Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. I have a lot of mosquito bites. Every day I get three or four more. They add up after a while. My digestive tract is not super psyched about this trip, even though I am making my own breakfast every day and trying to eat healthy. But all in all, doing okay, doing okay. Today is dad’s funeral. I am, again, running behind. Need to be at mom’s house at 10. It is 8:50 AM. It is unclear if I finish this email before I leave. I hope so.
Let’s see… various updates:
I found my selfie stick for my reading experiment on the flight back home, though it occurred to me that, duh, I will need to turn the page in the kindle app, which means every few minutes I’ll need to raise an arm to swipe. But I think that will be okay? I’ll still be able to 1) read, 2) keep my head leaned back, 3) keep my arm rested on the chair. Should be good. I am excited to try and look ridiculous in the process.
Did I tell you about the U-Hauls? There are no more car rental locations in Fairbanks. I drove out Dale road the other day past the Hertz, Enterprise, etc., buildings, and the buildings are still there, they still have their signs on them, but they are closed and there are no cars available. Really feel like someone in the rental industry missed the ball on that one. Like, yeah, okay Hertz had their weird, crazy special situation, but what about Enterprise? What’s the deal? Very odd. Anyway because of that, people in Fairbanks are renting U-Hauls as their primary vehicles. It’s clever. It’s a good time. There are a lot of empty U-Haul trucks driving around town. A U-Haul F-150 rental practically ran me off the road last night. Good for them! I am a slow driver. I deserve it.
Apparently there’s some sort of shortage in Cemetery iron? All of the cemeteries in Alaska at this point, my sister tells me, are owned by the same company. And they have to use this one, single, specific place down in the lower 48 to get the iron for the doors. You know, it’s like a concrete slab of a door to the niche where you keep your urn. And on the Door you mount your dad’s name, and dates, or whatever, in iron. They don’t really do carving anymore. Probably not scalable to the global, corporate level (hrm, there’s a thing to figure out). So now it’s iron. But there is a backlog of over a year. My sister ordered dad’s iron last April, and it just showed up. We didn’t think we’d have it in time for the funeral today, we thought we’d be funeraling to a blank door. But apparently it just showed up. Only took fourteen months. Real monopoly situation right there. Joan Robinson and Edward Hastings Chamberlain would have something to say about it.
Yesterday I left the hotel and went to meet Val at Costco. On the way I stopped by the train yard and took a picture of where I used to work on the railroad — cleaning the railcars for Holland America Westours. They were not there yet, sadly. But here is the yard:
I really want a Costco membership that place is so absurd and fun. There’s one in Durham but it’s too far away to be practical. Maybe a once-a-quarter kind of thing. Pretend we live in the bush and we flew into Fairbanks to get the season’s supplies. The place is just fantastic. I wanted to buy these really-very-affordable dip nets, but I don’t think it will fit in my luggage.
After Costco val and I went to Walmart to buy picture frames for dad’s funeral today, then we split up for a while and I went and walked around the Noel Wein Library and park, because I have such a soft spot for that place from my childhood.
And then to mom’s, where I got out the iPad, and went through my Dropbox folder of dad photos with mom, Val and aunt Fred, and picked about six that seemed best. Then we split up again and they worked on flowers and I went to Dateline copy, which is still around. Apparently one of Val’s friends owns it now. It is much expanded from the little copy shop with 2 Macs for DTP that it was when I was a kid. They had, like, the only laser printer in town back then. I spent a lot of time there. Anyway, the woman working there, Madeline, was very nice, and she helped me out a ton. She is trying to get a larger photo on Foam Core done for today, though she hasn’t called yet so I am not optimistic. We shall see.
Then back home to get the photos in the frames, but of course there were all sorts of problems with aspect ratios, and cutting and the like, getting 8.5x11 paper into 8x10 frames. So I ran over to Fred Meyer and bought some scissors, tape and construction paper and got them all squared away (ha, pun, or non-pun, depending on the frame). I think they look pretty nice!
So, that being done, I turned my attention to the slideshow for the dinner, which was such a pain because the internet is super slow here, and iPad OS is a total joke, but eventually I got it all sorted — one time, I tried to send a folder of images via AirDrop from my Mac to my iPad and the iPad decided the only app that would even think about opening the folder was the Brother Printer Utility App. Awesome! Also, fun fact, on both Mac and iPad OS, there is no shuffle mode for slideshows. Amazing. Just amazing. You can just picture it: somewhere, some product designer thought “well, people are going to fuck it up no matter what, so it should either be always shuffled, or never shuffled, and more people are going to be upset if it’s shuffled against their will, so we’ll just remove the feature, because 80% of the people who want shuffle won’t notice or will blame themselves for not being able to figure it out.” This company loves its users!
(n.b. the feature used to be there. They took it out a decade ago. And haven’t bothered to put it back in. Except on iPhone. Because it has so much larger of a user base, I suspect, the complaints were voluminous enough to register.)
And then the best part of the day: I got to see old friends. I had dinner — at Lemongrass, again, and I hope I go there, a fourth time this trip— with my old friends Carrie and Vern, and then we went to the Malemute and met up with Robin and Athena and Frank and Dana and it was so great. The Malemute is looking great. Looks exactly like it did when I was a kid. Apparently a new guy bought it and it is a hoping’ joint on the weekends, but it was pretty chill on a Wednesday, with some bluegrass pickers playing on the porch and maybe 40 people there.
Just fantastic. I hadn’t seen Athena or Robin in, god, like, 30 years? Well, that’s not true I ran into Robin at Fred Meyer sometime in the early 21st century. Carrie and Vern easily a decade. Just wonderful.
Okay, well, I need to get going to mom’s and Substack is being finicky with images and it took my all my extra time to get those last two images into this post, so no playlist today, sorry. And sorry I didn’t do a lot of “economics blah blah” or “Joe Manchin’s a dick” or rambling about gardening (though my friend Nick is at my house and just texted me that the garden is looking good and I miss it so much).
I wanted to ask about the outhouse and mosquitos! Since there's no door, don't they get in there and bite your nether regions while you sit?