Borrowed Homework #1

My friend, Lisa, has been kind enough to share assignments from her online fictional writing course with me. Assignment #1 guidelines posted below, followed by my three submissions. :)

Think of something you would never do. For example: dive off a cliff, cheat on a partner, steal from a department store, etc. Then write a passage about a character similar to yourself who does do that thing you would never do. Reach for that person who is like you, but not exactly you. Keep it short, preferably under 500 words.

#1 - Downtown

Ohhhh... I'm staring at the light again. And I love it, in a weird, slightly masochistic, sense-retarding way. Just for a couple minutes, so that lingering retinal-burn orb creeps across most of my vision like some kind of reverse tunnel vision. Now I walk down the hall.
Slowly.
Keep your hands to your sides, I tell myself. Grasping for doorways is likely to draw attention.
In the kitchen.
The refrigerator is stocked with butter balls in big tubs, half and half creamer cartons, and juices in cans and bottles: orange, apple, cranberry, grapefruit. All the way in the back is my orange juice. Nobody notices it in the back. My own special blend.
And I only need a sip!
A sip will send you reeling. A sip will shove the back of your brain into the front of your skull, and don't try it too far from the kitchen sink, either. I've turned my stomach practically inside-out with too large of a gulp.

...

Squeeze your fists. Squeeze your fists. Purse those lips shut and clench those teeth. The wall will hold your back.
Now slide down.
Slide
Ease
Drift
You're sinking
Your ship is sinking
Touch down on the sea floor.
Grounded like so many behemoths of the past, waiting to be discovered. I am the Nuestra Senora del Populo and my hull stinks of dead rodents and foul concoctions: tart juices and stale, bitter almonds. You can never tell how long you'll be submerged, but this time the slap of rubber echoes through the ocean current and music is playing an old refrain:

'...Downtown, where all the lights are bright
Downtown, waiting for you tonight
Downtown, you're gonna be alright now...'

And here I am, sitting alone in this aluminum box. I know I'm not moving but I'm pretty sure I'm getting shipped somewhere. Beat all you want on the walls with your sleeping pad, it doesn't make a sound.
But he forgot about my watch!
Scrape at my reflection--
--Crashing through my fingers out my ears, boiling my eyeballs like a burst of lightning straight to the brain!

So I sing that beautiful song in my head. I sing it out loud, so loud that it doesn't sound like music anymore and I'm shouting at the top of my lungs:

'...So go downtown! Things'll be great when you're
Downtown! Don't wait a minute for
Downtown! Everything's waiting for you!
Downtown! Downtown! Downtown! DOWNTOWN!...'

#2 - Decaf

Fuck caffeine, fuck creamer, and fuck artificial sweeteners, Sugar In The Raw, and doses of Bailey's Irish Cream. And fuck Starbucks too.

The words are such a mantra to Charity Carlisle's being, it's a surprise they're not tattooed somewhere on his body. Who knows, maybe they are. Charity Carlisle is like that, or at least he might be. And Charity Carlisle is all about the decaf. Straight up, no additions, fresh from the spout of the Mobil gas station dispenser, topping off that god-knows-how-old Nalgene bottle with a smug grin and a small pin affixed to the white collar of his Neiman Marcus dress shirt. In small, block print, the pin reads 'Free Trade My Ass, I Get My Coffee Where I Get My GAS!', a Charity Carlisle Original.

But today, Charity's trying something new. Charity's got his own special blend he's been laboring over in spot number three of his three-car garage-turned grow room. Used grounds from the dumpster behind the Mobil station make the perfect five to one ratio of mixed soil for his budding coffee bean garden. Why else would they be called 'grounds'!? And once this crop is harvested, Charity's gonna capitalize, capitalize, capitalize! The Mobil gets busy as all hell in the summer and leaving packets stashed around the aisles is his foot in the door. Pretty soon the manager will be knockin' on Charity's door, just begging for a Charity Bulk Coffee Account, unbeknownst that the key ingredient is sitting in heaps behind the station.

Napoleon said that in a revolution, there are only two sorts of men, those who cause them and those who profit by them. But Charity's pretty sure Napoleon never met Charity Carlisle. Yeah, he's pretty sure he'd remember him.

#3 - Knitwit

The World Championship Speed Knitting Competition is tomorrow, but today, in the steely grip of my easy chair, is when the real battle is fought and won. Any speed knitter will tell you that the day before a competition is all about mastering technique to transform a muddled mess of yarn and sticks into a fluid motion, pumping out scarves and socks, tea cozies and blankets. The needles become dancers in a tango of maddening tempo, their fancy footwork leaving by-products of warm winter sweaters and glove-mitten hybrids emblazoned with argyle patterns.

Know your enemies to defeat them. Meet the contenders:

Betty Rosenfield, a.k.a. The Spider
5 foot 4, 68 years old, her fingerwork is so nimble and smooth that they liken her to a spider spinning her web. That's partly how she got her nickname. And she doesn't slow down, so if you can't keep up, you're just another fly on the wall and now she's got you. Her signature piece: the reversible fly-fisherman's sweater vest.

Karen Crosby, a.k.a. The Human Loom
At a staggering 6 foot 11, 51 years old, Karen Crosby knits so fast that she's been drug-tested three times in a single competition. She pumps out patterns of pixies and ponies so prolifically that she earned her namesake, The Human Loom, after her first national competition. Her signature piece: the pocketed, quintuplet baby shawl.

Cybil Yeo, a.k.a. Mad Cackler
4 foot 9 and 83 years old, Cybil is the oldest competitor but those extra years of experience are why she holds a five year winning streak when she puts her knitting sticks together. Her speed ebbs and flows as she maneuvers through intricate designs and weaves foot after foot of feat after feat. What may look like a mess of random swatches will transform in minutes into a zoo of knit work, each piece punctuated by a shrieking cackle of laughter upon completion. Nobody knows exactly why she does it, but it never fails to send shivers through opponents' needles. Her signature piece: knitted stuffed animals on a knitted stuffed train.

As you can see, the pressure is on today. But ol' Maddie McFee's got a trick up her sleeve this go around. See, The Spider keeps the pace, but she's not the fastest of the pack and The Human Loom might be fast, but every competition her designs are a little sloppy, and when you're vying for World Champion, that counts too. The Mad Cackler eeks them out with good, speedy knitting, and avante garde pieces that push the envelope of where knitting is headed into the 21st century. But there's a reason they call me 'The Rabid Moose', and maybe it's that I'm unpredictable and drop spittle as I feverishly hammer out my knittings, but this year they'll start calling me The Rapid Moose. I've been prepping eleven months straight and I'm fast and I'm technical and nobody's gonna expect my creation: the far-too-tightly-knit competitor cozy.

Thanks, Lisa!

Summer Happenings and Beyond

A lot has happened since my last blog post (par for the course, these days), which if you don't count random video clips, includes hiking a valley,

building a suspended, wooden platform, biking a 24 mile trail,

losing a suspended, wooden platform to vandals, hiking a backyard mountain,

hiking another backyard mountain,

moving into a pre-existing house in the woods,

backpacking another backyard trail for three days,

and squatting in a tent outside a shed-turned-cabin.

Forest Fair, treasure maps in progress, and dog-sitting at various houses throughout Girdwood also fit the bill of 'Ye Olde Summer Events'.

Oh yeah, and the heading picture for this post is from the Waikiki Beach Camp-out 2009 in Cooper Landing!

Not that I'm trying to pass buck or anything, but there are a plethora of photos covering these events on my facebook page, or you can visit the individual photo albums without a facebook account by clicking these links:

Upper Winner Creek Hike
Biking Johnson Pass
Hiking Max's Mountain
Hiking Crow Pass, Part 1
Hiking Crow Pass, Part 2 (backpacking trip)
Hiking Crow Pass, Part 2 (10 minute backpacking video)

And for those of you who've been following these events via facebook and questioning whether this post is just a rehash of previous events and not worth reading, you'll be glad to know that getting this far in the post warrants a prize and a warning all wrapped up into one tasty tamale-of-a-heads-up:

Krikkit anyone?

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." ~Lao Tzu

I'm collecting quotes for a project I'll be working on over the next few weeks. Quotes I'm looking for should be on the subject of nature, solitude, and treasure hunts. If anyone feels compelled to add to my compilation, please note the quote and who uttered the words of wisdom. I've got a healthy 15-20 right now, but I'm welcoming more as space allows.

"Look closely at Central America, and try to imagine what would happen if this vital region were to fall into Communist hands. What would happen is a lot of Communists would be stung repeatedly by vivious(sic) tropical insects the size of mature hamsters." ~Dave Berry

Planning continues for a vacation in the heart of America, and by that I mean Central America. The current itinerary is as follows:

October 29th -> Fly from Anchorage to Seattle to visit Emily, Toby, Tiny Toby, Michelle, and Michael.
November 3rd -> Fly from Seattle to Cancun to begin the journey from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico into Guatemala (and beyond?).
Tentatively, January 15th -> Fly from Cancun to Anchorage to embrace the Alaskan winter once more and collect money as work allows until the next summer. Possibly considering Cancun -> Medford, Oregon in lieu of Anchorage.

This all depends on how much money I can collect in the next couple months. :)

As always, apologies abound for the delay between posts and thank you for reading.

Indoor Waterfall

Here's a waterfall for all you inside at your computers. Cheers! :)

Girdwood is a Rainforest

Girdwood is a rainforest with bears and lots of mud.
So, we are building a suspended wooden platform to keep us out of the muck! I've thrown this mini-movie together for a brief look at what we're up to out there. :)

A snippet from Seattle

Here's a short video or "mini movie" of my sisters, Michelle and Niki, playing cards in Seattle. A good friend of mine, Paul W., has been posting mini movies to the web and I love the idea and plan to contribute my own bits as well. Cheers! :)

Bad Poetry

 
A morning breakfast, eat.
Cup of coffee, remind me:
Gone are the nights of Thai food gas
And a million sensations
of beer-soaked imaginations
Flying cards and towers of glass
Camraderie between relations
Man the stations, our creations
Frozen images show us patience
A river has divided then and now

Now there's a mirror and a comb
A million tiny hairs returning home
And thick, grey clouds on the fly
an ocean-blown breeze across a clear blue sky.
Ducks on water and boats on glass
Tadpoles swam just beyond our grasp.
Here's a Singer sewer and Tom Waits
and two days from our departure gates.

And books
so many books
a piano
a gazebo
bad poetry and
a speeding clock

Visiting Seattle

 
I'm in Seattle. It is raining.

Niki and I are currently in Seattle to visit our littlest sister, Michelle, and her boyfriend Michael. I'm also here to check out the city and get some first impressions. And I'm also here to visit Bellingham and produce pictures of it for Emily and Toby, who will be moving there within a month's time.
I've been taking pictures and there will be more comprehensive Seattle posts soon to come (or maybe just one post with a bunch of pictures) but for now, it's an hour after midnight and I've been spending a lot of time walking around the downtown area. Good night.

Spring Cleaning

My room is a catastrophe. It is littered with used camping gear, brand new camping gear, empty beer bottles, freshly cleaned (and folded!) clothes, half-filled boxes of things I mean to keep, random piles of things I mean to annex, a pile of items I've already promised to someone else, and much, much more. It's April, it's spring, and it's six weeks from the point where I no longer live in a solid building.

No, that's not actually true.

In six weeks our lease expires. Actually, it's ten weeks, but our landlord lost the paperwork, we lost our paperwork, and he wants to move in at the beginning of June, so in six weeks our lease expires. At that point, I collect the items I want to keep, the used and new camping gear, and a good assortment of those freshly cleaned clothes, and mail a good portion away while keeping the bare essentials for what looks to be four months of camping in Girdwood, Alaska. The picture at the top of this is, more or less, the tentative site for camping. Our campsite should be relatively easily accessible from the town, but tucked away enough to prohibit attention. Proximity to running water is a huge plus, though this may also draw bears, which is probably the largest concern for camping in Girdwood for an extended period of time. I can't promise frequent posts at that point, but there will, at the very least, be more pictures.

It's been at least a month and a half since my last post, maybe two months, so to my faithful followers, I apologize for that. I've gained a higher respect for blogging now, as I realize that for me it is a balance between wanting to place content and wanting content to place. F Scott Fitzgerald said it well:

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

It's true enough, I want to have something important to say before I commit anything to a more permanent medium such as a blog site! :) That's not to say I haven't done anything interesting for the last six weeks, though. I was contracted to help write/design a text adventure, and I'm still stoked about that. From what I can tell, I am one of the few people to actually get paid for that in recent years. On top of that, the experience broadened my scope of writing for various mediums and here is how:
Writing for a text adventure consists largely of writing a description for a given 'room' or area in which the player stands. Easy enough? The description cannot be too short, or it is dismissible. The description cannot be too long because the player will be visiting this location repeatedly. The description cannot imply initial discovery of anything in the location, because the description must hold for any occurrence of entering the area. The description must also, fitting those guidelines, give casual mention to any objects which are to be interacted upon by the player. So take those guidelines and craft a world in which the player can feel immersed. It was just a wholly different writing experience for me, and very exciting. I'm still excited over it. Okay, that's the end of my rant on that.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the other thing that happened is we had a volcanic eruption 140 miles southwest of us, and since it continues to erupt, we occasionally get the Anchorage airport canceling flights and warnings of ashfall heading toward Girdwood! Exciting! :)

Being that it is now spring, Girdwood is transitioning from long underwear and jacket weather to shorts and a t-shirt weather, which leaves us, currently, in pants and sweatshirt weather. The sun doesn't set until 8:30PM and there are plenty of blue sky days to be had, while the piles of snow (some 15+ feet tall!) slowly melt away and the roads become a fragmented mess of sectional gravel and three-inch-thick ice transitions. Next on the forecast: three days of rain. And I can finally say I'm happy to see it. It's time for the sun, the rain, and higher traffic volume to wash away the lingering snow. Six months, biking and camping season.

Six to Eight Feet / Eyes and Ears

The Reader/Web Surfer/Fellow Blogger sat aghast, appalled, contemptuous, and distraught. Cheated! Lied to! Strung along like a...like a...like a kite in the wind! Promises had been made! The Trusted Word had been given!

Where were the posts on New York City????

The posts, in their most complete form, sat warm and tidy on the hard drive of SeanEO's Acer Aspire One laptop. Some of them were done, but some of them were too done. Parts were lengthy. Parts were barren of detail. Parts were unfathomably boring. And locked away on another hard drive, a hard drive that had ceased to work mere days before this posting, were the majority of the pictures associated with said trip. But there was a glimmer of hope. A new enclosure for the hard drive was on its way up to Alaska. With any luck, this would make the hard drive readable once again, and maybe, just maybe, the posts on New York City could be fleshed out in the way they had been intended. This is not the recognized death of the hard drive or the New York City posts, it is merely an explanation for the delay and, if I may be so bold, a horrible segway to posting these two videos.

The first one is a foot battle game Niki and I made up standing outside the mercantile store while waiting for the shuttle bus. As far as I can tell (we never discussed the rules or anything), you want to tap the other person's foot without them tapping your foot. Either foot. This video is mainly for visual content.

The second one is a lone saxophone player's song in a New York City subway station. It's not much to look at but it's the sound that counts. This video is mainly for audio content.





Enjoy!

And just one more thing...

Close to 34% of my readers requested more cellphone photography pictures. More have been added, and I'm going to make a conscious effort to continue this effort! That being said, I'm also giving captions to many of them, so I encourage you all to click on them for more detail and words as reference points. :)

Catch-up and Hot Sauce

 

A lot has happened since I last left words here!

My mother came to visit, I upped my WRPD (words read per day) count, and I had a short-lived, tragic love affair with a woman named Melinda. To be fair, she wasn't as hot as she claimed to be.

Following the two week cold snap (-30 degrees is enough to keep me inside most of the time, yet I still didn't blog), we got a 70 degree turn around with a week of 40 degrees and rain! Snowboarding be damned and solid ice sidewalks be praised, it became official winter biking weather! The mile long bike path from my house to my work was, and I don't exaggerate at all here, a curving up and down, back and forth, ice slalom of death for anyone without ice cleats.

Or studded tires. :)

One week gone and the rain turned to snow again. After three inches piled up, tire traction was gone and snowboards came back into style. I turned pages again and finished my Patagonia Trilogy Series and moved on to my first experience with Chuck Palahniuk with Rant. Before Rant, I spent a week hanging out with my mom. Call me a momma's boy all you want but my mom is great fun to be around! As this was her second visit to Girdwood, no tours were needed so engaging in winter sports, going to local concerts, and drinking lots of wine went uninhibited.

On the day my mother arrived, I also have a chance meeting with Melinda.

If you're a fan of sauces that make you simultaneously smile, cry, and slow down your food intake, check out El Yucateco's XXXtra Hot Chile Habanero. This stuff is great. I fell in love after one bite of one burrito.

The only problem is that she doesn't live in Girdwood, and she only hangs out at select stores in Anchorage. So when we don't drive into downtown Anchorage to buy Kombucha tea for my sisters, I search Fred Meyer's hot sauce sections (pluralized because their hot sauces are spread out across the store into three different sections. Asian foods, Hispanic foods, and canned tomatoes/steak dressings sections. How they decided to put Tapatio one place and Chalula another is anyone's guess) for an alternative. Unless there is a mysterious fourth section for hot sauces (industrial cleaning products?), Melinda was the hottest thing they had to offer. Sporting an extra 'X' and claiming to be a 'Reserve' item, I bought two bottles.

Oh, what a letdown. If you like sauces hotter than Tabasco, buy Melinda's hot sauce, but don't expect her to bring you to your knees. For off-the-shelf oral masochism, she is a weak player. El Yucateco, how I long for thee. Yet I still have nearly two bottles-worth of Melinda so I may as well buy some eggs and take the hit. I really didn't expect this blog to be a hot sauce revue but of all you readers out there (I'm reading three at the moment, tripling my count from the last blog!), I'm sure someone will take this into consideration next time they're making burritos.

On a sweeter note, Emily (my sister), has taken to coconuts over the past few months and, through trial and error, we've now learned an easy method for extracting the milk and flesh! A wine corkscrew and a hammer! Corkscrew into that sucker and let the milk drain out into a jar, then put a hole in the other side and hammer the shell for a fairly clean half and half split! Use a butter knife to pop out the flesh.

In other news, Anchorage and Kenai Peninsula residents have spent the last week on volcano watch. If you haven't seen it in the news yet, Mount Redoubt is bubbling, shaking, and is more than likely going to erupt 106 miles from Anchorage. Wind conditions may or may not drop a layer of ash on the more populated city in Alaska, so everyone is waiting with some form of anticipation.

Ah, and one week from today my oldest sister, Sarah, and my brother-in-law, Danny, will be here for ten days! We'll see if Mount Redoubt keeps them here longer... :)

Blue skies...sunshine...

...and 15 degrees below zero.

It's the longest cold snap in years for the municipality of Anchorage. We're going on two weeks of temperatures with a high of -2 and a low of -20 Fahrenheit. Blow your nose before you ride your bike to work, or your snot will freeze and you'll have to breathe through your mouth! Trust me on that one.

After a week-long hiatus of no phone or internet service (the company wanted me to give them money, those fiends!), I'm back and feeling more than a little behind in placing the written word on the electronic paper. And to go just a smidgen more abstract than that, here's my recently conceived abstract on communication, co-written by Baileys and Jameson & Co.:

"The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate."
-Joseph Priestley

Communication

Communication is the true connection between two people. It has its roots with the original two primates, 'Adam' and 'Eve', of course, who screeched and clawed at each other over apple and snake, herbivorous or carnivorous, and were so effective in communicating that both resigned to incorporate the other's belief system. Being that the snake was a Philippine Cobra, and its meat a natural aphrodisiac, the two primates copulated time and again, creating many more primates with whom they could then screech and claw at regarding the finer things in life. Only later did Eve realize copulation was the motivation behind Adam's carnivorous disposition (all those nights eating cobra alone by the fire must have driven him half-mad with desire!).

But let's not get sidetracked.

Pretty soon there were plenty of primates running around, eating fruit and meat and communicating on the most basic level, which is grunting. And anyone who doesn't want to acknowledge this connection to our past brothers and sisters, anyone who claims that we were created well past the point of monosyllabic expressionism, and that Charlie's uncle Roy is extra furry because not only does he masturbate uncontrollably, but the werewolf that bit him did also, let them look no further than the bathroom. No, we're not on masturbation still here; I'm talking about clean teeth. Clean teeth? If I've lost you at this point, reread the quote at the top of the page and have a giggle at my expense.

Cleaning teeth, the act of, more specifically.

Take a community of four human beings, four toothbrushes, one bathroom, and the desire to continue the act of teeth-cleaning for the duration of the bathroom community meeting, and have a look.

Here they are now:

Sophia is already in the bathroom, actually. She purchased the much sought-after toothpaste and is here to store it after applying a healthy dose to the head of her toothbrush. Now she is brushing her teeth.

Enter Brandon. He knows the new toothpaste is here and wants a clean mouth. Ahh, how refreshing!

Following on his heels are Charlie and Josie. Demand for toothpaste this morning was high in the community, and Sophia was chosen to gather the resource because she not only knew where to find it, but also had the necessary materials for trade, should she need to barter with another tribe.

See them brush their teeth in unison.

Pleased at the acquisition of this commodity, Brandon is nodding his head, smiling, and making sounds of approval:

"Mmmmmmm-Mmmmmmm!"

Charlie and Josie join in with smiles and similarly-pitched sounds.
This gesture is acknowledged by Sophia, and we can guess that she interprets it correctly because she smiles back, offers a 'thumbs up' signal, and sounds back:

"Mmmmmmm."

Now it would seem that Brandon needs to communicate an entirely new idea to Sophie. He has an inquisitive look on his face and he’s cocked his head to the left ever so slightly.

“Hmmm. Hmmm-hmmmm?”

This has attracted the attention of everyone in the group, but he is looking at Sophie specifically, and, with his right hand raised in a loose fist, he rotates his wrist back and forth.
Sophie has a look of confusion on her face. See how her lips are pursed outward, her eyebrows come inward, and her head cocks to the side, perhaps mimicking Brandon’s head placement. She includes a responding grunt:

“Hmmmmm?”

Brandon seeks to be understood. Now he moves his arms like he’s marching in place.
Now he’s rotating his wrist again.
He points at himself and grunts back:

“Mmmmmmmmm. Mmm! Mmm! Mmmmmmmm.”

Ah! Charlie recognizes these movements, a good sign, because Brandon is becoming frustrated. Charlie motions as if holding a large object in front of him, one hand in front of the other, and shaking as he makes the sound:

“M-m-m-m-m-m-m-mm! M-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-mm!”

Whatever was the gesture of Charlie’s, it is not correct. Brandon is shaking his head, clearly frustrated. Now Brandon is searching for something. The toothpaste! He’s holding the tube of toothpaste and he’s smearing bits of it on the bathroom mirror. He’s drawing a picture! It’s a car! He wants the car keys!

“Mmmm? Mmm-mmmm!”

Sophie is shaking her head. She does not want to give up possession of the car.
Now Brandon is shaking, waving, and hitting a Listerine bottle against the bathroom counter - an obvious sign of agitation, possibly aggression. He grunts forcefully:

“MMMM! MMMMM! MMMMM! MMMMM! MMMMM!”

Charlie attempts to pacify Brandon while Josie has left the bathroom. The battle for dominance in the bathroom between these two has been building up for weeks, initially spurred from the yogurt-stealing incident. Oh! Josie has re-entered the bathroom and she's brought a package of polska kielbasa. She's waving it to the other three and sounding off:

"Mmm-Mmmmm! Mmm-Mmmmm!"

The others are not paying attention. Clearly, Josie will need to create a larger distraction.
Brandon seems to be calming down now, as Sophia rubs the car keys against his face. Charlie is smelling various items he is picking up off the bathroom counter (ie: toothpaste, hand soap, mascara, q-tips, lip gloss).
Look, Josie has started a fire in the middle of the bathroom floor! She’s waving the kielbasa in the air and gesturing from the fire to the shower! And Charlie’s joined in! He’s dancing around the fire and he’s got the toilet plunger!
Now, Charlie with plunger and Josie with (newfound) toilet scrubber are sparring off around the fire for dominance of showering privileges!

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmm….Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm…”

“Mmm-mmmm, Mmmmmm-mmmmmm….”

Brandon, with toothpaste-ridden hands desperately clutching the car keys against his breast, now looks into the bathtub. He’s staring…he won’t stop staring…he looks annoyed…he has taken his toothbrush out of his mouth…

“Derek, put down your notepad and get out of the tub.”

Damnit.

This is field reporter Derek, signing off.

And this reporter is signing off as well. The morning and I have a date in Anchorage.