed everyone with the flawless dart throwing skills from his misspent youth.








This family of sea otters won the parade's costume prize.






The news about Sarah Palin resigning came the same day as the parade, so everyone was talking about it and wondering why she'd done it. Here are the town's papers, just before they're put into the mail slots at the grocery store.



Here's the winner of the Greased Pole Climbing competition. And people put money on about six hundred rubber duckies, which were dumped in the slough. The first three rubber duckies to pass under the bridge won big prizes, and the one furthest back, that got stuck in the logs, also won a prize. Then two guys came and collected them all in their boat for next year's competition.

I took loads of sea otter photos on our trip to Alaska, they didn't seem to mind our boat nudging up fairly close for a peek.



I found this pot during our foray at the dump, at the same time as I nabbed the roller blades. So I painted the pot before I did the painting on cardboard.





My aunt and uncle had a little bird house on their deck, so we got to see a family of swallows fly in and out all day. I think this is the male one, since his feathers are so bright. There were also lots of bald eagles hanging out across the slough, waiting for salmon to swim by. For some reason, the crows liked to give them hell; they'd even jump on their backs. And the eagles would put up with it until finally they'd crack, and kill one of the crows. It was so weird.


The place was never quiet because the magpies were always squabbling. I wish Gary Northfield had been there, he's always watching the birds from his balcony; perhaps he would've made some sense of all the fraught avian politics.


I was totally in love with the otters.













We didn't actually see any bears, but there was bear scat everywhere, so we were never far from them. Here's one of the piles we saw when we forgot to bring along the bear bells and had to spend a whole hike singing very loudly.



Camel Rock really does look like a camel:


I found this sea slug on the beach. It did this crazy thing where it puked out its whole face to crawl forward. Or something, I wasn't quite sure what it was doing.



And here's a fine specimen of a Great-horned kinsfolk:

Here's the next installment of my posts about Alaska. The houses in Seldovia have a lot of character, often a bit ramshackle looking, but sitting on stilts that can withstand tides and flooding. Here's a drawing I made of two of the houses along the wooden boardwalk:



My uncle's family has a cottage on the slough, the light green one here in the foreground:




Stuart and I sat on a rock across the slough at low tide and drew the row of houses. Here's his picture, which came out amazingly well, considering he hardly ever draws:



And mine:



Here's a photo of the guys on the deck, after my uncle (on the right) pulled out a bunch of maps of the area. We like maps.



The house on the other end of the row has been turned into a book and coffee shop since our last visit about nine years ago:



It's run by John Fenski, and is lovely cosy inside.





More stilt house photos:










(That's Lyle the otter in front.)













Here's my aunt peeking out from the kitchen:



And my uncle and my dad by the wood stove.



My uncle is Japanese Hawaiian, and his Japanese dad, Wataru, bought the cottage after the war and spent every summer in Seldovia. He got on well with the other people in the town, so everyone knew who we were and were very friendly. It was funny walking in to shops and overhearing conversations among the customers, with Wataru's name popping up to identify us.

Okay, this is a horribly unglamourous vignette from my Alaska trip, but you wouldn't believe the amazing stuff you can find at the garbage dump in Seldovia. (And that's after the bears have cleared out.) There's a special little area reserved where everyone leaves stuff that someone else might find handy, and I found some roller blades in just my size! Here's a comic triptych I painted on a carboard box, about finding the roller blades and then trying them out on the big wooden bridge near my uncle's house. I experimented with painting it in a sort of Alaskan folk style.



My roller derby sister's a total speed queen on skates but I'm wobbly (at best), so my dad gave me a little help until I didn't look like I was going to fall over. I'll post more pictures when I get back, but I thought I'd upload these two images because everyone else in the house is bustling about packing and I'm being a dork and putting it off.



Besides, it isn't even dark yet. That said, this photo was taken just before midnight... Read the rest of this post

Talkeetna, Alaska

Coordinates: 62 20 N 150 6 W

Population: 848 (2007 est.)

For those of us in the lower 48, the champagne toasts may already have faded from memory, but to Alaskans, the party’s not over yet. Why, you ask? Well, 2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of statehood for the Last Frontier. Various events have and will take place across Alaska this year, but I’m wondering if anything special is being planned in the little town of Talkeetna. Located due North of Anchorage at the confluence of the Chulitna, Susitna, and Talkeetna Rivers, this settlement precedes Alaska’s official entry into the Union by about 40 years. And, as I’ve recently learned, they also hold a Moose Dropping Festival each summer which apparently culminates in a Moose Drop Dropping. Strange as it may seem, I didn’t make this up, and offer a quote from the Chamber of Commerce as evidence: “Shellacked and numbered moose poop is hauled up in the air in a net and then dropped on a bullseye. Raffle numbers correspond to numbers on moose poop. Winners include the closest and farthest from the bullseye. Sounds like not-much-fun but it is a highlight of the day!” Anyone looking for a heap of a good time in July?

Although the Tiger’s Choice, the PaperTigers’ online reading group, selects books that are written for children but can be enjoyed by adults as well, National Reading Group Month has brought to mind those books written for adults that younger readers might adopt as their own favorites, and that could launch impassioned discussions between parents and children, teachers and students, or older and younger siblings.

The books on this week’s list are books recommended for teenagers, with content that may be beyond the emotional grasp of pre-adolescents. All of them are available in paperback and in libraries.

1) Ricochet River by Robin Cody (Stuck in a small Oregon town, two teenagers find their world becomes larger and more complex when they become friends with Jesse, a Native American high school sports star.)

2) The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle (Alice is twelve, growing up on a modern-day Wyoming ranch with a mother who rarely leaves her bed, a father who is haunted by the memory of Alice’s rebellious and gifted older sister who ran off with a rodeo rider, and an overly active imagination.)

3) Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod by Gary Paulsen (The author of Hatchet tells the true story of how he raced a team of huskies across more than 1000 miles of Arctic Alaska in what Alaskans call The Last Great Race.)

4) Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (This autobiography of a young girl growing up in revolutionary Iran and told in the form of a graphic novel is rich, original, and unforgettable.)

5) From the Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe (An amazing odyssey of a boy from the jungles of Burma who became a political exile and a Cambridge scholar, this Kiriyama Prize winner is a novelistic account of a life filled with adventures and extraordinary accomplishments.)

6) In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez (The Mirabal sisters were beautiful, gifted, and valiant women who were murdered by the Dominican Republic government that they were committed to overthrow. Their true story is given gripping and moving life by their compatriot, Julia Alvarez.)

As the weather becomes colder and the days grow shorter, find your favorite teenager, choose a book, and plunge into the grand adventure of reading and sharing!

The words Nancy Lord weaves into elegant sentences glisten with the same salt spray that washes over the gillnets and corklines she sets every morning on Alaska's Cook Inlet where, for the past eighteen years, she and her partner have made their home. When a writer earns her livelihood from fishing, it's unsurprising that she might try to reshape her life among nets and boats and fish into

Taku River, Alaska

Coordinates: 58 27 N 134 10 W

Length: 180 miles (290 km)

Look closely at a good map of the world and chances are, you’ll eventually stumble across the name of a town or region more familiar as a comestible (Champagne, Cheddar, and Parma all spring to mind fairly quickly). (more…)

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This story about a guy being busted for using public wifi is making the rounds and, like the recent scrotum story, has a lot of possible ways of interpreting events. Short story: guy gets busted for using public library wifi when library is closed, gets laptop confiscated for up to a week. Longer story is in the details.

• Guy in question has been asked to not use wifi in residential neighborhoods and so moved himself to outside of the library. Police officer might have a grudge, or a point.
• Library wifi is normally turned off after hours but they have been waiting for a technician to “install a timer” (hint: look for off button, works just as well)
• The police officer took the laptop to inspect it to see what the guy was downloading but since the library director is on vacation, they’ll be keeping it until the director gets back. They claim to be putting together a warrant to search the laptop.
• The use of the word “addicting” adds nothing to this story and seems immaterial to it except to stir things up.
• The police officer claims there are “requirements” to use the wireless, but that is not elaborated on in the story nor is that information available on the library website.
• No one from the library has commented on the story as of this morning, except they’re quoted to explain how the wireless works, but it’s already around the blogosphere.

So, what to make of this? Is there a law against using wireless that’s made publicly available? Is it okay to confiscate someone’s laptop for a week while you put together a warrant to search it? How much responsibility does the library have to implement technological solutions to enforce their policies (if there is in fact a policy, which is totally unclear from this story)? How much weight does the police officer’s assertion that the guy was “feeding off something that we know the city of Palmer pays for” carry legally? Is this guy really going to face criminal charges? I’m sure there is more to this story and it may make what we know of it make more sense, but for now I’m left scratching my head.

I install wireless access points for libraries and I make the various levels of access crystal clear to them (want a password? want a new password every day? want to turn it off at night? want to limit downloading? want to block certain users? want to make the network invisible?) and let them make their own choices. These are all hardware/software problems, not social problems and certainly not legal problems. They may become legal problems if we shirk responsibility for maintaining and understanding our own technology, but can we please not let it get to that? [link o’ day]