clean paint off cat

–that’s my only use of Google today.

I’ve just transformed my olive-green den into a friendly orange one. I have also transformed my gray kitten and black-and-tan cat into friendly orange-streaked ones.

In other news, my downstream bathtub pipes have been frozen for two days. Attempted to mix warm water in to melt. Made humorous attempt at plunging tub. Failed, failed. Am starting to miss hot water. But the small child in me rejoices at having an excuse not to wash.

It snows here on non-primary days, too

Alaska has never mattered before—so it’s a step up to get any political coverage at all. The AP’s headline was on voters braving cold weather and going to primaries in odd places. A woman in Barrow was hosting a primary there and making oatmeal cookies. A nice detail—I’m covering the Juneau Republican primary tonight at the Hangar on the Wharf.

But hey there, national media: it’s no big deal and just no story at all to brave snow for the primary. At least not in Juneau. (Time magazine said it was -50 here. It’s not.) Hint: The kids up here don’t get snow days unless they’re covered in an avalanche. Snow is what we’ve got here. We brave it to get the paper in the morning, to take the dog out, to go to the grocery store. I consider it a novelty, but I just moved here three weeks ago.

What’s big news is that anyone is voting at all. Or that Ron Paul supporters have been registering “in droves,” according to the local Republican party organizer.

Off to the Hangar—

Self-confidence earned in Starr Hill

My street is narrow and covered with ice. It is the only street on Juneau, I’ve heard, where you’re allowed to park the wrong way, because it is a cul-de-sac with no sac. The cars have worked two deep ruts into the ice. So even though you can’t see the pavement, you know where to drive. I find it easier than Glacier Highway, which is just a plain flat mix of white and black ice. But people who live in Juneau — downtown, as in below us — choose not to come up here if they can avoid it. I like to make a daily try just to see whether my car can do it with the California tires; why else did I get a Subaru?

So far I have not failed or even slipped much. The gravel-layers are usually reliable. But one day last week I parked at the end of the cul-de, on the hill. I parked facing up the hill. In the morning the snow around my car had solidified into an ice tureen, such as would serve punch to a party at the Ice Hotel up north. Any way I wanted to go was up a slippery hill.

I learned that the newfangled cat littler I buy is worthless for not only keeping my house free of cat stink, but also for traction. I bought it because it was made of old newspapers — being in the news business, I want the physical product to come to some use.

A white-bearded man started his big truck behind me as I was spinning on newspaper pellets.

“I’m too old and tired to help you,” he said. “There’s gravel in a bucket at the end of the street.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You could always just walk to work and leave it til spring,” he suggested.

“Thank you,” I said.

The gravel was what I needed. I rolled on out with a greater sense of accomplishment than one ever feels leaving one’s Oakland driveway for work.

Cats drinking water

Why does it taste better out of a glass?

Potted eggs: Getting by in Juneau

Juneau: It’s a fine clear day, the mountains across the canal on Douglas are pink with sunrise.

It’s -16 with the windchill out there, people. My garbage can is overturned on the other side of the house. The top has gone to meet its maker, maybe out on Mt. Roberts. Birds huddle next to the Christmas lights in the trees outside. Bake them chicken eggs with shaved jamon serrano, a mix of taleggio and red hawk washed-rind cheese, and a bit of parsley and fresh pepper. Croissant on the side. That’ll save you!

It saved me. I’ve got more space than I need in this apartment, but less heat. The monitor says 46 degrees; the down button works, but not the up. It’s my second weekend back in Alaska after two years in Oakland, Calif. My toes have not yet forgiven me.

Still, we are adjusting. We — me and the cat. I got myself the requisite pair of Extra-Tufs; the kitten I got a cat. I’m slave-laboring for a newspaper up here, so I’ve hardly gotten to enjoy my new home or get to know the town. I’ve learned more about federal timber sales than the trail two blocks away from my house. Did you know the Forest Service’s first priority is to sell trees? I felt like such a naif …

To Alaska

North I go. Off to report the news in the land of drill rigs, rigged elections, smoked salmon, black bears, brown bears, moose and gun-toting tax assessors. Alaskans, I’ve noticed, tend to relish their own stereotypes. In Valdez each year they have a Duct Tape Blue Tarp Carrharrt Ball, at which your costume is to be composed of those three universally available and useful materials. My Oakland life has grown so soft that I have stowed my Carharrts in the back of my closet.

The salmon are calling me

I may be moving soon.

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Bringing up myself

Disclaimer: Dear parents, I know you tried your hardest. Any deep inner flaws are the fault of the author. Or her sister.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parenting lately. It’s that time of life, I suppose. I’m a healthy hormonal 27-year-old female. The other night I dreamt I gave birth to a kitten. It was very cute after we washed the amniotic fluid off it. (My dreams are often physiologically detailed.) We were so proud. By ‘we,’ I mean me and my boyfriend — who in real life enjoys other people’s babies and, if I’m being real euphemistic about it, cats from afar. I have informed him that I do not wish to have babies unless they are kittens. Babies, ick.

Which is why the next part of the dream was a nightmare. The brain riffed; and in the next one-act I had birthed a baby. Mind you, the baby never surfaced in any scenes. One minute I was thinking my pants were getting a bit tight, and the next the belly was pancake-flat again, and it was clear something had exited it. At the time I was on some kind of quest, let’s say a Hajj. The whole thing made me feel hard-core and resourceful, because I seem to have had the baby on the side of the road.

I’m hoping this isn’t my entrance into the Zone. That place women go from 27-33, where hormones rule and babies suddenly stop smelling funny and their minds have an inability to remember how horrible it is when babies, toddlers, or teenagers screech, especially in inappropriate places, embarrassing their parents.

As my friends all know, my plan has always been that I’d only have children if I could take fertility drugs. Some cocktail that would splice the egg, not release a bunch of them. I’d like to have a passel of identical children, so that I can do psychological experiments on them with a sample size to support reasonably good statistics on the results. As a conscientious scientist I would have to send some of them away as controls — to be raised by wolves, penguins, cats or Eugene Oregonians. I have considered naming them all George Foreman, but just for fun. They’d have to have nicknames, too.

I’ve always known, anyway, that I needed a lot more parenting before I could legitimately traumatize another generation. Example 1: Hygiene and tidiness. I was finishing an audio job early this morning; I absently took a sip of coffee from the mug on the right while staring at the screen; but today’s coffee, unfortunately, was the mug on the left. Also, I actively avoid looking at my kitchen sink. Example 2: An overdeveloped sense of fairness, wrought by intense sibling rivalry, which manifests in times of need as an overdeveloped sense of unfairness. Do not eat the last donut alone. You will discover my wrath. It is embarrassing to see my own childishness sometimes.

My own parents cannot help me. They have moved on to cats, themselves. I think they prefer them. The cats are Abyssinians, which respond to commands like ‘fetch.’ That’s more than I ever did.

But I discovered a solution. I will parent myself! I’ve been considering bidding for a video-podcast editing job for a parenting-science center. The example vodcast was a lesson in gratitude. A cheery woman parent explained to her cheery interviewer that each night at bedtime, she asks her child to list three things about the past day that she’s grateful for. Over time she has begun to compile the list during the day. Mommy was most pleased the day that the child declared, upon receipt of an afternoon ice cream sundae, that this would be one of her three things that day. It’s a way to raise a person who is conscious of and grateful for the good things in her life. A glass-half-fuller, the cheery women explained. It’s certainly preferable to having one of those children, and we’ve all heard them, who screeches “But I wanted the PINK FLAVOR!” at the top of her lungs in public.

I’m going to abandon my Inner Taskmaster (who is named Vladimir, by the way) and cultivate my Inner Cheery Mom.

Today I am grateful for:

(1) My adherence to high coffee standards, even in poverty. High-quality work cannot be done on low-quality sludge. And I have already finished for the day!

(2) Pirated software. I can say no more.

(3) My landlord, who brought me smoked-turkey soup last night when I had to work late.

(4) The two kittens I am about to pick up from the SPCA. People who know me, don’t worry — it’s only temporary. I’m becoming a foster cat mama.

But we all know kittens are the gateway baby.

I smell someone sneaking iLiteracy to the iPod generation

Amazon is pre-hawking the ‘electronic paper’ reading device, available Nov. 29. I heard about it at every industry-related free-food event at the journalism school in the last two years.

It is called Kindle, perhaps to distinguish it from the old paper-paper — aka Kindling.

I was hoping for something like a Silpat with words on it (actually, if it could double as a cookie sheet, that would be revolutionary). But this looks like a Palm Pilot for a storm trooper.

I wonder how long it would last at the bottom of my backpack, where the bananas and the other books usually end up?

All Qaeda, all the time

I’ve seen plenty of pictures of Lahore lawyers’ riots today, a response to the new Musharraf’s de jure martial law. It sounds like the Punjabi Musharraf’s claw for power is all about keeping the Taliban, the Supreme Court, and the opposition leaders down. I almost never hear, for example, about how the Baluch insurgents have reacted. They seem to have no voice at all. And I cannot remember the last time I read the word “Pashtunistan” in the Washington Post. I’d love to read a less al-Qaeda-focused or more ethnically nuanced take on what’s going on over there. The only piece I’ve read recently that started to do that was a NYT piece in October; it was like a Pakistani Ethnic & Tribal Politics for Dummies. I’m no cowgirl, but the treatment makes me want to brush up on my Urdu and saddle up for Peshawar.