Having had a cup of coffee I've got diarrhea of the keyboard. If you had me on the phone I'd be talking your ear off. Tip: the key to drinking the old, reheated coffee from the pot you didn't finish yesterday is half and half. Enough half and half can make anything taste great. If you happen to have whipping cream (unwhipped) use that instead. Butterfat makes it better.
I'm gearing up for the Midnight Sun Intertribal Powwow. As Media Director I have my hands full. Today I need to fax a bunch of PSAs to more radio stations, I handed out posters to folks to put up yesterday, and the postering efforts continue. I've written all the news articles I'm going to write and you can find one of them here. In the same issue you can also read my interview with Emmylou Harris. The other part of that interview is in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, but unfortunately they make you pay to read it online. Sorry, folks!
Last night was the first time it didn't rain all night at my place. We have been having a monsoon season early, with lots of thunderstorms. On the 4th of July I played for an hour down at Alaskaland under a big tent. I started out with three people in the audience and one of those was my boyfriend! By the time I was done I'd attracted about 25 folks, and I could see folks dancing and skipping around to the fiddle all over the grounds outside the tent as well.
My landlord is retired and has nothing to do but set projects for himself. Unfortunately for me and the other tenant, he has fixated on the water system. Every day he arrives and starts messing with the plumbing, resulting in combinations of a)no water at all, b)no hot water at all, c)rusty mud instead of water and/or d)no water pressure so that it's impossible to do anything with what water is available. These projects inevitably entail large grinding, drilling, cutting, sawing and banging noises from the garage, which is underneath my place. The floor is a mere one inch-thick, and everything that happens down there is brilliantly audible. Including the ringing of his telephone, which sometimes starts at 7am.
So what with firecrackers, thunder and lightning, and the industrial cacophony from below, Sofia was close to having a nervous dog breakdown. It got so that as soon as the sky clouded over she'd start shaking, and then hyperventilating. She's been crawling into my lap, or staying at my heel for weeks now. Petting her and talking to her didn't seem to make things better, instead, she shook more and panted even harder. Sometimes she'd crawl under the coffeetable or my desk. Nothing I did would distract her and I was beginning to get pretty worried.
Luckily I got an email from the Humane Association that had an article about this very subject. I found out that petting and soothing does make it worse for some dogs. What many dogs need is a safe, dark cuddly den place to hide. My house is particularly dark, and the closet is very dark. So I put her dog pillows (she has Stevie's pillow under her pillow for emotional comfort, we both still miss him a lot) in a corner of the closet and closed both the sliding doors, leaving one end just open enough for slim Sofia to slide through. She immediately went in, curled up and went to sleep. This morning she's a much happier dog!
Some dogs have a RUN AWAY reaction to thunder, lightning and loud noises. Sofia would probably react that way if she were outside during the noisy times. You can read the article here.
Meanwhile I'm doing fine. The rain doesn't cloud the sky with gray all day and all night, like in Oregon. The clouds break up, blue sky pokes you in the eye with its brilliance and I'm getting tan from the sun. This year has been great as far as mosquitos go, nary a bug during the normal daylight hours. It's been a beautiful summer so far, albeit with a few forest fire smoke days, but nothing serious.
