Nice to have power again, though this morning for about an hour I thought the outage had fried my computer. Wouldn't work until I finally prayed over the thing and that same moment it came on. Marvelous how prayer can work. I would've lost a lot of work had it been a fried computer. Lots of tears on my part had it happened. Writing is what keeps me going and doing it with a pen would not be possible due to too much frostbite over the years. Besides, I really need spell-check.
Mona and I are trying to figure out what to do about transportation, so we would really appreciate your prayers in this department. Lots of prayers need in the family, as well as with friends, seems to be the times for it. Whenever I start to feel down about the various needs the Good Lord will remind me of how well we have it compared to so many of the homeless, starving and dying populace around the world. Sort of like being hit in the face with a water balloon. Thank you, Lord, I needed that wake -up concerning just how well Mona and I are doing. The enemy likes to lay traps like that, to bring on waves of depression and woe is me feelings. It is all crap! I just walk outside, look at my beautiful mountains the Lord made, take in a deep lungful of cold clean air and say "Thank you, Father!" For Mona and I, Alaska is truly a gift from the Father.
Years ago, while living in Fairbanks, we went through a 7-day power outage during a very cold fall. The storm struck in September and dumped a heapful of snow on us. National guard had to be brought in to help out. I had our family tent outside being aired out from out last outing and the snow overnight crushed it, bending all the poles and burying it under more than a foot of snow. Nice tent too. That was an interesting experience for all of us. In my writing of a Coming Storm I was thinking what it would be like to have the power go off and not to come back on again. No more microwave popcorn and those bags just burn up when you put them on top a wood stove, no more TV and the gas pumps no longer work. People begin to panic, crime waves rises by leaps and bounds, and people start stealing food as supplies dwindle. I had to figure out how this would effect life in general, remembering my City Preparedness Plans for natural disasters and such. I wrote up the plans for the City of Whittier when I discovered they didn't have any.
I believe I've mentioned it before of how one morning I was visited by an FBI agent and a Department of Defense high ranking officer, who had come to Whittier to advise me that Whittier's tank farm, which held all the fuel off loaded in Whittier and was transferred by pipeline to Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base, had just been confirmed as a possible terrorist target. They wanted to know what sort of defense I could put up to help them put together their own written operational plans. Before taking them out to the tank farm and seeing the railroad yards, I had to hold off laughing in their faces because of the strange looks on their faces when I told them, "I have two officers and we work one man a shift and this involves a lot of stand-by time because there is only three of us. We have two shotguns, our pistols and a single AR-15 I was able to pick-up in the event I had some nut shooting from the 3rd thru the 14th floors of Begich Towers. What sort of police response were you expecting, anyway? The 7th Cavalry!" I had to take all this into consideration when preparing my Disaster Plan, which also included Tsunamis as Whittier got hit with its own wave in the 1964 Earthquake. Anyway, these instances, plus the Seward and Whittier Disaster Plans helped a lot in telling what Alaskans could look forward to when the power went off. People can turn real ugly when they learn there simply is no more power and all the food is being seized so it can be rationed out. So, our 19 hours wasn't a big thing, just bothersome.
I'm not allowed to do much physical things, so when not in my office working I stay in bed and watch TV, read or snooze. Right now Mona and I are going through the 15-seasons of NCIS. finally we got to the point where the shows are new to us, as we didn't have regular TV service for a while and just watched movies from our collection. I pick-up a lot of old movies put out on VHS that have never been transferred over to DVD for some reason. You can often get them for free at the thrift stores or they cost 25 cents at the most. We own a pretty good sized Disney collection, which my great-grandchildren are really enjoying at the moment and of course my war/western collections. About 500 movies with DVDs and VHS together. Lost about a fourth of our VHS to the rains a few years ago when the tarp blew off the storage boxes, lost lots of books too.
I'm rambling a lot, sorry about that. I was going to mention the news highlights, but they are just too depressing and I'm not in the mood for that at the moment. I'll save you that experience.
Currently, I am still working on my latest Arizona Ranger story, which I have renamed to "Attack at Fort Bowie". Story centers on a combined Ute/Comanche attack on this east Arizona fort, where the Arizona Rangers, teamed up with the U.S. Cavalry put up a defense against nearly 500 Indians. Cochise, the Apache Chief and blood brother to my main character, upset with the Comanche, who violated their treaty when they crossed into Arizona and entered Apache territory, stays out of this battle. But he stands ready to take on both tribes if they further violate Apache land. There is no love lost between the Ute and the Apache, who have been at war for more than one hundred years. My lead character, JW Blake, is loosely based on a real white man who was actually a blood brother to Cochise and he ran the reservation where Cochise was held for a while before being sent to Oklahoma. It was there that he later died and was buried in an unmarked grave. His last wish was to have his remains hidden to prevent the white man from messing with his bones.
As I've said before, Cochise was a remarkable statesman and a great warrior general, much more than Geronimo ever was. He mentored Geronimo but according to tribal history he found him to be more warrior than a man who would care for the Apache families. But, Geronimo greatly respected Cochise and confined his war against the white, Mexican and French to his territory south of the border and didn't return to Arizona to fight until Cochise had surrendered. But Geronimo's band of warriors was often less than 75 warriors, not the the 300-500 warriors Cochise led. Still, Geronimo led his enemies a merry chase for several years and at one time he was getting the better of more than 4,000 American troops and 3,000 Mexican troops who could never find his mountain fortress.
Mona is working on editing "Homeland Security", which had been ready to be published until a lot of mistakes I missed were seen in our review of the proof copy. This is what happens when the writer does his own editing, or at least in my case. I like the editing she is doing. Susan who normally does this work has three of my books to work on plus her college studies. She should have her B.A. at the end of May and is moving to Fairbanks for a time to be with her daughter and grandchildren.
I guess that's about all for now. I'll move over to my manuscript now and work for a few hours. Then I'll grab a nap. I've come to really enjoy my afternoon naps. God bless all of you, may your prayers be answered and the lost be saved. BILL