OmegaMom

Hey, sounds like a fun topic on a grey, rainy, chilly morning, eh?

Okay, okay, it’s better than, say, “global thermonuclear warfare” (about which I have nightmares on a twice-a-year-basis, just like tornadoes) (the Wizard of Oz turned tornadoes into nightmare material for more kids than me, I am sure).

Way back when, in the mists of time, I took a Geology 101 class in college.  It was great.  I loved it.  There is an alternate universe where OmegaMom decided to pursue geology as a career instead of sort of floating about for years before deciding on computers.

One of the really neat things about this Geo101 class was that the professor discussed, in great depth and detail, the controversy about the Great Extinction Event of the dinosaurs.  It was interesting because the professor had been there while the controversy started, played out, and the paradigm shifted to the new, improved version of what happened.  Previously, it had been thought that a period of extremely active volcanism was what did the dinos in (remember that scene of the animated dinosaurs taking the big trek in Fantasia to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?).  But right around the time OmegaMom was born, a geologist named Luis Alvarez and his son Walter proposed a new theory:  that a meteor or comet impact was what had caused the extinction.  They cited, as evidence, the KT boundary layer, a layer of soil found worldwide, which was chock-full of interesting elements such as iridium and (I believe) osmium and particular particle shapes that are only produced under huge heat and impact stresses (tektites).

OmegaMom was taking this intro class at the end of the paradigm shift period (it took quite a while for the geology types to actually accept such a radically different view of looking at things).  It was fascinating, especially realizing that scientists could just toss every bit of “accepted” knowledge away, when presented with enough evidence, and move in a totally different direction.

The geology folk have been looking for evidence of other such things all over the place since then, and have found quite a few that seemed tied into other extinction events.  This has also led to a certain amount of interest in space agencies tracking near-earth objects (and to a few grand disaster movies), Just In Case.  After all, if it’s happened once, it can happen again.  And what will We do (we being the human race) if it does?

Then, this week, Small Mountain University issued a press release in conjunction with a bunch of other universities.

For years, the “accepted” knowledge about the extinction of the mammoths and other large mammals that roamed the Americas and northern Europe and Asia has been that they were hunted to extinction by human beings.

But lo & behold–according to this group of geologists, there is evidence that a large something–a comet or low density meteor–whapped the Earth about 12,900 years ago, causing firestorms, devastation, and a 1,000-year mini ice age.

First off, it’s a radically different approach to the idea of the mammoth etc. die-off–so that’s interesting.  Then there’s the question of how it will play out in the scientific community.

Then there’s li’l ole OmegaMom sitting here and reading that press release and accompanying news articles and realizing–with a weird gut-level oomph–that, hey, yeah, these things can happen, and it isn’t necessarily millions of years in the past or millions of years in the future.  Dudes, this event, if the evidence pans out, was a mere 13,000 years ago.  That’s a blink in the geologic record.  It’s like yesterday!

So every once in a while, OmegaMom catches herself casting the hairy eyeball up to the sky, wondering…when?  What if…?

(Like, “what if the Tunguska object had been bigger??”)

Hey, as disaster theories go, it’s got more sweep and grandeur than, say, Y2K or Peak Oil or even gl0bal warm1ng.

OmegaDad was out in the field for a few days, and the dotter and I were able to leave the house later than normal (due to not having to drive him to work).  So, this morning, when we left the house at 7:10 a.m., and it was dark, I was surprised.

It darkened my whole day, actually.

It was chilly and gray and windy, and it started out dark.

I’m afraid that my 11 years in Arizona, plus my years in sunny San Francisco (really!) (well, okay, the sunny East Bay), plus my 3 years in Arizona prior to that, have caused my body to think that sunlight is the natural state of things, and grey, cloudy, chilly, and windy is not.

So I spent the day in a major funk.

Hells bells, what is it going to be like for me in the middle of winter if I feel this way now?!

In addition, my underbrain keeps telling me that it’s too early in the year for heavy-duty jackets, that the sun will shine and things will warm up.  This is okay for me–I’ve got a Polartec fuzzy that I wear which covers quite a range of temperatures, and I know enough to put my hands in my pockets when they get cold.

But for the dotter, hmmm.  We’re used to wearing mainly fuzzies and light jackets, with the heavy stuff broken out only on severe days, and immediately consigned back to the coat hooks to wait for another batch of severe days.  In other words, we don’t have any suitable jacketry for the dotter.  Who, by the way, does not know enough to put her hands in her pockets when they get cold.  So we need to order the child a decent jacket/coat combo that will keep her warm down to, say, -15F.  And boots.  And snow pants.  So we have to measure her.  But we haven’t found my sewing stuff, which is where our soft measuring tape is.  (Don’t worry:  I’m going to use string instead, and things will get ordered this weekend.)  (Yes, we can buy stuff here, it’s just that I’m tired of asking the dotter if she likes this one or that one, and having her go “Eh”.  I’m ordering some stuff from Lands End, and if she doesn’t like it, tough.)

I go outside in the morning, and my underbrain says, “Hey!  What’s with this chilly stuff, dammit?!  It’s not supposed to be chilly yet!  Where’s the sun?!”

In Arizona right now, the sun is rising at 6:15 a.m.  The sun sets at 6:30 p.m., whereas here it’s setting around 7:30.  But I’ve got the feeling that it’s not the total amount of daylight that counts, but the timing of that daylight–same amount of daytime in Arizona as here right now, it’s just shifted.  And, after 11 to 15 years of my body seeing late morning sunrise as the equivalent of deep winter, my underbrain is flummoxed by a late morning sunrise meaning the end of September.

As a result of all this, my body has kicked into winter mode.  The main evidence of this is that my body desires sleep all the time.

Wah.  Wah, wah, wah.  I’m down and grumpy.  Call the wahmbulance.

We’ve been having drizzly rain here, and snow up on the mountains.  I took a few pics so you could see what we see down the street (alas, not from our house) and near OmegaDad’s office.

This is down the street that our cul-de-sac opens onto:

This is a view of the same mountains from OmegaDad’s office, about eight miles closer:

And a more panoramic view:

Dig those craggy peaks!

Onto the ethnic princess saga.  First, check out Richard Querin’s version of Miss Kenya, looking like an exotic belly dancer.  Then there’s my feeble attempt at an Asian princess.  Please note that it is a work-in-progress, that I am quite aware that the proportions are off, I realize the dress needs to be longer and flowy-er, and I don’t want to hear any commentary on the hands.  Do y’hear me?!  NO commentary.  And I don’t want to hear any sniggering from the peanut gallery, either.  I have a problem with hands, and think that I will just end up splicing on some model’s hands, a la Frankenstein.  I will simply say that I think that, right now, my AP is a cross between John Travolta (Stayin’ Alive) and a cheerleader:

Oh, yeah, and she needs feet.  And a crown or tiara.  And a magic wand or scepter.  And new hands (but we’re not talking about hands).

This evening, after I read a chapter from Jack and Annie to the dotter (The Magic Treehouse #9,357,381,220) and she was snuggling into her little pallet by the side of our bed, we were talking.  Someone is telling her she’s a “lucky girl”, and I tried to pry more info out of her, which didn’t succeed.  But I did tell her I was a lucky mommy.

Anyway, the conversation then veered off into:

OD:  I’m a rock star!
OM (skeptically):  Well, you’re not a rock star now, but you can be one when you grow up.
OD:  I want to be a cowgirl when I grow up!
OM:  You can be both!  A cowgirl and a rock star!
OD:  Oh.  I want to cook when I grow up.  And see the world!

So there ya have it.  A world-traveling chef-rock star-cowgirl.  Hey.  It works for me.

First Karyn suggested a page she found called “How to Make Coloring Pages Out of Your Photos”.  I’m not sure I found the one she found, but here’s one for PhotoShop and here’s one for Paint Shop Pro.  This is very handy, because, for instance, Krys found a picture of Princess Kasune Zulu which I could use for practicing with.

GrannyJ suggested looking for exotic models and tracing them.  I modified that into searching for various ethnic beauty pageants, and found Miss Kenya USA 2006 who is quite a pretty girl with a big smile and is wearing a few flowing dresses in the pictures.

Lizard suggested a really cool website, called It’s A Black Thang.  I spent quite a bit of time there, being sidetracked from the ethnic princess thing by lots of way cool art.  I really liked things by Bernard Hoyes in particular; but that’s because I like vivid strong colors, have some artwork in strong colors, and am thinking of doing our new living room colorfully (white walls, plain wood laminate floors, and lots of splashes of color, eh?).  But back to the princess thing–they have wallpaper borders with angels and ballerinas, and I’m sure I can figure something out from those.

Sara suggested taking a look at RainbowKids’ kids activities page.

Lisa said to put together a coloring page portfolio, put it online, and donate some of the proceeds to an African-American charity–nice idea!

SingingBird said she’d buy some.

(And wannallamanow said I was kewl.  Of course, he’s supposed to say that, seeing as how we’re married and all that.  I assure you, he can carry on an intelligent conversation, but I guess he was just overwhelmed by reading a week’s worth of my posts at once.  ;-)  Part of the problem is that he is required to carry a Blackberry at all times now…and he has discovered that he can surf the web with it.  I hesitate to mention it to him (but perhaps I should) but there may be problems with that when the monthly bill shows up.  Anyways, goodness knows why he reads my blog more now that he has the Blackberry, when there have always been perfectly good computers hooked up to the intertubes at home.  Ahem.)

Anyway, I played around with some pics using the Paint Shop Pro tutorial above, one pic of Miss Kenya USA and one of Princess Kasune.  Miss Kenya turned out better (though not very AA looking); I think there was far too much contrasty stuff with PK’s original picture to make the technique work well.  Printing out and tracing might do better.  Herewith samples:

Hm.  I’ll play with the picture idea some more and let you see the results.

Long-time readers will remember when I spent some time painting stenciled horses onto the dotter’s bedroom wall.

In a small boost to OmegaMom’s motherly ego, the dotter, when informed we were moving and finally comprehending the concept, mourned leaving the horsie mural behind.  This, let me tell you, amazed me no end, since the horsie mural had been buried behind a pile of junque on top of her dresser for lo these many months.

So, in a fit of motherly insanity, I told her I would paint new horsies on the walls of her bedroom in the new house.

Now, a year-and-a-half ago, the dotter was mainly interested in the horsies.  Currently, however, she has requested an addition:

Princesses.

Oy!

Watch OmegaMom rummaging through the googlehood for coloring pages of princesses.

Watch OmegaMom find lots and lots of coloring pages of Cinderella, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, Snow White.  Just put the word “D1sney” in there, and you’ve got it.

Now.  When she demanded princesses, my immediate response was to say to myself, “Self, we are not going to be limited to D1sney princesses for the dotter’s bedroom wall.  Nosirree, we are going to find non-D1sney princesses.  Nary a D1sney princess will touch our sacred walls!”

Har.

The dotter scotched that idea by specifically requesting a D1sney princess or two.  So I will put one each, scattering in and amongst the horsies.

However, I also told myself, “Self, we are going to look for specifically ethnic princesses to supplement the ew-ick D1sney plague.  I am tired of rosy-cheeked Caucasian princesses with very little variation.  I also want to find some warrior-type princesses.”  Just call me Mama-PC.

So I began looking on the intertubes for ethnic maidens of one type or another dressed in flowing gear.

I found a native American maiden (yah, right, like that’s hard to do) that actually had Indian facial features.

I’ve got D1sney’s Mulan if I really want to use her, but would prefer a different Asian princess.  But when I searched on Asian princess, I found more than one.  If I looked beyond the first two or three pages.  And there’s always (gag) anime as a resource, though it strikes me as an Asian riff on big-eyed black velvet paintings from the 60s.

Hey.  Here’s another:  Try googling “African-American princess coloring page”.  Give it a whirl.

I’ll sit here and twiddle my thumbs while you do.

You back?  Did you find anything?

Okay, okay, anything aside from “Maddy”, D1sney’s token black princess?  Anything that looked like a real, live, black woman, not like a Caucasian cartoon character whose skin has been darkened?

I didn’t.

I looked really hard.

I can find lots of coloring pages for Martin Luther King, when searching with that phrase (web sites with coloring pages of him that also happen to have “princess” somewhere on the page).

Now, I know some of you are rolling your eyes at me, saying, “Sheesh, making a mountain out of a molehill!  What’s the big deal–you’re trying too hard to be PC!”  And an entirely separate group of you is rolling your eyes at me, saying, “And this is supposed to be news?!  What, are you blind, deaf, and dumb to realize how color-stratified popular culture is?!”

But, lordy, it’s just so depressing to me.  I know that my mom had a hard time finding strong women role models for me as a child; you’d think that along with all those strong women (yes, there are lots of strong women in pop culture), with all the emphasis on diversity and colorblindness and racial equality and blah blah blah over the past thirty, forty years, something as simple as “black princess coloring pages” would be easy to find on the intertubes.  Call me naive.

OmegaDad suggested I get a “Teach Yourself Cartooning” book and teach myself to draw (such touching confidence in my abilities!) and start doing my own to put on the web.

Anyway, anyone have any suggestions?  I’m cheap, so preferably free.

I actually still have this book.  Somewhere.  It’s in a box in the garage.  On the cover it features mushrooms, aliens with big swollen heads, a professor with glasses (of course!) and a kid or two.  I seem to recall that the kid is male.  Harrumph.  But it was a grand read.  The writer wrote a whole slew of books about the mysterious Mr. Bass and the adventures he led the children to.

Why do I mention it?  Because all the rain we have gotten recently has made our yard a mushroom bonanza.  A short walk through the overgrown grass yields some amazing sights:

To give you an idea of just how mushroom-y the yard is, use the following picture as a guideline.  In words:  Take a step, and you trip over shrooms.

Because we’ve had so much rain, we have had to purchase the dotter a slicker and an umbrella.  We like the slicker–a cute reddish thing with pink apples scattered all over it, from Lands End.  She loves the umbrella, a Dora confection.

And there it is, that damned pixellation thing again.  I think I took that one before I figured out how to set the new camera up with maximum resolution for the pics.  I think.  Hmm.

Anyway, onto the dotter…

So many of my commenters are going “Hooray for OmegaDotter for being sassy and flouncy!”

I am cross-eyed.  Hooray?  I mean, yeah, it’s all well and good that she’s got strong opinions and is willing to voice them.  But dammit, I want those voicings of opinions to be mannerly (i.e., no sassing of mom and dad when they’re trying to tell you about empathy and being nice) and not mean (i.e., no “Go away!  I don’t like you!”).  It’s more than okay to not like someone–for heavens’ sake, we all have people we don’t like.  But being casually mean to someone else is a Big No-No in OmegaMom’s life and OmegaDad’s life.  You treat other people with respect and politeness until they give you reason to lose your respect.

So I’m cruisin’ the web looking at various “how to teach children empathy” pages.  A large number of them are Christian-oriented, but, luckily, they avoid religious references until the end of the Good Stuff.

The reassuring thing is that many of these pages are saying–essentially–that children are heartless self-centered snotty bitches/bastards for quite a while.  There I was thinking that by five years old, it was time for that empathy thang to kick in.  Actually, it has–she has empathy (sometimes) for mommy and daddy and for certain very well-loved people in her life.  But for folks outside that circle, the empathy factor diminishes.  Okay, let’s just say it:  It plummets.  Precipitously.  Like a stone going down a deep, dark well.

But according to all the things I’m reading, This Is Normal.

The thing is, I keep seeing all these darling little three and four year old girls who are nature-made nurse-y types, whose empathy factor overflows, who turn into teary watering pots at the sight of someone else who is hurt.  Our dotter?  Nope.  Not a bit.

The milk of human kindness is going to take a while to instill in her.  So.  Repeat after me:

“Other people have feelings.  You can hurt other people’s feelings.  We need to be nice to other people.  How would you feel if Bethany did x, y, and z?  Would that be nice?  Would you be happy or sad?”

And blah, blah, blah.

Oy.  Parenting is hard work.  This is homework, dammit!  I thought that after the threes and fours, the endless repetitive litany approach to teaching something to the child was over with.  Done with.  Don’t we have a rational human being here in the house now?  Well, yes.  Sort of.  But she’s a budding rational human being.  You can explain to her that it’s nice to have a neat house, and she gets it.  (Sometimes.)  But some other things need more time, I guess.

Of course, the blog title isn’t original.  While googling the lyrics to find out when the song was written, I found that lots of folks (including Dave Barry!) used that line as a lead in to this story.

The song was about a couple who were bored with each other; one day, the female half of the couple went cruising the personals ads and found one that resonated with her.  So she made arrangements to meet with the guy (via ads), walked in, and found…

…the guy was her significant other.

So that was the song.

In this week’s news, there’s the tale above, of Sana and Adnan, a married couple who haven’t spoken much lately. 

Sana and Adnan met each other pseudonomously (sp?) in a chat room, one was “Sweetie”, the other was “Prince of Joy”.  They started talking.  And talking.  And kept meeting up with each other online.  And decided they had found their soul mates.  Then they decided to meet up.

In the song, it was a happy ending.  In real life, it wasn’t.  The couple is in the process of divorcing, each party claiming the other was cheating on the marriage.

Which begs the question:  Hey?  Yoohoo!  You said he was your “soul mate”!  You’ve decided this twice now!  Maybe, rather than getting a divorce, you should get marriage counseling, and figure out why you and your soul mate keep messing up?

Oh, well.

Onto other, less amusing things…

A lovely day.  OmegaDad left work early and puttered around the house.  I finished up working, took the dawg for a walk, and then we headed off to open a bank account locally (did you know there is ONE Bank of America ATM within hundreds–if not thousands–of miles of us?!  ONE!!).  Then we headed off to pick up the dotter from after-school care.

When we arrived, out in the play area there was A Scene Taking Place.

One of the participants was the dotter.

Another participant, D., was in tears.

I walked up to hear Miss Cassie explaining to the dotter that she had hurt D.’s feelings by sticking out her tongue and saying, “Go away!  I don’t like you!”  Miss Cassie was being excellent, and I actually wanted to take her home and keep her around to pull out at times like this, to explain in very compassionate tones and words just how the dotter has made someone else feel and to suggest ways to behave to resolve situations (for instance, she said it was okay to not like someone else, but not okay to be mean to that someone else).

When the dotter knows she is in the wrong, she behaves a very specific way.  She was behaving that very specific way.  But then she insisted to us, in the car later, that she hadn’t done it.  Then she flounced and sassed.

Um.

Three strikes, kiddo.

Sigh.

Those of us who have been involved in infertility treatments realize that it’s not a perfect science, but rather an imperfect ART (pun intended).

The docs can eyeball embryos and think they look good, transfer them, and the end result is a big fat negative on the pregnancy test.  They can toss in an “ugly” embryo or two, and voila, a plus sign.  They can transfer two embryos and the end result can be a triplet or quadruplet pregnancy.  They can transfer six embryos to an older potential mom who has tried multiple times, and end up with a singleton, or a negative.

The clients are presented with a multitude of forms to fill out.  What do you want to do with leftover sperm?  Leftover embryos?  How many embryos do you want to transfer?  Hold harmless agreements.  Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis?  And more.

Lots of those forms you fill out are to ensure that the procedure goes the way you want it.  Typically, you’re not supposed to change your mind at the last minute; while it seems simple, there are many people involved, and it’s a good idea to have the details spelled out first.

Which is why I’m not at all sympathetic to the lesbian couple in Australia who had IVF done, had signed a document saying they wanted one to two embryos transferred, and at the last minute, just prior to going under anesthetic for the transfer, said, “Hey!  We want only one embryo!” who are now suing because the end result was…gasp!…twins.

They want $400,000 to cover the expenses of raising the second child, including tuition for private school.  The lady who got preggers suffered from (gasp!) nausea…she needed to use a walking stick to walk in the later months of her pregnancy…she was perturbed because they had to buy a two-kid stroller…their love life was ruined because she has focused so much attention on two kids…

Oy.

I am rolling my eyes here.

Would this couple be suing if one embryo had been transferred and implanted, then split into identical twins?  Would the pregnant lady have been so utterly devasted by that result?

If the couple had wanted only one embryo transferred, they should have specified so from the get-go, in the forms.  A form was signed that said one to two embryos.  They had every opportunity to–at that time–specify the one-embryo transfer.  Why didn’t they?

Bah.

As someone on a board I frequent said, thank heavens the girls who resulted from this IVF aren’t identified, nor are the plaintiffs.  Imagine finding out at 16, googling your own name, that your parents sued for wrongful birth.

This whole thing seems like an attempt to milk some rich reproductive endocrinologist for some extra dollars, frankly.

When OmegaDotter and I arrived here at the Final Frontier, August 2, sunrise was at 5:28 a.m. and sunset was at 10:38 p.m.  Twilight was an hour earlier and an hour later.  Essentially, we had light from 4:30 a.m. until 11:30 p.m., nineteen hours.

Today, sunrise was at 7:30 a.m., and sunset will be at 8:10 p.m. (shortly).; the day is running thirteen hours, with an additional hour and a half of twilight.  As the days get shorter, the time of twilight gets shorter, too.

(To get this information, I went to this handy-dandy sunrise-sunset calculator from the U.S. Naval Observatory.)

We are fast approaching the autumn equinox, the day when sunrise and sunset are supposed to be evenly spaced across the 24-hour day.

With the shorter days are coming chilly rains that deck the surrounding mountains with snow–halfway down their flanks on Monday morning, then melting back upwards, then a third of the way down today.

With the rain come winds.  The inlet Big City is located on is receiving gale-force warnings on a regular basis, and when one looks at the satellite images there are large comma-shaped cloud patterns swooping around the state.  A little tighter, and those cloud patterns would look very similar to hooricanes, so the wind warnings are no surprise.  As it is, we get ongoing drizzle rather than downpours.

The winds are muted here Chez OmegaFamily; our house is in a small dip and thus sheltered, and word has it that where we live is a lot less windy than, say, the town where OmegaDad officially works, which is more towards the end of the inlet and at the foot of some mountains. 

But still…it is raining leaves.  Golden leaves tumbling on the breeze, fluttering downwards to splatter across our back yard and front yard.  As the leaves sweep down from the trees, new views are revealed.  Our drive to take OmegaDad to the office shows more and more of the local houses, which are, during the leafy season, hidden away.

(Why is it “our” drive?  Um.  There is currently one car for the Omega Household.  When the insurance adjuster figures out the cost of the repairs to the old house due to the Huge Great Storm in Small Mountain University Town, and the relocation company decides to pull itself together to actually put the numbers into a calculator, we will be receiving the final dollar amount on our house sale to the relocation company, and will [hopefully] receive that amount fairly soon thereafter, minus the payoff of our old mortgage and minus the advance to put down on the new house.  Then we will pay off the new car and purchase a nice-ish used car, and we will be a two-car household once again.

OmegaDad has become convinced that the relocation company is actually dragging its heels in hopes that we will get an offer on the house and they won’t have to buy it.  I am inclined to agree with him.  But we have signed on the dotted line accepting their offer, contingent upon repair costs, and await only those estimates.  Damn it.)

Anyway, each day a new vista shows itself.  One day, the not-so-distant mountains are mostly gold and red and green, with grey rocks topping the autumn colors; the next, dazzling white snow drapes those same mountains down below the vegetation line.  One day, we are driving through thick forest with no idea how many houses there are; the next, a little log home peeps out between the leaves here, and a ranch peeps out there.

Like the length of the day, it’s ever-changing.

…is a science fiction novel by C.J. Cherryh about 50,000 psychologically programmed clones abandoned by their clonemaker on the planet Gehenna, the travails they face surviving after being left to their own devices, and the strange society they build out of the pieces of their psychological programming.

Very interesting stuff, like most of Cherryh’s novels.

In the meantime, this strange spot on the web called “OmegaMom” has hit 50,000 unique visits, according to SiteMeter.  Woot!

Of course, after writing this post and looking up the Amazon info, it turns out that it was forty thousand in Gehenna, not fifty thousand.  Blame my aged brain; I can’t remember anything these days.

To the left is the fugly light fixture.  Bleah.  I happen to like Mrs. Figby’s tulip fixture and think you can do some fun deco decor with it, but this thing is…is…well, it takes me back to a certain Chicago decor that includes, say, plastic coverings on sofas.

On to more important things:  Two memes from SheOfLittleBrain. 

#1. Rules–You must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have. When you are tagged, you need to write your own blog post containing your own middle name game facts. At the end of your blog post you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and to read your blog.

A–A is for, of course, adoption.  Without adoption, we wouldn’t have OmegaDotter in our lives, and, as a result, we wouldn’t be stuck with the fugly light fixture.  ;)  I could also, of course, do Alaska.

N–Hey!  How about Nanning?  That’s where we met the dotter almost five years ago.

N–New…new state, new house, new environment, new adventures.

E–Exploration:  The new state, etc., requires exploration.  Exploration is something that OmegaDad is excellent at; he plunges into new experiences wholeheartedly, with an enthusiasm and excitement that sparks the same enthusiasm and excitement within me.

Meme #2. This meme consists of ten questions to be answered.

1. If you could have super powers what would they be and what would you do with them? (Please feel free to be selfish, you do not have to save the world!)

I suppose automagically unpacking everything and getting it all into the proper places doesn’t count.  Sigh.  I’m going to cheat and use SheOfLittleBrain’s answer, because I think it’s cool:  teleportation.  It would be so wonderful to be able to teleport myself to see my mom for an hour or two, or to teleport the dotter off to see her One And Only True Love, or be able to visit OmegaDad’s family for Christmas on a whim, instead of having to spend months persuading him we should go and then driving (or, these days, flying) forever to get there.

2. Were you to find your self stranded on an island with a CD player…it could happen…what would your top 10 blogger island discs be?

Sarah MacLachlan, Lorena McKinnett, Lyle Lovett, Mark Cohn, the Carmina Burana, some Chopin etudes, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the Rolling Stones, and John Lee Hooker.

3. If you were a smell what would it be?

Cinnamon.

4. What bird would you most like to be?

A red-tailed hawk.

5. If you were a bird who’s head would you poo on?

Dick Cheney.

6. Are there any foods that your body craves?

There are times when my body screams for meat; then there are times when it screams for oranges.

7. What’s your favourite time of year?

Autumn.  I love autumn.  It’s filled with a very special light, the leaves are all turning, there’s a crispness to the air, and it’s a bit melancholy and bittersweet, foreshadowing winter to come.

8. What’s your favourite time of day?

Hmmm.  Afternoon?

9. If a rest is as good as a change which would you choose?

Right now, rest.

10. If you could have a dinner party and invite any 5 people from the past or present who would they be? (Living or deceased.)

My dad, Queen Elizabeth I, Eleanor of Acquitaine, Leonardo da Vinci, and Richard Feynman.  Names subject to change depending on the day.

Now, to tag four people.  Hmm.

Kate, at High Altitude Gardening.

Mrs. Figby, to give her a break from the culture shock of New Jersey.

Ms. Vinegar Martinis.

Singing Bird.

I’m sure this clarion call is something that will soon vanish from the annals of the U.S. very soon, if it hasn’t already.  Maybe I’m showing my age…do you remember “newsstands”?  In my experience, wooden sheds with an older guy who wears an apron with lots of pockets jingling with change; all three city newspapers arrayed in metal paper holders; a fine selection of news magazines and Analog and Ellery Queen and a few crossword puzzle books.  My memory has these wooden sheds tucked under the El tracks at corners, and it’s usually twilight or dark and raining.

That aside.  Paper.  Here’s a pic with lots of paper:

With the help of the most modern of technologies, the 5-year-old child, the above paper can be compacted to fit into a large-ish packing box.

We’ve found the plates and cups and silverware.  Mixing bowls are still AWOL.

OmegaDad has spent the day gallivanting off to Home Debit to get manly-man stuff to replace switchplates and fix a poorly installed phone jack and paint…the dotter’s room.  We promised.  Pink.  Sigh.  But we picked a pale shade of pink, so maybe it won’t be too bad.  There’s a light fixture in that room that the dotter has said, “Ooooh!  I like it!  I want to keep it!” about.  Mrs. Figby would be much more appalled by this light fixture than she is with the deco-esque lavender tulip fixture she is saddled with in her new house in NJ.  This thing is fugly.  But it’s pink(ish) and has pink flowers and purple flowers.  What more does any girl need?

Anyway, the majority of the day after the visit to the money pit has been spent by himself taping trim, replacing fixtures, putting down plastic…sooner or later, paint will actually be applied.

I, striving to be helpful, took the dotter out of his hair by hauling her off to purchase some clothes that fit, as she seems to have grown.

SheOfLittleBrain tagged me with a meme, which reminds me I have a few other memes to complete, and you may be inundated with memes so I can avoid any substance for a while. 

Jack and Diane bought an acre of land and a house in Alaska in 1987.  They paid about $67,000.  Time went on, their kids grew up, the US went into a housing tizzy, and Jack and Diane looked at their house and realized they could now refinance and get at the equity…maybe fix things up, pay off some debt, buy a nice plasma TV, send the kids to college.

So in 2005 they refinanced using Lending Vine.  They paid off the first mortgage and had money to spend–they had borrowed $135,000, a fairly conservative amount, merely twice what they had bought for, and probably quite a bit less than what their house was worth (on paper) at the time.

Home values were skyrocketing.  People were getting 20% equity increase per year.  All was good.

They got themselves an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage.  Maybe they really looked at the details and decided that the way the housing market was, it was a sure thing that they could sell the house for way more than the mortgage or refinance for way more than the current mortgage when things got problematic.  Maybe they didn’t see the small print until they were signing, and figured it was going to be okay.

They fixed up the house.  They did some other things.

The interest rate on their mortgage changed in 2006 and their payments went up.  The interest rates went up again in 2007, and were probably going to go up again in 2008.

They sat down early in 2007 and looked at the bottom line.

The bottom line was that their mortgage, which was for $135,000 in 2005, was now for $145,000. 

Houses which were selling like hotcakes only a year ago were now sitting stagnant on the market.  Newly built homes in fancy subdivisions were sitting empty, and developers were slashing prices to reduce inventory.

Jack wanted to leave Alaska; he was tired of the winters and wanted to move to the Southwest.  And, no doubt, the increasing mortgage and the increasing mortgage payments weren’t helping.

So Jack and Diane decided to move.  After talking to some friends in the real estate business, and looking at the way the housing market was framing up to be for the year, they sadly decided to put their house of 20 years for sale for less than the going rate, and much less than it could have sold for two years ago.

Go while the going is good, eh?  Pay off that scary mortgage with the numbers increasing every time you turn around…

Names have been changed, some details are made up (such as motivation and when the interest rates went up–but the document indicated that the interest rate could go up the month after the mortgage was signed).  The IO/ARM and the increase in the mortgage balance are not made up–we saw them in the closing documents.

Folks, don’t do it.  Just Do.  Not.  Do.  It.  Jack and Diane lost $10,000, and they were some of the lucky ones–they didn’t lose their house, they ended up with some equity after all, they got out in time.  The Feds are busy changing their tune every week, it seems; first the housing downturn was no big deal, then it was going to be over with in a few months, one week it’s not going to impact the economy, the next week it’s going to cause a recession…

There are states where 60% of the mortgages written up in the last two years are zero-down IO/ARMs.  There are states where the foreclosure rate is doubling.  It’s a scary scenario. 

Our house in Small Mountain University Town has lost 24% of its value in the past year and a half, according to Zillow, and SMUT is an area where housing is still going fairly strongly.  What if we had refinanced then for what our house was (supposedly) valued at?

Things to think about.

Remember back when, when I said we were swimming in a sea of boxes?  Well, the tide has returned.  We have boxes everywhere.  Labeled things like “pappers” and “stuff from hutch/living room” and “pillows” (I think there was one pillow in that box).  That’s if there’s any labeling at all.

Somewhere in the garage is a box with all the parts.  The parts to the futon.  The parts to put the dotter’s bed back together.  The parts that hold the shelves up in the bookcases.  Those parts.

I had a whole bunch of boxes that I packed at first and carefully labeled on all sides–the room, what was in the box…

Those boxes are somewhere in the garage.

We have a printer somewhere in the garage.

And lamp shades.

And some desk lamps.

Oh, well.  At least we have a garage!  Woohoo!  And, once we unpack, it will be an empty garage, that we can park, say, automobiles in.  This is a kewl concept to yours truly.

In the meantime, to all moving company packers everywhere:  I am truly, abjectly sorry.  I sincerely apologize.  I grovel.  I will never make you do this again.  If we move again, I will be sure that everything is nice and clean.  (I leave it up to the imagination of the reader to consider things that were stored above the stove for years without anyone even bothering to look at them until the movers came along…)

This will be a long, slow process. 

So we slept in our own bed last night.  (Well, OmegaDad and I did.  The dotter slept on a pallet beside the bed.)  It felt very strange, like when you run into someone you went to high school with, and used to hang with every day, but who now sports a comb-over and talks about “How ’bout them Eagles, eh?”.

…birds are singing, angels are flying around, and a chorus of hosannahs is ringing out.

We closed on the house.

We are in the process of abandoning the Shoebox.

More later.

Living in a shoebox has some side effects.  One of those is, since we are sans washer and dryer, we must visit the laundromat.

OmegaDad did the honors the first time.

Now…I hate crowds.  I hate noisy situations.  Too many people making too much noise around me makes my back start twisting up, my adrenaline level rise, and my teeth grind.  Figlet recently asked “What’s Your Krazy”–this is one of my very biggest crazies.

OmegaDad has it much, much worse than I do.

So he returned from his excursion to the world of coin-operated washers and dryers frazzled to a fare-thee-well, his teeth set, and his psychic aura emitting “KEEP AWAY FROM ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!!” on a continuous loop.  He gritted his teeth at me and hissed, “YOU are doing the laundry from now on!” and then went on a tirade about the quality of people at the laundromat, the level of noise, the problems he had simply moving about, on and on, for half an hour.

I nodded my head, rolled my eyes, and said, “Yessir!”

I’ve been visiting the laundromat once per week ever since.  OmegaDad gave me the hairy eyeball last week and asked me, “How come when you go to the laundromat, it’s empty and nice and quiet, but when I go to the laundromat, it’s a seething mob scene?”

I dunno.  I’d guess it’s my laundromat karma.

You see, I love doing laundry.  It’s soothing.  It’s calming.  I go into a Happy Place mentally.  I zone out.  I plunge my hands into heaps of warm, fresh-out-of-the-dryer clothes and could just get wiggly like a small puppy.

And the laundromat doesn’t seem noisy to me, because all the things making “noise” are making white noise.  There are washers washing (schloop schloop schloop) and dryers drying (rumble rumble rumble thunka rumble rumble rumble thunka) and video games going bleep bloop and various people chattering to each other, which, with the white noise as a background, blends right in.

Okay, so I’ve been lucky:  No great huge fights have broken out, no whacked out druggies have suddenly started seeing spiders crawling down the walls, no fundamentalist nutcase has started preaching The Word at the top of his (or her) lungs.

Given the current close quarters at the Shoebox, going to the laundromat has an added plus:  I am gloriously alone.  OmegaDad drops me off with the clothes and accoutrements, and then hauls the dotter off to do shopping.  I get myself a frappucino, read a book or the Sunday paper, and just relax.

Part of this being-in-the-moment and zoning out to the white noise is related to having grown up and living as an adult in the big city.  Chicago (and any other big city) is filled with noise.  There’s the sound of traffic.  There’s the sound of people’s boomboxes and TVs.  There’s the sound of the couple two floors down having yet another fight.  There’s the El rumbling by a block away.  There’s the distant rumble from the expressway.  There’s the kssshhhh-SCREECH of buses stopping.  There’s the sound of jets taking off and landing and circling around waiting for a chance to land.

The city is an ocean of noise.  And to survive, people who live in cities learn to let the noise mash into a generic background wash, like the sound of ocean surf.  Because if you paid attention to all those different noises while living in a city, you would go utterly insane.

The only time I wasn’t able to put city noise into the general white noise mishmosh was when visiting my buddy Suz when she lived in Wicker Park in a walk-up that was directly behind the El tracks.  That noise was impossible to mesh with the rest of the ocean surf.  (However, as I recall, Suz herself said that after a few weeks, it started to blend in with the rest.)

Today was our last wash day at the laundromat.  I get to do laundry in the peace and privacy of our own home Real Soon Now.  I’ll be able to do the weekly laundry without spending $20.  I’ll be able to nosh in the kitchen, piddle in the office, wear my jammies, and sort my damned clothes into as many different color piles as I want starting tomorrow.  Yeehaw!

But I’m going to–in a weird way–miss the laundromat zen.  A bit.

 One of the things about living in Small Mountain University Town was that we were surrounded mostly by evergreens (Ponderosa pines) and there were fewer deciduous trees (oaks and aspens).  The aspens would put on a golden show in the autumn, but you had to drive to where there were lots of aspens to see the best show.  The oaks–eh.  The leaves would turn kind of muddy brown and drop off, and that was it.

So autumn wasn’t a visual stunner, like those of us who grew up in the midwest or east are accustomed to.  The stunning you would get was the vibrant blue sky and the vivid white sun, which was, admittedly, a jazzy combination.

Now here we are in the Final Frontier, and encountering an entire new ecosystem.  The majority of the trees, shrubs, bushes, and weeds here are decidedly deciduous.  And they’re showy.  Oh, oh, oh-so showy.  Reds.  Golds.  Oranges.  Greens with red spots.  Burgundies.  Yum.  And we still have some yellows, but they are put to shame by all the rest.

We aren’t having a grand blast of everything turning at once–yet.  But so far, we have lots of individual plants and trees turning color and dropping their leaves.

Many years ago, a cousin of mine took her 3-year-old daughter out one autumn to collect leaves.  They took clear plastic contact paper, laid the leaves out on it, and then put another layer of clear plastic contact paper on top.  GrannyJ still has the resultant banner hanging on the back of her office door.

Taking a tip from cuz J., I decided the dotter and I should collect some leaves and maybe make some placemats out of them.

So here are some autumn leaves:

Pixelating out, again, bah.  But, nonetheless, maybe giving you an idea of just how varied and colorful things are getting.  When we make the placemats, I will present a pic of one of them, too…

Thanks for joining me in a world-wide WOOT on word of our closing!  As GrannyJ suggested, we are visiting the furniture and boxes now & then and petting things and crooning happily.

Official closing:  Monday, 10 a.m.

WOOT!!

I realize that you have been working in your business field for many years.  I know that, when one has been doing the same work for a long time, the details of that work are ingrained in the brain, to the point where one begins to speak a kind of shorthand or jargon and knows the procedures by heart.

But please do remember that some of us are not in your profession.  We have professions of our own, and have learned the shorthand and jargon of our own profession.  Our procedures are totally different than yours.  We do not possess amazing telepathic powers that enable us to grok your procedures and know, intuitively, that you need specific documents at specific times.  We sort of trust you to let us know.

Therefore, for instance, some of us do not realize that when you say, “Please have so-and-so email me an estimate of the down payment and closing costs”, you mean the very same Good Faith Estimate that has been sitting in the Shoebox’s living room for two weeks now.  Some of us think that people in other professions have arcane knowledge and procedures of their very own, and that the Good Faith Estimate gracing our files is not what you are looking for, but that you are looking for something like an “Official Relocation Down Payment Estimate” or some other impressively titled form.  We would have been more than happy to fax that very same document to you two weeks ago if we had known that was what you wanted.

(We won’t get into the question of why, when you’ve got so-and-so’s email address, you can’t just–amazing concept–email him yourself, requesting that information.  Or, if that’s illegal, unethical, immoral, or Just Not Done, explaining that in a nice paragraph that says, “I would email him myself, but we are not allowed to by Subsection C Paragraph 3 Subparagraph a of state regulations/federal regulations/relocation company association’s code of ethics.”  Of course, so-and-so is doing the exact same thing from his end.)

(We also won’t get into the question of why it takes six weeks for two completed house appraisals to wend their way through the bowels of your company to the point that someone finally produces an official offer which required maybe one minute of calculation, on letterhead and in contract form.  I was able to ascertain that the two appraisals were within 5% of each other just by looking at the numbers, and was also able to get the average of the two appraisals within seconds, so it’s not like it was Real Hard Work.  If it had taken less time, perhaps we wouldn’t now be needing to deal with the insurance company to get estimates and repairs for the water damage from the Great Huge Storm, but you would.)

Sincerely,  A customer who is just snarking in general

The Good News:  Our stuff is out of the moving van and in the house.  We will be able to visit our stuff now and then, and maybe sit on the floor for a while and look around and realize that there’s SPACE that will soon be ours.  YAYAYAYAY!!!!

We can’t, however, “move in”, because we have to wait until the day after closing for the sale to be recorded.  Apparently, unlike other states we’ve been in where closing day is the day you take official possession, here in the Final Frontier you can’t take official possession until it’s recorded.  I am going to ask our realtor here if, since our insurance takes effect on the 10th and potential insurance claims was the argument against early occupancy, maybe we could sneak in on the 10th, rather than the 11th.

Anyway, I think (think) everything is a Go for closing on the 10th.  Cross your fingers.

OmegaDotter serenaded us with the “I am Special” song while we were off on our day trip.  Since Mr. OmegaMom and I were busy chit-chatting, it just glided over my head at first.  But then, during a chit-chat break, I started listening.

Oy!

Let me give some context.  The move and its attendant upheavals have left all of us in a state of perpetual flux…and I think all the Omegas are security hounds in one form or another.  The dotter’s routines are furschimmelt.  Her friends are all back in Small Mountain University Town.  Her toys and books and clothes and (most sorely missed of all) horsies are in boxes in a van somewhere in Big City.  Her mommy and daddy are grumpy a lot, because every time we turn around, we’re stepping on a dawg or a cat or a kid or one another.

Anyway, she’s all shook up.

As a result, she has been acting up.  Big time.  Tantrums.  Snotty attitude (ugh).  Many renditions of “neener, neener, neener” tones applied to many different communications to mother or father or dawg.

Right now, we’re striving–very, very hard–to not come down on her too hard, but at the same time get it through to her that it’s just plain not nice to be mean and snotty and have an attitude.  That other people count, and that words and deeds can hurt.  That if she snatches things away from other people, or sneers that the crown that mommy drew on her Ariel at her express request isn’t good enough, or sing-songs neener, neener, neener too many times, people just plain won’t want to be around her.  That doing those things can make other people (like mommy, who has a fragile set of waterworks these days) cry.

Kindergarden and aftercare come in for a smidgen of blame here, too, because she’s being thrown in with older kids and Learning New Things (not all of which we approve of).

To me, self-esteem is something hard won.  It’s not something you get just for living.  It’s something that grows, something that you feel when you’ve accomplished a hard task, something that comes from doing nice things for other people.  It’s not a given.

So when I heard the dotter singing that wretched song…well, it appalled me.

Yeah, it’s nice that kids think that it’s okay to be themselves.  It is not nice to think that other kids are bad simply because they have, say, acne, or messy hair, or stutter, or just look different in some way or another.  And I know that some kids don’t get approval or love from the get-go and may need shoring up in the area of “self-esteem”.

But “it’s okay” is a long, long distance from “I am special”.  “I am special” is a license, in my opinion, for kids to internalize a very self-absorbed attitude.  It celebrates “me, me, me” and promotes ignoring others.

To me, “special” is a B&B owner/manager who goes out of her way to rearrange accommodations for other customers because you’ve got no place to go and you’re stuck in her Shoebox.  To me, “special” is a neighbor who shows up on your doorstep with a bottle of whiskey when you’re being a single mom for a month and have gotten some shocking news, and insists you have a drink while she sits and lets you cry on her shoulder for a couple of hours.  To me, “special” is a cousin who arranges a veritable cornucopia of kid entertainment to keep the dotter busy while on an airplane for 10 hours.

“Special” is also a little girl who was terrified of skating who is suddenly soaring across the ice on her own.  “Special” is a little girl who spends an evening catching herself singing an annoying little ditty (don’t remember what it was, just that it was annoying) and thinks and stops each time, after being told it was annoying.  “Special” is a girl who got a big thumbs up after sounding out and spelling her first word (”pony”).

All of these are either individual achievements or care for other people’s needs or emotions.

“I am Special” doesn’t address any of that.  It doesn’t address the need for children to learn that they can try, and fail, and try again, and maybe–with hard work–achieve their end goal.  It celebrates just “being”, and promotes an attitude that one needs only to exist to get a gold star.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am quite aware of what having low self-esteem can do to people.  But it seems to me that the “I am Special” song is a cosmetic approach that inculcates an attitude diametrically opposed to what “self-esteem” really should be.  What good is singing “I am Special” to oneself if it makes one feel entitled to the good opinion of others, without striving and achieving?

Donna, in a comment on yesterday’s post, recommended a book, “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young People Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before”, by Jean Twenge.  I suspect I’m going to be reading that one very soon.

There haven’t been any earthquakes or volcano eruptions.

The dotter is in school.

OmegaDad likes his job.

I’ve got a job.

My ticker, though still giving me twinges now & then, is essentially healthy.

“This, too, shall pass…”

I’m not going to think about the moving van that we tried to head off at the pass this morning, because the sellers are still moving out and we can’t move our stuff in.  We’ll deal with the “missed delivery” charges later.  Surely they can’t be too huge, right?

I’m not going to think about the Great Huge Storm that hit Small Mountain University Town last weekend that swamped Small Mountain University and, incidentally, leaked through the roof in our house back in SMUT, damages unknown but requiring repair, thus eating away at our equity.  All of which we found out about this morning.

I’m not going to think about a closing date that has been moved to the 10th, and the associated pay-through-the-nose costs for staying in the Shoebox for another week.

Not any more, at least.  You aren’t hearing me sobbing or screaming, “AAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!“, nope.  (GrannyJ did, however.)

So, instead, I’ll think about “self-esteem” and teaching kids to sing, “I am special, I am special, yes, I am!  Yes, I am!  There is no-one like me, there is no-one like me, hmm, hmm, hmm” to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star Frére Jacques.  (I can’t remember the concluding phrase, and don’t feel like asking the dotter to sing it yet again.)  And then I’ll write about my problems with that particular approach to self-esteem tomorrow.

Lizard noted that the words didn’t scan at all with Twinkle, Twinkle.  I was puzzled, singing them over and over again–the words fit just fine!  Then I realized that I had the wrong song entirely.  Dur.

Harrumph.  I think I’m going to give up; the above photo was gorgeous in its full-size version, but when I crop it and make it smaller and fewer dpi, I get those horrid pixelating effects.  Argh.

We went on a day trip yesterday to escape from the Shoebox for a while.  We saw glaciers, an iceberg in a glacial lake (above), went through a long one-lane tunnel that is also shared by a train, watched the ferry steam out of the dock, wandered off through the mountains to a place called Hope, and returned home at 10 p.m., with the dotter sleeping soundly enough that I could carry her in and dump her into her little bed without a peep from the child.

It was truly a glorious day.

The apex, the pinnacle for the dotter, was when we were crawling around a little stream that smelled of rotting salmon:

“EWWWWW!  Mommy!  There’s a dead salmon!  EWWWWWW!”

Followed immediately by:

“Let’s find more!”

Then she spent the trip back home drawing dead salmon and asking me to draw the bones.  I told her she was a morbid child.  She giggled.

There’s nothing quite like getting a (quite elaborate) picture of a dead salmon with “I Mommy” written on it to warm the cockles of your heart.

But when we woke up in the morning, we were still in the Shoebox, not magically transported to the new house.  Sigh.  Mommy had a bad day as a result and was depressed and snarky.

OmegaDad had no idea what a “cootie catcher” was.

The dotter, on the other hand, has learned that valuable tidbit of information from either kindergarden or afterschool care.  She didn’t know the name, though.

So she asked me, “Do you know how to play a…a…” and went into a semi-coherent explanation of what it did, on the order of “You make it out of paper and you color it and you choose a color and there’s writing on it…”.  Amazingly enough, I knew what she was talking about.

And it’s like riding a bike:  once you know how to make a cootie catcher, you don’t forget it; it’s a kinetic memory buried in your body somehow.  Give the hands a piece of paper, and while you’re talking, you make one, though you’re not sure whether it’s right or not.  That’s when you consult Ye Olde Internets, googling “cootie catcher”, and find the “How to Make a Cootie Catcher” page, and find that–to your amazement–this divertissement that you haven’t created in some 30 years has emerged–correctly–from your fingertips sort of like Venus rising from the sea.

This is because little girls, once they know how to make cootie catchers, spend a few years making them at every opportunity.

Making a cootie catcher while you’re talking with your dotter is a quick and easy way to awe and impress her.

Then you have to make another.

And another.  And another.  And you have to make mini-cootie catchers out of the trimmings off the big ones.  And your dotter will squeal, “Oooooh!  Oh, they’re so cuuuute!”

And then you will be subjected to (a) having to come up with fortunes, and (b) playing cootie catchers for hours on end.  In the Shoebox’s living room.  In the car.  In the yard.  And when the dotter (inevitably) loses one, you will be required to make yet another.

And then you’ll discover the joys of competitively blowing mini-cootie catchers across restaurant tables at each other, a la Spit.  (You do remember Spit, don’t you?  No?  Well, it has to do with folding a piece of paper into a nice compact triangle, and then flicking it across the library table with an intent to get it past the goal of your buddy’s hands.  You did this during Study Hall.  Amazingly enough, the librarian never gave you and your buddies detention for all those spirited games of Spit.  Perhaps because detention would have to have been served in…the library?)

I am eagerly awaiting clapping games, to the tune of “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack”.  And OmegaGranny will be pleased to know that the dotter is learning Hopscotch, and will be dubious about the pre-taped Hopscotch layout, though happy it’s not painted in.

I wonder if Jacks are still a big thing with girls?  And Double-Dutch?