OmegaMom

Since I know some of mom’s regular readers are reading, here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on:

When I got here, she was not herself.  She wasn’t getting enough oxygen, was very weak and tired (couldn’t walk from the front door to the kitchen), and I was very very worried.

And we were sort of socked in by the weather, ugh.  Some parts of Small Mountain University Town got up to five feet of snow last week!  We didn’t get that much, but we did get a fair amount of soggy snow…

Anyway, when we could get out easily on Saturday, I rented a car and we set The Plan into motion.  The Plan was to call 911, get her into the hospital, and see if they couldn’t (a) figure out what was going on, and (b) help, and (c) get her into a nursing home for a month (standard Medicare limit) to rehab her.

At that time she was saying that she didn’t think she could handle assisted living, and should just be put in a nursing home for good.

Well.  At the ER, they found that she had a mild case of pneumonia, which they (luckily) admitted her to treat.  She is feeling much better, says she is breathing better than she has in months, but she is still extremely weak.  I’ve been running errands, running back and forth to the hospital, trying to make various arrangements, and trying to keep her (and my) spirits up.  The hospital is arranging with a local nursing home to take her in, but we’re not sure a bed is available yet.  If so, she’ll be moved there tomorrow; otherwise, maybe Wednesday.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments.  I’ve passed on the comments from her blog to her, printing them out in batches as they come in, and they have been so warm and wonderful and cheering for her.  Kate from HighAltitudeGardening sent her a bouquet of bright and colorful flowers, and they grace her hospital room right now, keeping things cheerful.  Catalyst from Oddball Observations phoned, and just knowing that made her feel special and appreciated (I will call back, just have been busy with family phone calls & emails!).  The outpouring of love for her has been heartwarming.

I will post more later.

Well.

When I wrote that last post, it was going to be followed up by the “And she’s all better now, whew!” post.  But I had things to do that weekend, and places to go, so didn’t write.

But I did notice that mom hadn’t blogged for a few days, and she hadn’t sent me any email.  So I picked up the phone to call her (I previously had been calling her every day, but then thought she was better, so stopped).

At which point, she asked me to come out to Arizona again, saying that things were worse.

So here I am in Arizona, with mom.  I managed to sneak in during a break between the storms that have hit Arizona (and California before that).  The airplane was delayed two hours on the tarmac in Big City due to a malfunction that turned out to be a Ghost In The Machine, and missed my connecting flight in Salt Lake City…but Delta showed how absolutely wonderful it is by automagically rebooking all the people who had missed their flights onto the next available flight.  This was very cool–all we had to do was take our existing boarding pass, run it beneath a scanner, and a brand spanking new boarding pass for the rebooked flight was printed out.

But when I got to Phoenix and got to the car rental place, a snag occurred.  It seems that we didn’t have enough money in our account to cover any car rental (if I had had a credit card, that would have worked, but they automatically block out more money for debit cards, no matter how little an amount of time you want to rent)…paychecks being deposited on Saturday didn’t help.  I was tired.  I just wanted to get up to mom.  So I parked myself on one of the chairs in the middle of the huge car rental complex and proceeded to sob my heart out.

Then I called OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love OmegaDad?  Well, okay, just thought I’d mention it again.

Anyway, he arranged for the inter-city shuttle to pick me up and get me up to Prescott.  Yay, OmegaDad!

Driving up was an adventure–but the good kind.  See, since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have to worry about all the water crossing the road, or the high winds, and was perched up nice and high so I could peer out the windows and see over concrete barriers on bridges and wash crossings.  All of which were flooded with rushing water.  Waves.  Crests on the waves.  Waterfalls coming down the rocky roadcuts that we were traveling between.  Snow mixing with the heavy rain when we got to Prescott.

(Up in Small Mountain University Town, they have had something like four feet of snow.  Roofs are collapsing on businesses–the ice rink, the big, comfy used bookstore, the fabric store, more–and the city mayor has declared that all businesses must clear their roofs or face a fine.  The powers that be also closed the main highways around SMUT for 24 hours.)

Anyway, I am here with GrannyJ.  We are working on getting her into a nursing home for a few weeks, to see if they can do anything.  We’re talking about her maybe moving to live with my brother.  Lots of things to talk about.  She is not doing well, but she is–as ever–my sharp-witted, fun, sweet mom.

In the meantime, consider me a poster child for the Sandwich Generation:  OmegaDotter’s birthday is tomorrow, and she is in her first “real” gymnastics meet tomorrow, too, with judges and not every participant getting a trophy.  We had a little birthday dinner Wednesday, and gave her the family presents, but I wasn’t able to arrange her party in time…that’s up to OmegaDad.

I know a lot of bloggers who are having issues with their moms these days.  Kat Kaz (damn, should proofread when I’m posting at midnight!), Laurie, Lorrie, V…I’ve kept so quiet with them about their problems because…well, it’s kind of a “La, la, la, I’m ignoring things!” approach.  But we’re past the ignoring problems part here, and I want to apologize and shout out to all of you to say, “Hang in there, kiddos.”

I will keep all & sundry posted; I wasn’t planning to post tonight, but saw Anon in AV’s comment, and thought I should update.

When you’re a new parent, with a small life depending on you, you find yourself doing strange things sometimes.  One commonality that I’m sure my readers have experienced is how new moms and dads can find themselves stopping by their child’s bed in the night and watching—urgently, because you can’t hear the breathing and you’re afraid that something’s wrong.  You wait, suspended in the moment, your anxiety ramping up, until you see the slow, gentle, up and down movement of your child’s torso in tune with her breathing, and you move on, reassured.

I found myself doing that with my mother while I was visiting over Christmas.

I’d be padding into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and find myself popping in to hover at the side of her bed over her, watching, suspended in the moment, my anxiety ramping up, until I saw that slow, gentle, up and down movement of her torso in time with her breathing.  The anxiety was always there.  I’d find myself sneaking in while she was taking a nap, just to be sure.  The sound of her oxygen machine—which she’s used for years now—receded into the background, becoming part of the everyday noises of the house, but it was still loud enough so that when I’d check her, I’d have to get very close to see the small movements of breathing, to hear anything.  I hovered, just checking.

When we first got there, my brother and family were ensconced in the living room, so we made a nest for OmegaDotter by the side of mom’s bed, and I slept in the bed with her.  It wasn’t reassuring.  She was not her normal self; she was lethargic, quiet, enervated.  We were all worried.  Bro and SIL had taken her on an overnight trip down to Tucson, and from the pictures, it looked like mom hadn’t gotten out of the car much.

So there I would be, in the middle of the night, waking up with one of my infamous hot flashes, and I’d hear mom gasping for breath, with a soft moaning sound that turned into a whimper.  I would sit up and watch her, my brows furrowed, my heart aching.  If it kept on, I would nudge her slightly awake, so that she would close her mouth and breathe from her nose instead, the nose which had the cannula of the oxygen tube.  Then she could breathe, and I would be able to fall asleep again.

Her cardiologist had put her on a huge dose of Lipitor in mid-December.  My brother—at least twice her weight, and with cholesterol levels much, much higher than hers, was on 10 mg per day; she was on 80.  The theory, as we understood it, was that it was a jolt-dose, a purposeful systemic shock—but even so, it was unnerving.  Especially since the medical listings of Lipitor on the web included “enervation”, “exhaustion”, and “weakness” as possible side effects.  We made her promise to go to the doctor after we left to find out exactly why she was put on such a high dose, and see if he wouldn’t lower it.  In the meantime, I suggested that she simply halve the pills and take half the dose.

The day before we were supposed to leave—after my brother and family had left themselves—we went out on a drive to the lake, to see the (vile, mean, odious, scary) geese who had chased me and grabbed my pants legs and pecked the back of my knees in a vain search for bread while I was videotaping them.  It was chilly, but bright.  The dotter and I wandered around, she fed the ducks and geese, I took photographs…and mom stayed in the car.  Yes, it was chilly, but this was not like her.  She said later that day that every day she felt just a little bit worse.  Not a lot.  But enough.  And she was hardly eating at all.

That night, in the kicthen, as I was giving her a hug, I leaned my head on hers and whispered in her ear, “Would you like me to stay a bit longer?”  She reached up her hand to cover mine on her shoulder and said softly, “I think…yes, I would.” 

Science fairs will be in late March, so OmegaDad decided to get started with some experiments with the dotter.  Unfortunately, the experiments are daddy’s ideas, but, hey, get the kid used to doing it, right?

Firstly, she was very possessive about “MY lab!”  In other words, I had to explain to her that real scientists these days were very open about their research (see PLOS) and, if they’re excited about their experiments, they’re very happy to have people in, show them around, tell them what the experiment is about, etc.

Anyway.  Since OmegaDad has been Doing Bread this past year (and very nicely, too!), and trying out sourdough starters with wild yeast, he thought it might be fun to see if you could get a sourdough starter from varying fruits.  He selected grapes and blueberries because both fruits have a blush on them; apples, because they don’t have a blush; and then we had a control of just plain ol’ flour and water.  Herewith the ingredients:

Then there’s the scientist herself:

Note that she is wearing “goggles”.  She was very concerned that everyone in her lab wear goggles, because, as she explained, “You never know when you’re going to get an explosion!”  Then she demonstrated how things would blow up:

Please note the “lab coat”.  Folks!  Let me tell you about this amazing new costume for your kids!  It’s a chef’s coat!  It’s a lab coat!  It’s two—two!—two coats in one!  OmegaDotter received a chef outfit for herself plus a matching chef outfit for her Karito Kids Ling doll, and has since taken to wearing the pink striped black pants as pajama pants or loungewear ever since, and when time came to do the experiment set-up, she decided it would make a fine lab coat.

What followed:  Placing one cup of blueberries into a Mason jar:

Mushing grapes before putting them into a Mason jar (an action shot!):

Explaining what comes next, and how you need to be careful (note the goggles again!):

Adding flour (we got a lot of flour all over everything, including the floor.  There were also a grape or blueberry or two on the floor, sigh.  Not that I really want you to look at our floor; please edit those shots mentally.):

Adding water:

Stirring (please note that we used different spoons for each jar, so that we had no intermixing):

She has the Evil Scientist pose down perfectly—“I have created LIFE!!!  Bwahahaha!”

And then, the finale, a “Ta-da!” pose:

And then she signed off with, “Thanks for watching Weird Science!”

We are home in Alaska.  It has been an interesting few weeks, with its major ups and downs, which I may or may not discuss later.

When we got on our flight home, OmegaDotter was more than ready to be home.  I was, frankly, more than ready for OmegaDad to do some high-quality one-on-one with the dotter; she is high-maintenance at times, very touchy-feely, needing attention, bouncing, chattering, “on” all the time.  I was not looking forward to six hours of her trapped in an airplane.

We didn’t get a window seat.  We were both very sad about this.  We settled into our seats, and I was hoping (hope-hope-hoping) that the last seat wouldn’t be filled, though we had been informed that it was a full flight, so that seemed unlikely.  And then he showed up, with his tattooed arms, his leather jacket, his bald head, and jocular “I don’t follow directions very well!” comment about carry-on luggage stowage.

We took off, OmegaDotter chattering all the way.

He took out a notebook and began sketching.

OmegaDotter, on the other side of me, peered at his sketchbook and whispered, “What’s he drawing?”

I said, “I don’t know.  I think he’s trying to figure it out.”

She whispered excitedly (and loudly), “I think it’s a flower!  See how it swirls and goes around?”  I looked again, and said to her, “Hm.  It’s beginning to look like a rose…”

She got out her travel art box, and her latest version of Pippi Longstocking on her horse, then leaned in and whispered very quietly to me, “Can I show him my picture?  What is he drawing?”

“Maybe you should ask him?”

She squirmed, shyly.  I chivvied her on (I am trying to get her to ask her own questions, request her own interactions).  Finally, she leaned over me and asked, “Do you want to see my drawing?” 

He said he’d love to.  She handed it over, saying shyly, “It’s—“ and he finished, “Pippi Longstocking!  She’s the one with the pigtails that stick out, and the monkey, right?  That’s very good.  You’ve got a lot of detail going on there!”  She pointed to the sign and said, “It’s Villa Villa Coola.”  They talked Pippi for a short while, then he handed it back.  She asked what he was drawing, and he told her about using light blue as a base for sketching, then coloring over it, any mistakes in the light blue being hidden by the darker colors.  He said that he had started out drawing something else, but he heard her say it was a flower, and he went from there.

Both went back to their artwork.  OmegaDotter added a second story.  He added some wording and shaded in the rose.  She handed him her picture again.  He looked at it, and asked what was around the windows.  She replied, “Wood”.  He asked her what color the wood was.  She quickly began coloring in the window frames, then handed it back to him.  He asked what color the gate was.  She said light blue.  He handed back the picture and she quickly filled in the coloring…this back and forth went on for a few more iterations, with him asking what this area was, and what color should it be, and her making decisions and completing more.  He lent her some of his coloring pencils when she was short a color; he helped her figure out how to make new colors when she didn’t have a particular color.

When she was done, he offered a trade:  His picture for hers.  He wanted hers, he said, so that when she was famous, he could say he knew her when…

I want an art teacher like that for her.  Someone who—rather than prescribing or describing—asks questions and guides her.  She was in heaven.  He was patient and inspiring.

So, to Shane Ruggle, aka “Rug”, the Phoenix tattoo artist:  Thank you.  Thank you, thank you.  Love is a gift, yes, and so is the sharing of your knowledge of art.

Hi, all…I’m still in Arizona, and will be for a few more days.  Mom (GrannyJ) isn’t feeling all that hot, and I decided to stay on longer than planned, so I can ferry her to doctors to have her looked at and her meds examined and all of that kind of stuff.

For those who have had to change/cancel flights, a word of warning:  Travelocity customer support told me that the cheapest replacement fare (if we were to change our flights) was going to be $1500 (give or take a few dollars) per person.  At the same time, I was looking at the Travelocity search, and for the same day, I saw many flights in the range of $500 to $700.  Something was just Not Right.  So I went ahead and cancelled the tickets, and we now have a credit to be applied to the rebooking, so even with the rescheduling fee it will be much cheaper.

Later, gators.

ETA:  Oh, my!  I totally forgot:

Happy New Year!  May 2010 be a wonderful year for you all!

I bought a Very Special Gift for OmegaDotter this Christmas.  It was very small.  So I decided to do the box-within-a-box-within-a-box approach; I wrapped the VSG, put a bow on it, and a note saying it was the last box, dumped it all into another box, gift-wrapped that one with bow and note, etc.  The end result was nice and big.

I was actually rather nervous about doing this:  either she would think it was funny, or she would get horribly frustrated, and I had no idea which way she would lean.

Anyway.  Since she opened it first, I wasn’t ready with the camera, so the settings were wrong for the first box:

Second box—she was kind of perplexed:

Third box—she was getting the hang of it, and was amused.  I have a picture of her laughing, with the box already unwrapped, so we’ll use this one:

Fourth box—she’s giggling:

The VSG revealed—I think she likes it:  she screamed!

What was it?  An iPod nano, filled to the brim with songs I knew she liked.  She has since wandered the house with it connected by umbilical cord, belting out various songs—in particular, Fireflies by Owl City, which has been an earworm for both of us, as well as various Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus songs. 

Now, onto the consumer review:  OMG.  Apple has the “user-friendly”, ergonomic approach down to an art.  Or a science.  When I was setting it up for her, I pulled it out of its little box, plugged it into the computer, and *boom*, it hooked to my iTunes and started walking me through it.  Once it was loaded with music, *boom*, I was using it.  I am truly, truly impressed with the ease-of-use of this gadget—the dotter had figured out all the buttons (in particular, how to replay Fireflies over and over and over again) within a short time.  Now I want one…or maybe an iPhone, which does all the same stuff, plus.

The flurry of Christmas wrapping is done, and the presents are under the tree.  OmegaDad has almost completed his piece de resistance, the gingerbread barn, which is awesome.  Tonight’s dinner:  salmon and potato fans—yum.  The dotter has demonstrated to me—many, many times—just what technique she is going to use to jump upon me and OmegaDad tomorrow early in the morning to wake us up for Santa presents.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, peaceful Kwanzaa, and a joyous Festivus to all my readers.

I could so easily become a true pagan here in Alaska.  I woke up this morning and knew it was the day of the winter solstice…and I felt like dancing.  I felt like carefully nursing a flame awake from a coal saved the day before, in symbolic token of the flame in the sky that will grow again.  I felt like turning somersaults, or zipping from room to room yelling “YIPPEE!!!”, or just jumping up and down in incoherent glee.

I posted it on Facebook.  I posted it on Twitter.  And here I am, posting it on the ol’ bloggeroo.

I have so much sympathy and understanding for all those northern European folk who were really into winter solstice celebrations.  Yes, this is the official “start” of winter.  Hereabouts, though, winter has been here since early November (much later than usual).  Yes, winter will hang around for four more months.  But at least the darkness will disappear!

Just for general information, here’s what the sun was doing today:

At its height—around 1 p.m.—the sun got a whopping 5-1/2 degrees above the horizon (as noted in the graphic).  Flip the graph over and that’s what it’ll be on the summer solstice (or thereabouts).

I’m happy, happy, happy.  Yeah, it’ll still be dark for a long time tomorrow.  And the day after.  And after that.  But y’know what?  By mid-January, the day will be getting longer by leaps and bounds—five or six minutes per day.

To celebrate, go check out Starts With A Bang; he’s got some really cool pictures—time-lapse photos of the sun at winter solstice, plus a nifty year-long time-lapse showing the analemma that the sun moves through over the year.

We have had a series of foggy, foggy nights here in the Valley, and with the fog comes a beautiful after-effect:  hoar frost.  The fog hangs in the air, the icy nights precipitate the fog onto any nearby surface, and the droplets of water freeze and build upon each other into an airy, fairy coating on trees, branches, signs, fences.  Then the sunlight comes out, and in all directions you see a sea of frosty white.  This time, instead of just one night, we had many nights in a row with the fog, and instead of breezes blowing the delicate frost formations off the surfaces during the day (which usually happens), they have stayed and the next night’s precipitation can build upon the last night’s.

The fog, of course, is not homogenous; you have areas where the fog is thick and areas where it drifts and blows and thins out…all of which shows up in the amount of frost that deposits on the surfaces.

This phone pole, for instance, didn’t get much frost:

It looks just like kids’ experiments with crystallizing sugar or salt.

This batch of trees on a ridgeline caught the sunlight; on our side of the ridge, it was dark:

A little later in the day, I wandered by Suburban Alaska Lake, and was able to photograph this lovely set of little trees, all covered with the frost:

A closer look reveals the leaf-like structure of the frost sticking to the branches (dig that vibrant blue sky!  We don’t see that very often around here!):

And then I went all macro:

It really is both beautiful and fascinating.

This was the view across the lake.  See how all the trees along the right side of the picture are covered, while the trees on the left side are only covered halfway down?  The frost never got that low on the left side:

When I got home, this was the view in the backyard:

The frost doesn’t cling to the evergreens the way it does to the deciduous trees; I’m not sure why.

I had to drive off to our neighborhood crossing of the Little Lady river, to see what it looked like in this fairy frosting:

You can see how the sunlight only hits part of the view; that’s because the sun doesn’t get high enough in the sky to light up the whole area, since it’s in a little dip.

So:  This was the post that was supposed to get done yesterday.  Hah.  The broken nose makes me realize just how mobile my face is; I am constantly lifting an eyebrow or twitching my nose, and each time I do that, it hurts.  It doesn’t look like much, really—I am not sporting the advertised raccoon eyes, which surprises me.  All I have is a few scrapes and the swollenness, but even that isn’t much compared to what it could be.  The part that hurts the most, actually, is my neck and shoulders—I plowed in face first, so jammed my head.  Call it “face plant whiplash”!

Many thanks for all the readerly sympathy! 

I was going to post pics of the lovely frost we’ve had recently…

Or maybe post pics from the Christmas parade and fireworks show this evening…

But instead, I decided to trip in the garage, face-plant myself, and break my nose.  The ER doc says I will be sporting a fine pair of black eyes tomorrow.  In the meantime, I am zone-y on Percocet and not really capable of any writing of any depth or clarity or wit.

Manana, folks.

OmegaDotter and I are slated to go visit GrannyJ between Christmas and New Year’s.  OmegaBro will be there with his family, so we’ll have plenty of fun—lots of visiting, good eats, hanging out, playing with cousins, day trips.

Last year, my visit to Arizona was before Christmas.  The year before, it was before Christmas.  This year, it is after.

And, oh, lordy, what a difference it makes.

I have hit the wall.  I am drowning in the darkness.  I held out as long as I could, and was in fairly good spirits.  Somewhere in the past week, however, my body recognized that It Is Dark, and shut down.  I wake up and am totally, absolutely exhausted.  I could sleep all day long.  When I’m awake, I feel like I’m just going through the motions.  And today the tide of darkness swept over me, and all I felt was miserable.  Totally, absolutely, miserable.  Lead ball in the stomach miserable.  Bitchy, snappy, petty, angry, and underneath it all, on the verge of tears miserable.

Yes, the Magic Light helps.  Yes, the little blue pills help.  But they’re not enough.

Yes, the solstice is coming, and soon the light will be growing and the darkness will be shrinking.  But right now, that doesn’t help.

This is the time when I need to be going somewhere with more than six hours of daylight, with the sun more than 6 degrees over the horizon.  Rumor has it that the Nords and the Swedes are grim and gloomy during the winter—I can totally relate.

Just four weeks.  I can handle four weeks.  Two weeks to the solstice, three weeks until I’m in Arizona for a week, then back here and the days will start getting longer.

Then:

Now:

It doesn’t seem possible that seven years have passed.  Seven years ago, right now, we were on our way to Nanning after a lovely dim sum breakfast in the Guangzhou airport.  We actually signed the papers around 5 p.m. on December 8 in China, which would be around 7 a.m. here, and we met her around 6 p.m., which would be 8 a.m. here.

She’s pretty amazing.  We’re pretty damned lucky.

OmegaDotter had a silver crown put on one of her molars more than two years ago.  In the meantime, she has lost baby teeth and gained adult teeth, and her teeth are pushing on each other in various ways.  As a result, her silver crown started bothering her, and the night before last she told me as we were putting her to bed that it was poking into her cheek and hurting.

So I called up and made an appointment, which happened to be this morning at 9 a.m.

We drove in through the early twilight.  The mountains were just visible against the pink and lavender and purple clouds and the deep blue sky.

It took a little over an hour to remove the crown and put in a new filling (the dotter is very happy that it doesn’t hurt anymore, but sad that her shiny crown is gone).  I dropped her off at school.  Then I just had to get the camera and try to capture the skies.  I drove off to the Valley Resort, on the shores of Lake Suburban Alaska, noticing as I made the turns and peered through the trees towards the mountains that, OMG, the sun was actually rising, and if I didn’t get there soon, I wouldn’t be able to take that picture.

I got there just in time–10:25 a.m.  Five minutes later, the curve of the sun was over that saddle, and I would have had to fiddle with ISO settings to keep the sunlight from drowning everything else out.

(Sunrise was officially at 9:55 a.m., but those mountains were in the way.)

Our snow on top of melting snow and ice produced a phalanx of icicles hanging down from the roof beside the kitchen.  I liked the repeating vertical lines behind and in front of the fluffy snow-draped firs.

For your viewing pleasure:  The Big Picture once again does a Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar for December; go enjoy the purty pictures and remember to check back each day!

For more viewing pleasure:  absolutely incredible renderings of a 3-D Mandelbrot set.  Think of a 3-D fractal…Mathematics made beautiful!  I particularly like this one, which the creator has described as “shell life“.

I am enjoying the new C-Pop singers–thank you very much for your suggestions!  Since the dotter is mostly into bouncy dance-type music, I will wander through them picking and choosing (no Deserts Chang, alas!  But I think she’s groovy!).  Fantasia is also a great idea.

To finish things up, here is the world’s very best Poker Face parody, called “NeutraFace”, starring bearded designer geeks having fun.  Enjoy.  (I now want to have bearded nerds emerge from my bathtub):

The sun rose at 9:49 in the morning, and will set at 3:51 p.m., just a few more minutes.  We had a visit from the Pineapple Express yesterday; it is Alaska’s answer to the Polar Express.  Where the Polar Express is a blast of frigid Arctic air that swirls down into the Midwest following a huge dip in the jet stream, the Pineapple Express is a blast of warm air direct from Hawaii that barrels into South Central Alaska, melting the snow and ice and producing precipitation of one form or another.

First we got the melt.  You’d think this would be great, wouldn’t you?  But, alas, what it does is denude the forests of the one thing that keeps it bright in the wintertime, and leaves the skies gray.

Then we got the storm.  Where the Omegas live, it came as a day of rain–we were up to 40F.  But to the west, only about 30 miles away, the temperature was low enough that it came as snow, a huge snowstorm on the Lady River that dumped 30+ inches of snow in the hinterlands and in Small Alaskan Tourist Town That Prompted Northern Exposure.  A substitute school secretary in SATTTPNE said they had enough snow that the littlies, kindergartners and first-graders, were disappearing into the snowdrifts.

And then the weather turned cooler here, and our rain turned to snow.  So:  we had wet streets, car, trees, that iced up, then got snowed on.  Then the skies turned clear.

When I drove the dotter in to school, the full moon was hovering over the trees in the west side of the school parking lot.  The sun was just barely beginning to light up the skies to the east.  I dropped her off, ran to the convenience store, and drove home…but that lovely picture of the moon looming over the trees called to me.  At home, I ran into the office, grabbed the camera and drove back to the school, determined to get that picture.

Alas, it didn’t quite work out the way I wanted–I wanted that moon in the trees to be as crisp and clear as it was to my vision.  Since I haven’t worked out the ins and outs of the camera workings, I couldn’t figure out how to make everything in focus and not too bright.  So what you see above is what you get:  Moonlit trees slightly lighted by the first, faint blush of daylight.

It was beautiful.

That is what I live for, up here in Alaska during the winter.  Moments like that.  Because there is so much darkness at this time of year, and my annual bitchfest about the ever-encroaching darkness is revving up.  I talk to people on the phone…they say, “How d’you like the cold winters in Alaska?” with a bit of laughter in their voices.  And I talk to them about The Darkness.

It’s just a month or two that it’s bad, mind you.  I know that the winter solstice is fast approaching, and that three weeks after that, we will settle into the long cold bright time of year, where the days get longer but the chill of winter settles in deeper.  The cold is okay, really.  Because the sun comes out more and more each day, and sparkles off the snow and the mountains and the ice covering the inlet and the rivers and the waterfalls, so it is beautiful.  And behind it all is the knowledge that The Dark is Dying, the sun is coming back, spring will be here soon, and we will be into the Season of The Gloaming.

But that month and a half to two months where it just gets darker and darker?  It gets to me.  The sun was 6.8 degrees above the horizon today at its height.  That’s low.  That’s like “late afternoon just before sunset” low.

(The solstice is coming.  It’ll get here.  The dark will go away.)

I’ve got a little list of music to buy the dotter for Christmas, to go with her Big Present from me.  We’ve got some Don Henley, Elton John, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Petty, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, Feist’s “1-2-3-4″, Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, Taylor Swift, Kidz Bop, a Beyonce, some Chris Rock, a Sean Kingston, some High School Musical and Shrek…and to fill in the Chinese pop section, we have some Wilber Pan, Angela Zhang, S.H.E., and Jolin Tsai.

But I need some suggestions for classic or older rock, more C-pop, and new American stuff.  So, parents of 8-9-10 year olds:  What are your kids listening to?

Peach said, in response to my Dear Diary post:

I have to admit that when I read your response to her questions (maybe not given to her, but the ones you expressed ~ about it being unlikely that she could find her first parents, or her poster could get her parents in trouble?), it bothered me.
As adoptees we grow up completely believing what our adoptive parents tell us about the circumstances around our adoption. But when we become adults and find out more information (more than our parents said was available) it brings with it emotions that “just is” ~ nothing our adoptive parents could say or do will take them away or keep us from having to walk through the grief, no matter how hard they try. And it even more invalidation when we sense our adoptive parents are trying so hard to do this for us ~ to take away our pain, through their answers, honest or not.

It’s a hard balance.  I admit that I am a glass-half-empty person a lot of the time–one way of looking at it, though I prefer to think of it as “pragmatic” or “realistic”.  I do think it unlikely that, given what information we have, we could find anything, due to the fact that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.

Or at least, the information we were given says that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.  Which is one of the problems:  that information could be made up of whole cloth.  And we don’t know.

How do you carefully get this across to an almost-eight-year-old?  We don’t know.  Anything.  For sure.  How do you tell a child who hasn’t experienced a really big city just how many people there are there?  How do you explain that what information we have is a grain of sand on a big beach?  How do you say, “Even what we know, we don’t know that it is true”?

I have been very careful, all along, to say, “We think” or “we were told” or “the orphanage says” about these things.  But what one person says, another person may not hear, or may hear through a filter.  I say, “We think it must have been very hard for your birthmother to leave you.”  OmegaDotter may hear, “Your birthmother was devastated.”  I say, “The orphanage says you were left at the gates of XYZ.”  She may hear, “That is where you were left.”  How do you tell a child that adults lie about things like this?  She’s still at a stage where hearing me say “Bullshit!” accidentally when we’re playing B.S. (a card game–quite fun, taught to us by Aunt L. and cousins K. and I.) makes her gasp and say, “Oh!  You said the b…sh… word!  That means cow poop, but you’re not supposed to say it!”

Yes, I want to protect her.  Yes, I know it doesn’t help, in the end.  But the things that are wrapped around these questions are…well, more mature issues, questions of honesty and decency in adults, questions of the general ethics of international adoptions, questions of the problems of involving large amounts of money in the transferrence of responsibility for a small human being, questions of “human trafficking”.  I want her to know about these things, but in an age-appropriate manner.  So I start small.  I use weasel words, semantics…”we think”, “we were told”, “the orphanage says”…all of which are true, and all of which mean “this is information but it’s not the biblical truth”.  I have, in talking about her birthmother, told the dotter about the one child laws, and how they have changed; I have also mentioned that it’s possible her mother was young and unable to raise a child.  As she gets older, the more nuanced versions come out more.

Youngsters are concrete thinkers.  But as the dotter is getting older, she is becoming more aware that black-white thinking doesn’t always fit the world around her.  International adoption–hell, private domestic adoption, even adoption through the state–all of these have shades of grey on all sides.  So as she becomes more able to shade her own thinking about the world, so can we start offering more shades to her own story.

There are people who have searched for Chinese birthparents, with some successes.  Brian Stuy, of Research-China, has interviewed some birthmothers, and in Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China, Kay Ann Johnson also found and interviewed a number of Chinese birthmothers.  So birth families can be found, and some people have located their own children’s birth families.  Then I have heard tales of birth parents who have anonymously contacted people trying to locate them, pleading with them to not continue, because they are afraid of the repercussions.

There have been tens of thousands of children adopted from China in the past 15 years, and the number of located birthparents is still very small.

So:  How to say, “we will help you look” without it turning–in a child’s magical way of thinking–into “we will find your birthmother NOW”?  How to instill a realistic view of the probabilities?  How to find that balance?

The subject of international birth parent searching has also recently been discussed on This Woman’s Work and today on American Family.  Let me know what y’all think, too…

It snowed last night, a heavy, wet snow, unlike our normal dry powder.  This was the kind of snow that lingered on branches and made the area look very Currier and Ives-like.

We had small branches draped with the stuff:

We had the pea cables and posts topped off with white confection:

(The pea cables are a particularly proud piece of work from the hands of OmegaDad.  They don’t quite work the way we had planned, but they do provide a scaffolding for the pea plants to climb up–so long as we remember to get out there and start lacing pea runners properly early and often.  Otherwise our peas end up turning into viny clumps.)

This little lovely–a snow-covered rosehip–was in a very awkward spot.  I tried shooting it without the flash, but the light was dim enough that it needed to have a slow shutter, and the awkward spot made it so that every time I tried without the flash, my hands shook just enough so it was completely out of focus.  But the flash shot makes it pop, and it was so pretty, I thought I’d include it anyway:

The rosebushes here in Alaska have great big fat rosehips, the size of the last joint of my thumb.  We tried making jams from rosehips this summer; alas, the rosehips themselves have a pretty blah taste.  One would expect them to be zappy and zingy in flavor, but, no, they’re just very bland.

Our back yard:

The pictures were shot at about 3:30 p.m.  It was cloudy and still snowing, and the sun is setting at 3:58, so everything is rather dim.  Rumor has it we got six inches of snow; this is enough of a snowfall to warrant its own listing of snowfall totals from around the area on the National Weather Service forecast page.  We are still about 11 inches short on normal snowfall–we got plenty of precipitation in the form of rain earlier in the fall/winter, when the weather was still unseasonally warm.

It’s very pretty.  The kids (the dotter has her best friend A. over to spend the night) got cold and soaked from an hour of playing in it.

The real estate agent who helped us find our house (and is a dear, close, personal friend of our ex-governor’s) is a relentless saleswoman.  We get letters in the mail with helpful tips and tricks!  We get–at irregular intervals–a coupon to a local ice cream store or dollars off on purchases at a locally owned business.  And, this Thanksgiving, we were given a pie, apple or pumpkin.

So, we now have a store-bought pumpkin pie for free, sitting in our fridge.

We have a turkey thawing out, alternately in the sink and in the fridge.

We have lemons and rosemary and garlic to stuff the turkey with.

We have taters, parsley, and cheese for OmegaDad’s trademarked Green Smashed Potatoes.  (Om nom nom!)

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

All that’s left is for us to put together the feast.  I will provide chopping and dicing; OmegaDad is le chef and I will do only his bidding in the kitchen.

It is time to list the things in life that make us thankful.  Really, it would be a good idea to do this on a regular basis; maybe the world would be a better place for it.  So long as it’s quiet and private and not trumpeted to the world.  My tidbits of thankfulness wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the world; they’re all small and personal and, face it, pretty damned selfish.  What I am thankful for, someone else may find picayune, and vice versa.

Number one on my list is OmegaDad.  This guy is an endless font of incredible spoonerisms and malaprops that leave me laughing at the same time as I am left in gaping awe at his inventiveness.  I have asked how he does it, and he shrugs:  it just sort of “comes out–I don’t do it on purpose…”  We have been together for almost 16 years, and I still find things to talk with him about, still find him gentle and sweet and thoughtful and intelligent.  And, dayum, he cooks up a storm, dontcha know!  This year’s focus has been bread, and we have been the recipients of yummy flatbreads, lavosh, pizza dough, challah, plain white bread, breadsticks, French bread, tortillas, and homemade hamburger buns.  Wow.

Next is OmegaDotter.  She’s just amazing.  OmegaDad recently challenged her to finally pin down her back flip, offering a differing amount of money depending on how long it takes her to get it solid.  In the course of a week, she has managed to reach the point of always flipping over and 75% of the time ending up on her feet again.  (The practice is on our bed.)  She is reading by herself, and we alternate nights when I read to her with nights when she reads to me.  Every once in a while she will bestow a piece of artwork on us that makes my jaw drop.  And she’s beginning to bring out more and more unasked-for flashes of empathy and moral grounding.  Yee-haw!

Then there’s GrannyJ.  She’s 82 and still going strong, walking her small town, taking photographs, blogging and nourishing a local blogging community, and challenging me with new and interesting science fiction authors all the time.

We have our health.  We have our house.  We have friends and family.  We have a standard of living that would make 70% of the world gasp in awe.

We had Kai for eleven years–that’s good.  We’ve discovered that chickens, though they may be pretty damned dumb, still have a lot of personality.  Our garden overflowed with vegetables, even though we were moosed at times.  We have long, lovely hours of sunshine in the summer to balance out the cold dark months of winter.

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. friends and readers, and generally thankful warm fuzzies to my non-U.S. followers!

Some thirty years ago, I got sick.  And sicker.  And sicker.  So I finally hauled myself off to a doctor somewhere (I do not remember where, or how) and got diagnosed with mononucleosis.  And tonsillitis.  And strep throat.  All at once.  It hurt like hell.  So this doctor prescribed antibiotics for the items that were bacterial, lots of rest for the mono, and some kind of painkiller so that I could actually swallow the other items.

I was supposed to pop the painkillers every four hours.

By the time a day had passed, I was having psychotic delusions that there were giant white rats and cockroaches crawling up the walls of my apartment.

This was not, I am guessing, the intended result.  I ended up calling a friend in the middle of the night, sobbing, and asking that she help me walk the stuff off, or at least keep me company until it wore off.  We flushed the remainder of the pills down the toilet.

This was my first introduction to the idea of idiosyncratic reactions to drugs.

Last Thursday, I got a sudden backache in an unusual spot–mid-back, right below my ribs.  I’ve had an on-again, off-again urinary tract infection, so worried about kidneys.  When the backache didn’t go away, and I kept getting sharp pains in two points directly over where my kidneys should be, I decided to haul my butt off to the doc-in-a-box Monday morning.  (The DIAB offices were quite full and it took forever.)

No bacteria showed in my sample (?!), but the doc decided to treat it empirically:  if I felt like it was my kidneys, probably the best thing to do would be to do some antibiotics and some UTI drugs.

Oh, and while we’re at it, here’s some Tramadol for the pain (”non-narcotic pain relief” quoth the doc).

So I sashay off, get the prescription filled, come home, and pop some pills.

Fifteen minutes later, I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open.  I staggered into the bedroom with a book, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.  I sat at the dinner table in a daze, ate a bite or two of food, then wandered back to bed.  At 7:30 a.m., the phone rings, it’s my wake-up call for the day from OmegaDad…I spend an hour awake–in a daze–getting the dotter up and breakfasted and out the door and realize it might be a good idea to email work.  I open up the email program, start typing my boss’s name.  Except I can’t type; it’s gibberish.  I take a deep breath, reposition my hands, and start typing again.  This time it’s only half gibberish.  I take a deep breath, reposition my hands again, and start typing one.  Letter.  At.  A.  Time.

And then I went back to bed.

The end result:  One pill.  Twenty-one hours of deep sleep.  Four hours after that of space-y zoniness; awake, but totally unable to be, say, productive or coherent.

Oh, I woke up here and there.  Let’s see:  the pain-killing portion ran out about six hours in, I know, because I came to enough to think, “Hunh.  It hurts again.”  And I woke up around 11:30 p.m., rested my zoned out eyeballs on the clock, and thought, “I really need to get up to write a filler post for NaBloPoMo.”  Fifteen minutes later, I did the same thing.  Obviously, nothing got done.

So now I know:  no more Tramadol–or related items–for me.

Maybe next year I’ll actually complete NaBloPoMo.  So close!  Wah!

The antibiotics seem to be helping, though.

(And I am totally amused that no-one commented on my defiant liking of Lady Ga-Ga.  I must have stunned everyone into awed and appalled silence.)

One of the joys of Teh Intarwebz is that you can hover on the cusp of current culture, dip in and out like a hummingbird, and still live your own old boring everyday life.

For example:  I have taken to watching shows on Hulu.com.  Alas, I am also aware that Hulu.com is talking about becoming a subscription-only (that means $$) service come sometime in 2010; having found Hulu, I am about to lose Hulu.  Anyway, enough grief; I have found that I can watch Glee and Stargate: Universe on Hulu if I miss those shows the night before, and am happy.

In addition, when brouhahas such as Kanye West’s drunken outburst disrespecting Nice Girl Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Video awards occur, I can scour the web the day after to (a) see what actually happened, and (b) get down with all the nominated music videos.

Which leads me to my headline.  Actually, “led me to my headline”–I watched the nominated videos and found…

There’s a new Star (use your joisey accent on that:  “Stah!”) in the pop music firmament name of Lady Ga-Ga.  Lady Ga-Ga sings catchy pop songs that drip sexual innuendo in music videos that are pop art celebrations of out-and-out (::gasp!:: ::OMG!:: ::catch me while I blush and faint::) lewd sexuality.  She wears nude body suits.  She feels herself up.  She feels up guys.  They feel her up.  She wears outre makeup.  She wears outre clothes.  It is a wild Warholian act; it’s also a wild dionysian act.

And damn.  I love her.

I am aware that some of my readers absolutely positively thoroughly despise her.  (I’m talking to you, PAgent!)  I am aware that my cachet as an intellectual pseudo-counter-cultural ex-almost-hippie is tarnished beyond repair by saying it, but there it is.

I think she’s hilarious.  I love her over-the-top persona, her over-the-top hair, her over-the-top makeup, and her over-the-top music videos.  (I will admit, however, that these are music videos I do not want the dotter seeing.  When the dotter arrived home one day humming the tune to “Poker Face” and saying she had to show me a video, I practically plotzed.  Who the #@!& was showing this smutty stuff to my seven-year-old daughter?!?!  And then she started singing the words, and I realized that she was smitten by a parody video.  Whew.  Crisis averted!)

Then I discovered some interviews of her.  And I loved those–she’s snarky and snotty and playing the interviewers and leaps upon sexism.  And I discovered plenty of YouTubery where she’s doing her hit songs in live venues, small clubs or radio stations, one-on-one, just her and her piano.  I loved those, too–she sings like a torch singer, then switches off into a staccato singing silliness, then back to the torch singer.

Lady Ga-Ga is a mix of early Madonna, Elton John at his most flamboyant, and…and…oh, damn, give me a name of a torch singer from the forties, please.  She is a character and a half, and I go ga-ga over her.

Here’s the parody:

Here’s the original–no embedding, bah.

And here’s a live version:

I’m busy reading Predator, by Patricia Cornwall.  It’s creepy.  Really creepy.  And confusing.  Judging by the reviews on Amazon, lots of folks feel the same way.  But, still…

Mid-day yesterday, my back started hurting right beneath my bottom ribs.  I have no idea what I did to it, though given the location worry about kidneys and stuff like that.  It kept on hurting throughout the day.  When the dotter came home from school, I grumped about it…the next thing I know, she brings me an ice pack from the freezer and asks where to put it.

Later that night, in bed, I was still hurting.  Half asleep, half awake, middle of the night, I sort of mumble an “ow!” or two.  The dotter has been sleeping in our bed while OmegaDad is out of town, in a nest of sleeping bag, her favorite “Chix rule!” blankie, a down comforter, her roll-up pink fake-fur kitty cat pillow, and a stuffed duck.  So there I am, dazed and asleep and hurting, and suddenly a hand reaches out, pats me three times, strokes me gently, and she whispers, “There, there.  It’s okay.”  And I go back to sleep.

Aw, man.  She’s a Good Kid, dammit.

Instant negotiation mode:  Anyone who has been a parent can recognize that.  It’s when the child asks for something, and you give an answer that isn’t what that child wants, and the child immediately starts pushing the boundary back.  It’s how “maybe” or “I’ll think about it” gets magically re-arranged into “yes” in a child’s mind.  It’s how “next Saturday” becomes “tomorrow” when there’s talk of a friend coming over, or “one piece of candy after dinner” turns into “three!  now!”

So we have told the dotter that we will be visiting China when she’s 10 or 11.  This immediately gets turned into “why not when I’m 9?  Or 8?” whenever it comes up.

Why not?  Well, there are finances.  A trip to China is spendy:  there are the flights, the hotels, the meals, the tours, the museums, the tour guides, more.  This means saving up money.  (Sigh.  Really.  I actually looked just now at real, current prices for heritage tours, plus prices for air fare.  So, yeah, 10…that would give us enough time to save up the dough.)  In addition, there’s the question of maturity.  A trip when she’s 8 is likely to become a blur when she’s an adult, whereas a trip when she’s 10 is more likely to leave specifics in the memory.

A trip to China when she’s young is not an “if”, though it may have seemed like it to some readers.  A series of trips to China is an “if”.  In a perfect world, we would have enough money to traipse across the continents whenever the whim took us, but this is not a perfect world.  (Actually, in a perfect world, she would have been raised by her birthparents, and this would all be moot.)  We are able to say “Yes, we will take you to China” once; we cannot guarantee more than that.

My international adoptee readers may not like that, but that’s the way it goes:  We can schedule one trip, we may schedule two, and it would be really nice but very unlikely to do more than that before the dotter hits college age and starts wanting to make her own travel itineraries, probably including such parent-pleasing destinations as Ft. Lauderdale or Baja California during spring break.

(Excuse me while I start hyperventilating and practically faint at the very thought of my darlin’ innocent dotter in the midst of the heathen sun-loving, fun-loving, drinking & debauching freshmen and sophomores who crowd into the resorts during spring break.  Specifically male freshmen and sophomores who might be eyeing her with lustful intent.  ACK!  La-la-la, I’m not thinking about it!!!!)

Ahem.  Back now.

My non-adoption-related blog readers may think we shouldn’t do it at all.  That’s what’s interesting being the parent of an internationally adopted child in these days of Ye Olde Interwebz:  one can read all the mutterings, meanderings, thoughts and rants and dispassionately logical layouts of adult adoptees, and become assimilated into the Adoption Borg–but not quite enough, at which point the non-adoption people in one’s life think that you have become totally and absolutely obsessive about adoption and you’re going to turn the child into a neurotic wanker as a result. 

The upshot of all this:  none of your audience is completely satisfied.  Well, phooey on that:  We’re doing what we can, the best we think we can, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go suck lemons.  Or something like that.  Mainly, we’re tootling along in life doing what we think is best, and trying to keep adoption issues and Chinese culture an open item to integrate into the family dynamic without turning it into the be-all, end-all, and still doing the normal school- and summer-camp- and gymnastics- and holiday-gatherings- and family-visits-balance in life.

November keeps going, and I keep posting.  But by this point in time, it starts dragging.  I open up the blogging software and stare at a blank page, thinking, “There must be something interesting to blog about!”

Oh, there is.

I have my little list of questions to answer, from earlier in the month.  There’s still the “did you ever think of a sibling for OmegaDotter?” and the “There are people who deliberately cut off the culture of heritage?!?!” questions.

There’s also the comments on my “Dear Diary” post, which I do mean to respond to.

I also have a “great ladies of the family” series of posts in mind, talking about my great-aunties and how really nifty they were.

Plus a few more book reviews.

But right now, here’s the reality:

OmegaDad is out of town, at Chena Hot Springs (very cool place, by the way!), doing a work retreat/training/study combo.  I am left at home, holding down the fort.  This makes me realize just how very nice it is to have both of us here, together, functioning as a family, each of us (including the dotter) doing different things to keep the family rolling right along.  Not necessarily a lot, mind you, but each of us contributing enough to keep the rest from feeling like there’s just too much to do and not enough time to do it.

For instance, when OmegaDad is at home, I can take an hour earlier in the evening to putter about, think about things, and have something to start with when I face that blank page.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the parenting schtick, which takes time away from the blogging schtick.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the pet schtick.  Right now, that means checking on the chickens to be sure none of the other girls are coming down with The Chicken Plague.

With OmegaDad away, if I have a sick headache (like I did this afternoon), there are only two choices:  suck it up and deal with things while I’m feeling like puking and crying, or else (which I did) retreating to the bedroom, napping, and (a) letting the dotter play ToonTown and (b) letting the dotter watch TV until I wake up feeling better.  The dotter was a dream, making sure that she only did ToonTown for an hour (the Rule) and making sure that, when she turned on the TV, she turned it down and closed our bedroom door so it didn’t bother me.

It all boils down to one word:  Wah.  Or a command:  Pity me!  Har.  As if.  The world is full of single moms, and I salute them, because I don’t think I could do it all on my own, all the time.

I’m very tired.

I’ve spent the day putting small amounts of medicated water into the beak of a very very sick chicken, who wasn’t eating and wasn’t drinking.

And now I have to wrap up a dead chicken and figure out what to do with her.

Then I have to figure out how to let the dotter know that yet another of our pets has died.

Somewhere in there, I want to go to bed and sleep for days.

Chickens may be dumb clucks, but they have personalities and character.  Sarafina was a very sweet bird.

…Goes one of our chickens.  She’s been coughing and pretty languid for a couple of days; when we checked the chickens this evening, she had a bloody nose.

Dr. Google didn’t help.  But after some digging, the only things I could find that produce a bloody nostril discharge in chickens were avian influenza (ack!) and a piece by the USDA that said “serious avian disease”.

I was meaning to respond to some comments made by new readers to my post Dear Diary, but that will have to wait.  (Thanks to TonguMom for the link!)  Time to go out into the 17 below zero Fahrenheit weather and haul a sick chicken back into the garage…

Long ago and far away, when I was a teen-seguing-into-young-adult, I worked downtown in Chicago.  A block away from my office was Carson Pirie Scott & Co. (…sigh…), there were glamorous stores galore on State Street, and half a block away was the wondrousness that was Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore.  The paperback books were downstairs, and the science fiction area was tucked away in the back righthand corner.  It was a glorious spot for me to hang out in on rainy or snowy days, either during lunch hour or after work.

For a few years, I noticed a book on the shelves called “The Forgotten Beasts of Eld “, by a lady named Patricia McKillip, but never purchased it.  It had a stylized tapestry cover, with a white-haired girl surrounded by huge Beasts, and I would pick it up, read the back cover blurb–all of a paragraph long–and put it back, never being really tempted enough to buy it.  At the time, my 60 cents was better spent on Andre Nortons or (Oh, please don’t despise me!) Barbara Cartland (I swear, I swear, I stopped buying those things, really, truly, before she started writing in paragraphs one sentence long.).  (God, I can’t believe I am actually admitting to having purchased that woman’s books!)

Anyway.  One day, I broke down and bought the book.

I have been hooked on Patricia McKillip’s writing ever since.

The writing is lyrical, poetic, spare, sometimes haunting.  It is as if someone had taken an old myth, sung and storied for hundreds of years, and written it down as a novel.

Sybel is a witch, living isolated and alone on the top of a mountain, the daughter and granddaughter of cold, emotionless wizards who lived apart from humanity and “called” to whatever they wanted–including female companionship.  She has inherited a collection of Beasts, magical, wondrous creatures from myth and legend, who were “called” by her father and grandfather to live upon the mountain.  There is the Cat Moriah, there is the Falcon Ter, the Lyon Gules, the dragon Gyld, and most wondrous of all, the white-tusked Boar Cyrin, who speaks in riddles and koans.  (”The giant Grol was struck once in the eye by a stone, so that it turned and looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there.”)

All Sybel wants is to live her life with her Beasts and to find the Lyralin, a huge white bird with trailing wings, and “call” it to her.  But one day, her life is upended by a man in armor pounding at her gate.  He is carrying a baby.  He insists she take and rear the child, because it is the only place in the world where the child will live.

She takes in the child, saying she has cared for Beasts before, and surely caring for an infant can’t be that much different?

The warrior returns over the years at uneven intervals.  And between these visits and the growth of the baby, Sybel becomes drawn into the loves, hates, dramas and wars that pervade the outside world.  All the while, she is searching for the Lyralin, and begins being stalked by a mysterious, dark, foreboding being called Blammor. 

Darkness and light, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, isolation and immersion, and the nature of being true to yourself are all balanced in this book, written in a murmuring, poetic manner.

It’s short, it has absolutely no Dark Lords or elves or we-must-stop-the-end-of-the-world quests, but it ended up winning the World Fantasy Award the year it was written.  It was out of print for many years, and apparently McKillip does not regard it fondly, but it has been re-released.  I love McKillip’s later books as well, and would recommend any of them, but her writing is more…um…mannered now.  Beasts is McKillip as a fresh young writer, finding her voice, and it knocked my socks off 30 years ago (almost forty?!).

Okay, not the dark.  But definitely the cold.

The local school district had H1N1 vaccinations for registered students.  Having read tales of people waiting in lines for three, four hours to get the shot, I determined we should get there early.  We got there, not the first, but close to it, and waited inside the outer doors, but were not allowed inside the inner doors until it was Time.

In the meantime, more people came with their kids.  And more.  The airlock filled up with people.  And then still more came.

And these idiots propped the door open.

It was 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gah.

But once the time came, we got in and out within ten minutes.  The dotter and I went off to lunch together, then off to her gymnastics class, and then home again.

Not a sign of pain in her arm, not a whiff of fever, not a single side effect.  She was happy as a clam all day long.