Alaska

Alaska Permanent Fund: Capped, but still producing.

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I’m $1,100 richer today. So are a lot of other Alaskans: The Alaska Permanent Fund will distribute about $672 million to residents young and old.

Even toddlers will get that $1,100 direct deposit or check. That blows minds in the Lower 48, but it seems totally normal here.

It was supposed to have been more; one recent estimate was about $2,300. But this is the second year in a row that Gov. Bill Walker capped the Permanent Fund dividend, resulting in some serious outcry from eligible recipients.

There’s a reason for that. According to a study from the University of Alaska’s Institute for Social and Economic Research, the PFD has traditionally lifted 15,000 to 25,000 Alaska residents out of poverty. The study also noted that reducing the check by $1,000 would likely send 12,000 to 15,000 more Alaskans down below the poverty line.

The annual payout is particularly important in rural Alaska: Without it, more than 20 percent of Bush residents would fall below the federal poverty threshold. I believe it, given the high cost of living out there. (Hint: If you think you pay too much for milk in your city, imagine forking over $10 a gallon.)

 

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Grateful for sun and berries.

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I’ve been sick for several days now, apparently with the same virus that laid DF low last week. We share everything, including headache, sore throat and general malaise.

Since I’m not often ill, it always comes as a shock just how boring it can be to lie around all the time: too tired to hold a book up in bed or, when in a recliner, too brain-fogged to read seriously.

(Have watched the hell out of videos on MyPoints.com, though. If I’m gonna be sick, I might as well earn points.)

The weather outside has been as glum as my reasoning: gray skies, temps in the 40s, sideways-spitting rain. Blech. It was the kind of late-summer (read: early fall) weather that made naps mandatory yet not terribly successful. I kept dropping off and then popping awake; when I did sleep, my dreams were weird (baking a series of cakes? decorating and living in one of New York’s smallest apartments?) and made the sleep unsatisfying.

Today the sun came out and DF suggested a turn around the yard. The fresh air would do housebound-for-days me some good.

Was he ever right.

 

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Drinking from the hose, eating from the dirt.

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Saturday at my niece’s house was warm and clear, weather perfect for lounging on her newly painted deck and enjoying the scents of clover and sun-heated greenery. At one point we visited the tent-like structure that acts as her greenhouse, where we found tomato and squash plants languid from thirst.

She dragged out the pocket hose and soaked all the pots. A bit languid myself by then, I requisitioned the nozzle and shot it directly into my mouth. The icy blast refreshed in a way that a glass from the sink might not have.

No matter how old you get, drinking from the hose is absurdly satisfying. That is, unless it’s a really old hose that tastes like melting plastic.

This one didn’t. All I got was the flavor of Anchorage H2O, which is better than any city water has a right to be. (Fun fact: It comes from a glacier.) The experience catapulted me back to my childhood, when playing outdoors was so important that you’d sometimes drink from the hose rather than waste time going inside.

 

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The quinoa whisperer.

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Our garden is coming along more slowly than last year, probably because the soil was cold. We got something close to normal snowfall this year, for a change.

Within the past week the sugar snap peas have started to take off but the green beans are puzzlingly slow. So are several kinds of squash (spaghetti, blue Hubbard, pink banana), which aren’t anywhere close to dead but have somehow failed to launch.

Gardening is a series of trials and errors. But there’s still time.

Strawberries and raspberries look glorious, albeit still really green; we hope to be picking within two weeks. Carrots, beets, leaf and romaine lettuces, two kinds of Asian greens, potatoes and rhubarb look healthy. The spinach is pretty much spawned-out, so what’s left will probably go into the boiling bag.

The real stars this year? Quinoa.

 

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My dog days, in summer.

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For 10 days I took care of my niece’s dog so she could make a trip out of state. By the end of the first day I remembered why I don’t want pets: Because it means being responsible for another living creature, all the time.

As someone who’s lucky that her socks match* when she leaves the house, being unable to leave the house without first dealing with the dog was a challenge.

It was a lot like having a toddler around. Whenever I couldn’t see him or hear him I had an immediate reaction of, “Uh-oh – what’s he into now?”

As of the first day: the trash, the recycling bin and something on the counter.

 

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This, that and summer.

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Sorry to have maintained radio silence for so long. Not only have I been promoting “Your Playbook For Tough Times, Vol. 2: Needs And Wants Edition” and taking care of gigs for other sites, I’ve been slowed down by summer, in two ways:

Playing in the dirt, i.e., piddling around in the garden*. Although DF does the lion’s share of the work, I’ve still be spending less time at the computer and more time harassing chickweed.

Losing track of time due to the long, long summer** days.

About that last: On Thursday night I decided to try and finish “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” the second in the late Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander series (officially known as the Millennium Series, but I like the character so much it will always be the Lisbeth Salander series). It’s such a great read that I hated to quit, but my eyes grew heavy.

No wonder: It was 2:30 a.m.

 

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No firearms in the bouncy house.

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Over the weekend I went to Fairbanks with my friend Linda B., who had a play in the annual 8 x 10 Festival. It’s a very cool concept: The Fairbanks Drama Association puts out a call for 10-minute plays and, after blind judging, selects the best eight to be performed as an evening of staged readings.

As usual, it was a great evening. Linda’s play, “Here There Be Dragons,” was a delightful mashup of satire, swords ’n’ sorcery, and Pokemon Go. The other seven shorts were pretty entertaining as well, especially one called “Smartphone” – imagine asking the GPS on your phone for directions to a date, only to have the device direct you somewhere else instead and try to get you back together with your former partner. (Not to give too much away, but the phone had a personal reason to rebel.)

We saw swans and moose on the way up and back, had pie at Rose’s Café (although, alas, the sauerkraut pie is no more), bumped into a former co-worker who’s now teaching school in Fairbanks, and ate the sourest sourdough pancakes I’d ever tasted. It all would have been a lovely weekend had that stupid virus not still been kicking my keister.

But that’s not what this story is about.

 

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Adventures in steamed bread.

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bread-steamingAs part of my low-maintenance prepper campaign, I’ve been thinking about ways we could cook if a major earthquake led to a loss of electricity. We’ve got a burn barrel and a Weber outside, and if the gas were still on we could manually light the stovetop (but not the oven).

We’ve got tons of staples on hand and could likely outlast a major emergency – even if all our shiftless relatives showed up – because we have a fireplace insert plus loads of canned goods, flour and beans. One thing we couldn’t do easily? Bread.

Thus I’ve been researching recipes like stovetop corn pone, tortillas and other relatively simple staffs of life. When I recently got a copy of “The Kitchen Stories Cookbook: Comfort Cookin’ Made Fascinating and Easy,” my eyes fell upon a recipe for Boston brown bread.

The result is literally steaming in the photograph. (DF snapped the picture shortly after the first pieces were cut.) It was the perfect antidote to a cold winter night when paired with a thick soup made from boiling-bag broth, a pint of home-canned turkey, and whatever vegetables we had on hand.

My theory is that fresh bread, or even fresh tortillas, can make an ordinary meal – or an emergency one – seem much nicer than it actually is.

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Warmth and plenty.

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thOh, the breakfast we just had. Perfectly cooked bacon, done in the oven. Sliced tomatoes. The last of the homemade rolls from the freezer, toasted and served with a choice of three homemade (not by us) jams. Tea and coffee aplenty

Scrambled eggs for me and for DF, eggs done “the way Jesus had his.” (See Matthew 11:30 for the punny explanation.) A dish of yogurt with rhubarb compote, both – you guessed it – homemade. The only reason we didn’t add in some of those Del Monte red grapefruit sections was that we forgot they were in the fridge.

The fireplace insert was churning out BTUs, its flames resurrected from the previous evening’s fire that had entertained us and also dried two racks of laundry. While I slept in DF had folded that laundry and put away the racks.

This lazy Saturday morning was seasoned perfectly by gusts of snow blown against the kitchen windows. Not new snow, but slabs of old snow and hand-sized chunks of frost blown off the roof and the neighbor’s giant larch tree. My breakfast sat more snugly and smugly each time snow scoured the panes: It’s out there and I’m in here, enjoying warmth and a leisurely breakfast.

All of which reminded me of a line from Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth.”

 


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Christmas at the airport.

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santa_planeWhen you fly on a buddy pass you travel standby. Using a pass during the holiday season is a total crapshoot – or, in airline parlance, “not recommended.”

But I when I decided to visit my daughter for the holidays, I believed the traditional wisdom about flying on Dec. 24.

“Folks will already be where they want to be,” I kept hearing. “Plenty of room on the planes on Christmas Eve.”

Apparently a whole lot of people missed that memo.

 

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