A bright, sunny, day weighed down by darkness

I was up early today and fixed both Margie and me a good breakfast of oatmeal with apple bits, walnuts and cinnamon cooked into it. You may wonder what Margie was doing staying home on a Monday, instead of having me drive her into Anchorage in the early morning so she could resume her weekly babysitting duties. Tomorrow, I must drive her into Anchorage early so she can catch a jet to Arizona and spend some time on the reservation, visiting her aging mother and family.

I sorely want to go with her, as I need to visit them too, but I have much too much I must do here. In fact, I need to pick up my pace by about 300 percent if I am to get it done.

As the clock neared noon, I realized I was hungry. Margie had taken the car to a doctor's appointment. I did not want to open a can of soup, so I decided to walk to Abby's and have a bowl of her homemade soup. On the walk back to the house, I photographed this scene alongside the Seldon Road cutbanks.

As you can see, it is illegal for people on snowmachines and other vehicles to drive on the bike trail and, as you can see, they do anyway. Yet, in a way, during the long period of snow they do pedestrians a favor by packing down the trail for them. It is a different case in the summertime, when the trail is frequented not only by bicyclers, but pedestrians and moms and dads walking babies in strollers. Then it gets really annoying when someone comes roaring down the bike trail on a four-wheeler.

Of course, if they stay off the trail and ride on the dirt trail where they are supposed to, they kick up a horrible amount of lung-clogging dust, so that is annoying too. What, then, are they to do? Generally speaking, whatever they feel like doing.

The day had begun with terrible news - a nine-year old boy out snowmachining on a glacier with his father had fallen into a 200 foot crevice and was killed. 

As I was on the bike trail photographing the sign and thinking about boys who should not be snowmachining on a glacier, yet of a stricken father upon whom love and comfort must be poured and about immature outlaws on machines charging down bike trails, I did not realize it but on the other side of this country people were reacting to the terrible bombing at the Boston Marathon. What can I write about this? Nothing. It is just simply beyond me.

Still, we had to pay our taxes so, in late afternoon, Margie and I drove to H&R Block, picked up the package they had worked up for us over the past week and then drove to the Post Office to mail a check to the IRS. After I parked, we sat in the car for a bit so Margie could write the check and put it in the envelope.

As she did, I saw this woman through four car windows. I thought of First Corinthians, 13:12: "For now we see through a glass darkly...."

Then we drove home. Just before we got here, from the corner of Ward's and Seldon, we saw someone pulled over by a cop. I was very surprised by this scene, as this is a City of Wasilla policeman. We actually live in unincorporated Wasilla well beyond the boundary of the City of Wasilla and fall under the jurisdiction of the Alaska State Troopers.

I recalled the time I had to do a citizen's arrest of the drunken ice cream lady after she nearly ran my daughter over and then crashed into the culvert. I first called the city police, but they wouldn't come. So I called the Troopers. They came, but it took them an hour to get here. 

It was no fun, detaining a drunken ice cream lady for an hour but for the sake of the children of unincorporated Wasilla, I did.