Allie at Abby's writes a poem and takes my order

Saturday morning, I took Margie to breakfast at Abby's and was surprised to be waited on by a new waitress, just recently hired - Allie.

Allie of Abby's.

Allie is a poet and she is not only strikingly beautiful but quite bright. She is only 16, but has graduated from high school and is enrolling at the Mat-Su branch of the University of Alaska.

She is a writer and poet and plans to continue her studies until she herself is a college professor, teaching students who, for a couple of years, might not be much younger than she will be.

Although I brought my camera with me, I had forgotten to put a memory card in it and so I had to fall back on my iPhone 4s. I was a little worried, because there was a broad spread in dynamic range between the highlights and shadows and I knew that the iPhone could not handle that spread.

Even so, it did pretty good for a phone.

I took more pictures today and I really intended to include them in this post, but I shot them in my regular camera and it is just too late and I am just too tired and jetlagged to download, edit and process them. 

So I will save them for later.

And don't forget - there is still plenty left to come from the five-week trip I just completed, both from India and White Mountain Apache, Arizona. It will be at least a couple of days yet before I start again - maybe even a week.

Allie has a poem hanging on the wall at Abby's, decorated by her own art work. I took a picture of it and was going to run it, but then I suddenly realized I would be publishing her poem without her permission, so I held off.

Breakfast, by the way, was truly excellent - way better than the greasy spoon breakfast I had in Phoenix.

Too lazy, I take Margie to Abby's; moose licks Caleb's truck and then flees; fire on the snowy mountain side; woman gets pulled over by cop; continents drift but gray whale rescue posts loom over me

I woke up lazy today and I didn't want to do any damn thing. Except eat breakfast. I thought about oatmeal, but I could hear that the TV was on in the living room and Caleb was watching golf. I hate to eat breakfast with the TV on, although sometimes I do, but Caleb deserves to watch golf on Saturday morning, too.

Margie was still asleep but at just the right moment, she opened her eyes and looked groggily about. Having just come home from a week in Anchorage, I figured she would want to stay put and eat oatmeal. She doesn't mind having the TV on during breakfast. In fact, if Caleb is not around, she will often turn the TV on herself.

Still, I asked her, "I don't suppose you would like to go get breakfast?"

She looked around. I could tell she was feeling pretty lazy herself. "Yes," she said. "I think I would."

So off we went to Abby's. Margie had an omelette, with hashbrowns and homemade wheat toast. I had multi-grain sourdough pancakes with two eggs over easy and ham. Margie had not been to Abby's in awhile, and she was thrilled. Abby's just keeps getting better and better. I do not say this to put down either of the Family restaurants, or any others, but there is no place else in Wasilla that you can come even close to getting a breakfast so good as what we had at Abby's today.

Superb! Margie remained in a state of bliss for hours afterward.

Here is Abby and husband Andy visiting another customer who is about to depart. Behind the counter is Meda Warrior, who doesn't work there all the time but was helping out today. Meda is Aurora's sister, whose December wedding I photographed - even though I am not a wedding photographer.

I didn't charge anything to shoot the wedding, because if I did that would make me a wedding photographer, but afterward Aurora and Meda's mother Arlene created an account for me at Abby's and so buys me breakfast there once a week and a couple of times even twice. Abby was ready to put our breakfast on the account, but I had already used it one day this week and it didn't seem right, especially since two of us ate. So I paid for it.

I am getting a little worried, though. I have been expecting a check for about three weeks now. On Monday, I was told it would be mailed Tuesday. It still hasn't come. If it doesn't come this coming week, we are going to be in a hard fix. Margie leaves town Tuesday night and I leave Saturday night. We need that check before we go.

Such is the life of a freelance photographer and his poor wife - or at least this one and mine. There are those photographers who are much smarter, economically speaking than I am, who do not always get in the kind of jams I do.

Margie did not have jam on her toast. She was enjoying her buttered, homemade, wheat bread so much that it didn't even occur to her that she had not put jam on it until she only had two bites left to eat. 

"You should have had jam," I told her. "It's usually homemade and its real good."

After breakfast, I remained lazy. I did not feel like doing anything at all, but I decided I would go pedal my bike for five to ten miles anyway - but the front tire was flat. So I went on walk. Coming back, as I neared the house, I was startled out of a daydream when suddenly I heard something crashing about in the bushes right beside me. I had walked right to within a few feet of a moose. It, and the one it was with, charged off a short distance into the trees. I took a few pictures through the branches, then noticed I was standing right in front of my driveway, so I put my camera on the porch and went into the house to get a plastic bag to put it in so that lens would not fog up.

When I came back to get it, the moose had crossed the street and were in our driveway. The cow took off around the side of the house. The maturing calf licked salt off the back of Caleb's truck.

Once it had satisifactorily salted itself, the young moose took off to run across the yard and see if it could find its mother. 

I went back into the house. I had a great deal of work to do, but I still felt very lazy. I did not want to do it. So I just got on my computer and web-surfed for awhile. Then I went out into the living room and laid down on the couch, by the fire in the woodstove. I semi-napped for a little and might have fully napped, but Chicago had also decided to nap, on my chest. She kept trying to lick my beard. I didn't like that, so each time she would try, I scoot her an inch or two down my chest.

Then she would purr,creep back up and try to lick my beard again.

So it really wasn't much of nap. 

I then decided that I was not going to work at all. I was just going to take the whole damn day off and be lazy. It wouldn't matter in the long run. I heard a story on the radio yesterday about how, in a few hundred million years, all the continents north of Antartica, including Australia, will again be fused into one super continent. When it happens, it will be today, as surely as it is today right now and the fact that I got lazy today won't matter one bit.

Margie was out shopping and didn't come back with the car until close to 5:00. I then took a late coffee break. Metro was closed, so I went the Mocha Moose hut. Here I am, leaving the hut, getting ready to pull back into the traffic of the Parks Highway. There was no car behind me, so I took my time.

Now I am coming down Seldon, nearing home. It is drawing close to 6:00 PM. Look how much light there is! The dark season is coming to its end. Up ahead, I noticed that a cop had pulled someone over and was sauntering toward their car.

I pass the cop and the woman he has pulled over.

Finally, in the evening, I couldn't take it anymore. I was still tired and lazy and felt like doing nothing, but this gray whale series is looming over me. So I came out here. I made a huge amount of progress in a short time. You can't see it yet, but I did.

I don't think you will see it tomorrow, either. Tomorrow is Jobe's second birthday. You should see it on Monday.

It is almost midnight and Margie is baking cakes right now. Tomorrow, we will go to Anchorage and see how wet Jobe and Kalib and their guest, including cousin Gracie, who just arrived from Arizona today, get on Jobe's birthday.

I take a break from the Loft to take Margie to town and to eat at Abby's

Yesterday, I had to drive Margie to Anchorage so she could babysit the boys. Thanks to the Martin Luther King holiday, I was able to keep her for an extra day this week. She had to be there no later than 9:30 AM, so we were headed out of Wasilla by 8:30 AM.

Crews were busy cleaning snow from the roads.

We followed the waning moon toward Anchorage.

I found Kalib and Lynx studying each other as Al Sharpton pontificated in the background.

I lingered through much of the day to nap and take care of some things, then I began the drive out of Anchorage. I stopped for gas with one mile to go before empty.

A moose ran alongside the freeway.

This cop had pulled someone over. Now he was getting out of his car to go talk to the driver. Maybe he was going to write a ticket. I don't know. Perhaps he just wanted someone to talk to. Perhaps he wanted to make a bet on who would win the Super Bowl this year.

Maybe he wrote the driver a ticket, or gave the driver a warning and said, "don't do that again!"

Whatever "that" was.

Speeding, I would suspect.

But I don't know.

Things are not always as they appear.

Whatever it was, the driver probably did not think it was fair. "Unmarked car!" the driver probaby muttered to the driver. "Is this what I pay my taxes for, so cops can prowl around in unmarked cars and ticket people who would not even have been speeding if the cop had been in a marked car? Unfair! Unfair!"

I'm pretty sure that's what the driver muttered to the driver.

Come dinner time, I could find nothing handy to eat. So I went to Abby's, where I discovered that I, the camera man, was on camera. And see that aloe vera plant in the window? What I did not know when I took this picture is that it was gift for Margie and me, from Arlene Warrior.

When we visited her just before Christmas to pick up the atikluks, we admired her aloe vera plants. And now she had given us one.

This morning, I did not want to cook oatmeal and Caleb was watching TV, which was OK, because I had planned to go to breakfast at Abby's anyway. Here is Shelly, reflected in the window, just before she cooked an omelette for me.

Abby was not there.

I took a walk. This dog came and barked at me. I don't know this dog. I don't know why he would bark at me. I am good to all dogs.

A C-130 Hercules flew over.

When I went to the post office to check my mail and get Visa photos taken for my upcoming trip to India, I found a bill from my doctor for the visit that I had made in early November when I was diagnosed with shingles. I decided that I had better go pay it right away before I forgot again and while I still had some money left.

Along the way, I got to photograph two school buses at once.

It was a terribly exciting day here in Wasilla.

So exciting I damn near had a heart attack.

The doctor's office is just ahead. 

Now that I have updated the near-present a bit, I will return to working on my David Alan Harvey Loft series.