The one good thing about losing out on sleep two nights in a row is that the third night, I am tired and fall asleep quickly. I most likely will wake up a few hours later, but I at least will have gotten some REM sleep.

My computer isn’t charging, so Pete got my older, and supposedly better, computer going. Hoorah, it works just fine now – he put a lot of time into making sure it works, and it does. And it seems to have better lighting.

Well now, we had dinner with friends, and when we came up Murphy Road, we saw the aurora – bright green waves this time around. I thought, yes, this is why I live here. I think the same thing when in the daylight, I see the Alpen glow on the distant Talkeetna Range.

It has always been important to me to live in a place that is both beautiful and quiet. Never mind that the aurora if the felons down the road had their property lights off. They won’t be here forever and there will be other auroras.

And so, I spent the morning cleaning up the back room in the hotel in which we reside in the former banquet room. It’s usually too hot to work back there. It hovered around O˚ F, so it was a bit cooler back there. I did a lot of shlepping. I got the eBay box areas straightened out. The books are going – we sold a $500.00 book on watch repair (actually a two volume set) a few days ago, and a $30.00 book on watch repair today. My goal is to comfortably raise $800.00 so we can acquire a room dedicated to eBay postings and book sales.

I finished up in the former banquet room of the historic eagle hotel at 2:00 p.m. then drove over to the MTA Event Center where the young children hockey championships were going on. Our bookcase is in the very spacious front entrance, so I was able to set up basecamp – I brought in the little plastic tables and crayons and coloring books and set them up. The children were like flies attracted to honey. They appeared suddenly out of nowhere, about a dozen of them, and began coloring.

I took advantage of the situation and began reading books – two cat books, as they were coloring. The children were paying attention, with a few of them actually interacting with me.

One girl, 11 years old, took it upon herself to rearrange the books in the bookshelf after I brought in more books. (The bookcase took a full cardboard box full of books.) I also gave the children the gift wrapped chapbooks – one fellow went and filled his small backpack with them – I had to repack his backpack because he had come to the MTA Events Center with his backpack filled with small plastic dinosaurs.

Tomorrow I will be at home. Cold and windy, not conducive to horseback riding. I hope, there is that word – that tomorrow will be different.

Next: 53. 2/22/26: Running with Horses