OmegaMom

When we first moved to Arizona, we lived in the area of Former State Capital.  OmegaDad would drive up to Small Mountain University Town on Monday mornings, and return on Friday evenings or when his field trip was over (at first, this was ten days out in the field, six days off).  I would drive down to the Valley of Death on Monday mornings, stay with Great-Grandma in Sun City, and then drive back on Friday evenings.

Then OmegaDad’s job switched from term-temp (a two-year stint) to permanent.  This is a Big Thing in fed work, and a Good Thing.

We knew that we could now depend on being in SMUT for quite a while, so it was time to look for a home.

The bankers we contacted pre-approved us for what was, to us, an ungodly amount of money.  We shook our heads at each other and decided we’d look for something more in our range–which was, alas, quite cheap for SMUT.  (Even then, housing prices in SMUT were outrageous.)

One place our realtor suggested we look when we gave her our price range was Mountainaire.  We wanted Kachina Village.  Or Munds Park.  Anyplace away from the train noise.  (I can live with train noise; I grew up in Chicago and almost always lived near the El.  OmegaDad, however, thought that train noise would always intrude–he didn’t realize that the noise fades into the background when you live with it.)

Mountainaire was a small enclave in the forest, with about five hundred houses, half of which were used only in the summertime weekends by vacationing families.  Once upon a time, it had been a logging camp.  Then it became a vacation home area.  At the time we were looking, it was becoming a place for first-time homebuyers, young couples just starting out.

As we drove through there, our immediate reaction was:  “We can’t live here.  It’s way too hippy-dippy for us.  We could have lived here ten years ago, when we were young, but not now.”

The roads were dirt roads.  The houses were mostly teeny tiny.  There was a plethora of trailers-in-blankets–small trailers and mobile homes that had been covered over and expanded upon. 

There were oodles of cute little A-frames that were (maybe) one bedroom. 

There were a slew of houses that had simply accreted over the years, as owners had added on and added on as they got more money. 

And scattered throughout, there were newer homes, especially at the back, up on the hill. 

Rumor had it that one house, somewhere in Mountainaire, had a septic tank that was made of an old Volkswagen bus that had been set into a hole in the ground…

But we simply couldn’t live there.  No way.  We wanted Kachina Village, a slightly more upscale enclave across the highway.  They had paved roads!  And natural gas!  Woot!  Up-town style, dudes!

But I found this house on the internet.  It was a log home (we had always wanted to live in a log home–we had spent a few evenings rhapsodizing about log homes when we first met).  It was cute.  It was up on the hill, so it wasn’t as dusty (the houses at the bottom of the hill, where the one road entering the enclave came in, were subjected to large amounts of traffic and dust).  So I sent OmegaDad off to look at it.

He says he walked in the front doors, and said, “This is it.”

So we ended up living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods after all, for nine years.  And we loved it.  We loved our neighbors.  We loved the little store at the foot of the hill, owned by J and S and S’s parents.  We loved the feeling of community.  We loved that we could walk a few minutes and be out in the middle of the forest.  We loved that, on snowy days, we could pop on our cross-country skis and ski down the street into the forest.  We loved the pizzas and steaks from the Mountainaire Tavern.  We loved that we knew the guy who walked his ancient old dawg every day, making sure he went slowly enough so that his arthritic companion could keep up.  We loved that, by the time we left, we knew almost everyone who lived there, and most of the vacationers who returned year after year.  Scruffy and down-at-the-heels as it looks, it has character and community.

OmegaDad has been sending pictures from the Al-Can highway.  Right now, I’m using a chintzy, cheesy “easy” picture editor from Microsoft, so the end result for the pictures is ell-oh-you-ess-why, lousy.

But I thought I’d share them with you anyway, and when I have access to my own laptop again, I’ll re-do the pics and re-upload them.

Firstly, we have road signs. 

Welcome to the Northern Rockies:

Moose crossing:

Sasquatch crossing:

Caution!  Buffalo on the road!

Then we have the real things:

A Sasquatch (alas, wooden):

Another piece of high human artistry, the Big Beaver:

A couple of “awwww”-worthy babies:

(a fox baby, then a baby moose…note the car window at the bottom of the picture.  OmegaDad says that he could have swatted the baby moose on the bottom, he was that close…)

The buffalo, apparently, is much bigger than the Plains buffalo OmegaDad is accustomed to; he estimated about a third bigger?

A trio of bighorn sheep.

And, in closing, some just plain drop-dead gorgeous scenery…Muncho Lake:

An unnamed river:

My cousin, also visiting GrannyJ, when viewing these pictures told me, in a dire, warning voice:  “You’re going to be there a loooong, loooong time!”

OmegaDad wants me roadtripping with him.  I want to roadtrip with him.  Looks like a lot of fun!

(Coming–The Long Goodbye:  Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods; Interlude:  A Surprise; a report on the experiment with the cats and how to ship turtles via FedEx, and more!)

OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump moved to Arizona in 1981.  I was 22.  Everyone in the family was amazed.

OmegaGranny had lived in Arizona, on and off, as a child, and remembered the Arizona mountains fondly.  Her mother lived in Sun City, near Phoenix.  She had aunts and uncles who lived there, also.  So as she and Uncle Grump were nearing “retirement age”, she kept propagandizing Arizona as a place to move.  She and Uncle Grump subscribed to a real estate catalog for Arizona, and began daydreaming.

One day, out of the blue, the family got the word:  Uncle Grump, who had hardly ever left Chicago since he returned from Japan after World War II, had not only gotten on an airplane to fly to Arizona–spur of the moment!–but had signed for a piece of property in the central Arizona mountains in a nowhere spot on the map called “Wilhoit”.  OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump were moving!

After they moved, I spent all my vacations out there with them.  I’d fly out, drive up to the spot on the highway called Wilhoit (miles away from anything resembling a real town), and we would spend a week or two driving the backroads of central Arizona, exploring canyons and forests and Indian ruins.  They were in the (lower) mountains, and the view from their house went on forever–rolling foothills, dark canyon slashes across the hills, mountains in the distance.  As the days progressed, the light from the sun would shift angles, and every moment, the old view would morph into something new and beautiful.

Now, if you speak to people about “Arizona”, the immediate stereotypical image they get is of saguaro cacti, deserts, coyotes, and the Grand Canyon.  (In the typical tourist’s mind, the Grand Canyon is somehow smack in the middle of the desert.)  And Phoenix and Scottsdale.  So the generic view is that Arizona is all desert, all flat, all dry, and always 110+F in the summer.  It was my view, too, as all I had to really define the state was my visits to grandma in Sun City–which is definitely not the way to experience Arizona.

This wasn’t the Arizona my parents introduced me to.  The one my parents showed me was, in my mind, heart-rendingly beautiful.

So after a few years of visiting them on my vacations, and realizing that I was crying on the way back to Chicago, missing the mountains and the wide open spaces and (of course) my mom and dad, prompted by my dad having back surgery, I decided to move out there.

It was great.  There was only one problem:  money.  Where mom and dad lived (they had moved into the city that was 18 miles away from their spot on the road, because they were spending all their time there anyway) was a cute town, and very pretty and piney, but there was a distinct lack of good jobs.

So I moved out to the Bay Area, got a good job, paid off a whole slew of debt, decided to go back to college and finish off that damned degree, met Mr. OmegaMom-to-Be, and moved to (ugh) Lubbock to be with him (trust me, this is a sign of True Love).

As Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be finished off his Master’s degree in soil science, he started looking for jobs.

At the same time, he was currying favor with the in-laws by sucking up to OmegaGranny.  To do this, he regularly shared gardening tips, cool info he could come up with related to his degree subject, and anything more.  He knew that there was a government agency that had–free for anyone who wanted the information–surveys of various areas.  He called up the state soil scientist of Arizona so that he could get the survey for OmegaGranny’s area.

They started talking.

It turned out that there was going to be a survey of the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead starting that summer.

It just so happened that Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be was due to graduate with his master’s degree that summer.

State soil scientist told Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be to keep in touch.  MOMTB did.  And that summer, as mentioned, the surveys were opening up and being staffed.  MOMTB applied, was accepted, and there we were…

…moving to Arizona.

But not the Arizona of the stereotypes–the Arizona of my experience.

Once, when OmegaGranny and I took the shuttle down from Former State Capital to the Valley of Death to visit elderly relatives, we were stuck with a young man from the East Coast.  Philadelphia?  Baltimore?  Boston?  I can’t remember.  But what I do remember is that he spent the entire trip complaining about how BROWN and DRY and UGLY and HORRIBLE Arizona was, and how he couldn’t wait to get somewhere where it was green again.

OmegaGranny and I just raised our eyebrows at each other…because, to us, Arizona is beautiful.  We see the high chaparral, with its junipers and pinyon pines dotting the scrubby grasslands, as glorious.  We love the stark beauty of the geology that is revealed by highway roadcuts.  We love the way the dun and brown grasslands turn vivid emerald green when the rainy season starts.  Walking in the piney woods when the sun has been baking the bark of the trees so that the vanilla scent makes your head spin…or smelling the sharp, metallic aroma of rain hitting the rocks somewhere within a 30-mile radius…clambering through the riparian tangles that line creekbeds as we look for a particularly good area of petroglyphs…The shshhhh of snow falling in the wintertime (yes.  You can hear the snow fall.) or the shshhhh of snow melting in the sunlight…the constant yammer of the ravens and the jays…the vivid flash of mountain bluebirds flying by…the splash of color from pink penstemon or vivid red Indian paintbrush or the crumped-kleenex look of prickly poppy flowers…

There’s no way to describe just how much I love the real Arizona, the one that so many people will never encounter.  I will miss it.  I hope to return “home” someday.

Sunday afternoon, we were tired, it was raining, I just wanted to get things done, and the dotter was saying, “I’m hungry.  I’m thirsty.”  Multiple times.  So I thought about it, and said to her, “Okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to load up the car, drive down to Grandma Julie’s, and then I’m going to turn right around, come back, and finish cleaning up.”

Um.

That went over like a lead balloon.

Her eyes welled up.  She started sobbing quietly.  Then she started howling.  She leaned against me and begged me, “Don’t leave me alone!  Don’t go!  I’ll be quiet!”

Multiple times.  Louder and louder.  More and more.  Until she had worked herself up into hysterics.

So, we ended up packing the rental car, leaving a bunch of stuff undone, and heading down the hill.

Monday, I felt like someone had run over me with one of those pavement rollers…but by late afternoon, I mentioned to the dotter, once again, that I was going to have to go up the hill to finish cleaning the house.

Her eyes welled up.  She started weeping.  Then she started sobbing.  She leaned against me and begged me (again), “Don’t leave me alone!  Please!  Don’t go!  I won’t say I’m hungry!  I won’t say I’m thirsty!  I can help clean!  Please don’t go!”

And worked herself up into another set of hysterics.  This one so bad that she ended up finally falling asleep in the midst of the hysterics, catching her breath in a tired sob in the middle of her sleep every few minutes.

Tuesday, I had to do it.  By the time I got out the door, she was screaming, and trying to break away from Grandma Julie.

Let me put it bluntly:  She’s absolutely freaked by the entire move.  She’s terrified of being abandoned.

So I drove up the hill, more concerned with the dotter than I was with myself, which is a good thing.  Because when I finally finished cleaning out every last little thing, and took one last look at the house we’ve lived in for nine years, I didn’t cry.

I cried on Saturday.  At lunch with OmegaDad, I suddenly started weeping out of the blue, tears leaking out of my eyes.  At dinner with OD and the dotter, once again, I just started weeping.

But when I turned around and took this last picture of the empty house, I didn’t cry.  I took the picture, closed the door, locked it (yes!  We found the house keys!  After 8.5 years of not needing keys due to the dawg, it was a miracle we found those damned things!), walked out to the rental car, and drove away…I didn’t cry.

Yesterday, in the midst of my bleary-eyed weariness, I managed to make contact with Singing Bird to arrange to meet for lunch.  SBird is headed off to the East Coast to introduce her daughter, The Bee, to the family, and we wanted to get together before she left.

So OmegaGranny and OmegaDotter and I all managed to pull ourselves together, get bathed and dressed and hair combed to look presentable, and schlepped off to the local eatery to meet up with The Bird and The Bee.

The Bee is–to put it bluntly–a darling.  She’s smart and funny and sweet, and amazingly well-behaved for a two-year-old.  As a result, I have baby lust (again).

The dotter was charmed.  A baby!  Somewhere in the midst of all the socializing, she said to me, in a somewhat harried voice, “I’m sounding just like a mommy!”  Dotter and Bee colored together, and played the hand game (you know the one, where people layer their hands on top of each other, and the person with the hand on the bottom pulls it out to plop it on the top of the heap, and it ends up with everyone just flapping hands all over the place and laughing…).  The dotter, at the same time, was not charmed at not being the center of attention (her preferred spot), but did a yeoman job of trying to put it behind her.

After a yummy lunch, we kidnapped SBird and Bee over to GrannyJ’s house, where we played puzzles and the dotter decided to paint Bee’s fingernails with her new purple fingernail polish.  Bee wasn’t quite sure how to take this, and kept turning puzzled and somewhat perturbed looks at her mom, as if to say, “What on earth is this person doing to me, Mommy??”

Bee was a special needs adoption; she has a cleft lip and palate, which need some more surgeries (due in September).  In the meantime, her parents have taught her sign language, and she “talks” up a storm.  Right now, she’s not allowed to have milk products, as the pediatrician is trying to figure out if she has allergies; the dotter’s milk cup ended up next to Miss Bee, and Miss Bee, wasting no time, tried to abscond with it.  I removed the straw, thinking that would stop any prohibited substance abuse, but Miss Bee immediately picked up the lidded up, eyeballed it, saw where the straw came out, and promptly tried getting milk out of the straw hole.

Oops!  Little stinker!

It was a delightful interlude.

Onto other subjects:  OmegaDad is bedded down for the night in Great Falls, Montana.  While he thinks most of Montana is “kick-ass gorgeous!”, Great Falls falls flat for him.  The dawg is behaving well, OmegaDad thinks satellite radio rocks, and, since he has the laptop, he is able to play Scrabulous while talking to me and the dotter on the phone.

In the meantime, I am sitting on the floor with a borrowed laptop, hooked into mom’s DSL router, writing this blog post while she writes her own.  It’s very handy having her available so I can ask, for instance, how to spell “yeoman”, and whether it is “Great Falls” or “Grand Falls”, and she can gripe to me about her photo program saving edited photos in mysterious places.  It ends up being a very sociable approach.

We are here. I am tired and I have a cold.

The dotter wants daddy. Daddy is en route between Beaver, UT, and Great Falls, MT, so he’s not available.

The house is not quite empty; I need to trek back up the mountain to finish cleaning and collect houseplants.

Damn, I’m tired!

It’s very odd how echo-y a house gets without its stuff. 

It’s also very depressing (and distressing) to realize how many dustbunnies have been living in this house with us for all these years.  Ugh.  Of course, an ordinary fairly decent housekeeper wouldn’t have them.  Or only a few.  But a bad housekeeper (aka “Me”) has an amazing ability to collect dust, grunge, dustbunnies, and other schmutz.

The end result is that I’m dreadfully embarassed.  And glad that it’s only the movers (who seem to be really nice guys) who are seeing it and dealing with it.

The Alaska Thru Van is parked out front.  The furniture and the sea of boxes is out of the house.  There’s still a buncha junk in the garage, which the guys will arrive at 7:30 a.m. to pack and load.

Spacemom asked what The Plan is for the next few weeks.

First–tomorrow.  The bank, for us to get a Power of Attorney notarized, and to deposit the dotter’s money.  A last cleaning.  Some painting.  I hope to ferry the dotter off to OAOTL’s house for a while, and to K’s house, and maybe to R’s house.  I take houseplants to the vet’s, and offer some to the neighbors.  OmegaDad outfits the automobile.

Sunday–OmegaDad and the dawg set out bright and early in the morning.  I go around taking pictures of places for mementoes, load up tomatoes and Christmas cactus, and head down the hill to OmegaGranny’s.

Monday–Veg.

Tuesday–A visit with Singing Bird, I’m hoping!

Wednesday through August 2–Veg.  Swim with the dotter.  Take mamasan and the dotter off to various lakes and fun stuff.

August 2–the dotter, the cats and I drive down to the Valley of Death and get on an airplane to Alaska.  OmegaDad (hopefully!) meets us there and we drive off to Small Town, Alaska, and our itty bitty in-law apartment on the lake with a bazillion retired airline pilots.

Thereafter–The Alaska Adventure, including househunting.

Oh, yeah–I am now an official 3/4th time telecommuter taking 4 weeks’ vacation and then starting work again when the dotter starts school!

Our house is mired in boxes.  Boxes flood the living room.  Boxes make the office a (dusty and sneezy) maze.  Boxes sit proudly in the middle of the kitchen.

The cupboards are bare.

The dotter’s room features an ungodly number of boxes labeled “toys”.  I foresee a severe pruning once we get into another house.  Yes, it could have been done beforehand.  If we hadn’t had folks visiting the first weekend after we learned…if we hadn’t needed to fix up and paint the bathrooms and the kitchen and the hallway…if we had only had some more time.

The cats are upset.  The dawg is upset.

Last night, we asked the dotter to pick out two stuffed animals to take with us, at which point it became apparent that there was either an inability to understand the concept of “six weeks without our stuff” or a determined reluctance to believe it.  OmegaDad and I sat on our bed with a dotter snuggled with her head pushed into my chest and explained–again–the whole concept of “moving”.  Oh, she gets it, but she doesn’t want to get it.

OmegaDad’s crew threw him a goodbye lunch yesterday.  My crew threw me a goodbye lunch today.  I have yet another goodbye lunch at the local sushi joint with my supervisor tomorrow.  My supervisor has been joking about “the tundra” and igloos and Northern Exposure.

We located my passport and OmegaDad’s, but not the dotter’s.  However, I did find a fairly official looking Adoption Agreement with English translation, and have known (all along) where our official red-bound document with pics and seals is.  These documents go with me (except, of course, OmegaDad’s passport).

The big moving truck with “Alaska Thru Traffic” or some such specialized ad slogan on it will be loaded tomorrow.

We’re really moving.

Really.

OMG.

Once again, we didn’t have much rain.  But we did have an awesome rainbow stretching across the sky as the dotter and I drove home.  If you look really closely at the picture, you’ll see the second rainbow above the first.

It’s not as spectacular as the one OmegaDad and I saw one day which was so vivid, so vibrant, that it was as if there were a fancy neon sign in the sky…that one had multiple people pulling off the highway to stop and take pictures, it was so amazing.

But this one was pretty bright, showed the entire arc, and had a flitting second arc that faded in and out of sight.

The dotter informed me that she knew a song about rainbows.  I was thinking of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, but then she started singing “The Rainbow Connection”.

I’ll take this lovely rainbow as a Sign.

OmegaDad and I spent an hour at the bank, signing things and having them notarized.  OmegaDad had taken guppies off to the aquarium store, and apparently our wildly mutated guppies wowed the employees there.  They asked him if he was a breeder…hah.  Many of the guppies were purchased in a futile attempt to feed them to some turtles.

Tomorrow the packers arrive.  We’re trying to get last-minute stuff sorted out.  I’ll try to update tomorrow night!

The bathroom.  For most people, but not for me.  As I’ve mentioned before, when I go in to take my morning shower, the dotter invariably soon comes in needing to use the toilet.

Furthermore, if she is pooping, she demands company.  Hey, everyone’s got their quirks; I’m hoping that this one vanishes into the mists as she gets older.

To top it all off, this is where she tosses deep subjects at me.  Not the car; the car is where she gets words defined.

This morning, she asked what a nanny does.

In the Chinese adoption world, a “nanny” is what everyone calls the workers in the orphanages.  So I said that a nanny is someone who takes care of the children in the orphanage.

I have a story that I usually tell, but this time, it was time to sit down on the bathroom carpet while she did her stuff (”Ewww!  Don’t look, Mommy!”) and talk to her somewhat more seriously–at a more advanced level–about the whole story.

She wanted to know whether they took care of her forever before we “picked her”.

I told her that she was found at the gates of a factory/power plant, and that her mommy in China took care of her for a week before that.

She wanted to know why she was left there.  Oy.  So I had to talk–very superficially–about how people in China were only allowed to have one child.  She asked if that was why she was left there; I had to answer that I didn’t know, that there might be some other reason.

I also had to say that we didn’t “pick” her, but that she was chosen for us.

She asked if her first mommy was dead or sick; I said that I didn’t know, but I figured she was still alive and thought about her fairly often.

These conversations take place at odd moments.  I just grab them when they come, and do my best.  Just a few snippets, and then we move on to “Look, kiddo, aren’t you done yet?!” and dashing off to get hair combed and shoes on.

We’ve been trying to see lots of her buddies this past week and this week; when we were leaving to get together with K. at the park on Sunday, she exclaimed in a world-weary way, “Another playdate?!”  ::sigh::  “I’m having all these playdates because we’re moving to Alaska.”

Yah, sweetie.  Trying to cram them in.  OAOTL on Saturday, K. on Sunday, a gymnastics class with S. on Monday…Lets her see her buds, and me have an hour or two of down time.

I have some memes to do, but even memes take too much thinking right now.  So I will get to them when I get to them–I think I have been tagged for three memes, by Carol Ann, by GrannyJ, and by PreTzel.

So there’s one list.

Then there’s the list of cancellations:  Water, electricity, gas, garbage, newspaper, insurance on the Trusty Justy.

Then there’s the packing list:  OmegaDad needs stuff for 10-11 days on the road, with dawg.  OmegaDotter and I need a set of clothes for warm (down the hill with OmegaGranny) and cool and damp (Alaska).  I am to schlep a mighty collection of Christmas cactus down the hill with us to mom’s house; she, in turn, is to mail us cuttings so we can start our collection all over again.

Then there are the Things That Need To Be Done.

I have boxes of books to take to the local second-hand bookseller; word has it that they will actually pay money.  Not a lot.  But I had been under the impression that they would only do credit for other books, which wouldn’t work very well for us.

Aside from the Christmas cactus, we have a whole herd of houseplants to Do Something With.

Then there are the guppies and guppies and guppies and guppies.  And two growing plecostomi.  And a newt.  They are to be delivered to the local fish store on Wednesday.

Then there’s fifty kazillion goodbye lunches and a dinner or two.

And packing–carefully!–the dotter’s horse collection.  And a decision on which two stuffed animals can come with us to GrannyJ’s house…if any.  After all, there are animals there that will probably do in a pinch, though Calhoun or Bubby may be required.

The house is looking amazingly big.  One of the appraisers called OmegaDad the day after she visited, and she said, “Did you know that if you include the office (n.b.:  converted from one-half of the garage), your house is actually almost 1500 square feet, not 1248, like the county says?”  Suddenly, it looks like it.  Which makes the 1500 sq. ft. houses we’ve been looking at on the internet more dicey, in my opinion.  Though, of course, those houses have closets (CLOSETS!!!!), and two-car or three-car garages that aren’t sliced down the middle for the office-cum-junk-room.

We still have our eyes on one particular house, which is still available.  When asked why it was still available (it’s spectacular, or at least to us it is), the realtor opined that it was “too far out of town”.

We shall see.

Kris asked how long I plan to be offline.  Amazingly enough, if I can get my hands on a computer on a regular basis, no time at all.  Assuming, of course, that our temporary quarters have some type of internet connection.  (OMG.  What if there isn’t?  ACK!)  GrannyJ has a fine Mac, so I’ll be posting from there, and, while OmegaDad is taking the laptop, once we hook up, I’ll have my hot little hands on it once again, and will be able to cruise by an internet cafe or something if the temp quarters don’t have internet.  (ACK!)

The dotter has been singing “Happy Together” with the Turtles CD in the car, but she doesn’t have all the words down quite right yet.  I thought the post title was especially fun.

One and Only True Love stopped by with his mom and dad to present an oh-so-sweet piece of artwork, full of hearts and and flowers and “best friends”, to the dotter.  So OAOTL’s mom and I sat around chatting, while dad went off to look at yard sales, and then, when he returned, he asked what we were going to do with the Trusty Justy.  Sold!

Then they hauled the dotter and her bike off with them for an afternoon with OAOTL.  Ah, joy!  Another few hours of being able to pack and paint and clean (even more) without the dotter underfoot!

OmegaDad and I have a yin and yang thing going on.  Remember how totally freaked out I was?  Well, now that we have less than a week (the packers are coming on Thursday, the loaders on Friday), and we’ve painted and fixed up bathrooms and hallways and had Merry Maids in to scrub cabinets in the kitchen, and removed many boxes from various spots of the house and tossed a large quantity of stuff, I am feeling much more relaxed.

OmegaDad, however, was all laid back and nonchalant when I was uptight, and is now frantic.  “We have only four days left!  How are we going to get everything done in time!”

Hah.

Well, it doesn’t help that the paperwork that the residential property handling company sent us had both our names misspelled.  I noticed that mine was wrong right away, so called up to have them FedEx us a new packet.  Then OmegaDad read it and noticed right away that his name was incorrect, too.  So they have to send us yet another copy of the packet.

But things will get done.  And I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It’s amazing what things you find when you’re cleaning and packing and scraping and painting in a house you’ve lived in for nine years.

There are, for instance, the three boxes of toddler 18-month-size clothes.  I could barely bear to look through them, because it was a trip down memory lane.  The cute little grey footed pajamas that the dotter wore in the pictures we took of our first Christmas home with her…alas, those pictures are on the other computer, or I would post one of them.

We had received our referral in early November, and our agency said that we would probably be traveling in six to eight weeks.  The previous three months we had been working (very slowly) on the living room, pulling out the old early-’80s splotchy brown carpeting, scraping and painting the walls, and, most importantly, sanding the logs.

Hand-sanding the logs.

Which is what we had done in the utility room and both bedrooms…hand-sanded, slowly and carefully, sanded the “rustic” woodwork around the windows, and polyurethaned the logs and painted the window trim.

But when we hit the living room, what had worked in the much smaller rooms suddenly seemed to be taking forever–just like our wait for referral.  The 24-foot expanse of log on one wall was just overwhelming to us.

When we got the call, and the notice that we’d be traveling to China soon, we renewed our attack.  Sort of.  After all, we had six weeks to eight weeks to get it done, right?

Wrong.

Two weeks later, we got the call that we’d be traveling in…two more weeks!

Were we done with the logs?  Gawd, no.  Did we have carpet even ordered?  Nope.  Had we painted the sanded window trim and beams?  Nope.

Thanksgiving was coming up, which would automatically eat up two or three days in itself.

The 24-foot expanse just seemed more and more dire, as did the 24-by-24 expanse of flooring to remove nails from and screw down (screwed flooring squeaks a lot less).  OmegaDad and I were grim and determined, but it seemed a Sisyphean task.  The years of grime on the unfinished logs just weren’t coming off, and we were, by this time, sick and tired of hand-sanding.

Finally, the weekend before Thanksgiving, in an epic fight, I convinced OmegaDad that we should just rent ourselves a sandblaster and give it a try.  It would have been better to have a corn-blaster, as that’s the preferred way to go on refinishing logs; sand-blasting is too strong and shreds the surface of the logs, whereas corn-blasting is much gentler.  But corn-blasters for rent are few and far between, and expensive as hell…whereas you can find a sandblaster for rent at your handy-dandy local U-Rent-It place.

By the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, we had shoveled 600 pounds of sand into the sandblaster and out of the living room (post-sanding).  The grime was gone!  Of course, the surface of the logs was shredded, just as advertised.  But that shredded stuff was easily removed by our hand-sander, and suddenly we were making progress.  The blasted and sanded logs were smooth.  Sexy.  Alluring.  Easily polyurethaned.  A marathon two-day stint of coat after coat of polyurethane, and we were smitten by our newly gleaming and light logs.

We had also found that the local Home Debit had a relatively inexpensive Berber carpet that they would install within the week.  (It looked grey in the Home Debit store.  Really.  It did.  It didn’t look cream-colored.  No way!  Ahem.  It was cream-colored.  Let OmegaMom pass on some heartfelt advice:  Never.  Never, ever.  Do not EVER buy cream-colored Berber carpet in a house that has two cats, a large dawg, a husband who works with soils, and dirt roads.  Just do NOT do it.  Trust me.)

And we had buddies who descended upon us to prime the walls (24 feet with a cathedral ceiling).

We also had plane tickets to China, no living room furniture, and no more time.

We trekked off to China, leaving behind the newly refinished living room, with arrival back in the States circa December 22.

We celebrated our first Christmas with the dotter in a sparkling, light-filled living room with no furniture.  We were exhausted.  (Another piece of advice from OmegaMom–don’t start remodeling your home three months before you expect an adoption referral.)  But we had our darling dotter, dressed in her cute little grey bear-print footed jammies, and Christmas presents wrapped in colorful paper, and each other–and that’s what counted.

One of the many splendors of monsoon season is that bugs appear.  Poof!  Like they were freeze-dried, and the rains reconstitute them.  Even just a hint of the summer rains brings them out.

Some of the bugs are icky.  I hate, hate, hate the June Bugs; they are a kind of slimy tan color, they sit on screens and buzz, and they give me the heebie-jeebies.  I don’t know why I have such a visceral reaction, but they give me the creeps almost as much as earwigs do.

Some of the bugs are pretty ordinary, but interesting–we get hummingbird moths at this time of year as well, big, fat suckers that hover over flowers with humming wings, just like the hummingbirds (hence the name…what a surprise).

Then there are the scarab beetles.

Oh, I love the scarabs. 

The ones we have up here are brown with tan and light green stripes, about an inch-and-a-half long, officially called ten-lined june beetles.  The most interesting thing about them, in my opinion, is their lovely antennae, which are normally club-like brown things at the end of a stalk, but when they’re interested in something, the clubs spread out into a delicate fan.

They’re quite pretty and intriguing, but actually kind of dumb.

So the rains start up–even the slightest hint of rains–and the scarabs appear.  We can go out on the back deck by the door, and scoop up a scarab, admire it, and make it fan out its antennae.  They have tenacious little feet, so once you’ve got one on your hand, trying to shake it off is somewhat difficult…you have to shake hard enough to make it angry, at which point, it will hiss in irritation.

When I left Chicago, I soon found that the “night hawks” which were the sound of summer to me were nowhere to be found in the southwest.  I suspect that I will be saying farewell to my favorite scarabs, to be exchanged for (ugh) mosquitoes and black flies.  Hopefully, though, there will be other interesting small critters to discover in Alaska; I have read already that my favorite hummingbirds, the rufous hummers, actually do get as far north as Anchorage sometimes.  So we’ll try for the rufous hummers and see what kind of beautiful beetles we can find up there.

(Figlet–Yes, the rains do make our plants spring into bloom, just like the bugs–but I fear that our rains so far haven’t been enough to make things bloom.  If it does before we move, I’ll post some pics.)

I’m sure you guys can deal… from Passive-Aggressive Notes.

If you’re an IT person, or married to an IT person, or the child or parent or sibling of an IT person, you just have to check it out.

Friday night, I drove down the hill to OmegaGranny’s, the dotter sacked out in the back seat.  We got there, we dined with OG, returned to her house, and I immediately said, “Welp, kiddo, time for me to go!”

Then she dissolved into weeping.

Serious weeping.

Oh, dear.

Did I waver?

Nosirree, Bob.  Not a bit, not a whit.  I felt like a kitten killer as I drove off, but we had Things To Do, and a five-year-old underfoot, wanting entertainment, is not conducive to Doing Things.

I drove back up the hill in blissful quiet (the dotter thinks the CD changer in the car is just wonderful, and we’ve had a steady diet of the Turtles and the Beach Boys whenever she’s in the car).  I got home, and it was just me and OmegaDad.

Whoa!

I remember him!  He’s the guy I married!  I like him!  I enjoy being around him!

We spent from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. on Saturday scrubbing and packing and painting and other things.

And y’know what?  It was fun.  We Got Things Done.  We were able to take a breath after completing one project, then dive right into the next one, without worrying about feeding a child, or helping her with her horsies, or putting a new movie into the video or DVD player.  We heard no strains of Barbie.  There were no Sesame Street characters intruding on our concentration.  Nary a hair of a princess crossed our paths–or our minds.

We loved it.

And then…then…

We went out to dinner.  Just the two of us.  Together.  And had adult conversation–not x-rated adult conversation, just “what’s next on the agenda”, “omigosh, we’re moving to Alaska!”, “man, that fiddler is good!”, “I wonder what the artwork will be like up there” (after surveying the very modern southwest art in the restaurant), “We need to do x, y, and z by Tuesday”, and other mundane things.

We were able to sleep in the dark for two nights in a row.  We were able to wake up by ourselves two mornings in a row.  Both of us sank deep into weary repose immediately our heads hit the pillows, and the dawg snoring and the husband snoring didn’t wake me up (the dotter squeaking or snoring or rustling wakes me up–I’m still in that hyper-aware mode, bleah).

When we called OmegaGranny Saturday night, before heading out for dinner, the dotter, upon hearing daddy’s voice, began sobbing.  Then she asked for mommy.  Then she just wept incoherently on the phone.

I felt like a kitten killer again.  But, according to granny, she had been doing perfectly fine until we called.  (Granny already sounded a bit weary herself.)

So, despite feeling guilty as hell, and being tired as hell from the aforementioned scrubbing and packing and painting, I loved our weekend to ourselves, and plan to figure out how to do it as soon as we get to know people up in Alaska.  (”Excuse me?  Ma’am?  I see you have a five-year-old, too.  Here.  This one’s mine.  I’m sure she won’t be a bother to you tonight.  We’ll pick her up again tomorrow around five…”…pause…”Oh!  And what’s your name?  And your phone number?  Five o’clock!  Remember!  Bye!”)

Oops.  Forgot to add that she actually had a fine time at granny’s and was not a woeful weepy child when we arrived Sunday afternoon.

Okay, so as Singing Bird says, we southwesterners are rather monotonous at this time of year, yapping on and on about the weather, waiting for the rain, yearning for the monsoon season, wondering when it will start, and how long it will run, and how much rain we’ll get.

People in Texas right now must be bug-eyed at the thought of an entire region of the country wanting rain.  I’m sorry, folks.  I know you’ve been drowned to within an inch of your life, that you’re sick and tired of water.

But…being a southwestern gal, I have to dance and sing and spin about with my head arched back, just like a little kid.

It starts with tiny, wispy puffs of cloud.  As you watch, the puffs grow.  They expand.  They get fat.  They tumble over each other.  Go away for half an hour, and when you return, the little white wisps have turned into huge, towering thunderheads with leaden grey bottoms.

Usually, we have a week or two of those leaden grey bottoms producing only skeins of rain, thin veils that never reach the ground.

And then…then the miracle occurs.

Water!  Falling from the sky!

Being a born and bred Chicagah girl, there are times when my gut response to the first storms of monsoon season is just…totally incomprehensible.  After all, Chicago has one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world.  You dig a hole in the ground, and if you’re too close to the lake, you only have to dig about five feet before water starts showing up.  And, of course, it rains–wonderful, fierce midwestern storms, where you can feel the cold front passing through as the deciduous trees bend down before the wind.  The idea of just getting incoherently excited by water!  Falling from the sky! is bewildering to the Chicagah girl in me.

But there it is.

And there it was, today.  Rain.  Blessing of moisture, falling down on upturned faces in the office parking lot.  Sharp scent of hot rock and sun-warmed pines being touched by H2O.  Electrical excitement of watching the lightning sizzle between cloud and ground, and between cloud A and cloud B.

Alas, it wasn’t really much rain.  I think we managed a total of about .2 inches.  Enough to cause the aforementioned excitement, but not enough to really do diddley in the tinder-dry forest.

Last year, in June, there was a large fire in Way Cool Creek Canyon, to the west of Mills Park, the less hippy-dippy forest enclave to the south of us.  Fifteen miles away as the crow flies, but separated from us by the canyon, and by a highway.

Today’s storms brought our usual dozen or so fires started by lightning, the majority of them extinguished by hyper-vigilant firemen and women who are strung to the edge by the constant worry–”Is this the killer fire of the year?”  One of those fires, however, took hold.  Between, oh, 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., it had grown to (at least) 350 acres.  This fire is to the east of Mills Park, on our side of the highway.  It certainly didn’t look to be a mere 350 acres to me as I drove down the highway to deposit the dotter with OmegaGranny.  And driving back through the darkness, at one or two exits on the highway, it looked like the fire was right there, the red glow silhouetting ponderosas, highlighted by yellower spots here and there, and drifts of smoke.

So, a message to the karma gods:  I don’t really want the house to burn down.  I was just saying it.  ‘Kay?

Have I mentioned recently how much I love my mommy?

Honest to goodness.

I called her up this morning to beg/cajole a weekend of watching the dotter.

Practically the first words out of her mouth were, “I have an off-the-wall idea–you two need to just have the movers in there tomorrow, get everything packed and away, and just camp out in sleeping bags and eat off paper plates for the next two weeks!”

I allowed as how it was a splendid idea, but that the movers weren’t even showing up until Monday, and then it was only to put together an estimate.

Then my mom said, “I was worried about you when I read that post.  You sounded so sad.  I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it.”

Which, of course, made me start weeping.  Hell, it makes me start weeping again, writing about it.

Moms are pretty special people.

Anyway, I love my mom.  She’s special.  She always has been, and always will be.  She’s smart and funny and calming and down-to-earth.  And she writes a kick-ass blog.

Life is better today.  We whacked away at one of the bathrooms, and it looks vaguely civilized now (much better than it did before).  Bathroom #2 gets civilized this weekend.  The living room–aside from the dreadful carpeting–is actually looking empty (to me, at least), so we may be halfway to the proper “declutter” mark there.

I figured out what happened with a bunch of FY end stuff, and fixed it.

The upper-air wisps of clouds turned into Real Live Grey Thunderheads today, complete with gusts of wind and lightning, and severe thunderstorm warnings from NOAA.  Still, alas, no rain hitting the ground, though lots was drifting off the bottoms of the clouds (called “virga“).  It’s a promising start.

And, of course, I had a bunch of loyal and helpful blogging buds who virtually patted me on the head and said It Will Be All Right.  It’s astonishing just how helpful that can be!  (I promise, I am packing left & right and tossing stuff, as suggested, it’s just that we have 12 years’ worth of stuff to deal with, and sort into “stuff to be kept” and “What is this stuff?!  And why did we keep it?!”…)

So tonight I don’t feel as much like crying as I did last night.  Bit by bit, step by step, things will get better.

Then I get to spend two weeks with mamasan, the bestest mom in the world, and it seems like we might actually have monsoon-y weather by that time and we won’t be roasted.

What a difference a day makes!

I am not feeling happy.

After a humiliating piece of feedback about the house, we spent all day cleaning, painting, decluttering.  So, of course, the house looks even worse.

There’s something about a good dose of humiliation.  It makes you work like a dog.  I suppose this is good, in the generic philosophical sense, but right now it doesn’t feel good.  In reality, it makes me want to kick things, pout, and say “SCREW YOU!” to the feedback-giver.  Real mature.

In the meantime, I screwed up FY end because my brain has vacated the premises.  Anyone have an extra brain I can borrow?

Happy fourth.  I hope there were fireworks where you were; ours were cancelled on Monday.

In two weeks and one day, the movers come to pack.  They can’t come soon enough for me right now.

There were little puffs of clouds in the sky today, forming and reforming, with little veils of virga here and there.  This is promising; it means there’s moisture up aloft.  On the other hand, there’s absolutely no moisture down on the ground–our high relative humidity has hit 18% once today and once yesterday; yesterday’s low relative humidity was 2%, today’s was 3%.  Yesterday’s high was 93F; today’s was 96F.  It’s hot, it’s dry as a bone, and the beginning of monsoon season means we’re going to have a bunch of dry thunderstorms as that moisture aloft starts building up.  Let’s put 96F, 3% humidity, and dry thunderstorms together, why don’t we?

Maybe the house will just burn up and we’ll be able to get the insurance money…

Aren’t I just a little ray of sunshine?

…that GWB has commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence.

No, really! I’m surprised! Honestly! Aren’t you?

(OmegaMom walks off, pocketing her winnings from the casino at Rick’s Cafe Americain.)

Some person named Natalie Goldman has this to say about stress:  “Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”

Har.  This woman knows me, I’m sure.  I found her by googling “stress quotes”.

Some people’s response to stress is to eat like crazy.  Other people drink.  Many people get angry.  Some just cry a lot, or go into exercise overdrive, or go into an emotional deep-freeze.

Me?  I sleep.

In the middle of the day, my eyelids start drooping and all I want to do is find a place to curl up, close my eyes, and sleep.

It’s almost a narcoleptic style compulsion.

Y’see, when you sleep, The Real World goes away.  You don’t have to worry about how the dawg is going to handle 10 days in a car.  You don’t have to peer out the front doors at the people walking down the street who have stopped to grab a real estate flyer.  You don’t have to contemplate looking for a new abode.  You don’t find yourself sitting in the office, looking around you at the books and the heaps and the piles and the boxes, and flipping open the computer to go blog-surfing instead.

It’s an escape.  It has always been my body’s preferred mode of escape.  There is probably a well-known biological basis, something to do with constant glurts of adrenaline rushing through your body, and then having the post-adrenaline letdown.

I am well into the stress-sleep cycle by now.

There are other manifestations of stress:  I do bite my fingernails, I do have this impressive back knot that just *poof* appeared on Saturday, and I’ve been a bitch on wheels for the past few days.  But it’s the desire to sleep that’s an underlying, constant companion.

So if I’m talking to you, and start zoning out, or typing a comment that ends up sounding somewhat incoherent, it’s that sleeping thing.

Really.  I swea…rrr…it….izzzzzz….zzzzz….znork!

“We live on the edge!” exclaimed OmegaDad last night.  “We need a new car, so what do we do?  We go out and buy exactly the same car we already have!”

Say goodbye to the Little Green Car.

Say hello to the Little Red Car. 

A brand-new 2007 Outback Sport.  The new car will get a fantastic breaking-in period as OmegaDad tools it across country, dawg in the passenger seat.

OmegaDotter and I will be staying with OmegaGranny for a couple of weeks (with cats) while OmegaDad drives the long way.  Then she and I and cats will board the plane and fly out to Alaska to meet daddy.

I’m kind of sad about it–I really wanted to do the cross-country trip.  But a lack of paperwork has made it imperative that we not take OmegaDotter into Canada.  We just can’t afford to cross paths with an uber-officious border patrolman (or woman) wanting to follow the letter of the law.  I have nightmares of the dotter and I being stranded at the border into Canada and having to figure out how to get from there to Alaska…or, worse yet, stranded at the border into Alaska with the same situation.  At least at the border into Canada, we’d be close to airports…

So a request:  please pray, send good vibes, or otherwise attempt to influence the universe so that the monsoon rains start before the dotter and I stay with OmegaGranny; right now, it’s pretty toasty down the hill.

We’ve had the house shown twice so far.  Grandma Sharon and I spent a frantic two hours yesterday scuttling around the house and cleaning/straightening up to prepare for the second set of folks.

Things are slowly beginning to fall into place.