A file with "Dana Sena-Wease" written on it has been in my desk drawer since 2008, when I was a reporter. Back then, Sena-Wease was one more woman found dead in the Alaska wilderness. Her body had been discovered in a creek bed along the Seward Highway by a hunter checking his trap line in 2007. The details about her life and death were slim. No one had been charged with her murder.

On the morning of Valentine's Day, a stone engraver and student by the name of Cy Two Elk found a baggie shoved under his windshield wiper. Inside the baggie was a piece of photocopied paper. On the paper was a poem. Standing next to his Nissan Sentra, there among the graying snow berms of Spenard, Two Elk read himself a couple lines:

"The currents of light combusting/Like passionate lips/The revolution of Existence's skirt/Whose folds contain other worlds"

ART: This sculpture titled ‘Warrior Within’ was installed at Wasilla High School Jan. 29, but has been covered since Feb. 1 after some students and parents complained it resembles female genitalia. (Photo Courtesy Jim Dault)

My friends, if this keeps up, we are going to need a lot of tarps.

In the weeks since 18-year-old Samantha Koenig disappeared from a coffee stand on Tudor Road, there has been plenty of outrage to go around. A lot of people are looking for something to blame for what happened. I’m surprised by how many of them are pointing the finger at women and their choices.

Here’s one argument I hear a lot: coffee shacks are isolated and dangerous, young female baristas are taking a risk to work there.

"If I had my way," James "Sonny" Koenig, Samantha’s father, told a reporter after her abduction. "I’d do away with all those coffee shops on the roadside."

Getting a parking ticket is not a crime. If it were, my rap sheet wouldn't be pretty.

It's been especially rough since August, when the city's new parking enforcement arm, Easy Park, was born. Those modern meter maids with their three-wheeled scooters are not to be trifled with. Chances are they've nabbed you too. Ticket revenue between August and December was up 8 percent, from $166,000 to $180,299.

Missing barista: Allison Martin, owner of CalGirls Coffee Shop on Tudor, is selling coffee in cups with missing barista Samantha Koenig's photo on them.(photo: Julia O'Malley)

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.

Coffee shacks are a thing here, a signature Anchorage phenomena. A study in 2005 said there was a coffee opportunity for every 3,300 residents in the city. At the time, that was the highest coffee-to-person ratio in the US. It’s a competitive business and it doesn’t hurt to have a cart staffed with attractive young women. While that makes caffeine and pretty faces easy to find, it also means a lot of women like 18-year-old Koenig will be closing up shacks in dark parking lots of car washes and gas stations tonight. Plenty of them will tell you that’s a vulnerable feeling. Koenig’s disappearance dials up the unease.

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.