Dear Friends:

I hope your summer is going well and you are not cooking in 100+ temperatures or having to figure out how to dry out your house from flood waters. There is a couple who spend summers up here in Alaska and attend our church but have their home in Baton Rouge, LA. I called them the other day and found out that they are still in Alaska. They said their house was fine, however, their church and pastor’s home were totally flooded. Between the fires in California and the floods in the southeast, it has been quite a summer so far. Up here in Alaska, it has just been a crazy summer of contrasts. The first half of the summer it was just beautiful and the second half has been rainy almost every day. Every even year is a high return year on the Kenai River for pink salmon, commonly known as humpies due to the less than glamorous hump on their back that the males get when they enter fresh water to spawn. For most folks, they are not the most desirable of the salmon species but right now the river is chocked full of them! I took some guys out fishing for silver salmon recently and I’d estimate they caught and released close to a hundred humpies and got two silvers. Compared to the problems faced by folks in other parts of the country and world, I reckon these fishing problems are miniscule. Better to have to endure too many humpies in the river than having snakes and gators swimming in your backyard or having your house be reduced to smoldering ruins.

Book Progress
IWith all the rain recently, I am making good progress on my book. I am done with the manuscript and now Marveen is proof-reading it and making grammar and spelling corrections. She then gives the corrected hard copies to me and then I make the corrections on the computer. Then, I give them back to her and we go through that process again. Once that is complete, the next step is to put the chapters in the order that seems to work the best and then paginate the whole thing. Once that is done, we’ll proof it one more time and then send it off to Raven Publishing and turn them loose on the project. I have been blessed to find a really good publisher in Raven since my first book’s publisher decided to retire from that business. By the way, the first book is still selling and I get orders for another box of books every few month from The News Group in Anchorage that distributes the book to Safeway, Fred Meyers, Walmart and other outlets that carry Alaska titles. One of the familys in our church has a booth at the weekly farmer’s markets in Kenai and Soldotna and they have been selling quite a few there. One lady from Minnesota came to the church on Sunday so I could sign her copy. It amazes me how far-reaching a book can be. A few years ago we checked and it was available in 23 different countries.

Moose Calling
For several months we have had moose in our front and back yards almost every evening. They make the rounds between chomping on our strawberry plants and guzzling

CFM
Predictably, counseling during the summer months is slower than the rest of the year which has been a blessing in that it has enabled me to spend more time writing. I greatly appreciate the contributions to CFM that have enabled me to keep the rent and phone bill paid. It is also predictable that when the frost and first snow arrive before too long, folks will once again decide it is time to deal with their troubling issues.

Coming up
A big event in our family will be happening over Labor Day weekend when grandson, Dean, and his fiancé, Brittney, will be getting married up in Anchorage. I am honored to officiate in that ceremony and will do my best not to cry. Then, here in a couple of days, Marveen and I will be celebrating our 25th anniversary….and a few weeks after that, I will arrive at my 70th birthday. My, how time flies.

God bless you

Wayne and Marveen