The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It’s December here in Alaska.  For you 48’ers, that means snow and ice, bitter wind chills and extremely short dark days.  Unless you’re training for the Iditarod, you bolt shut the cabin doors, reach for the whisky bottle and settle in for the Yukon equivalent of hibernation:TV.
I’ve been here now, what seems an eternity, but is only four days.  I left with the flu my aging mother warned me 50 times to inoculate myself against and I’m only now beginning to eat once again.  Attempts at sightseeing or aimless hiking were usually shortcircuited with gastro-intenstinal rumblings that would have scared anything in the vicinity but moose.  Moose walk the streets here, grazing in cemeteries.  In my delirium, I never questioned it.  More cities should encourage moose.

Mostly, though, I missed travelogue Alaska.  What I did get a dose of was cable TV.  Maybe you have cable or Dish already.  I have an antenna on the roof, an upgrade from the old rabbit ear one we used for decades.  I see cable ads for, oh, $30 a month or so, which, I assumed, brought the viewer nearly unlimited viewing options.  After a couple of evenings with my hotel’s cable, I don’t understand why folks fork out anything, unless they (A) don’t have an antenna at all or (B) don’t have a roof to attach one to.

I had 40 channels of television freedom.  40!  By Hour Two I’d pretty much narrowed the 40 down to, oh, let’s be fair:  the comedy channel, two movie channels (that repeated the same films every day I watched), PBS-CNN-Fox-MSNBC just for my ‘news’ addiction (which it cured completely now that I will avoid all video news for the forseeable future or until I’m bedridden once again with something like terminal cancer).  The rest, well…..  maybe Extreme Pawn appeals to someone.  Or Chopper Sr. vs Jr perks up the Harley crowd.  Or Lick’s Towing, some backwash redneck clan of hillbilly repo men forever towing pickup trucks back from poor white trash meth cookers and their sorry ilk.  I could go on …. 30 more times.

But I’m at the airport now.  Frozen tarmac, snow bellying down from the Wrangell range.  It looks like a wasteland as far as the eye can see.  But … far far better than my last few nights in front of that hotel TV.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 at 4:40 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.