Won't be Slowdotna for long

I don't know how many Walgreen's stores America needs but it looks to me like you don't get to be a city without one. I guess it's a sure sign that your town is coming of age. So here's a pic of ours scheduled to open this spring with another pharmacy and cheap canned goods, anybody want to bet they'll be selling dip nets too ?

On weekends we don't go to the gym, we get up early and walk in town when the traffic and exhaust smell is light, it's one of our favorite things. Last weekend we went by the new store that's located on the old Mullen Homestead right in the middle of town at the 'Y' . The property is planned for another mall type deal with restaurants and all the paving that goes with it so MP and I were heartened to see on the back side of the property some mitigation is being done, it looks to me like Soldotna wants to become that city that ' did it right' with common area's and wetlands protection. When I was a young guy here Soldotna Creek which runs through this property was full of salmon, King salmon, and I'm betting it will again someday.

So we walked along with expensive river front houses on our left and 'conserved' land on our right. We walk into a shaded forest lane with this cool foot bridge over the creek and leading to inter connect with the River Walk at the new Soldotna Creek Park. Pretty darn cool, all of this is in town but it doesn't feel like it, I'd call that character.

Pretty soon those stairways you see in the pic below will be lowered into the river so thousands of anglers can catch thousands of fish. But for now it's just me and Mpeasy quietly taking it all in early in the morning, early in the season. I love the way our town is fitting in with the river, it's my fondest hope that the creatures that come along with it get the same consideration, or more. We ran into one of our City Councilmen who was jogging and in a short conversation we all agreed that Soldotna was shaping up just fine...you can't stop progress so just use the energy to shape it into right.

As we walked we came across this sign at a legendary watering hole, one of the last survivors of it's kind here in Soldotna. I got a big kick out of it as many a year ago that just could have been me.

Many of you know my music so what I thought what I'd do is put up the roughness of a brand new song as I just start working it up, you know, semi-learned. I heard this Brooks and Dunn song on my Pandora at the gym the other day and now that I can hit more octaves I thought this is one I could   ' polish' up for Mexico.  I went and found the lyrics on the internet and then it takes a bit to assign chords to it, when I recorded this last night I had practiced it maybe 10 times and by the time I'm happy with it MP will be at 1500 listens.  I have the camera at lowest setting as Blogspot only gives so much memory away.....hope you like it, semi live. I love the verses but that chorus is going to take some work.