Some days, crazy as it may seem, I miss living in Anchorage. This is the view from my office window this morning; it can be beautiful up here.

You can never have too many stories about war memorials on your blog.

This is the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq. To commemorate the occasion Tuesday night, a group of vandals defaced a WWII veterans’ memorial statue in downtown Anchorage by dumping red paint on it.

While the citizens of the US have every right to free expression of their opinion about war - and in fact our soldiers fight to protect such freedoms - that liberty doesn’t extend to the damage or destruction of property.

Ironically, the inscription on this memorial reads “To those Alaska veterans whose eyes have seen what the protected will never know.”

Maybe the paint-happy hooligans need to go spend some time on the front lines defending their ‘freedom of speech’.

I am in Alaska this week for work. Monday felt like spring, 50 degrees and sunny. Today was cold and cloudy, and tonight it’s snowing. And snowing. Hard. Bleah. My daffodils are up at home, I don’t need this!

Tonight as I was driving back from a business dinner, I saw a crazy taxi swerving in and out of traffic, only to take a screaming turn into the parking lot of… Walmart.

Only in Alaska. If you can afford to cruise around town in a taxi — or need to for whatever reason — wouldn’t you choose a little more upscale a shopping destination than Walmart?

Anchorage’s Walmarts are odd ducks in the Alaskan marketplace. They don’t even have groceries, but they have a better sporting goods (including guns, ammo and hunting gear) selection than most larger department stores. When the Wasilla Walmart opened up, it was a huge success, the talk of the town for months. All the Alaskan Walmarts - and most big box stores - open up their parking lots in the summer to fleets of giant RVs cruising the Alaskan highways.

“Hey, honey, let’s take the RV to Alaska this summer. Rather than paying for a campground, we can park for free at Walmart - and restock our fishing lures, too, while we’re at it!”

I hope the taxi passenger found what he was looking for. If it was the Real Alaska, he was probably in the wrong place.

Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin, the much talked about hottest governor in the nation, announced last night that she is pregnant with her 5th child. Not just pregnant – but seven months pregnant.

Go, Sarah!

I admire Sarah Palin on a number of fronts. I don’t entirely share her politics, but I am impressed by her drive, her sense of balance, her values, her humor and her femininity in an old-boy world.

She is noted for her crusading against political corruption, and that approach seems to have remained a big part of her agenda as governor.

When business leaders were questioned this year about the impact of her leadership on industry, the response was that nobody seems to be able to get to her directly. Apparently many industry execs & lobbyists had direct dial phone numbers and wheeling/dealing opportunities with the former governor – but the same is not true of Palin. She’s insulated herself from that influence-peddling environment, requiring industry and special interests to go through appropriate legislative and executive channels for decision making.

Go, Sarah!

There has been a fairly significant grass-roots campaign to have her named as vice presidential running mate to Republican John McCain. She indicates that this role is not something she’s “pursued or perpetuated”, and in fact much prefers to remain as governor of Alaska.

And now, pregnancy. She is, surprisingly, not the first governor to have had a child while in office. The acting governor of Massachusetts delivered twins in 2001. Nonetheless, this is fairly unprecedented territory.

Trouper that she is, Palin said that she doesn’t expect this to impact her availability as governor during an active legislative session. She indicated she had her 4th child on a Monday and was back at work as mayor on Tuesday. Although her husband, the “First Dude” is on leave from his oil industry job, she added that she would be bringing her baby to work with her.

Go Sarah!

At the conclusion of her announcement this morning, she said that she felt having kids and serving as governor are entirely compatible.

“To any critics who say a woman can’t think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I’d just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave,” Palin said.

Go, Sarah!

Petty Officer 1st Class Wil Milam is an aviation survival technician, or rescue swimmer, for the Coast Guard. His patrol is the remote, storm-wracked, hypothermia-inducing Bering Sea.

In February of 2007, he and his crew responded to a rescue beacon coming from Makushin Bay, near Unalaska Island. They took off at night into turbulent winds of 40 to 50 mph and gusts in excess of 60, low clouds, horizontal rain and visibility of one-quarter of a mile.

Among 15 foot swells, Milam was lowered to within 10 feet of the raft, and found four hypothermic men. The crew sent down their own cold-water survival suits for the men on the raft.

This is when the rescue started to go awry. When Milam re-entered the water to retrieve the guideline for the suits, he felt the frigid arctic water flood into his own. In spite of this, Milam helped the most severely hypothermic man into a survival suit and into the rescue basket, to be lifted to safety.

When Milam entered the water to retrieve the basket the second time, he realized he was in trouble – hypothermia was quickly setting in. He signaled for his own rescue, and was lifted to the helicopter floor.

Lying on the floor of the chopper, facing a fifteen minute fuel limit, he made a critical decision: the best chance the three remaining survivors had was his ability to rescue them.

In spite of his damaged suit, he returned to the water and rescued the remaining three men. After the third man was in the air, he realized how severely affected he was by his own hypothermia; he was semiconscious, uncoordinated, and by the time the rescue basket was lowered again, he was only barely able to get himself into it.

After making it back to the helicopter floor, the next thing he remembered was waking up in the Kodiak hospital, surrounded by heat lamps. He credits the flight crew for saving five lives that day, the men in the raft and his own.

For this rescue, Milam was awarded the Coast Guard Foundation Individual Award for Heroism, the Coast Guard Meritorious Service Medal, and his entire crew was honored with the Coast Guard Ancient Order of the Pterodactyl - Capt. Frank A Erickson Aviation Rescue Award for 2007.

Bryan happens to know this amazing guy; Milam’s wife is a colleague. Other than his day job being insanely, superhumanly heroic, Milam is just a humble, regular guy.

Wil Milam will be honored again on January 28, when he’s been asked to be a guest at the president’s State of the Union address. We will be tuning in to watch him.

For a more detailed account of this story, see the Coast Guard’s press release.