Icewind's Ramblings

As I enter the bathroom and lift the toilet seat I notice the intense light entering through the window projecting from the sun.   The light shines upon the toilet illuminating its presence as if it were a work of art.   As I begin to urinate I focus on the inner side of the toilet in order to decrease the amplification and splashing of my pee.   As I watch the pee enter the toilet I also notice an abundance of off-spray collecting upon the toilet’s seat underside, hinge, outer bowl sides and floor.   How disgusting I think to myself, all this pee everywhere.   From this moment on I began to wonder about all the pee from myself as well as my co-workers, glazing itself to the toilet. Cleaning and disinfecting the toilet may be one of the ickiest exercises of the home or apartment and one never knows who is cleaning these at work.   Someone must because there are new rolls of toilet paper there every morning.   For many of us, this can be quite disgu...

My grandson is almost three years old and proud of the fact that he is potty trained and goes to the bathroom like ‘big people’.  Saturday started out like most others for him with the typical playing, coloring, and the jumping around that comes with his age. I went to breakfast as usual and returned home to do the normal chores that come on the weekends.  My grandson went about his day and was a pretty happy little guy until his world fell apart just before noon. He prides himself in being potty trained and usually alerts someone (everyone) when he goes so sometimes it’s a pretty big deal for him.  Sometimes being new to the procedure he tries to get things right.  He sometimes can barely pee on his own without shooting a stream like a fire hose was out of control on the bathroom floor.  The problem I have to admit is not totally his fault.  The hall commode is a cathedral of tile (new I might add) and fixture with a throne set almost too high for his...

Or Getting the Bathroom to a point it can start being rebuilt. Today (Thursday 19 th ) started out frigid as we were again below zero this morning now several days in a row.  For some reason I was aware that this day had many small tremors and a couple of medium ones that gave loud “boom” noises.  At first I thought it might be the F-22’s coming back into Elmendorf for landing and dropping their speed below mach 1 creating a sonic boom as they decelerated.  But after several times I checked out the Alaska Earthquake Information Center for updates on today’s activity.   There was quite a bit of small tremors over 30 so far today and counting with activity in Cook Inlet between Homer and Anchorage and in the interior between Fairbanks and Anchorage .  It appears several fault lines are shifting plates far below the surface bringing with it the loud noise and jolt from the shifting surfaces. I am still amazed that there is quite a bit of activity on...

I was standing in line at the bank yesterday. As if there isn’t enough anxiety about banks these days, the branch where I go has a giant plasma screen TV behind the tellers so you can watch while you’re standing in line. Great. They always have it on CNN.  I’m worried about my account because of a mistake they made earlier and now I get to watch another war and more people with blood on their faces in Texas at Ft. Hood from an Army Major who is a coward killing soldiers and civilians as I wait to speak with a representative. Please pump all the fear and loathing you can into an otherwise normal trip to the bank, Wells Fargo! A shipment of Viagra was high jacked today I saw it on the news.  Police have put out an All-Points bulletin: Be on the lookout for two hardened criminals! They will face a stiff sentence when convicted and they'll surely be sent to a Penal Institution. Have you realized that in about 30 years, we'll have thousands of OLD LADIES running aro...

These past couple of weeks has had me tearing out bathrooms, with the remodeling ongoing leaving me little time to write or have any thoughts to put on paper. I can report the first bathroom is finished except for a towel bar so it went smoothly with the demolition of the flooring, cabinet, sink, and closet being redone.  The hardest part of the demo was getting the several layers of flooring out and the prep for the tile. Once everything was taken out the first thing was a fresh coat of paint, Lowe’s Baguette color.  It is a nice color that in the low night light conditions gives off a nice easy tone.  In full light it blends nicely with the tile shades.  What started this makeover was my wife looking on Craig’s list and finding Italian marble tile for a low price.  She found 18”x18” squares (40) of beautiful tile for fifty bucks.  It was enough for the bathroom and closet floor.  The cabinet was painted and new base trim was installed. We ...

Friday afternoon we head out to sea leaving the boat harbor in Homer heading 265˚ while running about 16 knots.  The fishin’ area we wanted was 26 nautical miles from Homer in the direction of Augustine Volcano which we could see in the distance with a plume of steam rising out of the top.   The "Ring of Fire" (map) is an arc stretching from New Zealand , along the eastern edge of Asia, north across the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and south along the coast of North and South America . The Ring of Fire is composed over 75% of the world's active and dormant volcanoes. This huge ring of volcanic and seismic (earthquake) activity was noticed and described before the invention of the theory of plate tectonics theory. We now know that the Ring of Fire is located at the borders of the Pacific Plate and other major tectonic plates.  Alaska has many active volcanoes ranging across the Cook Inlet from Anchorage winding its way down along the Aleutian chain. ...

On Aug. 15 to 17, 1969, (and into the 18 th ) hundreds of thousands of people, me among them, gathered in a lovely natural amphitheater in Bethel (not Woodstock ), New York . It was the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in upstate New York officially billed as “Aquarian Exposition” in White Lake , NY . New York was foreign to me at the time, worlds away from a typical southern boy’s existence growing up in Atlanta during the 60’s civil rights movement and all of the national chaos going on around the country during those times. I was just a funny kid with places to see and things to do in what I now, years later have jokingly called the series of my travels, “Looking for America ”. Gasoline was cheap back then at fifty cents a gallon so three boyhood friends were going to make the trek from Atlanta , Georgia to a farm in New York State . Steve Nash, Stuart Morris and I planned to leave three days before the concert started s...