I’m back from Alaska, and while I have many lovely things to write about my trip, I first have to get this ridiculous story out there. Because the combination of my foolishness plus the U.S. Postal Service can only end like this:

On our second night on the Aleutian Islands ferry, it stopped in the tiny village of Sand Point, Alaska around 10:15 pm, so it was rather late to stroll around. But I got off to stretch my legs, along with my dad, a girl I ended up befriending on the ferry and her mom. My friend said her coworker had grown up there, and had told her own mother to look for the ferry when it arrived. We noticed a small woman standing alongside a SUV at the dock, and sure enough, she was the mom, and she offered to give us a tour of her village. The tour was pretty simple: Here’s the “big shop,” here’s the health clinic, here’s the pool where I finally learned to swim when I turned 60 (which is crazy, because can you imagine growing up on an island and not knowing how to swim?). Anyway, she had a little gift shop, so I asked if we could stop and buy something to thank her for our tour. I bought four glass Japanese float balls, these beautiful orbs that wash up on the beaches in Alaska after they detach from the fishing nets of Japanese fishing boats. They’re gorgeous, and almost totally worth the rest of this story…

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I’m turning 29 in Alaska this week…here’s a preview of my trip.

I didn’t know much about my grandfather’s tour of duty in World War II until I arrived at his wake. Until then, he had summed up his time in the service with a laugh and a joke: After enlisting in the Army Air Corps, he was stationed in Alaska’s southwest islands… on a boat. But it wasn’t until I saw the photos of his time there that I became intrigued with the place.

The grainy images depicted a remote, mysterious landscape, one so far removed from his hometown in New York where he spent the remainder of his life. I learned that as a member of the 11th Air Force, his boat duties were more significant than he let on; he was rescuing downed pilots who were engaged in an offensive against the Japanese to reclaim the two islands, Attu and Kiska, which they had invaded and occupied in 1942. My grandfather had only 15 minutes to get to the soldiers whose planes had fallen before they’d freeze to death in the Bering Sea.  Today, my grandmother’s fading memory can recall only a few details from my grandfather’s time there, and as man of few words, she doesn’t have many to choose from. “He said it was beautiful but cold,” she recapped for me recently. Not surprisingly, I wanted to know more.

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My article in this month’s issue of Traveler deals with using Twitter to meet all your traveling needs. (And yes, I do Twitter myself: @Janelle_IT_Blog should you find my musings interesting…)

Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, and now John Hughes. Today is a dark day for the brat pack. One only hopes he lived up to the immortal words of his own Ferris Bueller:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Last night, after a tough session of Body Pump at the gym, my arms were too exhausted cook anything that required more than the opening of a can. So I did just that, pulling the tab on the Healthy Choice microwave soup and tossing some lettuce onto a plate (with some raisins, pine nuts, and cucumber for the record, lettuce alone is really just pathetic). I already felt guilty using the microwave to cook dinner. Then I sat down to read my New York Times Magazine, particularly, Michael Pollan’s dusty gross kitchen-cover story, “No One Cooks Here Anymore.”

In the piece, artfully tied to the release of the Julie and Julia film, Pollan argues that the rise of the televised cooking program has essentially destroyed the culture of cooking as we know it, shifting the focus from cooking to eating. Quoting a food-marketing researcher, Pollan writes that what “people call things ‘cooking’ today… would roll their grandmother in her grave –– heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.” Ouch.

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