The Flying Squirrel Bakery/Cafe in Talkeetna, Alaska opened right before I moved away from Talkeetna. I used to go there for a cup of coffee while I was writing, and they also served some excellent brick oven pizza. It’s one of the rare restaurants that isn’t in the downtown Talkeetna area. If you’re leaving town, it’s a few miles down the road on your left hand side.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 75)
Way back in my first year of college I went to Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro, Kentucky. A teacher at the school named Gary Bielefeld created the mosaic mural of mirrors shown in this image on the side of a building in the downtown area, using two tons of glass. Per the video, more than 9,000 drivers see the mural every day when they go over the blue bridge that’s just to the left of this parking area. For more information, see this 14news.com story.
It was an interesting afternoon to watch a Wikipedia entry. With the University of Colorado looking for a new head football coach, I saw this tweet saying that someone changed Steve Sarkisian’s Wikipedia entry early this afternoon (2/20/2020) to show that he was the new head coach at Colorado.
When I looked up the IP address at the bottom of that changelist — 128.138.184.70 — I saw that it was a University of Colorado IP address. But later in the afternoon it was reported that Sarkisian was staying as the offensive coordinator at Alabama and getting a raise, so his Wikipedia entry was reverted about 2.5 hours later.
Today (2/20/2020) was a bit of a milestone in that I was able to walk for 15 minutes straight before I got the first twinge in my heart. This was the first day I was able to walk that long without pain since the pericarditis episode of late 2019.
When I saw this image on Netflix I immediately thought that a story that might be interesting is about a soul who is both a man and a woman at the same time. At the moment it seems like an interesting idea for a book, movie, or series, a way to explore all sorts of concepts related to “gender identity.” Parts of it could be like In Your Eyes, and it could be a little like Cloud Atlas, but it would also be very different from those movies.
Ah, the Chicken Oil Company ... once I discovered it when I went to school at Texas A&M, I ate quite a few Deathburgers. I’m glad to see that they’re still in business. (Image from this link.)
Photos of mom and cub polar bears. I hoped O’Reilly would use these for the cover of the Scala Cookbook — because of the whole “scalable” thing, and to help raise awareness about climate change — but whoever puts images on their book covers had something else in mind.
Back in July, 2017, a bear walked into a liquor store in Juneau, Alaska. On the video it seems to be trying to decide which candy bar it wants.
February 19, 2014: I passed out for the first time. Before then I knew I was sick, but that was the first day I went down.
*three years of hospital visits and dozens of doctors*
February 19, 2017: For the first time in many years I’ve been able to practice yoga on a daily basis. As usual, during the first several weeks it was difficult and I was sore, but these days all is well. Soon this body will be rock hard and incredibly limber. :)
“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
~ Ben Franklin
I watched a Monk episode yesterday where he goes to see a hypnotherapist.
Hypnotherapist: Mr. Monk, you have to make a leap here. If you leap, a net will appear!
Monk: Who’s Annette?
The Rolling Stone article, The Oral History of Santana and Rob Thomas’ ‘Smooth’, is probably the best Pocket reference I’ve ever followed. It’s a good story about a great song. It struck me that Carlos Santana seems to have had the least involvement in the creation of the song out of all the players.
Here’s another view of Denali from the rivers in Talkeetna in mid-September. As I always add, Denali is at least 60-70 miles away in this photo.
When I lived in Alaska I was told that you can only see Denali one day out of every eight, so visitors only have ~12.5% chance of seeing it. I was fortunate to live there and see it many times.
(Not to be doubly morbid this morning, but that’s the river I’d like my ashes thrown into.)
A few September colors from Talkeetna, Alaska. If you take a left at that red bush and go ~100-200 yards, that’s where I’d like to have my ashes scattered when my number comes up. (That thought is brought to you by this morning’s chest pain.)
Never stayed in a roadhouse before, pretty interesting. You can walk in off the street and buy a shower for $4. Setup is communal, like a hostel.
(a diary note from my first stay at the Talkeetna Roadhouse, October 21, 2010)
Here’s a photo of three ravens surrounding a car in the snow in Wasilla, Alaska, on December 7, 2010. As I’ve written before, in many places they don’t plow the snow too hard in Alaska.
Dear diary: Filed under the category of “transparent dangling carrots,” today I realized that there is a surface reason the Dalai Lama talks about practicing compassion, and also a much deeper reason. It’s really quite a trip, though with my limited knowledge, for all I know it’s turtles stacked on turtles stacked on turtles.
(A diary entry from January 21, 2015. Dalai Lama quote: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” Image from this link.)
What happens at the motor home stays at the motor home. (I don’t think I want to know what happens in the motor home.)
Sign in a store window, Palmer, Alaska.
“Parhelions, more commonly known as sun dogs or mock suns, appear as fuzzy rainbows or bright spots in the sky ‘dogging’ the Sun. You are most likely to see a sun dog in the morning or afternoon during the winter. Records of this phenomena date all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. Famous Ancient Greek philosophers Cicero and Aristotle even made mention of sun dogs.”
(I’m pretty sure I made the photo from Google image search results, but I don’t remember where I got that text. I posted this on Facebook on November 23, 2013.)
