OmegaMom

Our (green)house is a very, very, very fine (green)house

So the greenhouse is complete, except for some trim work, as of today.  We happily lugged our two “baby” chickens into the greenhouse to provide a contained greeting spot for old hens and new chickens to get accustomed to each other, in preparation to migrating the new birds into the large coop.

I have to say, the greenhouse is awesome.  OmegaDad did a wonderful job.  It’s neat, tidy, sunny, light and warm inside, roomy, has lots of beams to hang plants from, and looks like it may provide a very nice spot to hang out on chilly days that have some sunshine.  Not that I’m thinking of lazing about there in the dead of winter, mind you.  But it’s really, really nice.

To refresh the memory, here’s what it looked like before:

And this is what it looks like now:

(Pay no attention to the detritus in the foreground of the second picture–there’s a pair of sawhorses with plywood making a work surface, which is covered with paint cans, tools, scrids and scrads of lumber and foam molding, and it provides a nice place to lean rakes, shovels, brooms, etc. while they’re in use.  The whole affair is due to be removed Very Soon Now.)

I am most satisfied.

The bunny…the bunny…oh, I love the bunny

The day after our baby duckling died (I am still sad about that), OmegaDotter went off to play with some neighborhood friends.  An hour later, one of the girls poked her head around the back of the house to ask if we, by any chance, had some carrots?  Why?  Well, see, there’s this bunny that we’re trying to catch…

So I provided some carrots, and figured they’d have a grand time unsuccessfully trying to attract one of the wild bunnies that hang out in the neighborhood (some of them are very interested in our veggie garden, but we have netting over it to deter moose, and it seems to deter the bunnies as well).

An hour later, three girls show up in our backyard lugging the world’s most enormous bunny.  OmegaDad and I take one look and know it’s someone’s pet bunny, but whose?  So we stash the bunny in our downstairs bathroom, animal refuge par excellence, I print up a bunny flier with a picture, and we send the girls out armed with fliers and tape to attach same to mailbox clusters around the neighborhood.

This is the bunny:

You can’t tell, but he’s HUGE.

A day later we get a call from Kelsey, who says she thinks it’s her bunny.  Since at that point I had no idea where the bunny was–A. and G. had taken it home, then A2 and her sister had taken it to their home–I asked her to call later when the dotter was home, so we could return the bunny.

A few hours later, she called and asked if we wanted the bunny.

So now we have a bunny.  His name is Copper.  He’s 7/8ths Belgian giant, 1/8 satin, three years old, and “frisky”, according to Kelsey’s dad.  “Frisky” means he’s not neutered, and thinks people’s legs are sexay female bunnies.

He, too, is moving into the greenhouse as soon as we get the (utterly gross yucky stinky peee-yew) bunny cage and shelter that we got from Kelsey’s family cleaned up.

Fame!

In my last post, I talked about Michael Jackson’s death and how I thought it was tragic.  Please understand, I am not trying to make him out to be any sort of hero.  To me, “tragic” does not necessarily correlate with “heroic”; I was thinking more on the lines of “tragic waste”.  I just think of a boy star who grew up surrounded by people who wanted a piece of him, and not having the maturity to realize that your friends are the people who will pull you up when you’re doing something stupid and say, “What on earth are you thinking, man?!”  There you are, young and rich and talented, and you’ve got people who call themselves “friends” who are not “friends”, but enablers, and they poison your mind against the ones who want you to stop and think for a few moments…to the point where all you have around you are the sleazebags, the sycophants, the wimps who *do* like you for yourself but aren’t strong enough to pull you back.  That is the tragedy to me, that someone with so much promise went off into La-La Land.

Oh, it’s not a new story; it’s so old it shows up in fables and folk tales and (no doubt) the Bible.  But it’s still a sad story, to me.

I’m leaving on a jet plane

The dotter and I board a plane very late this evening to head off to visit GrannyJ for a few weeks.  We leave poor OmegaDad behind to cope with introducing chickens to each other, figuring out how to make a bunny hutch out of the plywood and lumber we have left over, and being left alllll alooooone.  Right now, I’m in that state of semi-frantic obsessive list-checking.  Alas, some things on the list were destined to not get done.

I’ll try to post some entries, but am not sure how often.  The first week coincides with a visit from my bro and his family, so you’re more likely to see stuff after the end of the week.

Pop culture icons of my childhood and early adulthood are dropping like flies.  Ed (”Heeeere’s Johnny!”) McMahon, Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett, and now–in a real shocker–Michael Jackson.

Fawcett repositioned herself from pop-actress and B- or C-movie star to tragic figure by chronicling her death to anal cancer in a documentary that was shown this May on TV.

Ed was, of course, Ed, all the way.  Like many others in these uncertain economic times, he was facing foreclosure on his mansion last year, but managed to re-negotiate with help from friends.

And Michael…sigh.

What can one say about a guy who started out with an angel’s voice, moved on to pop-music stardom and creative risk-taker with “Thriller” and its associated music video–which was a ground-breaker when they made it–and then became a mockery for multiple alleged cosmetic surgeries and accusations of pedophilia…?

A tragic figure all around.

I am finding all of this somewhat shocking, and a nasty reminder that we’re all getting older.  McMahon was 86 and had lived a long and full life; Fawcett was 62; Jackson…?  How old was he?  Oh, that’s right, he was 50 years old.

Wait a minute.

I am 50 years old.

Whoa.

So there it is:  my youth is officially over with.  I can start reading the obituary pages of the newspapers, scanning them for names I know.  Next up is starting to drive slower.  Then I’ll be saying, “Eh?!  What’s that?!  Speak up, sonny, I can’t hear you!”  One foot in the grave already…

(That last part is mostly meant in jest.  Mostly.)

Life has been busy here, Chez OmegaFamily.  I have tales of the China Camp finale, the sad tale of how Ruby the duckling died, the rockin’ and rollin’ earthquake (5.4 magnitude) we had this morning that actually caused me to duck down beneath my desk, the bunny that OmegaDotter and her neighborhood girlfriends found, and further progress on the villa/greenhouse complex.

But right now, I just want to protest.

Remember how I gushed about Mr. L., the elementary school music teacher who is leaving for greener pastures, and how worried I am about who will replace him?  Well, we have now encountered a music teacher who is diametrically opposed to him in personality. 

I have been taking OmegaDotter in to summer camp around 9 a.m.  The first day of the second week of camp, as I chivvied the dotter in to the facility, we were greeted by all the kiddos lined up, hands on their hearts, and a middle-aged battle-axe of a lady playing the national anthem on the piano.  Now, I have little against the national anthem aside from the fact that it’s horrible to sing, and it actually makes me sad to hear it played so…so…mechanically is not quite the word I am looking for, but it comes close.  Every note played perfectly, but no rhythm, no swing, no soul.  Give me a musician who botches notes left and right, but does it with verve and joy any day!

I stood there with the dotter, feeling somewhat awkward, while the kids and counselors sang.  Then this lady moved right into a lecture about how it’s our duty to remember all the sacrifices Our Men In The Service have made, and that they have fought for the Right To Sing This Song.  And then she led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I am not what you would call a highly patriotic person in the normal sense of the word.  I really love my country.  I love the fact that we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness (in general*), and regard countries such as Italy (which had something like 40 governments within the space of six years at one point) with pop-eyed sympathy and a genteel shudder about the instability of it all.  I don’t like totalitarian governments, and cheered with everyone else when the Berlin Wall fell.

But bombastic “My country, right or wrong!”, “America!  Love it or leave it!” patriotism just isn’t my schtick.

So Miss Liza has two strikes against her in my book from the get-go:  she radiates rigid self-righteous belief in country, and she massacres music.  She sets my teeth on edge.

In other words, I took an immediate and violent dislike to the woman.

The problem is, it turns out that she is the “music teacher” for half an hour every morning at camp.

I am hoping and praying that she doesn’t kill all the joy in music for these children while she has them in her oh-so-patriotic clutches.

Today was the dotter’s first day back at her regular summer camp.  There was a handout next to the sign-in book.  I grabbed one and glanced at it.  It was a letter from Miss Liza.  It ensured that I think not only is she an uptight bitch who slaughters music, she’s pompous to boot and can’t write well (though she probably thinks she can).

The subject of this letter was first off how “we are gaining an understanding of rhythm and melody, by taking notice of the various applications and integrations, of those two fundamentals”, and how important music is in our lives.  So she asks that children bring in a CD each week to share with the class (just part of one song).  BUT…Miss Liza will judge the appropriateness of the music, and expects parents to help out by making sure their children avoid music with “inappropriate language, or subject content”.  This includes such things as (of course) drugs and alcohol, and also “mutilation” or “death”.  THEN she adds that they are “exploring musically the area of service and the effect it has had in shaping our country”, so the kids are asked to bring in pictures of family members who have been in service in some way.

Well.

I’m sorry, folks.  A lot of these are things that I think are just fine and dandy–that I agree with if presented thoughtfully and allowing questions–but this woman has set my back up and the entire tone of this letter set the hackles on my neck rising.  So of course, I had to show it to OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love this guy?

Y’know why?  The very first thing he did after reading it was to tell me we needed a good selection of protest songs to send in with the dotter.  Then he googled “protest music for kids”.  Then we spent an hour batting around songs that we thought we might be able to get in past the “inappropriate language” taboo (alas, they probably wouldn’t make it past the “mutilation or death” filter).  We thought of some classic folk songs from the 30s, war protest songs from the 60s and 70s, I tossed in U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and Midnight Oil.

OmegaDad really wants to do this.  I just feel like withdrawing the dotter from camp…

(*Yes, there’s a certain amount of irony in that “we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness” statement coupled with a protest video portraying the Chicago riots in 1968.  But–hey.  Look.  The riots died down, people voted, Nixon won, and America went on.  And when Nixon was brought down by Watergate, the country didn’t dissolve into chaos–Jerry Ford moved into the White House, Chevy Chase made a fortune with his “bumbling Jerry” routine on SNL, and America went on.  Part of what made it go on–perhaps–were these very protests.)

We now have a wild duckling in the garage.  It’s name is Rhubarb, Ruby for short.

I arrived home late from the morning trip to Big City, having dumped the girls at China Camp, dealt with Miss Emily telling me about coping with OmegaDotter and others who were…shall we say, enthusiastic, with the kung-fu instructor, to the point of being annoying.  “Enthusiastic” means climbing all over him, swooning on him, teasing him, following him–you name it; Miss Emily did not have to tell me in any detail, because I immediately knew what it was like.  OmegaDotter still has a lousy sense of other people’s personal space, and when she likes her instructors, she hangs on them.  Literally.

Anyway.  OmegaDad had planned to take the day off to attack painting the interior of the greenhouse, so that we can put up the poly-plastic sheets that will let the sun shine in.  I fully expected to get home & find him off in the back yard, doing his thang.

Instead, when I drove up, there he was in front of the garage, with heaps and piles around him, and making strange faces at me through the window of the car, gesturing for me to get out ASAP.

I thought he had decided to remove the last of the detritus from behind one side of the villa complex.  I was vexed, because I thought the plan had been for him to wait to do this until Sunday.  I was all prepared to grump at him as I emerged from the vehicle.

At which point, he informed me he needed help, and did I notice that all the various boxes, pieces of wood, etc. were making a makeshift corral around the rhubarb plant?  (Um, no.  But now that he mentioned it…)

“Oh, by the way, there’s a baby duck in the rhubarb plant.”

…

I knew, immediately, what this meant.  This meant that we were now the proud owners of a duckling.

As soon as we could get it out of the rhubarb plant.

For those who think this is an easy matter, let me remind you of the effects of 20 hours of sunlight and 4 hours of twilight upon vegetation.  This is not your ordinary rhubarb plant; there is no such thing in the state of Alaska.  This is a monster plant, a jungle unto itself, with leaves the size of an HDTV, rearing up taller than the dotter and almost as tall as me.

ONE rhubarb plant.

Anyway, I stood guard outside the OK Corral while OmegaDad rummaged in the rhubarb jungle for the duckling.

The tale was that he had heard the dawg going nuts while he was in the shower.  He emerged to hear all the neighbor dogs going nuts out front.  He peered out the living room window to see what the ruckus was (usually a moose).  He saw Bad Dawg, from next door, pestering something on the ground while an adult duck fluttered and squawked and attacked it.  He went bounding out the front door, snapping out a loud and firm, “LEAVE IT!”  Bad Dawg retreated, and lo and behold, a duckling rocketed up our driveway and into the rhubarb forest by the corner of the house.  So he quickly began making the OK Corral out of whatever he could lay his hands on from the garage, and waited for me to come home.

So we could capture the duckling.  Which was supposed to be about so big (hold your hands two handwidths apart).  Which turned out, when OmegaDad captured it, to be practically newborn with its egg tooth still on, and about the size of the palm of my hand.

Newborn wild ducklings, let me tell you, are quite jumpy.  As in, at a day old, they can escape from Chicken Prison in the garage, and we find ourselves searching through the garage for small, dark hiding places.  Chicken Prison has now been turned from a minimum strength leisure spa into Mad Max maximum security as a result. 

Here’s a lousy picture–she won’t hold still for pictures at all.

So there you are, an astronaut on the International Space Station, just motoring along, doing your job, and you get a call from Ground Control.

“Say, dudes!  Lissen up!  There’s this Russian volcano blowing its top, and you dudes are scheduled to be somewhere nearby overhead today…can  y’all take a picture for us?  Dude, that would be sweet.”

So as time approaches the rendezvous with this volcano, from a few miles overhead, you fish out your handy-dandy HD camera and point it out the porthole (or whatever astronauts really do when they’re taking photographs manually, which I know they can do)…and you grab this photo, very early on in a big eruption:

Which then proceeds to absolutely wow various folk around the world, including volcanologists.

And including me.  I immediately tweeted it, but just in case my faithful blog subscribers aren’t also Twitter followers, I thought I’d better mention it here.  It’s just too, too cool for words.  (For those who are interested, a bigger version of this picture is available at NASA’s Earth Observatory website.)

I have been driving one hundred miles a day this week, hauling OmegaDotter off to China Camp in Big City.  Luckily, we hooked up with another local family sending their daughter to the same camp, and we’re splitting chauffeuring duties–I drive the girls in, A’s dad picks the girls up and drives them home.  The girls seem to be enjoying the camp, and are learning lots of fun things and getting lots of “OMG, I’m not the only person in the room who looks like me” reassurance.  But I have to say, getting up early and schlepping the girls into town, then hauling ass back home so I can log in to work is, frankly, wearing me out.

So I thought I’d put together a post on an interesting issue I am having with photography and our Olympus digicam.

While we were out on our (wonderful, relaxing, fun) road trip a week and a half ago, we encountered some lovely lupine clusters in the woods by the side of the road.  I got close-up and personal with the lupines with my camera, expecting hoping for some gorgeous pictures.

Take a gander:

Isn’t that blue absolutely lovely?  Isn’t it almost celestial?  All those little slippers with those little purplish tips.  Ahhhh.  It’s breathtaking.  I have done not one thing to this picture except to reduce the resolution so it works on the blog.

I’m not happy–even though I love that picture and find the blues delicious.  Why?

The problem is that those lupines did not look like that to the nekkid eye, at all at all.  They were not that lovely, heavenly, celestial blue with bits of purple on the tips.  They were purple.  Mostly.  Even close up and personal, they were purple.  After a great deal of fiddling around with color replacements, this is more like what they should look like.  Sort of; it’s very fake-y because I used a lot of “replace color” and there are still some splashes that needed the color replaced but I had gotten tired of fiddling and the overall cast was similar enough to the real live flowers that it suited for this demonstration purpose.

This is not the first time I’ve encountered this problem; way back in late October, when the dotter decided she wanted to be a cheerleader for Halloween, I took a picture of her in a purple cheerleader costume–which ended up looking almost navy blue.  No other colors behave this way with our Olympus digicam–just purples.

Anyone have any ideas as to (a) what causes this response and (b) what to do with the camera to avoid it?

(The roadsides around here are filled with purplish flowers.  On one road, we have cascades of lupines.  To the side of the highway in to Big City is a field overflowing with wild iris.  The local streets have some type of lavender-purple bellflowers.  I don’t want to be taking pics of all these things if I’m going to have to dick around inside my photo software to get some vague semblance of the real deal.  Harrumph.)

OmegaDad was painting the trim on the villa/chicken coop/shed/greenhouse.  I was watching him up on the ladder whittling away at an old nail that was sticking out of the trim beneath the roof.  Something on one of the beams caught my eye, so I switched my attention…it was a dragonfly, happily sunning itself right at eye level.

I, of course, didn’t have my camera.

So, sending a quiet prayer up to the Kozmik All, I dashed across the yard, up the stairs to the kitchen, grabbed the camera, and came back.

The dragonfly was still there:

And then, as I was fiddling with my macro settings, worried that my original picture was fuzzy, he flew off, straight into my face.  Which, of course, resulted in a high-pitched squeak from me, which resulted in an alarmed “WHAT WAS THAT?!” from my husband, which required a certain amount of conversation to reassure him that all was well.

I never had a “passion” for anything, or nothing that I would call a “passion”.  My brother knew at about 11 or 12 that he wanted to go into biology, and he planned his life accordingly.  He currently works for the Dark Service as an ecologist.  A friend, two years younger than I, realized in early high school that he was really, really into theatre and special effects and lighting.  Many many years later, he is a professor of lighting technology who has written “the” theatre lighting textbook.  Another friend wandered from job to job for quite a while, decided to go back to college to get a degree in creative writing, and had an epiphany due to a breast-lump scare that switched her from her almost-degreed creative writing focus to pre-med, med school, and a current career as an emergency room doctor.

Me?  I kind of floated.  I wanted to write historical romances for quite a while, but my first year of college scared the snot out of me, so I dropped out.  Also, there was this miscommunication with my parents…Then I spent years in and out of college, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, until the ongoing interaction with computers in every job I was in lured me into a career in programming and software support.

Lurking behind all of this was the fact that my parents never, ever pushed me.  They never told me, “You must get a job as a doctor/scientist/journalist/what-have-you that will allow you to make lots of money/gain fame and fortune/load you with prestige.”  They let me work my way through all these adult decisions, trusting that somehow, some way, I would land on my feet and be–if not famous, filthy rich, and winning the Nobel Prize–at least happy and satisfied.

Sure enough, there I am, relatively happy and satisfied with what I’m doing.  Fer cryin’ out loud, I am paid to do puzzles!  I get to puzzle out what’s wrong with people’s computers.  I get to puzzle out how to grab just the right data from a database.  I get to puzzle out how to make the computer Do What I Want It To.  I get to do logic puzzles.  It’s fun!  I like it!  And they pay me!  Well, heck.  How could I not be satisfied with that??

But there are lots of parents out there who don’t follow the philosophy that my parents followed.  Parents who want to aim their children–like arrows–at a particular career.  Parents who will do everything in their power to make their children go into that career–whether that’s what their children want to do or not.

Sometimes this works out well; I am thinking of Johnny, whose parents made him get a degree in electrical engineering, and who is now happily working his 20th year (I think?) at MegaloCorp, currently doing project management.

Other times…

Well, what brought this post on was a post on PostMimi (how many times can I use the word “post” within one sentence???).  “Mimi” means “secret” in Chinese, and this is a sort of PostSecret specifically for AsianAmericans.  Today there was a post that read:

This is what i was doing with my life
MUSIC/OPERA/CLASSICAL BY DAY
A course away from GRAD
WORKING AS A CHEF BY NIGHT
Working with some of the most amazing/professional people i’ve ever met.

I was happy and excited at the direction it was headed
PERFORMANCE OPPORTUNITIES
A once in a life time chance to perform all over Europe
A CHANCE TO LEAD A FULL KITCHEN
A position i have been working up to.

My parents wanted none of it
“You will end up teaching…failing…wasting money…”

I am now forced to go back to school to Major in Sciences, something i never wanted to do.  I have just given up on a happy life.

It breaks my heart.  I want to shout:  “STOP!!  Don’t do it!  Don’t let your parents rule your life!  Live your passion!!!” 

But I don’t know this person’s life.  It’s quite possible that this person’s parents are paying for college, and refuse to pay any more unless s/he goes into sciences.  It’s oh-so-easy for me, from my perspective as a (gasp!) 50-year-old looking back, with a (gasp!) 50-year-old’s self-confidence, and my personal experience of no pushing from my parents, to say “follow your dreams!” to this young college student.  But when I look back, and think of my passive personality, if my parents had been like that…would I have had that courage?  Would I have been able to toss my feelings of comfort in my family, my utter belief in their utter belief in me, to the winds?  I don’t know.

At the same time, the thought of someone going into the sciences, or medicine, or teaching, or the humanities, or any career, against their wishes and with no spark or desire (or even an absolute dislike) for those subjects, makes me both sad for the person and sad for the others in those areas of expertise.  Do you want a doctor treating you who went into medicine solely because their parents said, “This is what you will do, or we will not pay for college/disown you/never love you again”?

There is certainly plenty of room in every profession for people who don’t have a passion, that’s true.  Plenty of people have gone into various fields with no great love for them, and done well.  But it sounds like this young person has worked hard to start a life in a particular set of creative areas where you have to have passion, you have to have that spark, or else you won’t do well.

Anyway.  I hope I remember this when the dotter is in college.  I hope I never push and push her in a direction she doesn’t want to go.  There are so many ways of making a living as an adult.  I know that she is passionate about art; she is always drawing and painting and creating.  It’s not easy to make a profitable living doing that, but it is easy to make enough.  So if that’s what she wants to do as an adult, trust me, I will do my best to say, “Do it!”

On the other hand, if she wants to be a rock star, I’m going to make sure she has some type of backup plan…;-)

They were celebrating Founders Days in Small Town Alaska this weekend, so we sashayed over there to enjoy some good old-fashioned carnival fun.

First, there was a pony ride.  Even though last weekend’s road trip included a spur-of-the-moment (sort of) and expensive real horseback ride for an hour, a pony ride around in a circle was still A-okay with OmegaDotter:

Then we had to feed ourselves with Fair Food, which means cheap food sold at not-so-cheap prices.  We plopped ourselves down in the shade and drizzle-protection of a circle of small trees and ate.  Then the dotter demonstrated the muscles that she has garnered from gymnastics, and proceeded to climb a tree.

Only a few years ago, tree-climbing was beyond her abilities.  But now that she has matured a bit, she can plan ahead, scoping out the best way up, and she has those muscles (hard-as-a-rock muscles in her legs, if you please) to grasp and propel her way up.  Not that these were very big trees, but still, she enjoyed it.

Then we had to check out the rides in the carnival.  OmegaDad does not like carnival rides, so it’s up to me to accompany the dotter.  First we did the spin-the-apple ride:  first we watched the folks before us and determined that it was much more fun if you got the apple spinning as fast as you could.  Once we climbed in, we figured out how to do it, and we were soon spinning merrily along, enough so that I was incredibly dizzy when the “apples” came to a halt.

Then the dotter and I had to do the mini-roller coaster.  One of these days, I will have to take her to a bigger fair or carnival type thing, where she can have a real roller coaster ride; in the meantime, this will have to do.

I think that the picture was actually taken before we started moving; a set piece, as it were.  We have video, but I’m not going to inflict it on you.

Of course, the dotter had to buy some things, and this is what we came home with:

So, sitting in my comment approval queue for the past, oh, two weeks, has been this delightful little tidbit:

{Hey|Hi|Hello|How are you doing|What’s up|How’s it going|Nice to be here}, I {liked|{love|enjoyed}|read} the post. {Recently|Of Late|Lately} {I’ve|I have|I’ve become} been more {interested|engaged|curious} in chickens and {coops|henhouses|hencoops|chicken coops} myself. Been {looking|searching|looking for} around for a {coop|henhouse|chicken coop|hencoop}, or more {information|info} {so|therefore|and then|and so|thus|indeed|hence} anything that is {putting|setting|placing|positioning} me in the {right|good|correct|adequate|proper|faithful|true|accurate} direction is {very|really} helpful. There is a {lot|heap|great deal|tidy sum|bunch|plenty|mass|mountain} of {information|info|data} out there to {sort|screen} through.

Some dude or dudette has this script, see.  S/he’s supposed to troll the net looking for blogs about (subject), which, in this case, is chicken coops.  Then s/he’s supposed to select only one of each group of word choices.

But s/he was lazy, and this is what I got.  I found it amusing.  Now that I’ve shared it with y’all, I can safely delete it.

What do you do when the power goes out?  If you’re like me, you wait a minute or two before you do anything, because you know it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  If it lasts longer than a few minutes, then it’s time to haul out the candles and lamps, and maybe give a call to the local electric company.

What do you do if it’s not just your house, your neighborhood?  What if it’s your city?  Well, folks who have been in hurricanes or earthquakes know it’s just a matter of time before the services come back on; the news is filled with folks telling you what’s caused the outage, estimates of how long it will take to get things working again, where the evacuation centers are, and passing on the information that people out of the area are working hard and it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  The realities, of course, are often different than the estimates, but you are assured that someone’s taking care of things.

What if it’s not just your city?  What if it’s everywhere?  What if, at the same time as the (electric) power went out, all batteries went dead, all internal combustion motors died, gunpowder stopped working…everything stopped working?

Imagine living in, say, Los Angeles.  Or Phoenix.  Or the East Coast metroplex stretching from northern Virginia all the way up to the middle of New England.  Imagine realizing, fairly quickly, that there is no power, that no-one can fix it, and there’s no way to replenish the food at your local grocery store–if you’re lucky enough to live near enough to walk or bike to it.  Imagine 40 million people all getting hungry and thirsty, and all very, very scared.  Add in the fact that no fire engines work, no police cars work, no ambulances work, and every single airplane in the sky has just become a plummeting bomb filled with thousands of gallons of flammable liquids…Top it off with ravaging illnesses in a few weeks, as unsanitary living conditions spread (40 million people pooping and nowhere to put the poop).

Now imagine it happening worldwide.

That’s the premise set up in the first chapter of S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire: A Novel of the Change.  News of a strange, enormous electrical storm affecting the island of Nantucket is immediately followed by radios, lights, everything going dead.  The world changes in an instant.  Is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  No-one knows.  The novel follows one woman, Juniper MacKenzie, a Wiccan who leads a group of survivors from Corvallis, OR, and one man, Mike Havel, who was piloting a puddle jumper for a rich man and his family through the Idaho mountains when the lights went out, manages to crash land, and leads them to safety.

Food is a big issue in the novel–the realization by modern people of just how much work is involved in getting food on the table, and how important it is to survive.  And violence.  Lack of order leads to lack of law leads to violence.  (Warning:  graphically described violence–you may get tired of hearing about how people’s bowels let loose when they get thrust by a sword.)

The main focus is how they survive, and how their communities develop and cope with a larger, more ruthless community led by Norman Arminger, a former history professor who is now living his dream of resurrecting post-Norman-Conquest medievalism in the city of Portland.

The next two novels–The Protector’s War and A Meeting at Corvallis–take place nine years later.  All three communities that were the center of the first book have stabilized and grown, and it’s obvious that the younger generation is taking things that most of the olders consider “pretend” morale boosters much more seriously.  MacKenzie’s clan–started almost as a joke–has become more and more “clannish”; Havel’s younger BearKillers, who were just kids when The Change occurred, revere him as a leader and warleader; youngsters who grew up in Arminger’s Protectorate are internalizing the huffy formality of court life.  And there’s a war.  But the bad guys aren’t necessarily as horribly bad as they seemed…and there’s a growing sense that the deus ex machina that caused The Change is interfering in a mystic way with some folks.  Just a bit.

The next two novels–The Sunrise Lands and The Scourge of God–take place twenty-one years after The Change. Juniper’s son, Rudi, who was the focus of a prophecy at his dedication ceremony at the end of the very first book, is now an adult, and facing a Quest–to go to Nantucket Island, source of the mysterious storm that caused The Change.  New characters are introduced, but old characters are there as well.  Old enemies now work together as somewhat comfortable allies.  New enemies appear.  Nantucket is a mysterious place that bends the space-time continuum in weird ways.  Some of the old survivors are dying off, while those that remain are befuddled by how the youngsters have internalized the makeshift morale boosters used to get through the crisis, turning them into a way of life.  The youngsters, in their turn, regard the tales of “before The Change” as so much mythical mumbo jumbo and roll their eyes when the older folks go into reminiscing. 

The mystical clues get thicker and happen more often…is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  Is Rudi the reincarnation of King Arthur?  How can some of the eeevul Prophet’s folk become essentially zombies?  You have to wait until the final volume is published in September.  I hope.

In the midst of all the blood and gore were some really intriguing ideas and amusing byplay.  MacKenzie clansfolk heading to the battlefield with their longbows, riding bicycles.  A social taboo against singing “The End Of The World As We Know It”.  Teenagers who take Tolkein literally, and start the Dunedain Rangers as a do-gooders’ association supported by payments for escorting caravans and a retainer for ridding the land of bandits–they speak High Elvish amongst themselves, and have had to cobble together ways to curse and talk about menstruation.  A society based on leadership of a bunch of yogi who were having a conference in the Tetons on how to use the newfangled internet to advertise their businesses when The Change occurred.  The Society for Creative Anachronism pops up all over the place as people who could adjust to the new world just a little bit easier.

I enjoyed the books.  You do have to suspend your disbelief at the mechanics of The Change–even his characters note that its effects happen only on the surface of the earth–but I assume the deux ex machina has taken care of that.  Some readers have commented that they don’t like Stirling’s descriptive style, so be warned:  he spends a helluva lot of time setting the scene, incorporating sights, sounds, smells.  I like it; you may not.

Since we’re still having gorgeous, clear, hot weather, OmegaDad is taking some days off from work to paint the formerly-stable-soon-to-be-greenhouse.  Here’s what it looked like before he started his work, a month ago:

Pretty cheesy.  I have photos of the whole process, but here’s what it looked like this afternoon:

In this picture, OmegaDad is hosing off the shed portion of the “villa” (as he calls it) in preparation for primer, which has already been applied to the greenhouse framing.  Looks a lot better, doesn’t it?!  We’re going to paint it to match the house; dark blue-gray with light blue-gray trim, and we’re going to put a square deck in the area between the two “wings”.

ANYWAY.  This is all preface to what is the main point of my post.  The dotter (shown in her painting T-shirt, which once upon a time was OmegaDad’s painting T-shirt) has been painting on pieces of plywood with the white primer.  Yesterday’s painting was of a horse (of course).  Today, though, when I came out to see how things were going, the dotter was working on a different painting.  This one:

Which I just think is very cool.

Big City has a proposed ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.  Today is the city council review, with a public comment period.  Big City’s Big Preacher has bussed in bunches of folks from Suburban Alaska to oppose the proposed ordinance.  There are hundreds of people there; the streaming media of the session is overwhelmed; and there is commentary on the Big City Newspaper’s article on the affair.

Amongst the comments are a bunch akin to “Hey, I don’t care what you do in private!  Just don’t flaunt your sexuality at me!”

No doubt, they’re really against overt PDAs, but I also think they count “normal” behavior as “flaunting” when it’s applied to homosexuals.

If I were to walk down the street hand-in-hand with OmegaDad, no-one would think I was “flaunting” anything.  If Joe and Jim, in a gay relationship of equal length to ours, were to do the same thing, they’d be getting the hairy eyeball about “forcing your sexuality on others!”

If I drop my husband off at work, peck him on the cheek, and say, “Bye, Babe!”, no-one in the parking lot there would bat an eye.  If Lois and Louise, in a lesbian relationship of equal length to ours, were to do the same thing, they’d be considered to be “flaunting their sexuality”.

If I put a picture of me and my husband at our wedding on my desk at work, it would be an opening for (a) people to say “Oh, what a lovely daughter you have!” (this actually happened to me once, grrr), (b) people to ask where we got married, (c) people to ooh and ahh at how cute we were, (d) requests for advice on weddings.  Bill or Bert, having married in New Hampshire or Iowa, are often afraid to do the same thing for fear of being fired.

If I call OmegaDad’s office and someone else picks up the phone, I can leave a message for him to call home, or have him say “I love you” to me in closing without any repercussions.  A gay or lesbian couple can’t do the same thing, for fear of responses from homophobic coworkers.

The folks who rant about homosexuality being a sin and a perversion, anti-discrimination ordinances being “special rights”, gays holding hands to be “flaunting” it, and homosexual marriage “devaluing” normal marriage just don’t get it. 

First off, I’ve said before, and will say again, that I think people who are afraid of promiscuity and the instability of modern households should be all for homosexual marriage–they’re settling down, they’re promising to love each other and cleave unto each other.  Wouldn’t that promote stability?  Doesn’t the desire for marriage for homosexuals imply that marriage is something special to them that they would cherish?  Aren’t two-income families better for the economy?  Don’t they have more disposable income?

As for “special rights”.  Sheesh.  All they want is to be able to do normal, everyday things–things that every heterosexual takes for granted so much that it isn’t even noticed, without being fired, or banned, or shunned.

And the “flaunting” question?  My god.  Homosexuals are faced every day with evidence of heterosexuals’ sexual relationships–in-your-face evidence. Few heterosexuals consider it “flaunting” unless it’s homosexuals doing the same thing.

I think that the people who were bussed in to protest it should be allowed to speak, but their opinions shouldn’t count in council members’ considerations of the ordinance.  They’ve got every right to their opinion, but they don’t live where the ordinance applies.  Their actions are akin to the out-of-staters who financed the “No on Prop 8″ group in California.  Let the people who are affected by such ordinances be the people to speak out and make the decisions.

It was gorgeous.  Sunny, warm, light breeze.  A little hazy, but, eh, I can live with that.  We had a grand time.  More later.

So I’ll check in later with hot post-apocalyptic science fiction, ‘k?

OmegaMom opens the door and peers into the bloghouse.  She’s carrying a feather duster, which she uses to quickly dust off the blogroll.  She tidies up the BlogHer ads, re-arranges a few Twitters, sits down on the sofa, and sneezes at the poof of dust that she stirred up.  She looks around, frowns, taps her teeth with a fingernail, and says, “Hm.  What we need are some flowers!”

“I think I’ll put some lilacs here.  It’ll make things smell so lovely!”:

“This spot here needs a close-up of some of our wild rose.”:

“Tsst, tsst, tsst…hm…what next?  Ah!  Let’s put some trollius over there.  That’ll make that spot bright and cheery!”:

“Now, to keep the wildcats away, let’s bring in the Leopard’s Bane.”:

“And I think I’ll finish the decorating by putting some sprigs of this mysterious blossoming tree right here.”:

Well!  It’s been a while, hasn’t it?!  Ahem.  I was brought back to my blog-ly duties by a plaintive email from my Unka Bill, who was wondering why every time he visited my blog and hit refresh, it was still showing May 27.  Um.  Well.  Yeah.  See, I’ve been busy enjoying the flowers and the sunlight and the rain.  And yard work.  And being chief cook and bottle washer for OmegaDad whilst he rebuilds the formerly-stable-soon-to-be-greenhouse.

Then there was the pizza party, when OmegaDotter’s friend A. came over to spend the night and we made homemade pizza.  He was a hoot (as he always is), and we had a grand time, though he and the dotter stayed up incredibly late.

Then I found a new author and series.  Um.  Seven books in about ten days?  That sounds about right.  I do love me some hot post-apocalyptic science fiction!

Then I got sick.  Not badly, but enough to put me in bed for a day and a half, sleeping it off.

And then I was turned onto Broken Picture Telephone, a game which is like the classic game of Telephone, except with notes and pictures instead.  I have been busily scribbling and writing notes for two days now.

Anyway:  HI!  I’m back!  Didja miss me?!

• Bah.  Our thunderstorm fizzled–we ended up with a little bit of drizzle, and the thunder and lightning disappeared.  Today, to demonstrate the amount of moisture we had that resulted in our monsoons, we have had gray skies all day, and rain.  We need the rain, but…oh, well.  I really wanted that thunderstorm to be a biggie.
• I tried–unsuccessfully–to avoid the homemade Rice Krispie Treats we have on the kitchen counter.  Some people are made of strong stuff, and can Resist; I cannot.
• The dotter is now in summer camp.  Woohoo!
• Which means she is encountering new people again.  Woohoo!
• Which means, in our rednecky area, another encounter with a kid who says “I don’t like Chinese people.”  This was apparently announced to the dotter and to R. and her brother H., who are also adopted from China.  That’s the bad part.  The good part is that the dotter found her favorite counselor, Mr. Zane (who is incredibly cute and sweet) and told him.  Mr. Zane then pulled the youngster aside and told him, “Hey, man.  That is so uncool.”  And no doubt a bit more.  The other good part is that the dotter told us at the dinner table and was suitably scornful, and talked about it easily.  Damn.  I hate this stuff.  I really wish there were a way to protect the dotter–and her friends–from such idiocy.  Anyone have any thoughts on a low-key camp-style diversity curriculum that I can pass on to the counselors?
• What possesses people/kids to say things like that, anyway?  Goddamn.

I grew up in Chicago.  It’s in the Midwest, for those of you who don’t know (har!).  The Midwest is blessed (or cursed, depending upon whom you ask) with magnificent thunderstorms.  Huge anvil-shaped cumulonimbus monsters build up, with accompanied by a build-up of oppressive humidity, until the air falls still and heavy and weighted and you feel almost like you’re swimming through it.  Typically, there’s a period of fitful breezes gusting one way and the other, before they die down, and you know IT is going to come through at any moment.  And then IT hits:  A wild burst of sustained wind coming from one direction, bending all the trees’ branches before it, tossing and turning the (ever-present) trash on the city streets.  With the wind comes an abrupt change in temperature–it can drop 20 or 30 degrees in a few minutes–and then the lightning starts, and the cracks of thunder, and the torrents of rain, and the wind always dashing it this way and that.  That’s the time to sit in your house near a window, so you can hear and see all the drama, and watch the water crashing against the windowpanes, and be happy that you’re safe and warm.

Rather than, say, walking to the El station without an umbrella, as it dumps water at the rate of an inch an hour.  Or driving, when you realize your windshield wipers aren’t up to the job, even at the top speed.

You also got tornado weather.  You knew it was tornado weather because the bottoms of the clouds, and the light filtering through, all turned an eerie greenish-gray color.  This was when you’d turn on the radio to be sure you heard of any tornado warnings–though it was extremely rare that you’d get one in the Big City; cities, it seems, tend to produce heat islands that cause updrafts that disrupt the beginnings of tornado formation.

Then I lived in the mountains of Arizona, which was blessed with monsoon season, a time when the storms would build up over the mountaintops and valleys over rivers, spreading outward, producing small thunderheads with powerful punch.  The storms wouldn’t sprawl over the countryside the way they do in the Midwest, but would produce–just like the weathermen say–”widely scattered thunderstorms”.  You can drive between them, and see the thunder, lightning, and rain being produced by one off in the distance, while being dry where you are.  But even though they’re small, compared to the storms in the Midwest, they’re intense, and filled with drama.

Then I moved to the Bay Area.  This is a place that has never seen a thunderstorm, so far as I know.  My need for weather drama went totally unquenched for years.

Then I moved to Lubbock, Texas, a benighted place where people think a row of tulips planted arrow-straight in front of their yellow-brick boxes is a “garden”, and where there’s no topography to speak of for hundreds of miles in any one direction.  BUT!  But Lubbock had three things going for it:  the spring and fall goose migration, wherein you would see, and hear, thousands of geese flying overhead, going north in the spring and south in the fall; incredible sunsets because of the dust and the aforementioned lack of topography–you could see the sunsets for an hour, a vivid array of golds and pinks and magentas and reds; and Wrath of God thunderstorms.  These were storms to conjure with, preceded by a wall of dust that would sweep through the neighborhood, covering everything with reddish loam, and then, when the storm hit, turned to instant mud spots.  Lubbock is in Tornado Alley, so not only did I get the drama of the storms, but lots of tornado weather.

Another stint in the mountains of Arizona lasted for ten years.

But here in Alaska, where we live, the rains are mostly long, slow, and dreary–no thunderstorms to speak of, normally.

This May, however…ah, it’s been glorious:  warm (almost hot), dry, clear, sunny.  And today?  Today, we are going to get rain.  Because the sky over the mountains to the north of us has been brewing monsoon clouds, like we got in Arizona, and now it is dark, threatening, lowering silver-gray and the thunder has been rumbling for an hour, getting closer and louder as the clouds build down to the valley where we live.  An hour ago, the clouds were still to the north, and I was sitting in the yard in the beating sunlight, listening to the sturm und drang behind me…now, the clouds have grown overhead and to the south.

Last year, we didn’t have any thunderstorms at all.  The first summer we were here, we had two or three; they are very rare.  In fact, the various write-ups of weather for these areas specifically mention that “even though you may have heard there are no thunderstorms in Alaska, it does happen…”

I was so excited, I called OmegaDad at work to breathlessly exclaim, “We have thunder!  And a huge anvil cloud!  And it’s coming our way!”  He laughed at me, and said, “I was just talking with M about thunderstorms, and telling him you would be so happy that we’re having one!”  Apparently, in one of those cosmic coincidences that make life interesting, I called him just after he announced that…Then, of course, he went on to claim that I was only happy when disaster was brewing, which made me pout, which made him laugh…

Anyway, I’m happy.  Thunderstorms do this Midwestern girl’s heart good.

Yesterday was spent ferrying the dotter off to a “Fun Meet” at her gymnastics place (what the heck do you call it?  “Gymnasium” doesn’t quite work.) for the entire morning.  Everyone who participated got a trophy (at least the ribbons were awarded based on points).  Oy!  None of my photos turned out well.  Oy!  The dotter had fun–hey!  And even though she needed prompting as to what came next, her floor routine was the best of her group.

Gratuitous video:

Today…today, OmegaDad and I spent scaring ourselves by removing the old wall to the outer part of the “stable” and framing in the new wall.  Why bother?  Well, just as a quick graphic showing the reason, we have the “foundations” of the two pieces on either side of the “door”:

It’s a miracle that thing has actually stayed upright (note, I do not say it has actually been plumb, or level.)  Not to mention that the cross-bracing on the back of these pieces of wall were cribbed* to within an inch of their lives by the previous horsie tenants.

Anyway, tomorrow’s post is going to be a pictorial history which will no doubt bore my readers to tears, but it’s history, dammit, and we have a very bad habit of taking dumpy stuff and turning it into nice looking stuff, and having no “before” or “during” pictures to point to.

While we were doing this (by “we”, I mean that OmegaDad did all the manly-man work, while I climbed ladders, held boards, helped measure, and fetched and carried pens, hammers, crowbars, drills, nails, and screws), we came across a surprise inside the upper portion of the wall–to wit, an ancient, dried-up hornet nest:

It was so pretty that I had to take close-ups:

Inside this splendid creation were dead old yellowjackets, mummified eggs, and the honeycomb-shaped cells:

I thought it was fascinating.  Believe me when I say I do not find a live hornet or wasp fascinating; they terrify me.  Yellowjackets I can cope with, and a long-abandoned nest filled with wasp-y cadavers actually makes me feel very good:  they are dead!  DEAD!  AND GONE!  Bwahahaha!

The dotter was very patient and hardly whined at us at all (it’s that maturity thang coming into play), so I rewarded her by hauling her off to the local lake for an hour.  Unfortunately, while it was toasty warm at our house, sheltered from the breeze as it is, the lake area was breezy and a bit cool, and the lake itself was still icy cold.  Given that three weeks ago, there was still ice there, this is no surprise.

*Non-horse folk:  “Cribbing” is when a bored horse chews whatever it can reach with its mouth. 

OmegaDad joked that, between us, we have “a glass”.  That’s because he sees the glass as half full, I see it as half empty.

As an example:  This evening I have been doing the annual round o’ gifties for various teachers and what-not at OmegaDotter’s school.  Tomorrow is her last day of first grade (OMG!).  But this year’s gift round is bittersweet, because we are losing two people at her school who I think are Just Awesome:  the principal, and the music teacher.

Before the dotter got into school, I mainly thought of a principal as just an administrator–someone who made the decisions and got things done, but who wasn’t really important in the grand scheme of things.  But Mr. Big, the current principal, has made me aware of just how much influence the principal has in creating and maintaining an environment, an atmosphere, in a school.  OmegaDotter’s school, under Mr. Big, has been warm, caring, nurturing.  It’s a good school (even if I find myself irked that the front-desk workers have [gag] Thomas Kincaide screensavers with Bible quotes on their computers).  There are ongoing “fun” things being done, that make the kids feel part of a large family, like the sock hop and the family movie nights and the welcome and farewell barbecues.  There is good communication with parents.  (Mr. Big endeared himself to me forever with his response to the “Chinese girls are mean!” incident last year; he knew just how much that would hurt the dotter and her family.)

So he’s going.  A new school has been built, and he gets to start it up next fall.  We’re getting a new principal, who seems like a boring Marine type.  We’ve met him, but had no real interaction; in my typical “glass half-empty” way, I’m sure he won’t be as good as Mr. Big.

The music teacher, Mr. L., came to us last fall fresh from his music education graduate degree.  He’s young, cute, enthusiastic, and he has a true gift for teaching children about the joys of music.  He instituted school-wide concerts, one in the winter and one in the spring.  He taught beginning band to fourth- and fifth-graders.  He started a special chorus for those who wanted to join and do the work.  The dotter came home after her music days humming and telling us about digeridoos and drums and trumpets.  In the concerts–well, it was amazing how well he did with the fourth- and fifth-graders playing recorders.  The younger kids all sang in tune and together.  The older kids demonstrated that they could sing multiple parts and fortissimo and pianissimo.  And the tunes he selected were just plain fun.

Then there was the time he challenged the school kids to bring in their coins for a special charity by saying that he was going to shave off his long locks and the kids who brought in the most money would be able to do the shaving.  Four of the dotter’s classmates were amongst the kids who got to do the shaving, and it was great fun for everyone.  (I did miss the long hair, though; sigh…)

He’s going too, to follow Mr. Big to the new school.  It’s a fabulous opportunity for him, to be able to set the tone for the school music program and make it his own.  And I, being “glass half-empty”, am feeling like there’s no way on earth to find a music teacher as good as he was.  OmegaDad, of course, regales us with tales of the new music teacher in his elementary school, and how the new teacher was So Much Better than the old one.  The difference here being that, in his case, a new young teacher was replacing an old, worn-out teacher who was retiring…

So it’s bittersweet.  Tomorrow the dotter goes off to her last day of first grade, then we swing into summertime activities, and the fall lurks ahead like a great unknown…

I am seriously going to miss Mr. Big and Mr. L.  They were part of what makes the dotter’s school so good.

OmegaDad, after watching a co-worker deal with the frustration of purchasing new software, sent this on to me.

1. Ask ITS for new software. ITS will ask you to fill out “The Form”.
2. Spend hours filling out The Form. You may need help answering some questions on The Form, but there is no form to get help with The Form, and no human knows the answers. (Certain questions were put on The Form as a cruel joke. There are no answers to these questions. YOU MUST ANSWER ALL THESE QUESTIONS.)
3. Route The Form for signatures. Everyone must sign The Form. There are 1.8 million people employed by the US Government. Most of these people will notice that you have made some error on The Form, thus they will return The Form to you. Correct the errors and resubmit the form.
   1. Only 7 of the 1.8 million US government employees understand how to work the postage machine.
   2. 6 of these people are at Team Building Training and cannot be contacted.
   3. The 7th person is currently recovering from injuries received while trying to repair the postage machine.
4. Once The Form has be routed for signatures, it will be returned to your ITS Representative. Your ITS Representative will notify you that The Form is now out of date. Please complete the New Form and repeat steps 2 through 4.
5. Prior to approval, the New Form will be placed in a clearly marked 8.5 x 11 file folder. The File will be stored in a secure location. Remember that scene from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ where they stored the Ark of the Covenant in that huge warehouse? That it where The New Form will be stored.
6. A Transient Form Specialist at ITS will be notified that your Form has been filed. The Transient Form Specialist will be instructed to email you regarding the disposal of your New Form. Transient Form Specialists are temporary employees hired through the Americorps Program. As such, Transient Form Specialists do not have access to government computing networks. This is a Department of Homeland Security requirement. Please be patient while the Transient Form Specialist finds a local public library with Internet access.
7. Contact HR for instructions on how to transfer oversight of The New Form to the person who will replace you at retirement. If you wish to acquire new software in order to do your job more efficiently, this is the most important step. DO NOT FAIL TO CONTACT HUMAN RESOURCES FOR TRANSITIONAL FORM RETIREMENT COUNSELING.

P.S.  If you decide to pass this on, and you know our Real Names, please don’t use his, eh?

I have come to a momentous conclusion:

When telling people when to visit Alaska, I should say, “Come in May.”

Rain?  What’s that?  Sunshine?  Oooh, lots.  Greenery?  Yup.  A few flowers–not as many as later on, but at least there’s no drizzly, chilly, rainy days.  It has just been glorious, and I highly recommend it to non-Alaskans as a good way to get to know Alaska.

The dotter tried to do her homework in the hammock this afternoon.  First there was the flat-on-her-back approach:

Then there was the sitting-up approach:

It ended up not working.  Too many distractions, too much sunshine, the breeze kept blowing her papers around, and then there was the problem that her pencil’s eraser was worn down.  Which, of course, meant she couldn’t do her work.  Oh, well; it was a fun afternoon anyway.

I might note that this is my hammock, now dangling from my new Pawley Island hammock frame, a Mother’s Day gift from the hubby and the dotter.  The hammock was my gift many years ago, and was hung between two trees in the back yard of our house in Small Mountain University Town.  Here, however, I was adamant that I needed a frame, rather than putting the hammock between trees; I wanted to be able to grab the sunshine, and anywhere we had two trees properly spaced, we didn’t have sunshine, or else it was right next to the next-door neighbor’s driveway. 

The lilac buds are proceeding apace.  The one bush is loaded with buds on every branch:

The other two bushes are just beginning to get their leaf buds, but I fully expect them to do just as nicely.

The pasque flower that was a bud last week is now fully open:

My other Mother’s Day gifts were a cake, decorated by the dotter:

And, of course, the obligatory hand-made Mother’s Day card:

Note the nascent cursive writing.  She’s not supposed to be doing cursive at school, but is busily producing her own version.  This will probably cause problems next year, or whenever they introduce cursive (if they do at all?)…

I would do Deep Thoughts about Mother’s Day, but will just give you the gist:  Mom’s day is one of the hardest holidays an infertile woman can cope with.  To all my readers who are still struggling with infertility, all I can say is that I hope you, too, will one day be getting the hand-made cards and the gifties made at school.  Another Mom’s day thought is that I found myself thinking of OmegaDotter’s birthmother a lot; the girl is so damned amazing and fun (and irritating and whiny) and smart (and capable of doing incredibly silly stuff), and I wonder what her mother is like, and feel sorrowful that she’s missing out on such a cool kid. 

Follow-up:  Not only did the New York Times quote OmegaMom, but Inside Edition emailed me, wanting to know about flu parties.  Since I don’t know diddly about flu parties, I passed the query on to one of my Tweets, who was interested in doing one.

A few months ago, yet another TED talk came across my radar.  This one was given by Aimee Mullins, a young lady who was born with missing fibula bones and had her legs amputated at age one.  Mullins went on from there to become a super-achiever–she received a full scholarship from the Department of Defense to attend Georgetown University, and became a record-winning athlete in Georgetown’s track team.  She competed in the paralympics, received modeling contracts, has acted in motion pictures, and is a motivational speaker.

At the TED talk, she spoke of disability being a chance to be “more”:

I came away from this video excited, thrilled, wondering “what’s next?!”

At the same, time, however, in the midst of all the gosh-gee-golly-wow that I felt, there was also an overwhelming feeling that this woman’s excitement for the future of prosthetics and the possibilities they open up for her and other was…well…a function of a position of privilege.

See, she’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s obviously wildly intelligent and vividly motivated.  She has people falling all over themselves to show her their latest-and-greatest prosthetic advances so that she can be a spokesman–albeit tangentially–for their new product.

Let’s look at a different amputee, shall we?

Let’s talk about D.  D. came down with diabetes–severely–in his thirties.  It could have been due to his addiction to Dr Pepper (doubtful, but it was a serious addiction!); one version is that his diabetes was caused by a severe blow to his abdomen from his on-again, off-again common-law wife and mother of his children, which deposited him in the hospital with trauma to (among other things) his pancreas.  But diabetes definitely runs in his family; his father had Type II, his grandmother had Type II, his cousin developed it in his forties, and no doubt there will be others.

Although the doctors were–as I understand it–overwhelming in their insistence that he needed to care for himself as a severe diabetic, including watching his blood sugar with an eagle eye, D. lived in denial, continuing his Dr Pepper addiction and sort of waving the diabetes away.  In his forties, he began getting severe foot infections.  He didn’t take care of one, and didn’t go to the doctor for a long time, and then there was a question of whether his doctor was a quack (one point of view) or whether he just wasn’t following doctor’s instructions very well (another point of view).  Anyway, as is common among diabetics, the infection in his toe turned gangrenous, it had to be amputated, and then things didn’t heal, so he had to have the foot amputated.

A year or so later, the other foot had to come off too.

D. was on Medicaid (I believe).  The insurers were reluctant to purchase prosthetics that were any good; oh, they’d buy the cheapest of the lot, but those (as I understand it) didn’t fit very well, were hard to walk with, and, what with one thing or another, D. ended up wheelchair-bound.

D. was not young.  He was not attractive–not ugly, but not attractive.  He was definitely intelligent, but rather than being a go-getter, he was the kind of guy who was always looking out for ways to “get around”, “get by”.  (This was, I must say, a severe frustration for the remainder of his family.)  He was the kind of guy who was irritated by other people trying to make him do things, like, say, the cops; but when someone else trespassed on his turf, he was indignant when the cops didn’t do anything.  Nobody was pounding on his doors offering him bigger-better-faster-more prosthetics.  And his insurance certainly wouldn’t offer anything but the basic.  In the end, his being wheelchair-bound cost him his life; his house was set on fire, he was upstairs and unable to escape, and he died.

There are 80,000 to 84,000 foot amputations each year in the U.S. due to diabetes.  A basic leg prosthesis starts at $2,000, with additional costs from physicians and prosthetic specialists raising the cost up to $10,000.  As someone commented on a Digg posting about Mullins’ TED talk, “most of her prostheses are likely already on the market (all except the arty ones, which appear to be custom designed). no prosthesis is “mass produced” they all have to be individually fitted and cast, sometimes more than once… below the knee prostheses average $8,000 - $16,000. the ones that are for running start at around $22,500. prosthetic limbs are horrendously expensive. an above the knee prosthesis can cost as much as $32,000. it is a huge problem facing the disabled community because health insurance almost never fully covers it or repairs, alot of coverage is as low as a $1,500 annual limit for prosthetics, which in most cases doesn’t even cover repairs.”  Steve, at My New Leg, takes you through the process of (a) getting a new prosthesis, (b) the complications, (c) dealing with insurance; his process starts here.  All the comments I read from either amputees with prosthetics or health professionals who deal with them made it very clear that it’s very expensive to get good prosthetics and it’s very difficult to get insurance to actually cover it.

Aimee Mullins is excited by the possibilities in prosthetics.  She has twelve pairs of legs; she can switch between any pair any day she wants.  (Which sort of reminds me of Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz (chapter here), who was able to switch heads depending on what she wanted to look like each morning–Langwidere wanted Dorothy’s head for her collection…)  Mullins is passionate about the future, about how people who need prosthetics can pick and choose what their new abilities are going to be.  But in her talk, she glosses over–actually, she leaves out entirely–the fact that her situation is far from the norm; she, by virtue of her go-getter personality and good looks, has a much better prognosis, prosthetics-wise, than, oh, 98% of the amputees out there.  My brother D. was one of those 98% who live in the real world.

Other commenters on the issue…

Reminds me

Andy Warhol famously said everyone is world-famous for 15 minutes.  Ah, fleeting celebrity!  I have touched upon it.  Yes, me–your very own OmegaMom–I have been mentioned by pseudonym in the New York Times.

Okay, it’s not like I was interviewed or anything (thank the Kozmik All!), and in context it sounds like the dude writing the article assumed that I was some type of epidemiologist or physician or something (I don’t even play a doctor on the Internet, folks!), and it was merely cribbing a comment I wrote on someone else’s blog.

How-some-ever.  It’s pretty cromulently KEWL to see my very own ‘nym on the pages (hey, a web page is, technically speaking, a “page”, right?) of The Gray Lady herself.

The context:  Towards the beginning of the whole swine flu H1N1 pandemic, one of my Twitterers asked if it made sense to deliberately expose oneself and offspring to the new flu now, since it seemed like a mild flu here in the U.S.  At the time, I thought it was a totally, absolutely, horribly lousy idea.  Now I just think it’s a lousy idea.  Anyway, knowing that Revere at Effect Measure was a Good Source of epidemiological answers, I asked in a comment if he’d speak to the “insanity” of doing such.  I got a bunch of responses that boiled down to “NO!  DON’T DO IT!”

Apparently, now that the swine flu H1N1 pandemic is really seeming to be a generally mild virus (so far) (cross your fingers, knock on wood, throw some salt over your shoulder, and maybe even pray to the Kozmik All), the whole “flu party” idea is spreading, enough so that the NYT got wind of it and decided to check it out with The Experts.

Being a modest sort, I didn’t find this thing on my own; however, Effect Measure got a trackback link out of it, so decided to check it out and report on it.  So here’s his take on the question, in more depth.

There it is:  My brush with fame.  Excuse me while I go hide from the paparazzi.

The dotter is suddenly missing One And Only True Love with great intensity.  I had found his mother’s phone number a few months ago, but never wrote it down; at the dotter’s behest, I tried locating it today online.  Surprise!  It wasn’t there any more.

Insert great sinking feeling here.  I am deeply afraid they have moved away from Small Mountain University Town, and we may not have any way of finding them.

So tonight, at bedtime, after our normal routine, the dotter was snuggled down in bed and I had pulled out my book and was reading, when I heard…

Crying?

Oh, dear.

Sure enough, the dotter was crying.  A little gentle prodding, and I got, “I miss C.!” from her in quiet sobs.

So we spent an hour with her on my lap, crying, and missing her old friend.  It was a very helpless feeling, as there was nothing I could do except sympathize.  I am distinctly reminded of an occasion when I was suffering from a broken heart and sobbing my eyes out on my mother’s lap while I sat on the floor of a van filled with relatives on our way to my brother’s graduation.  I’m sure my mom had the same exact helpless feeling.

OmegaDotter’s school has a revolving “extra” class each day–one day it’s gym, another it’s music, and the third is a visit to the school library.

She tends to bring home horse books of one type or another, with, every once in a while, a Jack-and-Annie book or a topical book (The Halloweiner for Halloween, for instance).  Today, she brought back “How To Draw a Horse”.  She was very perturbed, and claimed it didn’t really show “how” to draw a horse.  So while she was spending a lot of time on the phone with her best buddy A., drawing a thousand dollar bill for her and A. to use in their restaurant (A. was similarly drawing money on the other end), I opened up the book and started following the instructions.

Herewith, a horse head:

And a Welsh pony (I think; it may have been a Shetland):

I think they turned out rather nicely.  If the dotter keeps up with her art books, I may end up learning something.  That’s what kids are for, dontcha know?!  Fergeddabout the hugs and kisses and snuggling and all that–it’s a way to learn things you carefully avoided for many years.

The blog has suffered intensely because we’ve had spectacular, wonderful, gorgeous weather.  Yesterday our local Mesonet station hit 82F; today it hit 78F; on Friday, it was in the low 70s.  These have been record-breaking temperatures.  The sun has been shining, the birds have been singing, and I have been raking.

And raking, and raking, and raking.

I am, as a result, achingly sore in my shoulder, arm, and hip muscles.  I also have a fantastic sunburn.  Wah, wah, wah.  Pity me:  We’ve had weather to die for, and I’ve been outside for three days straight, playing in the yard, and discovering that, yes, Virginia, Alaska sunlight can give you sunburns.

A week ago, the snow was all the way down the mountainsides; now, it’s melted up two-thirds of the way.  A week ago, the trees were brown and bare; now, leaves are exploding everywhere you look and our neighbors’ houses are fading away behind the greenery (as is our kitty-corner, catty-wompus sliver of a view of the smaller mountains to the north of the valley).

This time of year is called “break-up”, because the ice encasing the rivers finally breaks into chunks and is swept downhill, down to lakes and the ocean.  There are bets and lotteries based on when various rivers will break clear.  There is also the problem of ice dams–where the chunks of ice manage to get snagged on something, then snag more chunks of ice, which capture still more, until you have a jumble of ice damming up the river.  Wayfarer Scientista has a lovely description of break-up in her area; Bill Hess was up in Wainwright, helping some native Alaskan whalers prepare an ice ramp for their whaling ship; AKMuckraker, over at Mudflats, took a walk along a creek today, along with some great pics; and Hig, at Ground Truth Trekking, has been using the (lovely, wonderful, long-awaited!) sunlight to play around with Fresnel lenses.

Our lilac bushes are putting out leaf buds and what looks, to me, like the beginnings of lilac blossoms (?):

Some fresh new trees leaves catching the sunlight:

And our pasque flower survived the winter, too, and is about to bloom:

So, essentially, everyone in Alaska is making up for six months of winter weather by soaking up as much sunlight as possible.  It’s amazing just how much being able to be outside and just bask can change one’s disposition–I am practically manic with delight at the joy of springtime.  Anyway, something has to give when one is obsessively enjoying the weather and the yard and the leaves and flowers and and and…and in my case, what gave is the blog.

Ah, spring!  When the pussywillows start popping, when the temperature hits 60 degrees, when yours truly spends days upon days upon days raking the yard to remove last fall’s dump of dead leaves and a winter’s worth of dawg poop.  What?  Surprised about us not picking up the poop during the winter?  Hey!  YOU try spending the extra few minutes to pick up dawg poop when it’s 20 below zero, there’s snow on the ground, and the dawg poop sinks into the snow because it’s so warm in comparison and it suddenly becomes a major excavation project to pick up the poop.

Just sayin’.

Anyway, I have been raking and soaking in the sunlight and warmth (we almost broke into the top ten highest temps for April today!), and loving it.  Oooh, yeah, gimme that Vitamin D, bay-bee!

OmegaDad, on the other hand, has rediscovered the one bad side to spring/summer in Alaska.

The Gloaming.

Last night, the dotter needed to snuggle with me in bed because she had watched something ER-esque on the TV at the neighbor’s house.  Apparently, there was lots of surgery, requiring lots of blood, lots of shouting, and generally unnerving stuff for her.  So I settled into bed with her and a book, and then fell asleep.

This left poor OmegaDad seeking another place to sleep.  (The dotter is too big now for all three of us to sleep well if she sneaks or is invited into bed with us.)

So he trotted out to the living room, blankie and pillow in hand, and snuggled up on the sofa.

Only to get all of about four hours’ of sleep last night, because of The Gloaming.

Yes, we have entered the time of year when we have lost all deep darkness at night; the time when the sunrise/sunset calculators that display twilight times now show “light” for astronomical twilight.  In two weeks, the calendar suddenly displays “light” instead of twilight times for nautical twilight.  Then, in the first weeks of June, civil twilight suddenly disappears and the calendars display “light” for that interval.

So The Gloaming is just beginning.  (Ooooh, a cute little itty-bitty baby Gloaming!)  It doesn’t bother me one bit; I can sleep through just about anything.  But any hints of light around OmegaDad make him sleep poorly; it’s just the way he’s built.  Our bedroom curtains block a certain amount of light, so it won’t bother him there for another month, but in the living room/kitchen area, we have three windows that have no coverings at all, and The Gloaming creeps in on crepuscular feet.

(Isn’t that a great word?  “Crepuscular”.  It, and “gloaming”, are actual real live words that are actually applied to this exact situation.  One thing I have loved about living in Alaska is that I get to use these words to refer to Real Live Environmental Conditions!  Woot!)

We spent the weekend doing weekend-ish types of things, including OmegaDad replacing the tree swing out front (it had an untimely demise due to rotting rope, which resulted in OmegaDotter being dumped and getting a small rope burn on her fingers).  And while this was going on (and laundry and cleaning and luvvin’ on chickens and stuff like that), I was watching the flood of information on swine flu on the Internet blossom and spread like fungus spores.

Watching the Twitter feed on the search term “swine flu” has been fascinating. 

Some utterly baseless rumors and misunderstandings (these are all things I have personally read on Twitter):

• Since this new version contains elements of avian influenza, swine influenza, and human influenza, it can’t possibly be natural; it’s been cooked up as a biowarfare weapon.  (Flu viruses swap DNA all the time, it’s why they mutate and we need new vaccines every year.)
• It’s a plot by Barack Obama to take attention off of the economy.
• It’s a plot by Barack Obama to force through his national health care agenda.
• It’s a plot by the libruls and Barack Obama to extend government control.
• The meeting between Barack Obama and Felipe Solis, director of Mexico’s National Anthropology Museum (Solis died the next day) was an attempt to assassinate the President.
• Sasha Obama has the swine flu.
• The reason the swine flu has shown up in the U.S. is because of illegal immigrants.  (Let’s just ignore the fact that the majority of the cases identified so far have been due to–eek, gasp!–tourists returning from Mexico.)
• It’s a plot by Big Pharma to drive up medicine sales.
• It’s the result of a slow news week and all media hype.
• It’s the END OF THE WORLD!!!!!!
• You can get swine flu by (eating/fucking/looking at/smelling) pork.
• The governments of the world are overreacting.
• The governments of the world are underreacting.
• It’s the fault of big, bad factory farms.
• I am sick–it must be swine flu!
• I am sick–I wish everyone would stop saying it’s swine flu!
• OMG, I am afraid to leave the house because of swine flu!
• Dudes, just chill out–x people die each year because of ordinary flu/because of car accidents/because of poorly prepared medications/choose your pet issue–so we don’t need to worry.
• Fifty kazillion riffs on the xkcd web comic related to swine flu and Twitter.
• Another fifty kazillion bad swine flu jokes (oinkment, kids kissing pigs, when pigs fly, etc.).

The psychology of the Internet rumor mill is just amazing to me.

Now, I have been reading the blogs of people who are actually involved with epidemiology (in particular, Effect Measure and H5N1), and they are confronted with two choices:  Either react now, or react later.  If they react later and the flu fizzles, hey, it’s okay.  But if they react later, and the flu doesn’t fizzle but turns into a pandemic akin to the 1918 flu, we’re all in deep kimchee.  If they react now, and the flu fizzles, well, it’s like the boy who cried wolf.  Do it too many times, and the one time it’s needed is the time that everyone will yawn, go “Ho hum, another flu panic…”  React now and the flu is a baddie?  Then everything is in place to stage quarantines, border closings, flu meds, and more when and where it is needed.

Right now, it’s really too early to tell.  The reports from Mexico are not good.  What I’ve read is 1600+ sick, with 150-200 deaths so far.  (Actually, what I’ve read in some places is 1600+ hospitalized, which is a major difference.)  By the end of this week, there should be much better data, including how fast it is spreading outside Mexico.

And, of course, maybe by the end of the week, they can figure out just what the major differences are that are causing fatalities in Mexico, but mild cases elsewhere.

Who is this?  I told her she looked 18 years old.  Then I told her she wasn’t allowed to look 18 years old again until she actually was 18 years old.

I also told her that my school pics were nothing like this.  Not a thing.  We had the ol’ stand in front of a beige canvas, be told to smile, click, and then the mugshot.