OmegaMom

Wednesday, the dotter climbed into my lap again when I picked her up.  Thursday, however…no climbing into laps, and when she said, mournfully, “I had a bad day again today,” I could tell by the subtleties of the tone that it was not a serious mournfulness.  

I slanted the Hairy Eyeball at her in the mirror.  She busted up giggling.

So, still no buddies at after care, no buddies at school, but I think (maybe) she is settling in a bit, and beginning to recognize people, so is feeling a bit better.

The commentary about teachers and aftercare workers helping the kiddos get to know each other was good–and, lo and behold, the next day, when I went to pick up the dotter, Miss Mary at aftercare was going around the room with all the kids, having them call out their names loudly so that everyone could hear.  I’m feeling very hopeful about the aftercare place.  And each day a different kid gets chosen as Mrs. Shoetree’s helper of the day, and the dotter knows that child’s name, so it’s helping the kids get to know each other.

Playgroupy-ness must needs wait until we’re in the house. (Will we ever get in the house??  Must be optimistic.  Must be optimistic.)  One nice thing about the house is its close proximity to school, so I can scooch over there during my “lunch hour” to check with school secretaries, leave notes for Mrs. Footrace, maybe eat with the dotter, maybe volunteer some.

One thing I’ve noticed that may take some getting used to for me is that all the moms are much younger.  (You’re supposed to read that particular line in a mournful tone.)

We ran into a family with a daughter from China while we were at the State Fair; this family is in Big City.  Which reminded us that Big City has an FCC chapter.  Big City also has–not fair!–a Mandarin immersion program!  Whoa.  But, alas, Big City is 35 miles away.  Close enough for Friday night Mandarin classes (also offered), and monthly meetings and suchlike.

Of course, the social awkwardness of a new school is compounded, as y’all said, by being new in state, the upheaval of the move, and our (as Carosgram labeled it) “inappropriate guilt”.  And the smallness of the Shoebox.  We are all getting on each others’ nerves, and the dotter really really needs to be able to settle down, which will help with the confidence level…just having her own “stuff” around her when she’s home will help.

Thanks everyone for the good ideas and the sympathy.  It hit me out of the blue, that the dotter might have difficulties, and I was feeling sad for her and guilty that I hadn’t realized it beforehand–all the suggestions and commentary has helped a great deal!  Y’all are Good Eggs, y’know?

…then there is no mountain, then there is.

That Donovan song is stuck in my head today.

First there was the closing being pushed back (boo!).  Then there was early occupancy (yay!).  Now there isn’t early occupancy (boo!).  And the closing is either Sept. 5 or Sept. 10 (boo, hiss!).

Gaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

Okay, on to other things:

Freak foam surf in Wales looks way cool.  Some commentary about how it’s being caused by pollution–it would be interesting to do research to see if it’s been happening on and off for centuries, which would put the kibosh on that idea.  It definitely happened 30 years ago, so it’s not new, just rare.

OmegaMom reveals her disdain for her child’s safety:  I think the toy recalls are going a wee tad too far.  Toys “R” Us Recalls Wooden Coloring Cases.  Because the paint in the lettering on the case contains lead.  (Well, okay, some of the black paint inside contains lead, too.)  Look here, folks.  Kids aren’t really highly likely to lick the lettering on the box.  And if they do, they sure aren’t going to get enough lead from that lettering to cause anything–we’re talking a microscopic dose here.  In addition, the kit is marketed for 5 years old and up; any kid of that age who is still eating paint shouldn’t be getting paint sets to begin with. 

A not-so-random thought:  Adopting a child of a different race does not automatically bestow a “racism-free” merit badge upon the adopters.  Really.  And if you hear of some adult Asians reading a particular series of articles and being disgusted by the racism in those articles, maybe–just maybe–it might be a good idea to re-read the words and try to figure out why those Asians feel that way, rather than getting defensive and waving your internationally adopted child around as a banner of your pure motives and right thinking.  Just maybe.  Ya think?

People who think IVF will ever be a widespread replacement for good ol’ human sex as a method of reproduction are just nuts.  They haven’t done IVF.  Or they have lousy imaginations.  And, please–before you start commenting on how people are going to select for intelligence, blond hair, and blue eyes, please learn a little bit about genetics and how difficult it is to pinpoint most of our traits to one specific gene.

For all those mainstream media types who think blogging is so declasse and worthless, I’d just like to suggest that any media person who is surprised by the mortgage mess and the sagging real estate market should have been reading bubble blogs for a year or so; it’s pretty amazing how events this year have marched in lockstep with the predictions of the bubble bloggers.

I go away.  Who knows what joyous personal real estate news will appear on OmegaMom’s blog next?  I’m feeling like we will be in the Shoebox until we die of old age…

(Not to knock the Shoebox.  It’s really darling, and would be great for a single.  Or even a couple.  On vacation.  But two adults, one five-year-old, a dawg, two cats, and some turtles, for more than a day or two?…nope.)

So here we are, new state, new job for OmegaDad, a Shoebox to live in with a new house soon, new school for OmegaDotter and new kindergarden…

Just before we headed off to China to meet the dotter, I quizzed some friends in the IT department about who they were sending their kids to for daycare.  There had been a mini baby boom that started the year before, and there were four or five ladies who had children similar in age to the dotter.  They gave me a variety of recommendations, which were more or less conveniently located, and I trotted off to one to check it out.  It was warm, it was welcoming, it was well-organized, and it was staffed by a slew of nice young things in the education program at Small Mountain University, so it was cheap (student labor=slave labor, essentially).

Four years later, at the beginning of summer, OmegaDotter left that daycare/preschool to go off to summer camp for the first time. 

She had been at the same place for four and a half years.  She had grown up with many of the kids in her age group.  She knew them all–and they all knew her.

When we’d show up in the morning, it was like a scene from Cheers.  Remember how Norm would walk in, and everyone at the bar would call out, “Norm!” “Normie Boy!” “Ey, Norm, how’s things?” and he would make the circuit, gripping biceps and slapping backs and sharing jokes and what-no?  That was the dotter.  She’d walk in, and it would be, “OmegaDotter!”  “OmegaDotter’s here!  Yay!”  “OmegaDotter, come here!”

And we knew moms and their kids at summer camp; there were familiar faces during the day or at pick-up time.  And One and Only True Love was taking swimming lessons at the same place in the afternoons, so that was, of course, a major plus.

All of this adds up to…a clueless mom.

It never, ever occurred to me that OmegaDotter had no experience in “how to make friends”.  No experience in being “the new kid”.  No idea, really, how to do it.

Well, duh.  Picture OmegaMom slapping her forehead, a la a V8 commercial.

When I picked her up from after-school care this afternoon, she was sitting all alone by the side of the playground, carefully filling in holes in the dirt.  All by herself.  And I remembered–oh, how well I remembered–what it was like being shy and new and lonely.

Now, it’s usually quite difficult to get details from the dotter.  It is, in fact, like pulling teeth.  Impacted wisdom teeth, at that.  She chatters and dances, and sort of slides away from the questions.  Which she started doing as soon as I asked a little bit about her day, and who she played with, and how was it?

So, bound and determined, when we got into the car, I said, “OmegaDotter.  OmegaDotter, come up here,” and I patted my lap.  “Want to sit on my lap a bit?”  Pleased and surprised, she crawled up front, got into my lap, and began the chitter-chatter.  And I started the inquisition, with detailed, specific questions.

I got:  “Nobody wants to play with me.”

When I asked if she asked them, she said she did, and they didn’t want to.

I asked her how it felt; when she shrugged and said, “I dunno”, I asked her if it made her feel happy?  She shook her head.  Did it make her feel kind of sad?  There was a pause, and she nodded, looking out the window.

The details were this happened both at school and at after-care.

And I’m left feeling kind of helpless.  I am not the person to come to for advice in how to make friends and influence people; I am shy as hell and it’s taken me some 40 years to get to the point where I just barge right in at parties and start talking to people.  It doesn’t help that I don’t know anyone here and we’re all new and everything’s up in the air right now…

I’m signing her up for gymnastics, and ballet as soon as I can find a recommended ballet studio.  So those will help a bit.  And I told her that in a few weeks she’d get to know most of the kids and she’d start to make friends (she seemed very skeptical).

But right now we’re all adrift, at sea, and it makes me sad to see the dotter sitting all by herself.  (A couple of the older girls have taken her under their wings, but she needs/wants some kids her own age.)

Speaking of the sea:  My new theme is anchored by a pic I took of the inlet by Big City a few weeks ago. 

I took the dotter in to school today, her first day of kindergarden.  Since things have been up in the air lately, she didn’t have new shoes, a new backpack, a fancy new outfit, or anything like that.  But, of course, I took the requisite First Day Of School picture.  Equally of course, it’s blurry.

I met Miss Shoehorn, who seems like a lovely lady, and handed her the bag of supplies requested.  (Since this was the first time we had ever done this, I had no idea if I was supposed to fill the dotter’s backpack with all the stuff, or keep it at home and dole it out bit by bit, or what.  So I dumped it all in a bag, figuring I would ask when we got there.  I can see why they don’t spell it out–after all, most parents have been through it many times already, so why bother?  But for those of us clueless firsttimers, it would have been nice to be told, “All this stuff gets put into one big pile of each item, and is doled out to the kids during the year as needed”, rather than just leaving us to go “Bduh, bduh, bduh, whaddoIdo wit’ this stuff?”)

I liked the classroom–it’s fun and organized and busy and looks like the kids will be involved, entertained, and learn.

The dotter handled it well; she was very excited to be Going To School!  But then came the moment when mommy was getting up to go…

And the tears came.  Big fat tears, seeping out of her eyes, her lips trembling oh-so-slightly.  And the tears began to fall, more and more of them, but she didn’t cry or sob, oh no no.  She just wept quietly, and asked me, in a very trembly voice, “When will you pick me up?”

Oh, baby.  Oh, you’re such a big girl now.  In a few days, that moment of fear and trembling will be a wisp of memory; you’ll be making friends and learning things and having fun.  All I wanted to do was to cuddle you up and give you big hugs, but I knew if I did, the weeping would turn to sobs and my big brave girl wouldn’t be able to handle it.

I didn’t cry, myself, not until I just wrote that last paragraph.  But, yeah, there it is:  she’s growing up, getting bigger, and sooner than we expect, we’ll be schlepping her off to college and the house will be much emptier.

Public schools have a wide variety of ways to introduce themselves to new parents.

Julie, of the Ravin’ Picture Maven, has a new kindergardener entering school this year, and was treated to a scene of chaos when visiting the school’s open house this week.

Luckily, I seem to have missed that scene both in Small Mountain University Town–whose open houses for new students were at the end of last semester (wow)–and here in Small Town Alaska.

The teachers at the SMUT-ty kindergardens were warm and welcoming to hapless-looking parents with small children tagging along after them (that would be me and the dotter), answering questions, showing us around their rooms, and describing their teaching philosophies.

The schools here in Small Town Alaska have, for kindergardeners, something called “Kindergarden Roll-In”.  In a small bit of disorganization, this item was never defined on the school’s website, so we arrived here not knowing what the heck it was, though we knew it took place the first week of school.  But when the dotter and I wandered off to our school-to-be to register, All Was Made Clear.

What “Roll-In” is, is a week wherein each kindergarden teacher contacts the parents of each kindergardener (de facto new students) and sets up a one-on-one appointment with the parent, the child, the teacher, the teacher’s aide, and, furthermore, with a speech pathologist and an occupational therapist.

Whoa.  Color me impressed.

Of course, also color me frantic when I found out that this meant that kindergarden actually starts a week later than the remainder of school, and my previously scheduled work start date of 8/20 would have been better to be 8/27.  Eeek!  A little bit of information on the school district website would have been helpful in clarifying that for those of us who didn’t have a clue…

So the dotter’s Roll-In appointment happened to be Thursday morning at 9 a.m.

It just so happens that I was being ferried to the hospital in an ambulance at 2 a.m. Thursday morning, and by 9 a.m. was hooked up to a variety of monitoring machinery in my hospital room.  But, whilst being x-rayed and poked and prodded and hyperventilating, I bravely whispered to OmegaDad, “The child…the child…”, my voice trailing off as my leaden-colored hand slid slowly off his forearm and hung limply off the gurney.

Er.  Ahem.  Well, I did tell him that he must be there at school at 9 a.m., dotter in tow, that the teacher’s name was Miss Sara Shoehorn or some such thing, that the room number was #4 (I thought), and he had to comb the dotter’s hair before he went there.

OmegaDad reminds me that I combed her hair, because he brought her in to the hospital before trotting off to the school.  It seems I have the Magic Combing Touch (which surprises the heck out of me, because in the normal run of things, the dotter howls, squeals, yanks her head out from under my trying-to-be-gentle hands, and gives every impression that I am torturing her mercilessly).  OmegaDad informs me that the dotter told him, quite sternly, “You don’t know how to do it.”

Anyway, dad and dotter made it to meet Miss Footlocker, and dad reports that the dotter was quite well-behaved.

I find it interesting that there are such widely varied approaches to bringing new students into the fold.  Julie’s experience is one end of the spectrum; ours (so far) has been at the other end.

But I still have to meet Miss Footfetish.

OmegaDad tells me that after the EMT dudes loaded me onto the ambulance, he stood in the doorway of the Shoebox’s bedroom and thought to himself, “I have to figure out something to say to the dotter, and it has to be true enough…just in case.”

Just in case.

The whole episode was really scary.  Just scared the snot out of me.

OmegaDad will tell you that it takes a lot to make me say I’m going to go to the doctor, and having me wake him up in the middle of the night to say, “I need to go to the emergency room” was enough to wake him up right away.  Actually, I told him, “I’m going to drive myself to the emergency room”, an idea which he nixed immediately, and as he was taking more and more time to get ready to drive me, I finally gasped out, “Call an ambulance.”

He says he was truly worried that he was going to have to deal with me dying.  I am under strict orders to Never Do Anything Like That Again.

Trust me, I don’t plan to.

It’s a very odd feeling, to be sitting on the floor in wild excruciating pain, wondering, “Is this it?”  I spent the time in the hospital mostly snoozing.  OmegaDad brought in the laptop yesterday morning, and I would turn it on, sign on, start reading email and blogs and news and stuff, and then *poof* would be asleep again.

Sleep, as I may have mentioned before, is my ultimate response to stress.

I was…well, under a certain amount of stress.  Less so as time went on (particularly after my cardiologist–now that’s a weird phrase, “my cardiologist”–informed me that pericarditis is about as “significant as a sore throat”).  I got to see my heart a-throbbin’ and a-pumpin’ away during the echocardiogram, an ultrasound of the heart.  The dude doing the echocardiogram informed me that I had a “nice, shiny pericardium”; I don’t think anyone’s complimented me in quite that way before.  Watching the activity of the heart was fascinating; the mitral valve flutters like a mechanical flap, up, down, up, down, while the heart is quivering and pumping.  The ultrasound equipment also will show, in color-coded glory, the blood that is entering the heart versus the blood that is exiting the heart, in orange and blue flashes.

Way cool to a nerd like me.

But still.  There I was, having spent a few hours thinking I was dying.

That’s scary shit.

So I slept.  And slept and slept.  You’d think, after all that sleeping, that I’d be nice and rested, but right now all I want to do is…sleep.  Because I’m still all shook up, and sleep is the best way to escape being all shook up.

OmegaDad says that the dotter was very upset and really, really wanted me back at home.  I really, really wanted to be back at home, too, once the drugs knocked the inflammation on its butt and I could finally sleep on my side without feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest and kicking me every time I took a deep breath.

All of this is more than anyone needs to know, I’d guess.  But it’s kind of a way for me to work through it, to realize that (a) I thought I was dying, and (b) whew!  No, I wasn’t.  Both of them take some processing, some thinking about.

The good news is that Perry Who-itis is not a heart attack.

The bad news is that I found this out after thinking I was having a heart attack.  It was no fun having OmegaDad call the ambulance, being investigated soundly in the ER, dealing with being poked and prodded and CT’ed and ECG’d and X-rayed and and and.

So I have pericarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart.  According to all the tests I’ve had, my heart is in super duper shape (I’ll probably end up like my grandma, just tickin’ and tickin’ and tickin’ along).

OmegaDotter has been wonderful, no bouncing, no fussing, a great deal of pretend medical stuff, such as using my sports bra to stand in for a blood pressure cuff.  And when OmegaDad picked her up at preschool today, she had a slew of drawings with “I mama” all over them, which warms my pericarditic heart.

I’m bored.  I’m in pain.  I’m constantly nodding off.

Wah.

Frickin’ fracken’ rowrbazzlin’ appraiser.

We were scheduled to close on Monday.

The appraiser didn’t even schedule an appraisal until today.

Now the appraiser has rescheduled for tomorrow.

The appraiser thinks she won’t be done with the report until Monday.

The mortgage company needs the appraisal to hand us the dinero.

The sellers want to move the closing date to next Friday.

Our temporary housing $$ run out 30 days after they start…OmegaDad got here on the 31st of July.

Not only will we be stuck in the Shoebox for a few days longer than we expected, we’re going to have to pay for it, too.

GAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!

Remember the judge who sued the dry-cleaner for some $60 million because his pants were ruined?  Thankfully, the end result was that it was ruled in the defendant’s favor.  I had thought that Judge GimmeMoney had faded into the background (until he found a new victim), but it turns out he’s appealing the result.  Picture OmegaMom rolling her eyes hard enough that they might fall out of her head.

I follow a science blogger named Pharyngula (PZ Myers, a professor of developmental biology at the University of Minnesota in Morris).  Myers reminds me in many ways of my fuddy-duddy brother.  He’s cranky, funny, interesting, writes about developmental biology and evolution, and carries on a long-standing (rather heavy-handed) harangue against organized religion of any kind.

A while back, in 2004, he wrote a review of a book called Lifecode, whose author, Stuart Pivar, claims that all embryos begin their organization based on spherical topology, and it’s the same process for every critter alive. 

PZ wrote a review of the original book (reposted in July). 

This year, Pivar revised his book and a new edition was published.  PZ wrote a couple of new reviews which were pretty scathing.

Pivar is now suing PZ Myers and Seed Magazine for $15 million for libel for, among other things, calling him a “classic crackpot”.  Luckily, almost all the legal commenters on the various posts scattered around the blogosphere related to this case have said that the case has no grounds and will likely be tossed out of court.

O Brave New World, that has such creatures in it!

(I have been quite remiss about responding to comments lately; I blame both undue stress and lack of broadband.  And then I hang my head in shame.  I do, I do like comments, and I will [I will!] respond more!  Promise!)

I have previously bemoaned the gender-stereotype-reinforcing nature of the U.S.A.’s commercial giants, who ensure that all girls’ toys and clothes are varying shades of purple and pink, and boys’ toys are primary colors and their clothes are earth tones.

Today comes reportage of a study that proclaims that women just durn naturally prefer pink.  It’s inherent.  It’s in the genes, gals!  It’s an evolutionary advantage–female gatherers being able to hone in on ripe fruits, etc.

Boy howdy!  How’d they figger that one out?

Well, let’s see.  They flashed 1000 different colored rectangles on a screen and had the men and women being studied pick (quickly) the ones they preferred.

Does this strike anyone else as…um…well, not proving the idea that the preference is inherently gender-linked?

I mean…how’d they ensure that all the men and women studied haven’t been previously influenced by all the gender-specific coloring that they’re exposed to from day one for the past 30 or 40 years?  (It’s either Granny J or Great-Grandma who says that, in her day, the preferred “girly” color was powder blue.)

Really.  It’s a serious question.  The only way I can figure that they would be able to really determine this is if they grabbed men and women from the deepest, darkest, most isolated depths of the Amazon jungle for their experiment.  Any grown man or woman in the U.S. or England or other westernized country has been bombarded with culturally determined “right” colors for their sex from the day they were born, via TV ads, newspaper ads, clothing and toy selections in stores, etc.

You can, I guess, test babies’ preferences by that old standard, “which one does the baby pay more attention to?”, like they do with questions of whether babies prefer their parents’ faces to strangers’ faces, or the scents of familiar people versus strangers.

But to claim that testing adults who have been conditioned from birth to gravitate towards certain color schemes will prove that this tendency is inherent is just a bunch of hooey in OmegaMom’s well-considered and expert opinion.

One of the lovely advantages of having a good internet connection is the ability to look up things that interest you, quickly and easily.  And, say, read government PDF documents.  (Unhindered By Talent notes how having the internets at your fingertips is akin to former years’ having an encyclopedia handy in the house.)

So yesterday, we wandered down to Port MacArthur, as I mentioned in passing in my previous post.  To get there, we took the road down to Knok (for a piCNIC in KNOK, har har).  Then we drove down to Loon Bay, where the road ended up dead-ending at a grassy airstrip in the middle of some trees.

Loon Bay turning out a disappointment, we were driving back, and passed a sign to Port MacArthur.

Imagining a quaint, run-down old Alaska port, I pointed down the road and said, “Let’s go there!”

So we drove.  The paved road ended and the gravel road began.  But, dayum, that was a sweet gravel road–wide, spacious, flat, surrounded by the usual thickets of trees and underbrush.  And it kept going.  There were very very few other drivers.

Soon, I saw, in the sky, a jet.  And then another.  And then we saw the Inlet.  We drove a little further, to an intersection in the middle of nowhere, with stop signs.  ??  We turned.  We drove a bit more.

And there, at the end of this 14-mile drive, was the port.

Brand spanking new.

Deep-water dock (one).

Angled flume to bring unknown cargo down to the ships.

Quiet.  Deserted.  A sign about security, but easy enough for the dotter and the dawg to just skip around the sides of the gate.

And there, across the inlet, close enough to spit on (well, almost–it’s about 4 miles), was Big City, with all its port facilities and docks and 300,000 people and the international airport.

We returned back home curious and intrigued.  We did a search on Port MacArthur (not the real name).  And we found the most interesting stuff, including the aforementioned government PDF documents…

Let’s talk about the “Bridge To Nowhere” again.

There are actually two such bridges which were lumped together in Senator Stevens’ and Representative Don Young’s multi-billion dollar pork dealie.

One is a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island.  Gravina Island is where the airport for Ketchikan sits.  There’s a ferry that goes between the two every fifteen minutes.  For some reason, the Alaska Powers That Be want a bridge there instead.

The PTB also want a bridge between Big City and Port MacArthur.  Salon happily called the Port MacArthur area a place where 1 person resides, and sneered at Knok as a bustling megalopolis of 22, carefully ignoring the fact that there are 66,000+ people living within minutes of Knok in an area that is estimated to grow almost ten times the population within 20 to 30 years.  The general consensus is that Stevens Young et al. want the bridge to benefit the son-in-law (? some sort of relative, at least), who owns a whopping 80 acres of land right by the port, and it’s just to give big bucks to the bridge builders and let son-in-law sell his waterfront property to rich folks who want swanky homes on the Inlet.

But nosing around things in relation to the port, we discovered that it’s not a small plan at all.

Y’see, let’s look at transportation in Big City.

They’ve got an international airport.  The city is growing.  They need more flight capability.  But the airport is right in the middle of town, constrained by its neighbors.  They can’t build a new one inland, because there’s a whole slew of mountains tied up in a state park.  They can’t build to the east, because that state park comes right down to the Inlet to the south.  They can’t build to the west, because suburbia is already sprawling that way, plus there’s an inconvenient military base or two in the way as well.

But…but…a mere four miles away, right across the Inlet, there’s hundreds of thousands of acres of empty land, and a borough that has ambitions and (perhaps?) a desire for an influx of tax and federal money.

Also, any goods that are unloaded in the port at Big City that are due to go north have to detour east around the Inlet, and then west again, before they go north.  But…but…if there were a road at Port MacArthur…or a railroad…and more of a port…the ships could unload there, and land transportation would shave about one hour and sixty or so miles off the trip for each trailer coming off any container ship.  Ditto for any cargo going out, like, say, coal, or lumber, or oil.

We’re talking Big Bucks here.

Build that bridge.  Pave that road (scheduled to have been done this summer, but it looks like it’ll be another year or so).  Suddenly, shipping that comes into Big City can bypass that sixty miles/one hour detour, and head north right away.

And it just so happens that the Master Plan for 2020 includes a “preferred location” for the new international airport.

Just north of Port MacArthur.

So imagine you want to grow.  Imagine you have thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of folks who would like a less expensive place to live.  Imagine you want to move your airport.  Imagine you’d like to save millions–maybe billions–on shipping costs. 

If you only had an itty bitty 4-mile-long bridge…

(Currently there are also plans for a passenger ferry, which, of course, the Sierra Club and others infinitely prefer.  But if the long-term plans are truly what is outlined in those government documents, a ferry just won’t do, not at all.)

Anyway, it’s very interesting what you can find on the internet as the result of a tourist jaunt to a quaint, deserted port.

By the way, none of the journalists’ stories I’ve found so far on the “Bridge To Nowhere” seem to have any clue about all this ambitious expansion, this brand-new industrial complex that is envisioned.  They’re just too busy having fun poking at bridges to empty, unpopulated land, and yammering about pork.

Yeah, it’s pork, but lemme tell you, it’s pork with sweep and vision.  It’s not a “Bridge to Nowhere”…it’s a case of “If you build it, they will come.”

A one-month hookup with the local EV-DO wireless network.  Woohoo!  Now I can surf and talk to my heart’s delight.

AND, more importantly, I can work on Monday!

Woohoo!

I can already tell you it’s not as fast as my cable modem was back in Small Mountain University Town…so I think we’ll be going the cable route when we move into the new house.  But the EV-DO wireless network is fast enough, and we’re now able to do Bonnie & Matt’s sixth week routine from ITV’s Dancing On Ice once again.  The dotter will be happy.

When I muttered to OmegaDad that the daycare/after-school care place I had found wasn’t really my cup of tea, he decided to question some coworkers.  Cassiopiea (very nice lady) mentioned that our local gymnastics place does daycare too.  Since I had been planning to haul the kiddo off to gymnastics to get some of the Tigger-ishness out, I leaped upon the idea.

Thank goodness.  Much more my cup of tea.

So when Monday rolls around, the dotter will be in for a week of preschool and I’ll be a-workin’ again.  And then next Monday she starts kindergarten.  And then that Wednesday is closing (CLOSING!!!!).  (Countdown:  10 days.)  And we can start really settling in and not feeling like tourons any more.

Speaking of tourons, we have been friggin’ tourons from hell lately.  We’ve driven off to see The Big One (from a distance, but it was clear and lovely and they’re damned huge mountains).  We’ve checked out the tidal bore in the Inlet.  We’ve discovered the tiny little Port MacArthur, which is, apparently, a logging port and nothing more at the end of a 14-mile road; we’ve checked out Wacheetna, the quaint tourist town at the confluence of the Big Lady, the Wacheetna, and the Matsuna rivers; and the small town museum for Knok, which was the big port once upon a time, until the railroad came through and turned Big City into The Port.

It’s been fun.

There are many aspects of our modern life which are ubiquitous, so ubiquitous that we don’t even think of them.

Friends of ours were due to be married on Saturday, September 15, 2001 in California.  We had plane reservations and were getting excited about our mini-vacation in the Bay Area.

Then, of course, 9-11 happened.  Life everywhere came to a horrified standstill.

Planes, also, came to a standstill.  But word came through to us:  D. and C. were still planning to get married, come hell or high water.  They were driving straight through from North Carolina to California, not stopping at all, and they’d be there.  So, given that they were toughing it out with a cross-country drive the likes of which we hadn’t seen since we were in our late teens, we couldn’t be outdone…since no planes were running, we would do our more usual thing and drive out there.

The eerie thing about that drive–aside from constantly worrying that there was going to be another horrendous terrorist attack, and speculating what it would be–was that the skies were totally empty.

There were no contrails.

None.

It made us realize, at a gut level, just how many airplanes usually travel across the U.S., and how accustomed we were to seeing jets fly by, and seeing the residual contrails.  It left us feeling disjointed.

I realized this past week that one of the things that I’ve been subliminally missing here is jet contrails.

Not a one.

Oh, we have oodles of little airplanes scooting across the sky.  Small airplanes are an Alaskan fact of life; there are tiny little grassy airstrips everywhere, and floatplanes docked on all the lakes.

But jets?  No jets.  No contrails.  If you look at one of the data visualization maps of air traffic, you’ll see that most of Alaska is…off the beaten path, as it were.  The bottom parts of Alaska are hubs of trans-Pacific flights, but nothing more. 

In this case, however, it doesn’t leave me feeling disjointed.  The disjuncture felt before was because of the contrast with our long-term experience.  My realization this week was, rather, a sudden surprise:  Oh!  There are no jets traveling around here!  Which was not a disjuncture because I have no experience here–to me, this is just another facet of living in the Final Frontier.

A semblance of normalcy is something I’d dearly like.

The Shoebox has a little dormitory refrigerator.  It’s a very nice dormitory refrigerator, but as a place to store any amount of food, it kind of sucks.

So, this week’s menu, so far: 

• Fresh salmon, from our B&B manager’s freezer.  It seems that she regularly has guests who fill her freezer with fresh-caught salmon.  She asked me, somewhat desperately, if we were interested in some salmon.  Har.  This had the advantage of not using space in our mini-fridge.
• Salmon salad, using leftover salmon from the night before.  The salmon took up a small amount of space in a zippie.  The spinach for the salad is now eating up large chunks of free space.
• Grilled cheese sandwiches.  Cheese is small.  The bread goes in a drawer.
• Bar-B-Q from a tub.  The tub doesn’t take up too much space.
• Tuna Helper.

We are used to buying milk in gallon jugs.  The first gallon we stored on its side on the second shelf.  The second gallon, the second day, leaked–which we discovered upon seeing a small white river oozing out from underneath the Shoebox Fridge onto the nice pine flooring.

The end result of these dinners (and similar gourmet delicacies) is that:

• I am on the verge of a carnivorous hunt for vegetables.  Stalking, searing high-intensity focus on the prey, that kind of thing.  Lock your veggies up, because I will swoop down upon them and scarf them up with a red predatory glow in my eyes, my tongue lolling out.
• We are eating far too many carbohydrates.
• We are eating far too much cheese.
• We are spending far too much money.

That last one is a real issue; the others don’t bother me as much, except that my hunt for vegetables may cause problems with folks in Small Town Alaska as I swoop through their gardens wreaking havoc.

But, damn, it eats up your money to not be able to buy food and store it.  Given that food costs are a tad more in Alaska to begin with, I end up feeling like we’re hemorraghing money.  (For instance, the price of my little frappucinos?  Oy!  What had been $5.50 with a savings card in Small Mountain University Town is running $7.50 with a savings card here.  ::whimper!::  So I’m trying to be good with the fraps…)

It makes me realize just how difficult it could be for people who live in shoeboxes on a regular basis.  What if you can’t afford anything more than a room or two, and you have a family?  Setting aside the psychological effects of the crowding (and trust me, all those studies of rats in crowded conditions are highlighted in my memory these days!), the difficulties of creating a balanced healthy diet when you have limited storage space for raw ingredients and you can’t store leftovers.

So right now, we’re waiting.

Two rooms wears thin, very quickly.

Dial-up wears thin, very quickly.

I start up work again on Monday; I’ve located a daycare/after-school care provider but haven’t figured out how to access the DSL here at the Shoebox.

The biggest problem (aside from being On Top Of Each Other All The Time) is that everything is up in the air for another week or two.  Closing is on the 28th. 

Then there’s our buyout.  We’re waiting on that.  We get an advance to help with closing on the new house, but we’re just waiting and waiting and waiting for the official buyout notice.

Once closing goes through, we’ll have either DSL or cable.  Once closing goes through, we’ll have six rooms, two bathrooms, and a garage to wander through.  Once closing goes through, I’ll have an office.  Once our buyout goes through, we’ll have a second car.

Sorry for no exciting, scintillating discussion today.  I’m just frazzled and frustrated and hate being up in the air.

The advice from old-timers here is, if it’s clear and sunny out during August, take advantage of it.  This includes OmegaDad’s new boss outright saying that if it’s a nice day, he should consider taking it off.

Well, okay, then.  So Friday we went off to Margaret Pass in the sun.  The part I love–with the Little Lady River barreling madly down from the mountains–turns out to be only a portion of the whole drive.  You go further on, and you find alpine meadows with blueberry bushes.

The lady who manages the shoebox we’re living in told us, “Oh, you’ll know when you’ve hit the blueberries by all the bottoms sticking up”, and, sure enough, she was right.

First, we stopped for a picnic at Constitution Peak.  The dotter has somehow learned to skip like a mountain goat from rock to rock, and she was darting around the edge of the river.  She claimed it wasn’t cold; I don’t believe her.

Constitution Peak rears up from the road and river in an almost sheer stretch; its definitely the “angle of repose” all the way up.   This is avalanche country, and there are warnings alongside the road (along with the “Recreational Gold Mining Allowed” signs).  The mountain is covered with vivid green vegetation and looks emerald in the sunlight.

The river leaps and tumbles, and everywhere you look there are huge boulders and waterfall shelves.  I hope the color shows in these pictures; part of the river is your normal river color, but the rest is an icy aqua blue.

After the picnic, we headed on up the road.  And up the road.  And up the road.  Into the mountains.  Higher and higher.  (In reality, though the mountains are alpine mountains and we were above the treeline, we only got to 3,998 feet on this trip, which surprised me.  I was thinking alpine vegetation equals alpine height; in the Arizona area we were from, you need to be up at about 12,000 feet to hit the treeline.

We were peering about, wondering where the blueberries were, when we turned a corner and saw them:  people with their bottoms in the air as they leaned over picking blueberries.  So we stopped at a handy parking area, emerged from the car, and picked berries.

Then it was time to head on, up and up some more, to Peak Lake, where we encountered paragliders leaping off cliffs, some families hiking with their dogs, and more out-of-state plates than I’ve seen in a week.

So.  It’s God’s Country.  Listen to OmegaMom lecturing herself about how she needs to wait for an entire year before she makes any judgments.  We’ve got to do a winter here to know what it’s really like.  Word has it that this past week is extremely unusual weather for August, that August is generally rainy and chilly every day.  But so far…so far…well, it’s just glorious.

(BTW, excuse some of the lousy pictures.  For some reason, my PhotoDraw is behaving badly and some of my edited pics are pixelating badly.  Bah!)

So.  Moose are apparently somewhat unpredictable.  They can kill people.  The best thing to do is to never, EVER get between a mama moose and her calf.  If a moose lays back its ears, lowers its head, and the hair on its neck starts to rise up, you are in for an aggressive charge.

The idea is to (a) make sure you’re aware ahead of time, so you can angle away from any moose you encounter, taking an alternate route; or (b) take shelter behind a tree or rock or car if the moose is charging; or (c) curl up on the ground and protect your head and neck if the moose has charged and is now kicking you.

I am so happy to learn this.

Some further info and stories:

• June is the most dangerous time of year for moose encounters.
• Moose encounter tales from all over the northern U.S.
• An excerpt from “Don’t Get Eaten:  The Dangers of Animals That Attack”.  Note the cute yellow highlights that censor the word “moose”…
• “Moose more dangerous than bears??” topic on Alaska Outdoors forums

There you have it, from your intrepid Alaska correspondent.  If you’re ever trapped by a moose, you now have some information on what to do.

Thanks for all the congrats on the new house.  We are busy collecting documents and what-not, to get the mortgage locked in before the entire U.S. mortgage industry comes tumbling down.

For those who are thinking that they aren’t hardy enough for the winters, I will give blow-by-blow reports.  Some folks from Minnesota and one of the Dakotas have claimed to OmegaDad and me that the winters there were much worse than the winters here, for what it’s worth.  I’m thinking the adjustment I will face is the question of 19 hours of darkness, ugh.  Anyone with any knowledge of full-spectrum lamps, and willing to recommend one, feel free to do so in the comments!

We got the house!  We’re trying to arrange for early occupancy (i.e., renting for a week or two before official closing), because otherwise OmegaMom is likely to be arrested for murder, specifically, murder of OmegaDad, OmegaDotter, and OmegaDawg.  The OmegaCats are okay, because they don’t push.  Or get under foot.  Or bang into me.  Or any of those other things that Closeness, Extreme Closeness, brings to a family stuck in two rooms.

The house has an acre of land.  It looks like a two-car garage with an apartment on top, but it has been remodeled inside, and the living room/kitchen area is bright and airy, with wood laminate floors.  Downstairs is a smallish family room, a third bedroom, the laundry, and a second bathroom.

And there are closets.  I am in heaven.

Elementary school, it turns out, is just a few blocks away from the new house.  So today OmegaDotter and I trotted off to the new school to register.

Let’s see what’s truly different about school in Alaska:

• One of the hazards your child is to be warned about, if the child is going to walk or bike to school, is moose.  There is a line in the parents’ handbook that advises parents to tell their child what to do in case of a moose encounter.  Um.  I’m kind of clueless there, folks.  What does one do in case of a moose encounter???
• Recess every day, unless the wind chill is lower than -10F.  Yes, that’s minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Students may not bring sleds or skis to school.  The school will, however, provide roll-up sleds for recess…no skis, though.
• PE includes cross-country skiing.  Okay, maybe they do provide skis.
• Students bringing ice skates to school must have blade covers for the skates.  You will be interested to know that a paper bag is not considered a skate bag by this elementary school.  Who’d've thunk it.
• Unlike Arizona, where the alternate language is likely to be Spanish, here it’s Russian.  So, the letter for the English-as-a-second-language folks is written in Cyrillic.
• Students must bring snowpants to school.
• The emergency drills include earthquake preparedness.  The emergency procedures include a requirement for a local person to pick up your child, since so many Small Alaska Town residents actually work 40-50 miles away in Big City, and there are some bridges that could collapse in case of an earthquake.

Some Alaska observations:

• I didn’t realize just how accustomed I was to multiple state license plates until I got here.  I have seen one non-Alaska plate that isn’t on our car; it was from Florida.
• Someone in the know tells me that the reason for all the latte shacks is that 40-60% of the adults in Small Alaska Town work in Big City, and that the wintertime drive requires a jolt of java to wake one up going and keep one awake returning.
• I’ve found Small Alaska Town’s playground:  Margaret Pass.  Way up Margaret Pass, there’s a glacier that pumps lots of water into the Little Lady River, which rumbles and tumbles downhill over huge boulders next to the road up the pass.  This is a gorgeous river, with icy blue water.  It’s supposed to have lots of salmon.  (This is Good.)  The Margaret Pass road is perfect for a nap run for the dotter.
• If you’ve ever heard of the “Bridge to Nowhere”, a classic Alaska boondoggle, I am now here to tell you that the Bridge to Nowhere is not a boondoggle.  The lower 48 media portrays it as a bridge that connects two areas that don’t have anything–one side just empty land, the other side a tiny Eskimo village.  The lower 48 media needs to do its homework better…Small Alaska Town and its environs is a bedroom community for Big City, and to get to SAT from BC requires a drive up one side of a large ocean arm, crossing the river, and then driving back west along the other side of the ocean arm.  It turns out that the “tiny Eskimo village” is a whole slew of suburban subdivisions, and the Bridge to Nowhere would actually provide a shorter commute, save gas, and keep emissions down.

After a few days of chilly rain, we have had a few days of glorious 70s sunshine.  With the sunshine comes action similar to Arizona’s monsoon season:  the mountains to all sides develop thunderheads atop their peaks, classic cumuli towering up into the sky, with iron-grey undersides.  Small Alaska Town valley, though, is drenched in the sunshine.

Things are extremely green here.

And extremely small.

The dotter, who is bouncy like Tigger, is having problems adjusting to the cramped living quarters.  We have already had a glass of milk break all over the living area, which resulted in mommy and daddy being grumpy and the dotter being weepy.  We are trying to instill in the dotter the idea of “think first before you do things”.  Hmmm.  We’ll see how this works.

In the meantime, I’m going to give you an idea of our living space.

Here we have the house in which we are residing.  Nice house! 

But we only have two rooms of it, the ones that this cute little porch leads to.

This is the park-like lawn which we see from the porch.

This is the lake with all the little seaplanes.

This…this is our “living room”.  I figure it’s about 8×10.  We are a Loving Family, and find the closeness calming and intimate.  (Har.  If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I am quite willing to sell to you for a small pittance.)

This is the bedroom.  I think it’s about 11×11.  The black lounge that OmegaDad is sitting on is a massage chair!  And, oooh, it’s nice!  We fight over who gets to use it (when we remember it’s there).

There’s also a bathroom, but I didn’t feel like angling myself to show it to you.  The bathroom, for some odd reason, doesn’t have a door.  If you want privacy while taking a leak, you need to chase everyone out of the bedroom into the spacious living room, and close the bedroom door.

We went looking at houses today.  It was a loooong day.  But.  But…

We put an offer on a house.  It’s cute.  It’s bigger than our previous house.  It has an acre of land.  It has a nice kitchen, lots of closet space (closets!!!), and lots of laminated wood flooring, which appeases OmegaDad, whose ambition after we emptied out the old house is to Never Have Carpeting Again.

I’ll let you know how the offer goes; we should know Monday or Tuesday.

It was a long plane ride.  A long two plane rides.  We got to Small Town, Alaska, at about 10 p.m. Arizona time.  We went to bed an hour later, and it was still bright outside (though overcast).

Our temporary quarters are cute.  If I were living by myself, it would be perfect.  There’s a tiny living area/kitchenette, plus a bedroom with a bathroom.  The bathroom doesn’t have a door… 

The main problem–aside from the teeny tininess–is that the only internet access is via dialup.

This is the in-law apartment in L’s house.  L’s husband is a retired airline pilot; he and a bunch of friends purchased land around the edge of a lake, and all of them have private airplanes that they can either land on the grassy airstrip or on the lake.  So you turn off the main road onto the driveway, and there’s this huge STOP sign that informs any driver that airplanes may land on the grassy airstrip crossing the driveway unexpectedly.  L’s son works for Alaska Airlines, and is quite cute and very interesting.  L herself was baking bread today, and brought us a loaf of bread.

Today I saw fifty kazillion craggy mountains, a glacier or two, rushing rivers (especially glacial rivers, which are an interesting iron grey color due to all the loess, silt from the glacier–they actually look like rushing rivers of cement).  We went to the farmer’s market, which featured a singer singing all of OmegaDad’s favorite songs by his favorite singers; we ran into a lady with a child adopted from China (alas, she lives in Seattle, and was merely visiting her folks).  The people and the community feeling was very similar to the feeling from Small Mountain University Town!

We went to a reindeer farm and fed caribou.

We went to Don’s Trout House for dinner; Don’s Trout House doesn’t serve trout, but does serve steak.  OmegaDad claims that we need to go to Nick’s Steak House to get trout.

Oh, yeah, and the sun sort of came out for a while, which was nice.

So, yeah, it’s kind of pretty here.

But the really interesting thing is that Alaskans must have serious caffeine dependencies.  On the 15-minute drive from the teeny-tiny apartment into downtown Small Town, there were at least 15 latte shacks.

Just how can a pair of towns with maybe a total of 20,000 people support that many latte shacks?  Color me puzzled.

More later.  Somewhere along the line, I’ll post pics and respond to comments, and maybe read other people’s posts.  But this dial-up access is for the birds.  Not only is it slow, it blocks the phone line…

Tomorrow we start looking at houses.  Believe me when I say we’re highly motivated.

OmegaDad has arrived in Small Town, Alaska, and he and dawg are ensconced in the temporary little apartment that the relocation bennies cover.

So, since he’s there, it was now time to pack up turtles and ship them to him.  Carefully following instructions garnered from TurtleHomes, I had three little boxes for the turtles, and proceeded to pack them…

First, we have Frankie, our smallest, freshly cleaned…Frankie, somewhat timid, retreated to his shell and cowered…

We have Frankie placed upon a bed of moistened paper towels…

We then cover him with crumpled newspaper, so he won’t get excited and tip himself over (a tipped-over turtle will smother if he stays in that position too long).

Then we carefully taped the box, with one of the hinge flaps tucked inside, so that there was a ventilation opening.

We did all three like this, resulting in a Tower O’ Turtles:

At this point, I stopped and did what all turtle-handlers should do:  scrubbed my hands and then used a wee tad of bleach with water.  Turtles carry salmonella, even nice, long-lived friends of the family like Yurtle, Halley, and Frankie.

Then we put crumpled newspaper into a cardboard box (complete with air/ventilation holes) and laid the taped plastic boxes in their nest.

All nice and snug.  Then we labeled the hell out of the outside of the box, lots of “THIS END UP” messages, and “LIVE ANIMALS”, and a carefully drawn and cut-out turtle from the dotter.

At which point, it was time to run errands.  The bank…deposit a check from Great-Grandma.  Oops, there will be a hold put on it until Friday.  Hmmm.  Oh, yeah, and we won’t take the dotter’s piggy bank; you will have to sort and wrap the coins before we will accept them.

Harrumph.  Back out to the car to our next stop, the UPS store.

Oops.  The UPSStore won’t take the turtles.  But they suggest going to the UPS depot in the next town over; perhaps they’ll take the turtles.

Onto the UPS depot.  At the depot, the lady at the counter informed us that they wouldn’t take the package.  There are, it seems, schools with courses on “how to properly package live turtles for shipment”.  No privately packed and privately shipped turtles allowed.  What you see next is OmegaMom making a moue of frustration:

We next went to Pet Smart to see if they had turtle shipping available, or any great ideas.  The nice girl at Pet Smart said, alas, that they didn’t do private shipping.  Maybe Fedex?  Or the local pet store, a more “mom-and-pop” type of operation?

We returned to OmegaGranny’s house, defeated.  A phone call to Fedex resulted in no go, as well.  The local pet store owners (friends of OmegaGranny’s next-door neighbors) weren’t in.  We were stymied.

But, as luck would have it, Alaska Airlines will let you ship turtles in the baggage compartment.  Woohoo!  A nice young lass from AA helped me make the confirmation that we would be taking turtles with us, and it was on to the next errand.

In a call to the Former State Capital Cheap Rent-a-Car franchise, I asked, “How late are you open for car returns?”  They said 5:30.  We eyeballed the clock, and I headed out.  (First, we tried to contact Cuz E., who in the midst of all the phone calls had kidnapped my laundry bag of dirty clothes and taken them hostage to the local laundromat.  See, I would need a ride home from the Cheap Rent-A-Car franchise…But we couldn’t contact Cuz E.  So I headed out anyway, planning to hang out, read my book, and wait for rescue/a ride.

I drove out.  I got there.  Immediately I was suspicious:  It said “Cheap Rentals–Truck Rentals”.  Hmm.  Lo & behold, it turns out that, while they used to do the car rentals, they no longer did so.  (Why didn’t they say something when I called earlier?)  And the nearest Cheap Rent-A-Car where I could return the car?  Well, it was either…

Small Mountain University Town (!!!) or Valley of Death (!!!).  Since the whole plan had been for me to ditch the rental here and us all to be ferried down to the airport in Cuz E’s car, this seemed to put the kibosh on OmegaMom and dotter having a cushy ride to the airport.

But all is well.  We are caravanning to the airport, me in the rental car to the car rental return, and OmegaDotter, OmegaGranny, Cuz E, E’s daughter C, the cats, the turtles, and the luggage in Cuz E’s car.  Meet up at the ticket counter, make sure all is well with cats and turtles (with a back-up of taking them back up the hill with E, OmegaGranny, and C if the airline changes its mind), and then…

…on to Alaska.

We arrive in Alaska around 7 p.m. Pacific Time.