Barista Samantha Koenig's abduction last week sent a shiver through the workers — most of them young and female—who spend their days in Anchorage’s coffee shacks.

OVERVIEW: View looking south over East Loop Road in Government Hill. Some businesses and homes may be leveled to make way for the Knik Arm Bridge.(MARC LESTER - Anchorage Daily News)

People living in Government Hill will tell you it might sound good at first but the plan to build a billion-dollar toll bridge across Knik Arm doesn't pass the common sense test.

"I'm not paying no $10 (to go) back and forth," said Keum An, who owns Lee's Alterations near the gate to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Especially, she said, with the cost of gas and the fact that it isn't any faster to Wasilla than taking the Glenn and Parks highways.

The first plane trip I remember must have been about 1980, a flight on Alaska Airlines from Portland, where my parents were in school, to Anchorage to see my grandparents. I wore a dress and tights. I took a tour of the cockpit. Breakfast, which didn't cost anything and was pretty decent, showed up on a tray with real silverware, tiny white paper tubes of salt and pepper, and a small card printed with a short passage from Psalms.

.ESPRESSO SERVED: Ashley Holder serves coffee at the Java Junction espresso stand on Old Seward Highway last week. The stand is known for its baristas who dress in bikinis. (ANNE RAUP / Anchorage Daily News)

Ashley Holder, 24, didn't have too much time for my questions at the Java Junction bikini coffee on Old Seward on Thursday morning. Customers were backed up and she had a four-shot vanilla latte and a mocha with raspberry going at the same time. She wore a pair of jeans and a pink, animal print string bikini top. I watched her slide the window open. According to my phone, it was nine below zero.

It happens at least once a week, in the grocery store, on the treadmill at the gym, at the movies. A stranger comes over and says, "I have a column idea."

I love this (except, maybe, when I'm on the treadmill). Some of my best columns have grown from tips and questions from readers. I'm back from five months on maternity leave, and I'm fueling up my story list. I wanted to invite readers to send column ideas.

What makes a good column idea? Here's the criteria: it has to be interesting and it has to tell readers something they don't know about where we live.

I called Tropic Massage the other day to see if it was still in business. Two women were arrested there on prostitution-related charges last month. A woman answered the phone. She had a heavy accent. I told her who I was. She said they were open for business.

Who is in charge, I asked.

"I don't know."

"You don't know the name of your boss?"

She didn't work there, she said. She was from Hawaii and had only been in Anchorage for two days, she said.

"I just come down visit," she said.

I'm taking extended family leave until January. I'll still be active on Facebook and Twitter. I'll also be checking email now and then.
After a column I'm working on right now runs, I probably won't be writing any more columns at least not for a few months.

I won't be back at my desk until at least January 9.

Thanks for reading! Talk with you all then.

Jessica Beagley

Is punishing a 7-year-old by putting Tapatio sauce in his mouth torture? How about forcing him, sobbing and screaming, into a cold shower?

What does it mean to do these things to a child, at least in part, for the sake of publicity?

An Anchorage jury is looking at these questions this week in the case of Jessica Beagley, an Anchorage mother charged with misdemeanor child abuse after a video of her angry hot sauce and cold shower punishment session appeared on the "Dr. Phil" show.

SHRINE: Suel Jones admires his Buddha that has become a coffee house shrine. (ERIK HILL / Anchorage Daily News)

A couple years ago a former BP machinist named Suel Jones fell in love with a 700-pound white marble Buddha statue carved by a roadside sculptor in the Marble Mountains outside Da Nang, Vietnam.

"I just looked at it, I really can't tell you why, maybe the face, maybe the texture," he said. "I said, 'I just want that one over there.' "

Parking enforcement officer Lynn Haske tickets a vehicle Thursday, the first day of EasyPark enforcement. (Photo by BILL ROTH / Anchorage Daily News)

Photos: EasyPark's first day of enforcement

You might have missed it, but last week our governor quietly mixed religion and politics more overtly than any governor in recent memory, including Sarah Palin.

On Friday, Gov. Sean Parnell issued a proclamation, expressing Alaska's unity with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and our support for Perry's large evangelical Christian-led rally over the weekend. Parnell said Alaskans should "seek God's face," and he declared a day of prayer.

Have you seen my dog?: Rosemary McCrudden, 2, holds a poster seeking news of Blanca, who went missing on New Year's Eve. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)

Have you seen a dog named Blanca? She disappeared eight months ago. But her owners, Jennifer Crews, Mike McCrudden and daughters Kathryn, 6, and Rosemary, 2, think they might still catch a glimpse of her. They haven't stopped looking.

HOME ON THE SIDEWALK: After moving his belongings, John Martin holds his cat Sheba as a maintenance ambassador for the Anchorage Downtown Partnership performs a periodic disinfecting and cleaning of Martin's urban camp site Thursday on the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and G Street. (ERIK HILL / Anchorage Daily News)

I've been hearing from a lot of readers responding to my column Monday on the Robert Hansen film, wanting to talk about their own brushes with Hansen in the late 1970s and '80s in Anchorage.

I had one call from a woman who said she worked for the court system during his grand jury as an in-court clerk, taking shorthand. She said that before that, she used to routinely go to his bakery to buy donuts for jurors.

When I heard about plans to make a movie about Alaska serial killer Robert Hansen, something didn't sit right.

Russell Knight and his shop, Knight's Taxidermy in Anchorage, have a show on the History Channel called Mounted in Alaska. (BILL ROTH / Anchorage Daily News)

- Audio slide show: Take a tour of Knight's Taxidermy

- Post a photo of your mounted game

HOMESTEAD: Saskia Esslinger and her husband, Matt Oster, are doing the Alaska Food Challenge by pledging to eat only local for a whole year. They are growing a lot of their own food at their "urban homestead" in Midtown Anchorage in addition to buying from local farmers. (BILL ROTH / Anchorage Daily News)

Watch the audio slide show: Urban homesteaders

On a midtown block of Williams Street, where Matt Oster and Saskia Esslinger are a month into a 12-month commitment to eat only local food, earthy idealism blooms as bright as the palm-sized zucchini flowers in their garden.

PUTTING: Matt Forney, president of the Alaska Disc Golf Association, has written a letter to the Anchorage Police Department asking police to enforce laws against public drinking. (ERIK HILL / Anchorage Daily News)

If ever there were a laid-back game, built on strolling through the woods, hanging with friends and sipping a little beer, that would be disc golf.

But on the city's most popular course at Westchester Lagoon, the mellow feel has faded. Where once evenings used to bring slightly granola-fied 20-somethings with their fluorescent discs and bottled beer, a larger, rowdier crowd has moved in. Things aren't so laid back any more.

SERVED: Process server Todd Severson has been delivering bad news to people since he was 18. (ERIK HILL / Anchorage Daily News)

Todd Severson does not have good news.

If he is on your porch -- a big, clean-cut guy in a windbreaker, chomping cinnamon gum, double-ringing your doorbell, knocking on your door frame -- it's because you didn't take his call. Maybe you thought if you avoided him, you could keep bad news at bay. But of course, the world doesn't work like that.

THE GIFT: President Richard M. Nixon and his wife Pat, center, present pieces of moon rock and a flag from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to Alaska Gov. Keith Miller, right, and his wife Diana in late 1969. (Photo courtesy Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.)