OmegaMom

We were handed a tiny, solemn, scared little 10-month-old in a Chinese Affairs office in Nanning.

I still remember feeling, later that night, as we were sitting in our hotel room, looking at our new daughter, that a Very Large Mistake had been made, that these people didn’t know what they were doing:  they gave us a BABY?!?!  What on earth were they thinking?!?  We had absolutely no idea how to take care of a baby.  In fact, within a day or two, she managed to roll off the bed and bump her head, and we were sure that we had damaged her for life.

Hah.

Let me show you what she was like when she was three:

And when she was four:

And five:

Six:

Seven:

Eight:

Nine:

And ten, this year—some pics that I haven’t posted here, but may have on Facebook.  First off, all dolled up as the flower girl at her uncle’s wedding:

Her fall fifth grade school pic:

Her gymnastics team pic:

And a nice picture at lunch with us and her grandparents who came to visit (now doable because we live in New Mexico, not the wilds of Alaska):

We are well on our way into the scary world of tweendom.  There are times when she is an absolute mystery to me.  But then, there are times when we spend the entire ride home from gymnastics (1/2 hour) singing with pop songs on the radio at the top of our lungs.

She is beautiful.  She is artistic.  She is athletic.  She sings beautifully (but, alas, I haven’t been able to record her, but I might be able to talk her into it, or simply sneak a recorder into the car on one of our drives home, so she doesn’t go all self-conscious).  She is growing up.

She is in Level 6 in gymnastics, and next year, if she manages to conquer the (scary) giant on the uneven bars, she will be in Level 7/Optionals, which is a major step forward.  She has a rock-hard body, and delights in showing off her six-pack abdomen.

She is constantly alerting me to things that are inappropriate…at the same time, she and her buds at school have reached the stage where anything that can remotely, possibly be related to anything inappropriate sets off a fit of embarrassment and laughter.  (Prime example:  The science volunteer who comes in once a week to do a few hours of experiments and science with the kids was talking mechanics, and started describing a situation where one BALL was shooting into TWO BALLS, thus, no doubt, imparting kinetic energy.  Did we get told about kinetic energy by the girl?  No.  We got required to sign an essay about showing respect to teachers and volunteers because she and her buds busted a gut laughing about BALLS.)

She has finally found a book that appealed to her enough so that she a) purchased it, b) started reading it, and c) finished reading it, all on her own, with no urging from me or requirement from school.  What was this literary delight?  It was Justin Bieber’s new book.  Hey.  Whatever works, y’know?  At this point, I am ready to fall down on my knees and kiss the ground in front of his feet for that particular piece of grace.  No-one better bad-mouth Bieber to me any more! 

(I really plan to write more on the blog.  It will probably be only on weekends, though, as our time gets eaten up with traveling to and from gymnastics…)

Time to bite fingernails.

I hope the friend who says she will eat a Milk Bone at the dog park on Friday if Romney wins won’t have to!

On a more serious note:  The arguments I presented in my previous two posts about the election were the logical, rational arguments.  On the other hand, I have some major emotional reasons to vote the way I did.  Some of them include the fact that I have a uterus, and my daughter has a uterus.  Some of them include the fact that I have (and have had) some family members who are gay, and I want them to be able to have the same marital rights as I do.  One is that I have become fed up with the extremism of today’s Republicans; the very notion that Obama is a socialist just boggles my mind.  I cannot imagine a world where skin color is a reason to vote against Obama (check out the early tweets on #VoteWhite, sigh).  And more… 

I voted straight Democratic today (the first time I have ever done so), and I deliberately didn’t vote for Republicans who were running unopposed.

We shall see.

We have visitors.  One of the visitors has a camera.  She came along on my walk with the dawg to do some pics, and also took some while we all were at lunch in Town With Spanish Name That’s Pronounced The Same Way The One In Missouri Is Pronounced.

Me and the dawg, silhouetted:

The dotter, captured as she was laughing at about a photo she had snapped:

I really like it because she’s not “posing”.

What I look like currently:

And a happy, happy dawg, in mid-run:

I thought this might make a nice break from political stuff from all directions!

Three words:  President Paul Ryan.

Two words:  Financial de-regulation.

One word:  Choice.

On the first point:  Paul Ryan’s budget plan is a disaster for every aspect of the government except for the military.  Under his plan, non-defense discretionary spending (that would be spending on, say, the USDA, NOAA, USGS, NIH, CDC, NASA, etc.) would be cut by $1.17 billion dollars.  It would be roughly cut in half by 2021. 

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that there’s a helluva lot of Good Stuff™ coming out of agencies such as these.  (Conflict of interest note:  That would include my husband’s salary, benefits, and retirement, too.)  To use just a couple of examples, NOAA is the agency that correctly predicted that Hurricane Sandy would take a sharp turn to the west and head inland at New Jersey, and that it would combine with a strong nor’easter.  USGS is the agency that does volcano monitoring, which may not be a big deal in general, but in Alaska is a big deal.

Paul Ryan’s budget plan would also cut funding for federal disaster relief, Pell grants, and “revisit” the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform.

Which leads us to point number two, financial de-regulation, which Mitt Romney has said he is for.

Can I just say “ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR BLOODY EVER-LIVING MINDS?!?!”

Look.  You know what caused the greatest recession since the Great Depression?  Repealing the Glass-Steagall Act.  The Great Depression was caused by wild amounts of gambling on the stock market with borrowed money which was backed by…the expected gains from the gambling on the stock market.  Somewhere along the line, suddenly people realized that there was nothing backing up those loans, so they were essentially worth nothing.  The onset of the Great Recession was caused by the realization that the wild amounts of gambling on the housing market with borrowed money that was backed by…the expected gains from the gambling on the housing market was all a chimera, a game of smoke and mirrors.

I remember watching with open-mouthed amazement the prices of houses in our little Hippy Dippy Enclave In the Woods as they rose…and rose…and rose yet again.  At that point, I started following several “housing bust” blogs.  Some of them were written by wild-eyed end-of-the-world doomsayers, but some were written by economists or housing market analysts who were taking a clear look at the fun-house-mirror world of NINJA (no income, no job) loans, house flipping, mortgage derivatives, and derivatives of the mortgage derivatives.  When it all caved in, I wasn’t surprised.

For those of you who don’t really remember what it was like…there was a rumor that Henry Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, actually got down on his knees and begged Nancy Pelosi and other powerful congresscritters in a secret meeting in September 2008 to save Wall Street and the banking industry.

It was that bad.

While I don’t like George W. Bush and think his presidency was awful, I have to hand it to him and the congresscritters:  they hunkered down, put forth a bailout bill, and when it was shot down, put it out again and pulled in all their congressional IOUs to get it passed.  It was highly unpopular.  But I feel it was also highly necessary.  TARP was the first step in saving our country from the Grander Depression, in my opinion, with Obama’s economic stimulus the second step.

And all of this was started by financial deregulation.

Mitt Romney joked in one of the debates that he wasn’t talking about allowing people to start banks in their garages.

That’s not what I’m worried about.  I’m worried about another stupid round of high-rolling gambling suckering the U.S. into yet another round of wild “prosperity” that is founded upon…nothing.  And then staring into the financial abyss yet again, when my husband and I are retired and living on a fixed income.

My third point is choice.  I have a daughter.  I have a daughter adopted from China.  I have a daughter adopted from China because her parents had no choice.  Whether it was economic, whether it was seeking a boy-child, whatever—the entire cultural situation in China that produced the situations where there were “extra” girl babies being abandoned, backed by, in some cases, forced abortions…well…

I want my daughter to be able to have a choice when she becomes sexually active and (please no!) accidentally gets pregnant.  I want her to be able to decide what is best for her.  If she decides to have a baby and keep it, that’s cool.  If she decides to have a baby and relinquish it for adoption, that’s cool.  If she decides not to have a baby, and has an abortion, it is her choice.

I don’t want her choice to be dictated by old white men who think a few cells is equivalent to a living, breathing human being.

As recently as during the Republican primaries, Romney said he “absolutely supports” a Constitutional amendment banning abortion.  Paul Ryan, his running mate, is the author of the “personhood” bill.  Both have said they want to defund Planned Parenthood.  Both have supported laws that would allow companies to deny their employees coverage for birth control and abortion due to moral or religious beliefs. 

My personal belief is that my employer has no right to limit what female reproductive services my insurance dollars pay for.

Now, since the Republican primaries, Mr. Romney has backtracked on most of these positions.  He is attempting to re-position himself as a centrist to appeal to the independent and moderate voters. 

Which Romney should I believe?  The one who ran for governor of Massachusetts claiming he was pro-choice, then in 2005 vetoed a law expanding access to emergency contraception, then claimed he would support revoking Roe v. Wade in the Republican primaries, then claimed there was no legislation regarding abortion in his presidential agenda?  The Romney who was quite the hawk during the Republican primaries, or the one who pretty much nodded and said, “What he said!” to all of President Obama’s positions during the third presidential debate?  The one who favors financial de-regulation, or the one who said “Well, of course we need some regulation!” during the second debate?

The Des Moines Register seems to have fallen for Romney’s shift-to-the-middle stance, which they cited in their endorsement editorial.  But I can tell you from experience that hoping a right-wing candidate will actually be more centrist than he sounds is a Bad Idea.  I voted for George W. Bush in 2000.  Yes.  (Please don’t hit me!)  I voted for him thinking he couldn’t possibly be as right as he sounded, and that he was probably going to be a pragmatic centrist.  I thought Al Gore was too liberal.

Hah.  Look what I got.  You can believe I did not vote for George W. Bush in 2004.  I’m not going to fall for another “shift-to-the-center-now-that-I’ve-got-the-nomination” ploy again.  Besides which, as I stated in yesterday’s post, I am fully satisfied with Barack Obama as president.

Four years ago, during his campaign and during the presidential debates, Barack Obama promised a few things.

He promised to focus on Al Qaeda and responding to those who attacked the U.S. on 9/11.

He delivered.  Osama bin Laden is dead; the leadership of Al Qaeda is in tatters.

He promised to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

In December 2011, the last U.S. troops left Iraq.

He promised to put together a national health care plan.

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Health Care Act into law.  It isn’t the sun, moon, and stars we were all hoping for (I particularly wanted a public option), but it is a start.

He promised to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for U.S. military servicemen.

On September 30, 2011, that policy was ended.  Amazingly enough, our military forces are not in disarray as a result, and the world has not ended.

He did try to close Guantanamo; the prison is still open because…well, there are still prisoners, and Congress refused to pass a bill to cover the costs to transfer the prisoners to a facility in the U.S.

He did try to pass a cap-and-trade bill, but once again this was obstructed by Congress.

He has instructed the Justice Department to stop enforcing The Defense Of Marriage Act.

He signed the Lily Ledbetter Act into law shortly after he was inaugurated.

When President Obama was elected four years ago, the economy was in freefall.  The stock market hit its low in March, 2009, two months after Obama was inaugurated, but had done the majority of its fall the previous year.  The high of 14,164  for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was hit in October 2007; by late October 2008, it was already down to 8,451, and it wavered around that point for the remainder of the year.  Now?  The DJIA is back up around 13,000.  By the end of 2008, the U.S. GDP was plummeting by almost 9% for the last quarter of the year.  Starting with the third quarter of 2009, the GDP has been positive again.  By late 2008, the U.S. had lost 2.6 million jobs for the year.  Job losses continued, though slowing down, until March 2010, and have been on a continuous upward trend since October 2010.  Even though faced with a recalcitrant Congress, President Obama managed to get a jobs stimulus bill passed in 2009, and economists agree that without it, unemployment would currently be much higher and GDP much lower.

The world economy tanked in 2008.  There are countries out there—ironically enough, many European countries that Republicans consider “socialist”—that followed the austerity path, rather than the economic stimulus path.  Those countries are now still mired in deep recession and high levels of political unrest (Greece, for instance, is facing unemployment of 25%).

Climate change is on everyone’s mind right now (even though there was no mention of it during the presidential debates), what with Hurricane Sandy’s recent hit on the Northeastern U.S.  Barack Obama is aware of and his administration is quietly working on dealing with global climate change. The U.S.’s carbon emissions have dropped to a 20-year low, natural gas and renewable energy resources have become much more prevalent as energy sources for the U.S. during his administration, and U.S. auto MPG rates have been ramped up, with the most recent requirement going up to 54 mpg (average) by 2025.

I think Barack Obama did a hell of a job given the mess he walked into.  When he was elected, the Onion’s headline was “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”.  Why he still wants it is anyone’s guess (my personal opinion is that his poor performance during the first presidential debate this year was that he was wondering if he really wanted to deal with this shit for four more years).  But since he wants it, I’m going to vote that he gets it.

Somehow or other, this little girl:

Has turned into this OMG-how-did-this-happen tween (oh-so-ironic picture taken at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History):

It happens while you’re not looking.

I have been incredibly busy today, zipping to and fro, getting my boobs squished, telling the car mechanic I have to bring the car in on Wednesday, not today, ferrying a boatload of fudgsicles to school, wrapping gifts, dragging the girl off to gymnastics, buying cupcakes for the kids at gymnastics, running home, writing this blog post, then it’s off to pick up the girl and all of us head out to dinner at her current favorite Chinese restaurant.

Oh, yes:  this year, her putative birthday happens to fall on the Chinese New Year.  Happy year of the Dragon to y’all!

I have more to say, but no time to say it in.  Ack!  More later, gotta run!

So here it is, almost 2012. Tomorrow will be the Omegas’ 14th anniversary. We are safely ensconced in our new house, which we closed on yesterday, the last closing of 2011 for our title company. We have had some thirty+ inches of snow at the house over December, which is only now totally melted off our back deck.

In excellent “greet the New Year” fashion, I am sick and regretting not hauling my butt off to the local doc-in-the-box today. OmegaDad has, in the past month, ripped 90% of the cornea off his right eye by gouging it with his thumb while in the throes of a nightmare (it’s all healed now, thank the Kozmik All), gotten sick (I think I got the thing I’m suffering from from him), and almost broke his finger yesterday slipping on the ice.

OmegaDotter, at least, is neither ill nor injured. She has her first gymnastics meet with her new gym next Friday (we will be there cheering her on), has made friends at her new school (one of the top ten elementary schools in the state, a pure fluke of good luck), and is settling in.

I leave you for a day or two–really! Just a day or two this time, I promise!–with the best of wishes for the New Year, from our house to yours!

(Hopefully, you will be able to see a video of OmegaDotter doing her newly accomplished back walkover on the high beam after this.)

Okay, so I suck at updating. And, for the nth year in a row, I have hopelessly flubbed NaBloPoMo.

Sigh.

Maybe next year, eh?

So. We are now ensconced at a lovely little B&B in Ranchos de Big City (not to be confused with River Rancho, a suburb of Big City filled with McMansions crammed together cheek by jowl). As a result of this stay, we have become enamored of Ranchos de Big City, an area on the banks of Big River that is filled with huge old cottonwood trees, old ranchos of sprawling adobe structures sitting next to outrageously large new construction.

The streets are tiny. The properties are put together in huge blocks, so you might have a series of one-acre properties lining the street, with a series of one-acre properties behind them, reached by a common lane/driveway leading off the main street.

Interspersed here and there are irrigation ditches, which the local residents have used as hiking paths for years and years, to the point that the village of Ranchos de Big City finally gave way and made the ditches into official village hiking easements.

Following the irrigation ditch right next to the B&B, one finds: behind the house, horses in a corral; next, a pair of friendly llamas; then a newer adobe barn with yet more horses. On the far side of the ditch, you have: behind a lovely stick-and-wire privacy fence, a huge pond with a waterfall gurgling into it, filled with migrating geese; a field with more horses which is a destination for the migrating sandhill cranes; then some outbuildings which are home to some happy dogs with hoarse barks…

And on and on…

We love it. We would love to live here. Unfortunately, it’s outrageously expensive. But we would never have known of this area without the B&B, which caught OmegaDad’s attention by it’s name, which is quintessentially New Mexican.

Aside from that…

OmegaDad has started his new job. He has a corner office with big windows. He was greeted by seven neat stacks of files that his assistant said were items that needed his immediate attention. He also has an administrative assistant, which he finds somewhat befuddling; he is so used to doing everything for himself that she has to remind him that she’s there to help him, and she can actually do things for him…so he can wrangle those stacks of files into shape while letting her handle the day-to-day stuff.

The dotter and I have been exploring. We drop OmegaDad off at work, return to the B&B for (scrumptious) breakfast, head out for a hike somewhere we can let the dawg off his leash for a while, then drive around to scope out various properties OmegaDad and I have decided we might be interested in. Then we take a swim at the B&B’s indoor pool, schmooze with the utterly charming elderly proprietor for a while, then go pick up OmegaDad from work. (It will be nice when one of our cars arrives here, so the to-and-from-work schlepping ends.)

We now have a handle on a temporary, month-to-month furnished rental, so we can take some time looking at properties.

When we left Big City, Alaska, it was snowing. It took half an hour for the airplane to be de-iced before we took off. Our old Alaska town has has -5 temperatures already.

Here in Big City, New Mexico, it has been sunny and–at worst–down in the upper 30s at night. Everyone here complained the first few days we were here about how cold it was…we just sort of gave them old-fashioned looks and reminded them just where we had just come from. (And for the record, the huge storm that was all over the news? The OMG-it’s-the-end-of-the-world storm? Was on the north and west coast of Alaska, about 600 miles from Big City, Alaska. So, not only did we miss the storm by flying out of Alaska two days before it hit, we would have been just fine anyway, because it was like living in the Panhandle of Texas when a hurricane hits the Texas-Louisiana border. )

I have pics on my iPhone that I would like to insert, but I don’t know how using WordPress’s built-in post writing ability.  Bah.

So I’ll just say that I drove in to Big City to drop my car off to be shipped to New Mexico, OmegaDotter had her last day at school and gymnastics, our inflatable mattress deflated overnight, OmegaDad took turtles in to get a health certificate, and now we’re all exhausted.

I am writing this using my brand-new iPhone, curled up on an inflatable mattress.  The house is empty, except for the heap of stuff we are either shipping to NM via UPS or schlepping onto the plane with us.  (That includes one dawg, three cats, and three turtles.)

OmegaDad is setting up turtle carriers.  OmegaDotter is snoring on another inflatable mattress beside me.

The cats were quite traumatized today.  Piggy, our 17-year-old half-Siamese, half-calico dainty scaredy cat, spent most of the past four days carefully hidden in the box spring of our bed.  When the movers finally came to take our bed away, we cornered her, then I deposited her in our empty closet.  Newman, our Siamese mutt cat I inherited from my mom, spent the day hidden on a high shelf in the dotter’s bedroom.  Wooly, our laid-back cat, I confined to the upstairs bathroom.  By the time the movers left, Piggy and Newman had gone AWOL.  Luckily, a few hours later, they both timidly emerged again.

The dawg spent another happy day at doggie daycare.

Tomorrow I clean.  And I drive my car to the port to get it shipped.  Then a day of finalization of various stuff, a night at a hotel, and we fly out Sunday.

More tomorrow.

Above is the container truck being backed into our driveway.  Yes, it is really happening.  Yes, the movers have packed some stuff into the container.  Yes, we have sent OmegaDad’s car off to the shippers (my car goes on Friday). 

We spent two hours this evening sorting everything that we’re either taking with us on the plane or shipping via UPS so we’ll have it right away when we get to Big City.

Things are moving along!

Bella asked for an update on the move.

Yes, I know that Bella requested it more than a week ago.

That is how the move is going.

::frenzied rictus in place of a grin::

The movers are here.  The house is like a hurricane has hit us.  Almost everything is packed, and we have four nights left.  No standard foods—though the refrigerator is full of scrids and scrads.  No plates.  No cutlery.

The beds are still here, but it sounds like they’re departing tomorrow.  Ah, well, we have inflatable mattresses.

I’ve been hauling the poor dawg off to doggie day care every day, so the movers (and I) don’t get literally “hounded” by the constant territorial barking.

I’ve been shutting the poor cats into the master bedroom, where there are heaps and piles of Things We Want To Ship Directly Or Take With Us scattered about.

The furniture in the living room has been carefully covered with wraps.  The moving guys assured me we could still sit on them.  Oh, goodie.

I’m frantically pulling together documents for our mortgage application for whatever house we decide on in Big City, NM.  (Actually, outside Big City, NM.  Preferably in more mountainous, tree-ish areas.)

OmegaDad and I are sniping at each other.  We are both sniping at OmegaDotter.  She is sniping back.  It is great fun.  Not.  I have taken to reminding myself “just a few more days, and we will be done with the omigod we are taking an airplane with three cats a dog three turtles a man a woman an almost-10-year-old and associated luggage I can’t breathe help me God whole affair.”

(The chickens and bunny rabbit have gone off to A Good Home.  Story to come.)

Then, of course, we get to settle in to a few days at a casita in a bed and breakfast in Big City, then find a local month-to-month rental, while we’re looking for a house to buy.

BUT.  Here?  It is gray.  The wind is howling off the glaciers.  The sun is rising at about 9:30 and going down at about 5:45.  It is currently in the 20s and there is snow on the ground that is being whipped into crusty small drifts by the 60 mph gusts.  In Big City, NM?  Sunny (or just clear at night).  In the 50s and 60s during the day.  It will be windy later in the week, but…the sun is rising at 7:30 and setting at 6:15.

I will be so glad when this is all over with!

(Oh, yeah, and I’m attempting [bahahaha!] NaBloPoMo, yet again.)

The first portable computer my parents bought, brand-new practically one of the first ones off the assembly line, an Osborne I, when I was 21 or 22:

It weighed 23.5 pounds.  The screen was five inches wide, green on white letters and ASCII graphics.  It came with SuperCalc (a spreadsheet program) and WordStar (a word processing program), plus a version or two of BASIC so you could do programming if need be.  It had two 5-1/2 inch floppy drives, one which would hold the program, the other of which would hold your documents.

We thought it was amazing, though I do remember absolutely hating to carry the damned thing any further than, say, from one room to the next.

When Mom bought the Osborne Executive a few years later, she gave me the old machine, and I used it for a while while I did free-lance typing from home.

The kind of “portable computer” I want to buy now:

It’s about the size of a sheet of paper.  It weighs 1.33 pounds.  With it, you can access the world.  And, dayum, it’s pretty, not like the ugly, utilitarian clunkiness of the Osborne.

What a difference thirty years makes.

What a difference one person makes.

A few years after the Osborne I/II showed up in our house, the magazine I worked for bought computers for all the editors.  I—the in-house computer whiz–was the one who discovered that CP/M, the operating system we used, had a glitch where you could accidentally save your article with no file name, but that it showed up in the directory, so you could retrieve it and save it with a new name.  Many a young editor who had their articles disappear after many hours of working on them paid for lunches for me for saving their files.

I vividly remember the day that the magazine bought a hard drive—with all of 10MB of space.  Since I had already demonstrated my ease with computers, it was assigned to me.  I remember all my buddies gathering around to “Oooh!” and “Ahhh!” at it.  It was about 10 inches tall, 10 inches deep, five or six inches across.  They were astonished at how many articles we could store on it.

The editor-in-chief’s secretary bragged about buying a real IBM PC at home.

At the same time, one of my best friends got an Apple II.  Thereafter, every time I talked to her, when she wasn’t lamenting the latest married man in her life or other equally DRAMATIC situations she maneuvered herself into, she was talking up Apple products.

And nowadays, due to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and—in another corner, Bill Gates—and their ferocious technical and marketing genius, our entire worlds are different.

We carry iPods with music.  We carry smart phones.  We buy almost anything via the Internet.  Grandparents get pictures of grandkids via email or Facebook.  I shopped for our first house on the Internet in 1998, back when Realtor.com was new; nowadays, internet service is practically considered an everyday, necessary utility for folks who aren’t computer whizzes.

The world has changed so very much in that way.

My grandmother lived through a transition from horse-drawn carriages to jet airplanes and landing on the moon.  I, and my age cohorts, have lived through a similar startling transition, from carbon paper and typewriters to streaming media and phones that answer spoken questions.

Steve Jobs died today.  It was his vision, his driving need for clean lines, ease of use, and fusing technology with the personal, that has led us into this world of “the Revolution will be texted!”, sexting, online banking, music wherever we go.  He died after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer.  He was 56.  He and Wozniak started Apple in 1976, thirty-five years ago.

Where will we be in another thirty-five years?

RIP Steve Jobs.

Some good blog posts on the subject: 

Will Wheaton, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”

John Scalzi, “Steve Jobs and Me”

Chez Pazienza (Deus Ex Malcontent), “iSad”

New Mexico, here we come!

OmegaDad accepted a position in Big City, NM, yesterday.  The job starts in about 8 weeks.  We took OmegaDotter out to dinner after her team gymnastics for the day and told her…

She cried.

Sigh.  I remember what it was like for her when we moved here to Suburban Alaska, those first few weeks when she didn’t know anyone at all, and I spent time cuddling her every day after school for a week while she processed being away from her One And Only True Love and her friends from Arizona.

Now she has to go through that again.

Oh, I know quite well that within a year, she’ll have new buddies galore, and thanks to the Miracles Of Modern Technology she will be able to keep in touch with her old buddies.  But for a few months, it will be very difficult for her.

In the meantime, I have been struck—quite unexpectedly!—by sadness at leaving Alaska.  While I will never, EVER miss the long, cold, dark dark dark winters, which leave me dull and depressed and miserable, I will miss the mountains, the long summer days, the fun of having daylight change so rapidly from short to long to short again.  I will miss the chance to see the northern lights.  (Alas, last night, when the latest wowza geomagnetic storm hit, it was overcast here and the almost-full-moon was shining behind the overcast.  So we got a lovely pearlescent sky, but none of it was the northern lights, wah!).  I will miss having actual seasons.  I will miss the thick, sweet, peaty smell of the wet boreal woods, which is so different from the light, dusty, vanilla scent of dry ponderosa forests.

I will also miss that odd plus to living in Alaska, the yearly PFD check.  While we should have banked it, we used it for such things as flying down to…the Southwest!…right around Christmas, or, last year, out to the Southeast.  Those trips were something that kept me sane during the darkest days near winter solstice.

I don’t have many friends here, myself; we managed to deposit ourselves squarely into the Bible Belt of Alaska, filled with conservatives.  I remember during the last presidential campaign arriving at the dotter’s gymnastics facility to be greeted with a bleacher full of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” pins.  On the other hand, our next door neighbor is a lovely liberal lady with her equally liberal female partner (who has had to deal with some really ugly experiences as a result); I will miss her and her family dearly.  Also, the family of OmegaDotter’s dearest friend are liberal and laidback; I’ll miss them too.

But it’s a new adventure!  Onwards!

As of today, we have been in Alaska for four years.

OmegaDotter has grown from a little girl going off to kindergarten in a strange place, with tears after school for the first week, to being a 9.5 year old mini-diva who is deep into discussions of (ACK!) periods, breasts, and boys with her buddies.  Luckily, these are things I have talked with her about long since, so she comes back to me and talks about her buddy discussions with me.

I’ve discovered that pop music is an excellent “in” to some more tricky topics about sex and drinking and “being pretty” versus “being yourself”.  (“Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack”, for instance, was a good conversation starter…)  There are times when my eyes bug when I’m listening to the songs, and I swear things are Just Too Racy!, but then I think back to the songs my friends and I listened to, in the Dark Ages, and I realize a lot of it was the same stuff, with more drugs in the songs back then and more alcohol in the songs now.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll.  The perils of being the mother to an almost-tween.

She is now almost up to my chin in height.  When we moved here, she was still below my breasts.

Speaking of breasts…things are beginning to move in that direction for her, too.  Oy.

Part of me wants her to just stay my little girl for a lot longer.  Another part of me is finding these discussions interesting, and finding her becoming a bit (just a wee tad) more mature and interested in some more almost-adult topics that don’t revolve around sex and puberty.  Alas, she still hasn’t become enchanted by reading, so I am considering a strict bribery-for-reading regime this school year.  A dollar a chapter?  Something like that, to push her past her “Ewww, reading is boring!” stage.  At least, I hope it’s a stage.

She and I went to Arizona for five days in mid-July and had a wonderful time hanging out with my brother and 18-year-old niece.  Niece and dotter adore each other, and almost all the pics I have of the dotter from that trip include pics of K. as well…but here is one where I cropped out K. so you can get a grasp of how leggy my girl has become:

In other news, our puppy is now 50+ pounds and six months old.  Everywhere we go, we get comments like, “Oh! What a pretty dog!”  What they don’t know is that our dog is like one of the brontosaurs of old, the kind that needed an extra almost-brain in the end of their tail.  I call him our lummox, because he is so cute and friendly and goofy and just plain…well…dumb.  I actually think he will turn out not so intellectually challenged as he grows older, but right now he’s got the “I’m a goofy dawg and need to chew things and get tangled up in my leash and whap things with my tail (as HARD as I CAN!) and Bounce Like A Tigger!” stage down pat.  It is trying.  Especially when the shoes get chewed up.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on right now.  More later.

It seems that even though (a) I haven’t been writing much lately, and (b) I certainly haven’t been writing much about adoption, per se, when I do write a post, someone nominated me for the “Top 25 Adoption Blogs” at Circle of Moms.

I know nothing about the website, honestly.  So, for what it’s worth, I toss this out to my (few remaining) loyal readers:

One of the nice things is that I’m in good company.  Malinda of Adoption Talk; AmFam at American Family; Tonggu Mama at Our Little Tongginator; Heather, at Production, Not Reproduction; Shannon at Peter’s Cross Station;  and M3 at Do They Have Salsa In China are all also nominated, plus a smattering of adult adoptees and a whopping two birthmothers.

Go forth and vote for those who you think do best!  (I believe you can vote once each day, but am not quite sure.)  This is not, however, a vote-for-OmegaMom promo, as I think my dearth of blogging lately sort of makes an award like this moot.

In the meantime, I am serving on a grand jury for two days every two weeks and find it promotes a heavy dose of cynicism.  Criminals are stupid.  Teens do stupid things.  Fights get started over stupid things (chipped coffee cups, anyone?!  Dirty sheets?!).  Drunk drivers are stupid.  Lots of people stupidly drink or do drugs or sell drugs.  Women get into stupidly obvious bad relationships.  Most of the cases we see are depressingly banal.

I can see why police officers tend to be world weary and cynical, oh my how I do.  I’m only doing this for three months, very part time; they do it all the time.

Additionally, I am finding lots of things to be worried about vis-à-vis a tween who is much too eager to grow up.  (To her, that means “being a teen and having boobs”.)  Sex!  Drugs!  Creepy dudes!  The thrill of swiping someone’s credit card to buy (wheeeee!) towels!

(ETA:  Anyone have any idea why my badge—which I swiped directly from Malinda’s post, where it shows with a transparent background—does not have a transparent background on my blog?)

Last year, on the day you died, I stopped in the gift shop at the hospital.  There had been a bright, colorful cat or cow sitting in the window (I can’t remember which now) that kept calling to me as I passed by it, saying, “Your mom would like me!”  So I finally stopped in, thinking that the color would light up your hospital room, and the silliness would make you smile.

When I handed it to you, you unwrapped the bag it was in, and you smiled and went, “Oooh!”, just like I knew you would.

And then, just a few hours later, I was watching you suddenly gasping for breath.  I was watching the respiratory therapist trying various different things—an aerosol, a higher rate of oxygen, an oxygen forcing mask, as opposed to the “on-demand” mask you had had before—as your O2 levels dropped and your heart rate plummeted.  We were telling you to calm down, to try to breathe deeply.  I said to you, worried, “Mom.  You’re rattling, Mom.  You need to slow down.”

I remember the respiratory therapist calling the doctor.  I remember thinking to myself that this couldn’t be happening so suddenly, that you had been—if not your normal self, at least chipper and alert and amused by the toy I had brought you—just an hour previously.

I remember the doctor coming in, and putting her hand on my shoulder, and saying, “Kate.  Kate, I need you to step outside and talk with me a moment.”

I remember going out of her room, and leaning, dazedly, against the wall, my eyes focusing far far away, as the doctor told me that I had to make a decision.  I remember looking at her, at her sorrowful eyes, and knowing what I had to say.  I was crying.

“Stop the machines,”  I said.  “Take her off the oxygen,”  I said.  “She wants it that way,” I said. 

She pulled me into her arms and murmured something—I don’t remember what—and then we went back into your room.  She told your favorite nurse to “make her as comfortable as possible”.  She told the respiratory therapist to pull the oxygen mask off. 

The nurse shot you up with morphine.  A lot.

They all touched me as they left the room.  There were hands patting my shoulders.  There was Elizabeth the nurse holding my hand.  The doctor hugged me again.

I sat there an hour with you, holding onto your hand.  Your heartbeat went slower and slower.  It was so odd, Mom, because you would be quiet for a minute, and then take a breath, and then be quiet again.  The time between breaths got longer and longer.

And then you were gone, and all I could do was hold onto your hand and cry and cry and cry.

I took off your wedding ring then, and put it on my ring finger.  It’s there still, with my engagement ring and wedding ring.

And I had to go back to your little apartment, the one that we had worked so hard to make colorful, and cheery, and yours, and I made phone calls, and I cried.

It’s Mother’s Day, Mom.  It’s your day.  Normally, I would be calling you up and telling you what OmegaDad and OmegaDotter had gotten me, and would be asking how your flowers were, and what you had been doing.  I’d be able to ask you about Girl Drama, and get advice from you on how to handle it.  I’d be able to whine to you about how OmegaDad didn’t get the job in Spokane.  We’d talk about OmegaBro and his family.  We’d chat about Andy and Dana and Georgene and Jim and your local breakfast bunch and what the Queen Bees at the facility dining room were doing lately and what you had for your latest blog posting.  I’d tell you about how I’m on Grand Jury duty, and what it’s been like.  You’d want to talk politics, and about Bin Laden’s death.  I’d tell you that OmegaDotter is suddenly up to my shoulders, when she was just below my boobs just a year and a half ago.  I’d tell you that the rhubarb are exploding, and the lilacs and forsythia are budding out leaves, and I’d ask for your advice on what to do about the forsythia never blooming.  We’d be making plans for my normal June visit, and deciding where I could drive you, what odd little out-of-the-way places you wanted to investigate and photograph.  I’d tell you that this has been a bad year.  I’d tell you that I’ve gained a lot of weight.  I’d tell you that I suddenly look old.  We’d talk about the fact that here in Suburban Alaska, we’ve been having weather that’s a helluva lot like Monsoon Season back in Arizona.  I’d lament about the puppy’s tendency to put anything and everything into his mouth, and how he’s so desperate to play with Wooley the cat but Wooley the cat can’t stand him.  You’d laugh at my description of Wooley getting fed up and rearing up and boxing Seward—bap bap BAP—and the dog yelping and running away with the cat chasing him.  I’d tell you about the Alaska mini-vacation we’re taking next weekend.

Y’see, Mom, that’s what I miss the most.  Just being able to chit-chat with you, because we never ever had awkward moments in our conversations.  They always just flowed, one topic to the other.

I miss doing the crossword puzzles with you.  I miss kissing you goodnight.  I miss pulling the car to an abrupt stop because you saw something that intrigued you.  I miss your encyclopedic knowledge of wildflowers.  I miss being able to ask you questions about Dad, and about the family.  I miss your wide interest in so many things.

I miss you so much.  I love you.

(The funny thing is, you’d be telling me, “Pull yo’self together, Katya!  You need to join a club, get out, meet people.  Stop wallowing and turning into a mushroom!”  I hear you, I know it’s what I need to do.  But I had no idea…no idea…how hard your death would hit me, love.)

It was up in the 50s today.  Yay!  Woot!

The rhubarb are beginning to show little red pen1ses, just the very starts of the explosion of greenery to come.  I posted pictures last year from about two weeks later, and you can see how they end up looking like weird red brains before they open up fully.

The snow is almost all melted from the back yard, the sunny side of the front yard, and the driveway.

OmegaDotter has taken to wearing her flip-flops.

The twilight has now extended to about 11 p.m., which means that any opportunities for watching Northern Lights is now vanishing into the mists.  Oh, if there’s a whopper of a solar flare, I might stay up until 1 a.m.  But then again, I probably won’t.  At least this year I finally saw some aurorae, and was totally, absolutely jazzed; all the result of the sun—at last!—gearing up from the solar minimum and producing some flares and plenty of sunspots.

There are pussy willows popping out; I have been watching their spread from the lower regions—which are warmer—up, bit by bit.  The pussy willow line has almost reached the altitude of our house.  (This is not to say that our house is high up; we are at about 700 feet above sea level.)

Many thanks for the virtual “there-there”s about the dotter’s foray into tween-hood and the relationships between the sexes.  I have told her she can be T.’s “girlfriend”, which consists of maybe holding hands and taking walks, but dating waits until she’s 14 or 15.  There are other issues, but they are related to living in a redneck-y, Bible-belt-y area of Alaska, and I may or may not discuss them in another post.

Right now, though, I’m just enjoying the real beginning of spring.

OmegaDotter is now nine years old, and in third grade.

She has a crush on T., who is ten and in fourth grade.

“He’s so beautiful!” she told me one afternoon a week or so ago.  We drove past his house on the way to gymnastics, and he was outside; she was right—he is a very nice looking boy.  At bedtime, I snuggled with her and asked her whether he was a nice boy, and that just because someone looks pretty on the outside doesn’t mean that person is nice.  She rolled her eyes at that, because she’s heard it often enough that she was able to recite the words with me as I said them.

The next day she didn’t have the crush.  T. was mean and a bully.

A few days later, she did.  He was not mean and not a bully.

A few days later I., who lives nearby, came by with T., she went off with them to play, and all the kids hung out.  She danced into the house later that evening and said, “I just went on a sort of…date!”

:: BOGGLE ::

Okay, almost immediately she allowed as to how it was not a real date, that they had all played on the trampoline at T.’s house, and gone for a walk, but boy howdy, did she have a crush on T.

The dotter informed me that night at bedtime that T. “cusses a lot.  I don’t like it.”  (Somehow or other, we have managed to raise a child who, though snotty and sarcastic and an almost classic Queen Bee [ugh], does not cuss.  In fact, she has started taking OmegaDad to task for his “bad language”.  This amuses me to no end, because OmegaDad is, in fact, quite restrained in the cussing department.)  She said she was going to tell him he shouldn’t cuss.

I thought it might be a good idea to phrase it differently—we are working on “I” phrases and explaining how things make us feel—so maybe she should say that she really doesn’t like cussing and would he please try not to cuss around her.

I am, in the meantime, still boggling.

This evening, I. and T. came by just before I was picking the dotter up from gymnastics.  When we got back, I said that the dotter could go over and play, but had to be back by 9:30.  She returned home at 9…when she realized what time it was, she announced she was taking the dog for a walk, she’d be back in a half hour, and went back out.

Of course, she went by T.’s house.

T. walked her home.

The dotter then informed me that T. had asked her if she would “go out” with him.

Oy.

So she has been informed that she can go out with him in a group of friends, hang out, play at his house, etc., but she cannot “go out” with him on dates because she is much (OmegaMom gasps, swoons, places a trembling hand upon her forehead) (did I mention MUCH?!) too young to be going on dates.

OY.  Isn’t this kind of stuff supposed to wait for a few more years?!  I have been rather blindsided by the whole thing.  I am, of course, immensely pleased that she’s sharing the whole dang thing with us, and that she’s been discussing whether he’s a nice boy or not with me, and giving examples.  But for Kozmik All’s sake, I thought we were safe from this insanity until she was 12 or 13 or something like that.

OY.

She told me that she told him her “Two Secrets”.  These turned out to be a) how old OmegaDad and I are, which kind of embarrasses her, and b) that she’s adopted, and it was hard to tell.  When I mentioned that it was pretty obvious that she was adopted, she said that she meant it was hard to talk about being adopted.  Sigh.

Anyway, does anyone have any advice?  Puh-leeze?

So we have, essentially, a baby in the house.  A baby that does not wear diapers.

I never thought I would miss diapers.  But I do.

Anyway, the baby is teething.  Which means he is chewing.  Everything.  Boxes.  Shoes.  The used bandaid that somehow OmegaDotter managed to drop behind the living room sofa.  The carpet.  Markers that were under the sofa that were close enough for him to pull out.  Hair ties that were hidden on the floor somewhere.  Some Unnamed Things Under Our Bed (I do not want to know).  He has reached up onto the chest at the foot of our bed and—in seconds—dragged off a scarf and a blankie and started chewing on those.  When I am suiting up to take him out for a pee-and-poop-break, he starts trying to nibble the fur on my boots.

Of course, I am doing my damnedest to each time say “No!” in a firm voice, and then replace the forbidden chew fruit with a Family Approved Chew Toy.  In the meantime, he is a chewing machine.

I am also keeping an ear out and trying to catch the faintest hint of a whimper that indicates pee or poop is about to be deposited.  This means I am missing about half the time.

I had to shut the door to the downstairs bathroom, where the cat food is, because he discovered it today and was like, “Ooo!  Treats!  Yummy!”, even after I took him back to his food bowl and put a bit of puppy chow in it.  Two bites, then it was time to scoot back downstairs and run into the downstairs bathroom.

One of our cats is hiding in our bedroom closet.  He emerges in the middle of the night to settle on my tummy, purr, and lick my fingers, my nose, etc.  But as soon as any out-of-the-norm noise occurs, BAM!, he’s back into the closet.

I have woken up in the middle of the night to haul him out for a piddle break.

So the good things:  Seward is learning to sit.  He’s isn’t learning to stay in a sit, but he does (generally) sit when we command it.  He is learning that being taken out into the yard means it’s time for him to pee and/or poop and have Much Made Of Him.  He is obviously fully recuperated from his Monday surgery to remove his itty-bitty testicles.

I’m too old for this.  Luckily, it will only last a few months.

Aside from that, he’s a sweet, gentle puppy.

Meet Seward.  Seward is two months old.  He’s a mix of Husky and gawd-knows-what.  OmegaDotter’s gymnastics coach, upon seeing his huge paws, suggested he was part Saint Bernard.  Um, I don’t think so.  I also sincerely hope not.  My suspicion is part German Shepherd.

Anyway, he’s a puppy.  He does what puppies do:  He piddles on the floor (though he’s rapidly learning that going outside is for peeing, and we are rapidly learning his peeing cues), he chases the cats (only one of which has decided to emerge from hiding after two days), he chews things.  We are trying to teach him “Sit” and “No” and “Down” and “Leave it” right now, with more advanced stuff—such as “Heel” and oh-my-gawd-it’s-never-going-to-happen “Come”—for later.

(Chewing.  Sigh.  I just intercepted him and OmegaDotter’s hairbrush and her fancy-pants swimming goggles.)

Seward was a bribe.  Specifically, he was a bribe for the dotter.  This is because she had fulfilled the requirements for her previous bribe—no minuses for behavior in gymnastics—which resulted in horse riding lessons.  It also, alas, resulted in an immediate drop in her behavior.  OmegaDad, a firm believer in bribery, immediately put “puppy” into play as a bribe for doing well at the state meet in gymnastics.

Now.  I’m not a great believer in bribery, myself.  I feel like it sets the bribee up for exactly what’s happening:  once the bribe is earned, there’s no motivation for x behavior anymore, and y behavior sets in, instead.  However, OmegaDad had come down the heavy about the state meet, and was insisting she get first place and second place and I don’t know what all, and, naturally, it was Extreme Pressure for the girl.  So, while she was participating in the state meet, and doing fairly well though not as well as her best meet, I was giving OmegaDad the Hairy Eyeball about how he was being a hardass.  The dotter started out fairly good on the beam, but didn’t do so well on her second event, and worse on her third, and she was, at that point, stressed and unhappy.  (Besides, it being about a year and a half since Kai died, I was sort of wanting a puppy, too.)  The dotter produced a second place and two third places in her age group, plus a fourth place overall, and I declared that it was okay, and we would get a puppy.

I had forgotten just how time-consuming a baby animal can be.  Cleaning up the piddle and chasing after him every time I hear him sound like he’s chewing is very distracting.  But!  I have been taking him out for walks in the morning and the evening, and am now looking forward to going for hikes with him and the dotter when the snow and ice is completely gone.

In the meantime, I have a slew of blog posts brewing in my brain, so hopefully it won’t be as long before the next post as it was before this one.  We’ve been off to a Chinese New Year celebration, the dotter has been drawing cartoons, we have baby chicks we incubated and hatched, I finally saw the Northern Lights (but did not get any pictures, wah!), we all got sick for a week apiece, one after the other—it’s been busy.

(OMG.  The puppy found a large piece of foam rubber hidden away somewhere and totally tore it apart in about five minutes.  And I just diverted him from chewing some computer cords.  OMG.  Johnny was right, damn him:  On Facebook, when I announced the puppy’s arrival, he said, “Let the chewing begin!”)

Let’s say your political party has campaigned against the Rising Tide of Eeevul Librulism and managed to get a sound majority in the U.S. House of Representatives (but not in the Senate).

Let’s say your political party has claimed it is for reducing the U.S. deficit, for smaller government, against the Eeeevul Librul Conspiracy of Anthropogenic Climate Change, against abortion, against the encroaching immorality of the librul Public Broadcasting System.

You need to show your voting constituents that you are Working Hard to win the culture war and save the United States as it was designed by the (cue angelic choir) Founding Fathers.

You take a look at the U.S. federal budget.

You could take a whack at military funding, which is huge (20% of the federal budget, not counting percentage of Department of Energy costs aimed at military spending, and not counting the percentage of Veterans Administration costs aimed at medical care for military members wounded in the recent wars).  But that would look bad to your constituents, as you also campaigned on a strong U.S. military presence around the globe, and standing strong in the War on Terror.  Besides, you know those sneaky Democrats in control of the Senate might actually agree with those cuts and leave them in!  So leave that out.

You could take a whack at Social Security (20% of the federal budget).  But while it might look good to your constituents, you know that a large number of them are actually using Social Security.  Start cutting there, and your constituents will start suffering and blame you.

You could take a whack at Medicare/Medicaid (23% of the budget).  But, once again, your constituents are adamant that the government not mess with their Medicare.  Maybe there’s a way to fiddle with Medicaid…

But look at all these other things to cut that would fire up the base!

Hey!  There’s funding for Title X—reproductive health and family planning, and—OMG!—Planned Parenthood!  That’s ripe for the cutting, and boy howdy, will your constituents love that!  Cut the whole thing!

Oooh!  There’s funding for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio!  Yeehaw, let’s cut that puppy down!  Another eeevul librul program bites the dust.  Real Americans, hard working, red-blooded, blue-collar Americans, they don’t watch PBS or listen to NPR.

Ahh!  What about the IPCC?  (What’s that, you say?  That’s the funding for the U.S. portion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)  Ooooh, yeah, that’ll play perfectly with your constituents!  Global warming, shhhyeah, right—what about all that cold and snowy weather on the north coast of the United States?!  Yeah, yeah, the Antarctic is showing temps that are up to 10 degrees higher than normal on a regular basis, permafrost is melting all over the place in Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia, but, hey, that’s not here, where regular folks live.

We are on a roll, here, folks!  The EPA?  A bunch of overly regulating bureaucratic flunkies whose main purpose in existence is to impose restrictions on good, hard-working businesses.  Let’s put the axe there, too!

While you’re at it, make sure you ensure that funding for advertising the military at NASCAR races is kept in.

Because, you see…you know very well that this stuff plays well with your base.  You can fire them up, have them nodding their heads as they watch Fox News, pumping their fists, and know quite well that none of it is going to go through, so you don’t have to deal with any…oh…repercussions of these kinds of cuts.  Because you know quite well that the Democrats who control the U.S. Senate won’t pass any of these cuts.  Because you know quite well that even if the cuts did pass the Senate, President Obama would veto them.

The only problem in this entire thing is that it might—just might—anger the centrists and liberals in the U.S. enough to cause problems in the next elections.  But, hey.  Given all the stuff that’s been going on over the past ten years, it’s pretty obvious that the centrists and liberals in the U.S. aren’t going to stay angry enough to actually do anything, especially if these cuts don’t pass.

So it’s a win-win situation all around, right?

It has been a bad day.

We had our family meeting with the therapist.  When we got home, OmegaDotter was to do her homework before heading to the gym.  OmegaDad headed off to the bathroom.  OmegaDotter finished a couple of problems, then looked at one and started whining about how she couldn’t do it.  I got snarky.  She got whinier.  I got snarkier.  She got hysterical.  OmegaDad emerged from the bathroom.  It escalated.

I ended up shouting loudly at OmegaDad for quite a bit, then storming out of the house.

I found myself at a local bookstore-cum-coffeehouse.  I bought a book.  I got myself a hazelnut mocha.  I got a slice of key lime pie.

While I was eating it, I began to cry.

Because, you see, key lime pie was Mom’s favorite type of pie.  And today is her birthday.  And she’s not here.  And it just sucks in general.

This evening as I was driving the dotter home from gymnastics, she was talking about M.’s two sisters, who are both pregnant—one at 15 and one at 18.

Luckily, I have indoctrinated her enough so that she commented that they had made “bad decisions.”  Yo, baby, that’s what I like to hear!  She further went on to say that the younger sister, now at 6 or 7 months pregnant, was now big and ungainly (well, okay, she said “fat”, which bugs me, but let’s continue on), and I added that her back probably hurt a lot, and her legs, and she had been sick to her stomach early on…

OmegaDotter asked me how on earth I knew, since, well, I’d never been pregnant (okay, two weeks pregnant…).  I allowed as how I had gotten sick to my stomach, but that was it.

She then said that it was good that I hadn’t been pregnant, because if I’d been pregnant, we wouldn’t have adopted her.  Well, she’d still have been adopted by another family, but we wouldn’t be her parents.

And then she added the kicker:  “I’m a lucky girl.”

Ack!

So I quickly told her that we were the lucky ones, because we got her and we love her and she’s smart and funny and blah de blah de blah.

Which segued into how we didn’t have a choice, and didn’t get to choose her, which led into how (so far as I know), the folks at CCAA actually read the files on the kiddoes and read the files on the parents and try—at least a little bit—to match the personalities of the parents to the kid.  Of course, it’s hard when you’ve got nannies’ perceptions of what a little baby is like, but I occasionally read the translation of their description of the dotter, and the thing that stood out was that she was intense and thoughtful and liked music—all of which were definitely mentioned in our homestudies.

But still…”lucky girl”.  Sigh.  “Lucky” to have her birth family be forced—whether by law, by custom, by economic issues, by overbearing inlaws, or what-have-you—to abandon her where she would (hopefully) be found.  Or, possibly, “lucky” to have her birth family decide to sell her to a finding service (Brian Stuy, at Research China, has been writing about how his research seems to be leading to a great deal of baby selling earlier than previously thought).  “Lucky” to have been taken out of her birth culture…

Oh, yeah, sure:  We love her, she loves us, we’re a (generally) happy family.  She’s smart, she’s getting a good education, she’s doing great in gymnastics, she’ll have college and support, and become a fairly successful middle- to upper-class U.S.A.ian woman.  That part is all good.  But underlying it all is a basic fact:  she started out being abandoned.  And maybe it will mean a lot to her when she’s an adult, maybe it won’t.  But there are plenty of adult international adoptees out there on the internets who write about how that one basic fact forms a foundation for the rest of their outlooks and attitudes.  (Please don’t label these people “angry adoptees” or “unhappy adoptees”—typically they’re quite happy with their lives; it’s just that there’s a facet to their personalities that those of us who grew up in our birth families don’t have to cope with.)

Argh.

I am trying to get a copy of my grandmother’s death certificate so that I can close an account that has both my mother and my grandmother named as owners.

This is turning into a bureaucratic nightmare.

It seems that having a birth certificate listing my mother as…well, my mother, and a death certificate listing my mother’s mother as my grandmother does not suffice to establish that I am, indeed, my grandmother’s granddaughter.

But, nooooo.

I have to send them a copy of my mother’s birth certificate.

Which, of course, I don’t have.

I have plenty of copies of her death certificate…

My paralegal passed me on to her local “investigative services” company.  They listened to my tale of woe and said that, alas, it would be just as quick for me to order a copy of my mother’s birth certificate.

In order to get a copy of my mother’s birth certificate, I had to send a copy of my birth certificate.  And submit a “Sworn Statement and notarized Certificate of Acknowledgement”, which required a visit to the local bank to get it notarized.  And pay more money.  And wait more time.  Oh, yes, and I couldn’t upload the document…I had to fax it.

So, out of all this, some financial advice for all and sundry:

1. If you’re going to just pass your money on to your kids, put them as beneficiaries on all your financial instruments.  Alas, there was a mixup in communications with my mom, and she thought we had put me on all her accounts as “pay on death”, but it was only the accounts at one bank and none of the investment accounts.  It was so nice to have the real estate in beneficiary deeds—all we had to do was record mom’s death with the county, and her properties were automatically distributed as noted in the beneficiary deeds.
2. Another option is to do a living trust, into which you write all your financial instruments.  That way, you have dealt with all the paperwork, and your heirs will not need to do anything.
3. If you have an account that has a co-owner who has died, get that person’s name off the account pronto.  Oh, it is so easy to let these things slide—after all, don’t we all have plenty of time?
4. If you have stocks and bonds that you have purchased in small amounts, and have those certificates, you can always put them into an investment account and name people as beneficiaries, rather than having the certificates sitting in a safe deposit box.
5. Once again, if someone is named as a co-owner of your stocks or bonds and passes away, immediately remove their name(s).  Once again, this would be easier if you had them in an investment account; that’s what the investment people are paid to do.
6. If you’re going to be the executor of someone’s estate, and you’re going through various papers and see something, like, oh, say, a person’s birth certificate, or an original death certificate, grab it and put it in your ever-so-vital “estate folder”.  Do not say to yourself, “Oh, there’s mom’s birth certificate!  Wow!” and then put it right back where you found it.  Which place you will not be able to remember, and, furthermore, which place may be many many many miles away from you when you need that document again.

All stuff I have learned this past six months.  Sigh.  Now all I have to do is wait for mom’s birth certificate, at which point I can close that account, transfer it to the estate account, put the stocks and bonds into the estate account, and then divvy it all up.  It’s not like it’s a whole helluva lot of money, but the fact that it was in bits and pieces made it more difficult.

This year, OmegaDad made sure to have some little gingerbread houses for OmegaDotter to do all by herself, because she gets tired of having to follow daddy’s directions.  She wants to let her creativity reign; he wants to rein in her creativity (in this case only!), because he always has A Vision for his holiday gingerbread creation.  Anyway, he made four tiny little gingerbread cottages for the dotter to decorate, while he immersed himself in his pagoda-on-the-hills creation.

I helped the dotter, but only as directed.  What she said, went.  So here’s the overall view from above:

You have four gingerbread cottages with green and red tiling; a car on the road, two pine trees (one decorated), a little pond, and Santa and an elf making snow angels.  You can’t see them, but each of the cottages has a wreath made of chewing gum.  Chewed chewing gum.

This is a close-up from the side of the front scene, in which you can see the decorated tree much better, plus the candy-cane fencing:

Santa, being so eager to run out and make snow angels, had dropped his bag off at the entry to the village:

While all this was going on, OmegaDad was sculpting his Santa of fondant:

Santa was going to be skiing down one of the hills, so he had to be on skis.

The finished product has ski poles, and the hands are wrapped around the ski poles, which is why Santa is handless in these pics.

So here is the grand product, the pagoda on the hill.  Note there are no ninjas.  I do not know what happened to the planned-upon ninjas, they just sort of vanished.  Maybe they are so sneaky that they are invisible, but they’re really there?!  Note the lovely, smooth, glass-like lake.  See Santa skiing downhill?  He was originally up higher, but…he skied further down the hill, and OmegaDad decided that this was the spot Santa needed to be at.

The night scene:

In the back of the pagoda hill, there is another tree and another panda:

A close-up of the pagoda and its Christmas tree:

The pagoda, alas, started tilting early on.  At this point, it is the Leaning Pagoda of Alaska, and OmegaDad and I figure that sometime soon, when the dotter is bouncing around, it will fall and go boom.

You might think this is a very sparse, little decorated gingerbread scene, and thus not very much work.  I assure you, it was a lot of work.  Three huge batches of rice krispie treats.  Many, many, many batches of fondant and royal icing.  The pagoda itself is made of stacked circles of rice krispie treats with gingerbread roofs made by coating the outside of pot-pie tins with carefully draped gingerbread.  The trees are made of fondant, rolled out, cut into graduated circles, then carefully given points by pressing with the pointy part of a heart-shaped cookie cutter.  And on and on.  OmegaDad’s creations are always fun, and always a lot of work, and always (though it may not seem like it) a lot of work.  Please applaud his project!

(I note that, even after lo these many gingerbread projects being featured on the blog, I did not have a “Gingerbread” category.  That has been rectified.)

From our house to yours:

It has been a busy week here.

First up, we had the lunar eclipse.  OmegaDotter had her best bud A. over, and the two of them were running all over the place, but not interested in going out into the cold, cruel backyard, so we managed to steer them to the window on the entryway landing, where they could see it as it happened.  In the meantime, OmegaDad and I were in and out and peering and photographing and trying out my dad’s small telescope (which, lacking a spotting lens, was a bust).  I took many shaky, blurry pictures, but finally wised up and braced myself against the corner of the house to get this view of the almost-totally eclipsed moon and some stars (faint):

Cropped and blown up, it looks like this:

I was pretty pleased.  Not bad for a hand-held camera, though there were a number of truly lovely pictures floating around the web from people who had Real Live Telescopes to photograph through.  Sigh.

Then—then!—We had winter solstice.  Not that we did anything to celebrate, but boy howdy, let me tell you, looking at NOAA’s weather website for Big City, which always shows how much gain or loss of sunlight we have had, and seeing a positive number–all five seconds of it!—thrilled me no end.

“But, but…,” you’re saying.  “OmegaMom—what were the LOLs about?!”

Ahhh.

Well.

Over the past year, I have been propagandizing OmegaDotter about Locks of Love.  This propaganda was my attempt to make her think of others, think of doing things for others, with it being a serious donation, not just a “Oh, well, I don’t like that toy anymore; put it in the donate bag!” approach.  OmegaDotter has adored having long hair, and loved the various hairstyles we can do—French braids, joined ponytails, “French” ponytails, plain braids, buns, high-up ponytail, low-down ponytail or braids, etc. etc.

When I first started talking about Locks of Love, she shied away immediately from the whole idea.

I didn’t push it.  I just mentioned it now and then.

Then, a few weeks ago, a long-time blogging buddy who also adopted from China posted about her daughter having her hair cut for LOL.  I showed OmegaDotter the pictures.

And suddenly—suddenly it clicked.  Firstly, “ooh, a cute short haircut!” clicked.  And secondly, donating her hair clicked.

So we made a date, all three of us.  OmegaDotter would donate her hair and get a short haircut.  A. would get his hair cut shorter for basketball.  I would get mine trimmed so it wouldn’t look so shaggy while I’m growing it out.

So off we went.

Here she is, pre-cut:

Her hair was down to her waist.  The hairties are to separate her hair into ponytails for donation.  The hair stylist took the ponytails and braided the hair, then ::snip!:: off they came:

This is what she looked like post-shearing and pre-styling:

We had researched short hair styles and found her a style she liked—a bob with the hair cut shorter underneath, so it curls under.

This is the end result:

We got it done at Great Clips, and it was free (which I didn’t expect).  They even handled packing it up and sending it in.

OmegaDotter loves her flippy new do, and has even figured out how to pull the top layer back into a ponytail to keep it out of her face for gymnastics.

I’m very proud of her.

OmegaDotter is off spending the night at a friend’s house, so OmegaDad and I took the opportunity to Get Things Done. 

What this consisted of this evening is me wielding a hair dryer to warm up wax paper stuck to slabs of chocolate Rice Krispie treats, and OmegaDad carefully cutting and gluing them together with buttercream frosting.

Why?

It is time for OmegaDad’s Christmas gingerbread house.  This time, he is doing a pagoda on top of a Guilin-esque hill, beside a stream.  The great secret behind many a creation here is the structural use of Rice Krispie treats; in this case, the hill is made of layers of them.  He had made three cookie sheets full, then covered them with wax paper while they “cured”; the problem is that the wax paper had adhered completely.  The first slab, we picked the wax paper off veeeerrrry carefully.  Then OmegaDad had his flash of brilliance, scurried off to the bathroom, returned with my hair dryer, and voila, the deed was done quickly and handily.

Now, I realize that many adult adoptees will cringe at the decor ideas for this year’s gingerbread fantasy, but keep in mind that these particular ideas come straight from OmegaDotter:

There will be pandas made of fondant.  Here’s one of the pandas, already made:

Isn’t he squee-fully cute?!

Then, OmegaDotter insisted that there be ninjas.  She likes ninjas, so ninjas there will be.  She and OmegaDad spent a happy evening researching how to make fondant ninjas on Google images.

There will be a stream of vivid blue rock sugar.

There may be a Chinese-style bridge over the stream.  It is in the plans, but OmegaDad sounds kind of dubious about it.

The pagoda will be a round pagoda, somewhat like this hexagonal one.

OmegaDad told me this afternoon, while surrounded by heaps of dirty dishes and carrying the last slab off to the dining table, that The Food Network was letting everyone down, because their Cake Challenge show never showed the immense work that had to be done in the background to allow the stars to do their stylin’ cakes—the people who made the fondant, the royal icing, the buttercream, the layers of cake.  All you see is the finished pieces being carved and put together, but behind all that is the unsung work of many others.

And while we were doing that, the Senate was voting to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  It’s about time!  And both of Alaska’s senators voted for the repeal—yay!

So we put up the tree this past weekend.  Since we rearranged the living room a few months ago, we had to make a new place for the tree—rather than in front of the window, as in past years, now it is in a corner by the stairs up from the entryway.  It’s very pretty.

This is the tree:

Here are OmegaDotter’s ballet slippers (the ornament):

A nutcracker:

A snowman:

OmegaDotter’s horsie ornament, given to her by GrannyJ a few years ago:

The pickle:

Another snowman:

And many more eclectic ornaments, gathered over the years.  A pineapple, a strawberry, mushrooms, red-and-white striped balls, tapestry spindles, an artichoke, an onion, a garlic, a collection of glass petit fours, stacked glass presents with a bow on top, cowbells, wooden apples, horns…

This is the new cat:

He looks the very picture of innocuous innocence.  Sweet, kind, unassuming, loving, overweight.  He is the cat I brought home from Mom’s house in February, when I returned after moving Mom into the extended care facility.  She didn’t want the responsibility at that point—she didn’t even want more than a couple of her immense collection of plants, because it seemed like too much to take care of them.  So the cat returned to Alaska with me.

He likes to lick people.  He has the teeny-tiniest purr, barely audible.  So he purrs, and licks, and drools, and then starts nipping, all very gently, but quite persistently.

We think he has never experienced a Christmas tree before.

O, the delight!  O, such glittering goodness!  O, such tinkly bells!  O, such rustling needles when you bat at the ornaments!  Truly, a Christmas tree is a heaven-sent gift for felines!

Right?

Worst of all, this innocent cat has been leading Wooly, survivor of many Christmases at our house, astray.  Newman bats at the ornaments, they sway and jingle and glitter, and Wooly has to bound over to see what’s going on, slither around the base of the tree, and bat at an ornament or two himself.

I have spent every evening since we put up the tree hunting down ornaments, or sweeping up broken ornaments.  So far, thank heavens, the only ornaments that have been broken are the boring ones, the plain glass balls of various ho-hum colors.

At least we haven’t had any cats climbing the tree.

Yet.

I leave you with a shot out my office window, a “this is Alaska” moment.  Today, while I was working, I heard a crunch-thump very close by, and caught a glimpse of a large shadow; I turned and there was the moose, and then there was the mooselet.  They sauntered stilt-legged across the backyard, nosed in the snow-covered raised beds for a bit, then cruised past the (long dormant) ornamentals and flowers by the greenhouse wall.  So of course I had to catch a picture of mama and baby:

We were rumored to get northern lights last night…alas, I did not see any.  Maybe tonight.