If you’re looking for misuse of the English language but don’t want to hang around with politicians, doctors or civil servants, consider reading press releases. My inbox is full of the things and they frequently cause rude, rude noises to come out of my mouth.

“Guestspert”? Are you (bleeping) kidding me?

Whaaat? When did “e-tailers” become a word?

“Turntabalist”? Your parents must be so proud.

Sometimes, though, neologisms have their revenge: They become so ubiquitous  that I find myself using them, either in print or aloud.

When I say things like “repurposed,” I want to smack myself. On purpose.

Or how about “I know, right?” and “going forward”? How did these get to be such earwigs?

I picked DF up at the airport last night. He’d spent nearly a week in the Lower 48 dealing with his father’s end-of-life issues. Hospice is now involved and his dad is being made comfortable. He feels extreme weakness but no pain and is receiving oxygen as needed.

DF spent most waking hours slogging through reams of paperwork and bushels of belongings. Bank, insurance and health records were every which way. The power of attorney (written some years back) turned out to be problematic so DF had to get it rewritten, re-signed and re-notarized.

One agency wanted to know the names of all doctors his father had seen in the past two years, and guess what? Nobody knew. Heck, there wasn’t even a record of the defibrillator he’d had implanted.

Previous giveaways of odd conference swag or anti-“Blue Monday” boxes have always been popular. Maybe that’s because a bunch of little oddments are fun to open. Or maybe it’s because the readers, like me, can’t resist a freebie.

This week’s prize is a collection of this-and-that from the Last Frontier, as much as I could fit in a large flat-rate Priority Mail box. I didn’t get these things at a conference but they should certainly fight the blues. After all, how many chances do you get to win a kuspuk pattern?

Every year in early March the city of Anchorage puts snow on downtown streets, so the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race can have its ceremonial start. For the next nine or 10 days Alaskans talk about wheel dogs, snub lines, mandatory 24s and towns with names like Ophir, Shageluk, Shaktoolik, Unalakleet, Koyuk, Kaltag and – my personal favorite – Safety.

“Safety.” Just what I’d be thinking about if I were standing on sled runners in the middle of the night, on zero sleep, with wind chills well below zero.

This year’s race was won by 53-year-old Mitch Seavey in 9 days, 7 hours, 39 minutes and 56 seconds. He’s the oldest person ever to win – and this year, he beat his own son, Dallas, who finished in fourth place.

Like they say: Youth and vigor can often be overcome by age and treachery.

I’m sitting near a blazing fire watching Chamber of Commerce snow fall. The flakes are fat and fluffy and seem to dance on their way down, the way the bits of white inside a snow globe frolic back and forth before settling.

The house is perfumed by the corned beef simmering in a Dutch oven and by a batch of kale and sausage soup (heavy on the potatoes, moderate on the garlic and with a judicious amount of Frank’s Red Hot pepper sauce). If I concentrated, I could probably scent the last of the homemade yogurt that I drained through a cloth-lined colander a little while ago.

But the dominant fragrance is of freshly washed laundry hung on racks set up between me and the fireplace insert, which is cranking out so much heat that the clothes and towels may be dry before I finish writing this.

Domestic contentment – made even more delightful by the fact that it is shared domesticity. When DF got home from church (he’s the cantor for 8 a.m. Mass) he dove right into chores: two loads of laundry, putting the corned beef on to cook, cleaning the tub, general tidying. I can track his progress by the whistling or occasional scraps of song he emits while moving from job to job.

Where was I? Cutting up soup ingredients, placing some vegetable scraps into the freezer for making stock later on and relegating others to the compost, putting the yogurt into a container and storing the whey in a jar. Oh, and smiling. Smiling.

I love a man who whistles while he works. And I especially love a man who doesn’t regard the domestic arena as expressly female.