OmegaMom

…is the loneliest number.

We had ONE trick-or-treater here at the house.

Which makes me the more glad that OmegaDad scoped out the local Halloween scene with one of his coworkers, who has a 5-year-old also, and was invited to her house to trick-or-treat in her neighborhood, the Place To Be for Halloween.

Having suddenly come down with the collywobbles midday, I sent father and dotter off on various Halloween-y expeditions and stayed home.

And got ONE trick-or-treater.

Bah.

We have a few cute pics of dotter-as-kitty-cat, but they are on the other computer, which OmegaDad is playing with.  Tomorrow.

While we purchased our (very expensive) (medium-sized) pumpkin a few weeks ago, we only got around to doing the carving this evening.

This Halloween, in fact, has been characterized by a slew of delays.  We have the dotter’s costume–but I still need to iron it.  OmegaDad is out buying milk and tights–tights for the costume.  We have no idea whether people do trick-or-treating here in our cul-de-sac, or anywhere near our neighborhood.  Since everyone lives on one-acre lots, and the houses are set back a bit, it means a bunch of schlepping to-and-fro, enough to cause the dotter to wear out quite early on.  In addition, from what I can tell of our neighbors, we don’t have anyone with kiddos nearby.

I suggested to the dotter this evening that we might want to do a Halloween party or two instead.

You might have thought I was dissing the Pope or some such thing.  She gasped.  She wailed.  The words, “I don’t want to go to a party!” emerged from her shell-like lips for the very first time ever in her life.

I dither.  We shall see tomorrow.  The dotter’s general 5-year-old pillishness at the dinner table had her father threatening her with no trick-or-treating this evening.

All that aside, like I said, this evening was pumpkin carving time.

First, we had design work.  Note the intense look on my face, the laughter on the dotter’s.  The bit of white showing beneath the child’s knee is her notepad, on which she was drawing various jack-o-lanterns as design ideas.

Me at work some more:

The dotter wanted a “princess”.  Now, normally I’m quite good at doing evul looking pumpkins, but I originally bowed out on the princess design.  The dotter tried.  She didn’t like it.  OmegaDad was called upon.  After about fifteen minutes of him hemming and hawing, I offered.  I had a plan of almond-eyed Betty Boop-dom, with curvaceous lips and arching eyebrows.  This is what we ended up with:

First, the annual OmegaDad-as-psycho-killer picture:

Alas, the pink bottle brush standing upright on the counter sort of (a) blocks the knife work and (b) just doesn’t fit the mood of pyscho-killer.

Two heads are better than one, especially if one has a knife protruding from it:

Scoopage was next.  The dotter actually scooped some stuff herself this year, instead of being staged with pre-scooped stuff from OmegaDad. 

Here, OmegaDotter channels sixteen-year-old Muffy–”Ooh!  This is like, so totally gross!  I can’t believe how gross it is!”:

OmegaDad then took pity and took over the scoopage.  Of course, there was the obligatory “threaten the dotter with ooey gooey pumpkin innards” which resulted in much squirming and hilarity:

Just call her Priscilla Pumpkin, please:

After the carving was done, and the candle inserted and lit, this is the end result:

Not quite the sexy lady/Betty Boop look I was aiming for, but more like an evil djinn.  This is OK.  To get the sexy lady, OmegaDad would have had to do a lot more fiddly curly stuff, with eyebrows that arch more and trail off more, and a more bow-like upper lip…all of which would require a much more delicate pumpkin-massacring (sp?) instrument than our ancient and rusty drywall saw.  Every year, I flinch as he does the carving, praying to the Kozmik All that his hands don’t slip and we don’t end up at the emergency room with geysers of blood and tetanus shots galore.

OmegaDad has returned with tights and Halloween candy.  Luckily, there are no KitKats and no Reese’s Stix.  I will have to be content with the Hershey’s Special Darks…

Our new house has a laundry chute.

Did I tell you that?

It’s so cool.  I highly recommend that anyone who has two or more stories put in a laundry chute to the area where the laundry resides.  It is very nice to have no more laundry baskets (faux hampers) taking up real estate in the bedrooms and slopping over with mis-aimed dirty clothes (courtesy of the dotter and OmegaDad–I, of course, never miss.  Or if I do, I take the all-of-two-seconds it takes to pick the piece of clothing up off the floor and put it properly in the basket.  Not that this sticks in my craw or anything.  Honestly.  Why would the fact that I bring this up after having a laundry chute for two months make you think I have a complex about it?).

We also have a Wooly cat.

I think you already know that.

Our cat finds closed doors to be an affront to his existence.

You would think that big, heavy, solid wood cabinet doors–like we have here–would dissuade him from trying to open them, but that merely makes it more of a challenge.

The laundry chute, unlike all the other cabinet doors, hinges on the bottom.  You’d think that the cat, accustomed to normal cabinetry that hinges on the sides, would give up and slink off.

Oh, no, not him.

The other night, while doing something upstairs, I heard a horrendous “CLUNK!” from the upstairs bathroom.  Later on, as I passed the bathroom door and reached in to turn out the light (no-one else in this house has the “turning off the light” gene), I saw the maw of the laundry chute gaping wide open.

OmegaDad met me as I was coming down the stairs.

“What is your cat doing up there to make such a racket?!” he asked.

I informed him, and we went downstairs together, to find Wooly cat emerging from the laundry chute door, looking very pleased with himself.

He has also discovered how to open the front door and the kitchen door.  This is not as amazing as it sounds, as those two doors don’t fully latch until you lean on them, hard, and hear a “click…click”.  If you don’t lean on them hard, they look closed, but easily surrender to a determined cat who has discovered that being outside is the Most Amazing, Wondrous, Astonishing Thing In The Whole Wide World!  So he sits by the doors, just waiting for us to not-latch them, and then he paws and paws at them until he gets them open.

This perturbs me for two reasons:  1) Wooly cat has never been an outdoor cat, and doesn’t know a thing about big wild hungry animals; and 2) it’s October and it’s already in the low 20s at night, and a wide open door makes me see $$ on the gas bill.

(Our other cat, who hides under the futon in the family room downstairs and only comes out once in a blue moon, has been an inside cat for years, since about the fifth time we had to retrieve her from the tree next to our house or the roof of the house.)

Another post will be about the wiener dogs next door, who like to come visit.

(N.B.:  O, Mr. and Mrs. Johnny Verbeck
How could you be so mean?
We knew that you’d be sorry for
Inventing that machine.
Now all the neighborhood cats and dogs
Will nevermore be seen
‘Cause they’ve all been ground to sausage meat
In Johnny Verbeck’s machine!

OmegaGranny and OmegaUnk will be extremely familiar with that song.  I’m just curious if anyone else out there in Internet-land is…)

But I got a whole bunch of my Dianne Wynne Jones books and have been reading.  When I’ve not been glooming about the greyness and the snow and the chill and the dark.  And the length of time it’s taking to get the *#@! relocation company to get off its ass and getting frantic about the offer expiring and blah de blah de blah…

I’ll try to pull together a halfway decent post soon enough.

The weather forecast calls for cold and snow.

And cold and snow.

And cold and snow.

Not too cold yet, though.  Twenties and thirties.  We have had two snows so far, last night’s giving us about four inches at the house.

The dawg loves the snow.  He barrels about in the snow, shoveling it with his nose and flipping it into the air.  Then he bounces around, pees, poops, shovels some more snow, and bounces some more.

The sun is coming up at about 9:10 a.m. and setting at 6:15.  At Small Mountain University Town, the sun is rising at 6:42 a.m. and setting at 5:38…we’re now off by an hour of daylight, and rapidly decreasing.

We had our first parent-teacher conference today.  Mrs. Shoefetish and Mrs. Brian assured me that the dotter was doing quite amazingly well academically.  We actually got a “report card”.  Goodness.

In terms of the kindergarden curriculum question, the report card specifically looked at kids being able to name colors, shapes, count to five, know their first and last name.  They’ve gone through six letters of the alphabet.

The dotter was praised for her creativity; she likes to make “books” during free time, and apparently the other kids at her table are so taken with the books that they’re starting to make them too.

MIL called this evening; in an attempt to keep the dotter quiet while OmegaDad spoke on the phone, I pulled the dotter aside to do some drawing.

Somehow this morphed into us doing clapping games.

You remember clapping games?

I learned one new one; we raced through Pattycake; we did “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea”, though neither of us remembers the specific clapping pattern; and we ended up laughing uproariously at each other.

That was fun.

Lest you think that all is fun and games with the dotter, let me say both OmegaDad and I were amazed that the dotter got exemplary marks for “following directions” and “behaving appropriately”, and just nodded our heads and rolled our eyes at the “still learning” “score” on “respecting the rights and property of others” category.  I am now beginning to suspect that the dotter is Miss Sweetness and Light at school and saves up all her snarkiness for us at home.  Man, oh, man, can she whiiiiiiine!

But this evening was quite fun.

We are still waiting on the finishing touches of the relocation company buying our house.

Grrr.

As soon as that check hits our bank account, we are out buying OmegaDad a car of his own.  Or OmegaMom a car of her own.  Or whatever.  This one car dealio is driving both of us nuts.

Also as soon as that check hits, I am picking up the phone to call the local blind installation company so we can get some insulated cell blinds put in.  And drapes.

Santa Ana winds.  Huge wildfires.

I’ve said this before:  Having lived in California, I can say that the thing that scared me most was the autumn fire season.  Not earthquakes.  Earthquakes are a now and again thing.  Fires are a sure thing, every autumn, before the winter rains begin.

Cousin and family were evacuated from Ramona, and everyone in the family is okay, so far.

My thoughts go out to everyone in the San Diego area.  I remember the Oakland Firestorm, and how it affected everyone in the area–everyone knew someone who had lost a home in that fire.  This one sounds like it’s going to be quite similar.

One of the intriguing things about having a child in the house is that you (the adult) realize just how many things you take for granted that are hard to learn (for kids).

Walking.  That’s a big one.  A toddler demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, just how difficult walking upright really is.  It requires immense concentration.  A sense of balance isn’t intrinsic–it requires practice.  It takes months of constant practice before a toddler can turn the Frankenwalk into something graceful and thoughtless.  Daily practice.  Hours and hours of it.

Somewheres along the line, after all that practice, the brain switches from conscious effort to unconscious act.

It’s fascinating.

Dimes, pennies, nickels, quarters.  It’s only with a kid around that you really grasp the idea that it’s utterly senseless, to the naked eye, that the different sizes of these different coins has no correlation to the “worth”.

Then we come to reading.

English is a language with lots of input from a variety of other languages.  It’s a mutt, pure and simple.  There’s Latin.  There’s Saxon.  There’s medieval French.  There’s a slew of native American words, from a variety of different native American language families.  There are Arabic words.  Made-up words.  Acronyms.

Then there are regular verbs versus regular verbs.

Then there are the archeological remnants of old pronunciations that linger on, like a linguistic appendix.

When you get down to learning to read, how do you distill all these disparate ingredients into a set of rules?

Take, for instance, the word “knight”.  Once upon a time, it actually was pronounced somewhat like it is spelled–kunihcht, with that ch being one of those gutterals that modern Amurrikans can’t handle.  But a child just learning to read, and sounding out the letters…you have to explain, well, the “k” is silent.  Why?  Um.  (Here you can diverge into two vastly different approaches:  “It just is.”  Or “Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a Germanic language that pronounced the ‘k’ in a word like that, but as time went on, people who spoke English slurred that ‘k’ more and more until it simply disappeared…but our spelling still shows it.”)  Then you have to explain that “igh” is pronounced “eye”.  (At least, in this case it is.)  And decide whether to do the short version or the long version or the medium version (”English is a funny language, dear”).

Or the letter “e” in all it’s variety.  Why, for example, is the “y” at the end of the word “variety” pronounced “eee”?  Why did we stick “y’s” there, instead of something else?  Why is the “e” at the end of most words silent, but in “the” and “he” it isn’t?

How about “ed”?  Why is it pronounced just like it looks in the word “red”, but not in “looked”?  Why does it sound like a “t” there?

And on and on.  And on.  Oy!  It’s a miracle you guys can read this bloggage at all!

This is brought to you courtesy of the dotter, who read her first full page from a Jack and Annie book today.  Woot!  (OmegaMom is doing the Snoopy Dance.)  Yes!  A full page!

But man.  That one page of The Magic Tree House #2,721 was full of such pitfalls that adults (read:  OmegaMom) skip right over as they read, while children (read:  OmegaDotter) stumble over and question and wonder why.

Yes, in reality there are rules.  But there are so many of them!  And so many exceptions!  And so many rules that depend upon the placement of letters!  And lots that depend upon the word itself!

And, yes, it’s easier than ideographic languages, such as Chinese, where a literate person has to learn between three and four thousand individual ideographs.

But, still!  Good lord.  OmegaDotter was simply exhausted by the end of that one page.  It takes a child an immense amount of focus to do something like that.  Thank heavens for the vast variety of reading material out there, so that most kids can find something to read that interests them enough to motivate them to focus that hard, that gives them a reason to continue to practice, practice, practice.  Because the only way to internalize that intricate, labyrinthine mazework of phonetic rules is to just keep plugging away at it…just like learning to walk.

Today’s saddest Google hit on my blog:

How can I refinance when my house has lost so much value?

That one simple question has so much backstory, and that story is being repeated over and over and over again across the country.

Anyway, son, my answer is:  Don’t ask me.  Don’t ask blogs.  Don’t ask Google.  Ask a mortgage company.  Ask a consumer credit repair organization (and make sure it’s an organization, not a scam).

The housing market has well and truly tanked.  Housing sales are off by 50% year-over-year in parts of California, a drop that hasn’t been seen since they started keeping track of such things.  Foreclosures are skyrocketing.  In areas where people are stubbornly keeping to their original house price, sales are totally stagnant.  The Fed is rumored to be looking at dropping the interest rate.  A consortium of (scared witless) banks has gotten together to create a fund to save “structured inventment vehicles”, which are being hammered by the sub-prime mortgage mess.

And the DJIA, after dipping a toe into record territory, has slid backwards this week.

So, no, son, don’t ask me how to refinance now that housing prices are beginning to drop.  I’m sorry.  I have sympathy, I really do, but at the same time, I really don’t–if you’re in a mortgage mess, you need to take a lesson from this:  read your damned mortgage terms before you sign the paper.  And think looooong and hard before you agree to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars at some un-predetermined interest rate, gambling on your house’s value to keep rising.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Sorry.

On Saturday, OmegaDad tumbled down the stairs, carefully cradling the shopvac while variously his ankle, knee, hip, ribs, and arm whacked (bump, bump, bump!) against the stair risers.

I was busy vacuuming (using the Dyson, which truly sucks, yay!) the uncovered heating phalanges in our bedroom, so I didn’t hear the catastrophe.  OmegaDotter, playing in the oh-so-crowded living room (all the bedroom furniture had to find a home, eh?), heard, and solicitously followed to make sure he was okay.

That evening, he sported a truly awesome baseball-sized goose-egg on his ankle.  We iced and wrapped and elevated, and he gobbled ibuprofen, and after a few days he was decorated with the putrid yellow and green markage that shows a bruise on its way to healing.

Then, yesterday, it started hurting again.  Carrying the dotter up the stairs on his shoulders (ahem, OmegaMom is rolling her eyes here for a variety of reasons) made his ankle feel “weird”.  And yesterday night, when we examined the bruising, there was a new, large, purplish line of bruising underneath his ankle.  Hm.

So, to err on the side of caution, we marched off to the urgent care center this a.m. to have a doc look at it.  The doc agreed an x-ray might be a good idea, so we had that done, and as luck would have it, all looked okay, and OmegaDad has been pretty much told to tough it out and gobble more ibuprofen.

Anyway, while we were awaiting the doc, we cruised the urgent care clinic’s magazine collection.  I picked up Time and Newsweek.  OmegaDad picked up Field and Stream.

Then he had to share his running commentary.

He started from the back of the magazine.

Featured on the back is a truly Klingon-esque crossbow.  Scarily medieval looking.  Lots of pointy stuff.  Lots of cut-outs.  Flashy.  Truly studly.

OmegaDad started flipping forwards through the ad section, muttering, “You need to see this…the whole point to this magazine…Nope, that’s not it…nope…nope…”

He paused momentarily so I could gape at a small ad featuring a picture of Big Foot, or maybe an Ent.  Or possibly a walking haystack.  OmegaDad disabused me of these notions, snorting, “Woman!  Don’t you recognize manly camouflage when you see it?!”  I pointed out that in the picture, the man, walking across a mown green lawn, wasn’t camouflaged at all.  “Picky, picky!” complained OmegaDad.

He continued flipping.  Then he hit two full-page ads, and proclaimed, “Ah-HAH!  Now, see, this is what hunting is supposed to do for you!  You go hunting and become a Manly Man!”

The ads were for “male enhancement”.  Har!

He soon found another ad for “male enhancement”, which featured an amazingly urbane looking gray-haired dude in suit pants and white tailored shirt (this is a hunter?  Where’s his camo?) with a True Babe climbing up his body, her legs wrapped joyously around his waist, her back arched, her long red-brown hair tumbling down, her head back…

OmegaDad said, “Just by reading this magazine, a man’s penis grows long enough so he can have intercourse with a woman riding his shoulders!”

Then he flexed his arms and gave a manly “Hunh!“

Then we paged forward some more to look at rugged, manly ATVs in full-blown camouflage.  And knives (”Hoo hoo hoo!” hooted OmegaDad, like a gorilla).  And more crossbows.

You could feel the testosterone oozing from the pages.

OmegaDad, let it be said, grew up in Oklahoma and spent his entire late teens and early 20s out hunting with his buds.  So he is behaving kind of like me if I started poking at my now-deceased eldest brother; it was okay for me to diss him, but I didn’t want to hear anyone outside the family dissing him, y’know?  Thus OmegaDad and hunting/fishing magazines.

Next time, we need to do Cosmo.  Or Ladies Home and Garden.  Or, god help us, a teeny-bopper’s magazine…

(Update:  I can already foresee that this particular post is going to end up being one of my most popular ever.  It has been up for all of two or three hours, and already I have a hit on “male enhancement”. Har.  Surely it will outstrip gl0bal warm1ng in no time at all!)

When we went looking at properties here in AK, OmegaDad wanted to find a place with more than one acre that was a horse property (i.e., zoned or HOA’d into allowing horses).

Lo and behold, we now have a greater-than-one-acre horse property.

Of course, a horse is far (may I reiterate that?  FAAAARRRR.) into the future.

However, OmegaDad Has A Plan.

The plan includes goats.

Ahem.

It goes:  We get two goats, cheap.  We feed them, we take care of them, we milk one of them, they have baby goats, we sell baby goats, we stash the $$ in an account, lather, rinse, repeat.  His plan has two prongs:  first, get the kiddo into the habit of tending to helpless animals; second, build up the $$ for a horse.

Now, me, personally?  I’d be more than happy to buy a horse and board it somewhere else.  Wandering around the back forty of our lot has reminded me that horses produce vast amounts of horse poop.  Vast.  We have large heaps back there of nicely decaying horse poop that will no doubt have a good future as mulch for gardens.  But it has driven into me the question:  What exactly does one do with all the horse poop?

Not to mention the thought of any poor critters being dependent upon the dotter for care.  Not to mention the corollary to that, which would be Someone Else Will End Up Tending The Goats.

All of that aside, OmegaDad and dotter are thinking goats.

OmegaDad purchased a magazine at the local pet store all about goats.

Yes, there is a goat magazine.

Cute little buggers, actually.

Anyway, the milking question came up.  The dotter refused to believe you could milk goats.  OmegaMom, ever the computer junkie, located a bunch of videos on YouTube about milking goats.  The dotter was fascinated and grossed out.  Her succinct comment:  “EWWWWWWW!”

So OmegaDad had her practicing on his hand.  That wasn’t really working, so he got out the hand condoms.

(What, you ask, are “hand condoms”??  Latex gloves, used in various areas in the house, such as when painting, when washing lots of things, etc.)

He blew one up.  It was a hit.  We are all sitting in my office, the dotter practicing “milking” the balloon-like latex gloves.  We are slightly giggling.  At some point, the dotter decides to be a goat, and positions the blown-up glove beneath her so OmegaDad can “milk” her.  Some Twister-like confusion occurs, in which the balloon-glove goes whirling around the room, emitting a fart-like sound.

“Daddy!  You pulled my udder off!”

All of which made us giggle even more.

So then OmegaDad decided the dotter needed a somewhat more lifelike imitation of udders.  He and she vanished into the hinterlands of the house.  Then a snickering dotter returned to the office to demand my presence in the downstairs bathroom.

The latest latex glove had been filled with water.  But not filled enough.  It drooped.  It stretched.  It wiggled.  It pointed udders in wildly varying directions.

It made me and OmegaDad howl with laughter.  So much so that my stomach hurt; I haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time.

OmegaDotter was not as amused, and thought we were very silly.  Which, of course, made us howl more.

Alas, the water-filled pseudo-udder popped sometime overnight.

We are such sophisticates.

(Aunt Jean says that L’s issues were due to a series of strokes, not Alzheimer’s, but that it was horrible nonetheless.  Noreen mentions that I should investigate drug side-effects–I think, however, that the memory issues are merely the mental fog of early menopause.  Johnny asks why no pics on the “Wah!” post about the painting job; I tried, Johnny, I really tried, but every picture came out looking blue.  That aside, the paint, when dry, looked better, we have done a second coat, and I think we are content.)

(Gah.  Forgot.  Two more things:

1.  Do please check out my DonorsChoose challenge, and donate $10 to my selected teachers’ projects.  They’re nothing major, just small potatoes.  Can you help?

2.  Is anyone else having problems with the side columns on my blog?  If you resize the browser widthwise, the side columns appear and disappear for me.  Does it do the same for you?  Does anyone have any clue what might cause that?)

Right now, the “No, I wouldn’t”s are in the lead.  The tally is OmegaDad, EzFez, Margaret and Theresa, all of whom essentially say “Why?  It’s just another thing I would worry about!”

I do like Theresa’s idea of “just feed me ice cream and gummi bears!”

The “Yes, I would want to know”s either have a family history of Alzheimer’s or a deep-seated need for control.  ;)  Del says while he might use it to prepare, he might just blow his retirement savings on fast women and booze.  Sister Carrie doesn’t quite put it like that, but says she wants to enjoy while she can, as does Kat.

I’m squarely in the middle on this one.  On the one hand, Medical Science Is Doing Amazing Things These Days.  (Hear that plummy announcer’s voice?  I swear I have Marlin Perkins’ voice forever engraved on my mind–pseudo Alzheimer’s aside.  “As the sun sets on the Serengeti, my intrepid assistant Jim is dangling from a rope in front of a hungry lion…”)

Anyway, Amazing Things.  The point being that, perhaps, sometime soon, they’ll come up with drugs or therapies or a brain-artery Roto-rooter that scrubs the plaque away, and Alzheimer’s will no longer be the soul-sucking personality destroyer that it is now.

In which case, hell, yeah, I’d like to know ahead of time, so that I can trot myself down to the local medico and say, “Gimme drugs!”  (Or “Gimme that Roto-rooter; I’ll do it myself!”)

On the other hand, I have the experience of OmegaBro’s maternal family to scare me silly.  Aunt J. (OmegaBro’s mom, dad’s first wife) had an ongoing edgy relationship with her own mother, with a hefty thread of resentment coloring everything.  And then her mother started the downward spiral that is Alzheimer’s.  She got tossed out of the assisted living home–either because she had become so nasty and bitchy that no-one wanted anything to do with her or because she kept forgetting that she had put a pot of water on to boil for tea.  Then she lived with Aunt J., who had to cope with a slew of emotions based on obligation, resentment, tainted love…

Of course, to me, L. was a lovely lady, but I still remember the first year she lived with Aunt J., when, at Christmastime, over the course of five hours she asked the same set of questions five or six times.  It was my first experience with Alzheimer’s, and made me incredibly sad, because L. was a vivid, vivacious, witty, proud and self-sufficient lady, or had been.  And that was at the early stages; by the time she died she had been bedridden for a year, no longer recognized her daughter, her grandsons, or her great-grandsons, couldn’t clothe herself or take care of herself in any manner.

So, on the third hand, knowing ahead of time, coupled with my memories of L., would give me incredible incentive to investigate any and all possible treatments and rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But, on the fourth hand, I am prone to stewing, and, like all the “Hell, no!” folks above, it would be just yet another thing to stew about.

Okay, so far I’ve got four hands going here.  I am not an octopus.  But obviously I am not decisive on this issue.  Finding out early if I had cancer?  Hokie doke.  No problemo.  Let’s find out, let’s kick that cancer’s ass, and if it doesn’t work, well, we’ve fought the good fight.

Ditto with diabetes, heart disease…

But these are all physical.  It’s the mental and emotional capacities that get clobbered by Alzheimer’s.  It’s so easy to be strong (at least in theory) with physical problems, but not so easy with a shrinking fear of the Essential Me just…fading away.

Anyway, it’s an interesting mental exercise.  Part of my issue is that I have all these incredibly long-lived women in my mother’s side of the family…so I keep thinking it’s not possible that can last more than three generations, that the strong pioneer stock must be diluted by now, so there must be some catastrophe awaiting me as a legacy from my dad’s side, to put the kibosh on the long-lived Mills women.

In the meantime, given that the first of the Baby Boomers has just begun picking up her social security check, and there are millions more just like her following along, the field of gerontology and elder health is just going to be busy and booming for quite a while.  Since I am towards the end of the Baby Boomer cohort, it’s quite possible that all the research that is going to go on in the next twenty years will pay off with exceptional dividends for me…and those like me.

Onto less morbid topics tomorrow!

Right around the same time that my female hormones really went around the bend (aka “perimenopause”), I began to have a whole slew of side effects.  Hot flashes, a hell-on-wheels hair-trigger temper, a sex drive that tanked, and memory issues.

Each of these taken separately was a total pain in the ass.  Taken as a whole, it’s a personality disaster.  But, even so, most of it is stuff you can grit your teeth and grin and bear, or take various nostrums to deal with.

One aspect, however, really, really bothers me, and that’s the memory problems.

The thing that bothers me is not the fact that I have them–everyone has memory lapses, and walking into a room and suddenly realizing you can’t remember what you went in there for was nothing new and exciting to me, just something to take in stride.

What was disturbing, however, was the form the memory problems took.

I pride myself on my vocabulary.  My ability to flit from word to word.  My personal OED sitting at my neuron-tips, just waiting for the right shading of meaning to pull the proper word out of the mental dictionary.

The form my perimenopausal memory problems took–and still take–is one where very simple words elude me.  I’ll be talking, and suddenly, instead of, say, “oven”, my mind and mouth will say, “refrigerator”.  It’s always a somewhat related word, just slightly skewed.  And worse than that are the times where I simply cannot recall the word I want to use.  At all.  I find myself saying, “the place where all the food is kept cold” and waving my hand about as if to pull the proper word out of the ether.

The thing that scares me most in terms of getting old is Alzheimer’s disease. 

No-one in my family has had it, that I know of; we’ve been remarkably lucky in that as we age, we suffer from all sorts of icky age-related diseases but still retain full mental faculties.  Diabetes?  Yup.  Cancer?  Yup.  Heart disease?  Yup.  Alzheimer’s?  Nope.

Coming from a family that is so rich in folks with excellent mental abilities and a lively love of mental games and learning and puzzles…all of those things are prized possessions to me.  The thought of losing those abilities…the thought of having to depend on someone else because I was losing my own ability to think…these thoughts scare the snot out of me.  It’s my very deepest fear.

Researchers have recently come up with 16 protein markers in the bloodstream that serve as markers for Alzheimer’s, with a 90% success rate.

Would you want to know?

I read that story and my first thought was, “Hah!  Now I can get a test and find out if my specific type of memory lapse is a symptom of Something Worse!”

Then I thought again.  Firstly, of course, is the 90% success rate, which implies a 10% failure rate.  The articles I’ve read didn’t say whether that 10% was 10% false positives (”Why, Jane!  I am so sorry that seven years ago we diagnosed you with Alzheimer’s; it turns out you’re one of the lucky folk who actually won’t get it!”) or false negatives (”George, we’re sorry, but it turns out that we were wrong; you are developing Alzheimer’s very quickly.”). 

Secondly…well, secondly.  What would you live like if you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you were developing Alzheimer’s.  That even though nothing showed up currently in your personality, all the signposts were there indicating that every day, bit by bit, your brain was decaying, and after a certain point you would no longer exist as a person.  That in a few years, your loved ones would be dealing with you-as-a-burden, someone who no longer recognizes them and no longer loves them.

I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I’d like to think that I’m the type to find out and face reality.  But at the same time, it’s so much easier to live with a “maybe” than with a “for sure”.

What would you do?  Would you want to know?

Pumpkins.  At this time of year, in Small Mountain University Town, every single grocery store is knee deep in pumpkins.  There are pumpkin corrals out front, with cheesy scarecrows at the corners, and pumpkins of every size possible, from teeny-tiny to ginormous, spilling out in carefully orchestrated abandon.  Pumpkins are sold by the pound, and tend to run about (if my memory is correct) 30 cents per pound or less.

Today, one of the items on our shopping list was a pumpkin.

Actually, two.  One small, for school.  One pumpkin-sized pumpkin for the carving and scooping and candles and all that Halloween stuff.

So the dotter and I went to Carrs.

No pumpkins out front.

No pumpkins right inside the door.

Helllooooooo?  Pumpkins?  Where arrreee you?!

I finally found the pumpkins, up front but in an out-of-the-way area.  An itty bitty teeny tiny display with maybe 15 pumpkins total.  The pumpkins were eighteen dollars for two pumpkins.

No.  I am not shitting you.

Eighteen dollars for two.

There was a slightly bigger display of pumpkins at Three Bears.  They also had some ginormous ones, and their pumpkins were being sold by the pound.  Forty-nine cents per pound.

I thought this was the land of big veggies…

Wah!  I wanna go home!

In another “wah!” item.  OmegaDad finished painting the bedroom.

We had hemmed and hawed at the hardware store when purchasing paint.  I wanted a sage-y color.  The one I pointed out, he said, dubiously, “Looks awfully dark…”  So we picked out a lighter shade of the same color.  (Or so we thought.)

The paint is wet.  The pink paint in the dotter’s bedroom was much darker when wet.  Maybe greenish paint doesn’t behave the same way?  Maybe when it dries out, it’ll be darker, instead?

Because right now, it’s a pale celery color.

Celery?!?!  WAH!

(The above was written earlier.  OmegaDad, seeing my downcast face and hearing my, “Is that what it looks like??” said we should go get more paint…after all, everything is already masked off, and we can paint over.  So it looks like we’ll be getting an honest-to-goodness “sage” color after all.  The paint, much dryer now, is still looking like pale celery.  Or pistachio ice cream.  Not what I wanted at all!)

Most people, when they paint a room, go in, slap some masking tape on, and start painting.

OmegaDad, on the other hand, becomes a perfectionist freak.

First, he finds every.  Single.  Spot.  On the walls that is even slightly scuffed or marred.  Then he patches it.  Then he sands it.  Then he sprays texturizer on it.

Then he masks of every.  Single.  Piece.  Of non-paintable stuff.

Our latest brainstorm was to purchase a paintsprayer, thinking this would make things easier in general.

Bwahahahaha!

Excuse me while OmegaMom goes outside and double over in paroxysms of laughter.

Bwahahaha!

Now we have the opportunity to not only mask things off, but to put plastic all over things!

OmegaDad and OmegaMom spent the morning taping plastic sheeting on the ceiling of our bedroom.  Admittedly, this could have been avoided if OmegaMom had wanted the entire bedroom to be the same color, but I’d like sage walls and creamy white ceiling.

Even OmegaDad, the painting perfectionist, said at one point, “Y’know, if this room were even slightly smaller, it would be easier to just use paintrollers.”

Ya think?

Ah, well.  OmegaDad is out purchasing WD40 or a similar unguent, needed for the paint spraying machine.  When he returns, he will enter into the bedroom, close the door behind himself, put up plastic sheeting and masking tape over the doorway, and spray himself silly in his hermetically sealed bubble.

At least this time he has had the sense to purchase a respirator.  Normally when OmegaDad plays with chemicals in a spray format, it’s to clean bathrooms, and his philosophy is that if a little bit is good, a lot should be a lot better.  Then he gasses himself, spends the rest of the day in a headachy daze, and leaves the house smelling vaguely like an industrial waste site.

(My whole thought about the spray painter was that it would be handy for such things as, oh, painting our workshed out back–the exterior.  Or painting various pieces of furniture.)

It snowed last night.  Not much, pretty much just a dusting.  More is predicted for tonight.

Okay, so my rant about the “scene” setting on digital cameras in my previous post set me to wondering.  So I finally dug up the manual for my digicam and read up on the whole “scene”.

(Har!)

So the scene about the “scene” is that digicams apparently have a bunch of pre-set settings that are applicable to particular types of photos.  The “scene” setting, in conjunction with selecting the proper “scene” type, supposedly changes a variety of settings for your camera to make, for instance, the process for sunset photos different than the process for ski-slope photos different than the process for backlit photos, etc.

This is not the first time that I’ve tossed a rant based on total ignorance out onto the blog, then researched the subject, and had to recant.

I recant!

And I will not say, E pur si muove! like a certain famous scientist did.  (My recantation being purely voluntary, his not.)

The problem, it seems, is that the default “scene” on the scene setting on our digicams is one that produces generally dreadful pictures for run-of-the-mill snapshots.  I’m quite happy with the results from the “auto” setting, but guess that now that I am informed properly about what the “scene” setting does that it behooves me to play around with it a bit and report back.

Del asked:

Hey, aren’t moose really big animals with cranky dispositions and are best left alone? And you have these things wandering around in your backyard???

Yes, moose are really big.  Yes, moose have cranky dispositions.  Yes, they are best left alone.  And, yes, we do have these things wandering around our backyard–though we’ve been here more than a month (!!) and this is the first time they’ve appeared.

Moose are truly big and truly cantankerous.  The neighbor of a coworker of OmegaDad’s had a dog kicked to death by a moose recently.  One blow.  Blam!  And, as I wrote about early in our Alaska experience, the school district specifically requests that parents instruct their kids who walk or bike to school about What To Do In a Moose Encounter.

Having grown up on Rocky and Bullwinkle and Whassa Matta U, I must say that this has come as a paradigm shift for me.  Elk, which plagued us in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods, were pretty laissez faire.  You leave them alone, they leave you alone.  No warnings were posted about how to deal with elk.  Hitting an elk on a dark highway in the middle of the night was much more likely to total your car than, say, hitting a deer, but word has it that since moose are bigger (males average 1200 pounds, females 900 pounds; elk males average 750-950 pounds, females around 550 pounds) you’re more likely to just plain die if your car hits a moose.

All that said, moose seem to be the mascot of Alaska.

We will no doubt get more moose in the yard over the winter, and I will try to get better pics.

So there I was, schlepping down to the office after getting something from upstairs, and I notice something dark in the backyard.

Lo and behold, it’s this:

Yes, Virginia, there are moose in the great Alaskan suburban wilds!

Now, Virginia, we need to discuss digital camera settings.

I kept wondering why, why were my pictures so blurry?  Was I shaking with excitement?  Was it just cold?  Are my eyes becoming so bad, so quickly?  And then I happened to notice that the digicam was set on “Scene”.

Please, Virginia, tell me what on earth the “scene” setting on digicams is good for?  Just a clue??  All it does it give you blurry pictures.  Gah!

And tell me why, Virginia, it’s so damned easy to switch settings on digicams from “auto” or “portrait” to that useless “scene” setting?

Do any of my illustrious readers actually use the “scene” setting?

Of course, by the time I realized the pics were blurry as the result of that setting, the moose had wandered on, and were tormenting neighbors’ dogs by simply existing.

Not mine, but a mini-rant prompted by two separate questions on two separate boards I frequent.

One was from the mom of a just-turned-4-year-old in preschool whose teacher had informed the mom that her child was “behind” because he couldn’t use letter sounds.  In other words, he was “behind” because he couldn’t go “buh, buh, buh” when presented with a “B”.  The kid did great guns with the alphabet songs, loved being read to, has a vocabulary that would befit a 2nd grader…

The other was from the mom of a just-turned-4-year-old also in preschool who was thinking of Kumon for her kiddo to tutor him in doing straight lines/curvy lines because, once again, someone made her think he was “behind” because he wasn’t drawing nice straight lines or nice curvy lines.

My succinct mental comment to both comments, in toto:  WTF?!

To expand:  Really.  What.  The.  Fuck.

I’d like to say that if one of the dotter’s preschool teachers had cornered me when she was just turned 4 and given me the same prognosis, I would have laughed in her face.  Unfortunately, I’m quite aware that as a first time mom I lean toward the “I’m clueless, you’re the expert, you must be right” approach.  My WTF is from my superior position as the older, experienced mom of a 5-1/2 year old, looking back.

In addition, I have the experience of knowing what the dotter’s kindergarden curriculum is like.  Right now, they’re doing…one letter per week, focusing on the sounds.  One number per week.  (All stuff the dotter got in her last year in preschool, but soaking in a bit more and beginning to “click”, IMO.)

I read those two questions and my immediate desire is to find those preschool teachers and read them the riot act.  Fer cryin’ out loud.  Kids in preschool are supposed to be having fun.  Circle time.  Playing with Legosâ„¢.  Dressing up.  Running around outside.

Everyone claims my dotter is smart, but I can tell you she certainly wasn’t phonemically aware at the start of her fourth year, nor did she do straight or curvy lines very well.  In my few encounters with Mrs. Footstool, her kindy teacher, the general impression she has passed on to me is that the dotter is doing quite well “academically” (socially?  Eh.), so it appears that her lack of those apparently essential skills hasn’t caused her any difficulty.

If any of my readers are preschool or kindy teachers, it would be nice to get a comment or two from y’all about whether my response is more the norm, or whether these two preschool education fascists pressing these kids are more in the know.  (Yes, I know my labeling them that way gives undue pressure to lean towards saying, “Yo!  OmegaMom!  You’re De Man!” but, hey, it’s my blog.  )

(SpaceMom:  Thanks for letting me know my email was down!

To all:  Does anyone know what note opens Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor?)

Okay.  We have a new house.  I need to decorate.  I have some very specific ideas.

Apparently, my very specific ideas are out of step with the home improvement fashion industry–or perhaps the fashion industry in general.

After all, I think baby-doll tops are too, too ’70s for words.  And they make every woman who wears them look pregnant or fat.  Have you looked at any apparel stores lately?  Tell me what you see.  (Blog reader, blog reader, what do you see?  I see baby dolls surrounding me…)  Let’s put it this way:  last year, there were no baby doll tops.  This year, it seems there is nothing else.

No, I’m not planning to decorate the house in baby doll tops.  But the proliferation of BDTs is a symptom of what I’m about to complain about.

Each of those BDTs is brown.  Or muddy green.  Or a kind of putrid pumpkin orange.  Or a dim blue.  Or a combination of any or all of the above.

It’s well-known that at the beginning of the fashion year, planning a year out, an elite group of sorcerers psychics gurus madmen fashion color consultants meets to decide what are going to be the in and trendy colors next year.

I read an article about this meeting, and these consultants claim (apparently with a straight face) that they are not dictating the colors to be used, they are predicting, based on current trends, what colors will be popular.

You will not be surprised to find that OmegaMom finds this a truly hilarious concept.  OmegaMom is firmly in the camp of conspiratorial thinkers who despise the color psychotics fashion color consultants because she thinks they are a portion of the Illuminati Conspiracy To Rule The World And Crush Free Thinking.

Anyway, there I am, wanting to decorate, with some very specific ideas and colors in mind.  Are any of the colors I am interested in available?  Or the designs?  Hah.  No, what is available is the 2007 version of the ubiquitous avocado and mustard.  Dim, murky colors.  Gloomy.  Dark.  Bah.

I was able to find some lovely bright colors for our bedroom.  We’re going to paint it light sage and splash all this color around.

We found the (ugh) pale pink for the dotter’s bedroom, but trying to find, say, pink curtains is an exercise in futility…well, okay, I can find pink sheer curtains.  Whoop-de-damned-do.  I’m not going to put sheers on these windows, if you please; come next July, that kind of insanity would dump us all into the nuthouse ASAP.

But.  Bright colors for towels?  Nope.  And, having decided to indulge my girly-girl side with a little frill and frippery, my search for lavender and pink towels, plus a fabric shower curtain with flowers that are lavender and pink, has come to naught.

I went looking at sofas today.  Every damned piece of furniture at the store was dark.  Dark wood.  Dark sheets.  Dark sofa upholstery.  Dark brown and gold and green rugs.

Bah.  Picture OmegaMom muttering dire curses and shaking her fist at the cabal of fashion color consultants (servants of the Illuminati).

OmegaMom has a blank brain today, so it’s time for a bunch of quickies.

• Surely there’s more to this story than reported?  Can one be charged as a terrorist for having a copy of a book?  I shudder to think of the things in my parents’ library; dad was both into chemistry and into things that go boom as a young lad.  Dad’s pictures that alternate from a Rasputin-lookalike to an excellent facsimile of a skinhead would just make the HSA agents quiver like bloodhounds…
• An excellent description of a newly adopted child with attachment issues and how the parents coped and broke through to the child.  (Warning:  requires registration, but a very moving and well-worth-it listen.)
• A recent MSNBC front page featured two stories closely juxtaposed:  “Is Your Child Ready For a Credit Card?” and “Feeling the Middle Class Economic Crunch?”  Hm.  You don’t happen to think those two things just might possibly be related, do you??
• The dotter is being Gloria The Firehouse Dog quite often lately.  She sits and barks at the kitchen door.  OmegaDad put his foot down when she carefully brought him one of my Tevas in her mouth.
• Figlet asks “What did we do pre-Google??”  ProjectNiHao says, quite plainly, that it was a nightmare finding things pre-Google.  PNH and Theresa both have dealt with similar sock issues (Theresa had an ingenious approach of turning the socks inside out, though that would only work with non-patterned socks), and Courtney says that Laura at 11D is having the same issues with her son.  But, back to pre-Google–or, more properly, pre-Internet–times:  I read an awful lot more books then.  And went shopping.  Outside.
• We are having real homework now.  It’s no big whoop, just copying zeroes, ones, and twos, and answering questions about what to do if there’s a fire (it’s Fire Safety week).

The past few weeks have featured tantrums of epic proportions in the early morning hours, as we seek to persuade OmegaDotter that she should be wearing socks.

Y’see, five years of living in Arizona have persuaded her that socks are a truly optional thing.  Only on the coldest of the cold days did she really need socks; aside from that, she was a happily sock-free child.  Sandals:  no socks.  Flip-flops:  no socks.  Sneakers, loafers, etc.:  no socks.  We would, of course, have preferred she wear socks with the latter, but it wasn’t a hill to die upon.

She’d wear tights with fancy shoes and dresses, mainly because they were frilly and appealed to the girly-girl in her.

But here we are in Alaska, and winter is barreling down upon us, twin guns of snow and cold aimed straight at the dotter.  I am not looking forward to real winter, and OmegaDad and I have been talking up -15F days and frostbite and cold wet purple toes to the dotter.  In the meantime, it’s been chilly and rainy and pretty miserable most days, and we have had an ongoing battle raging in the mornings to just get her to wear her damned socks.

We are talking so much tantrumming that OmegaMom found herself tired and weeping and really, truly (really, truly) wishing that she could go back five years or more in time, so it could be her and OmegaDad and no screaming shrieking flailing hitting tantrums every morning.

I am not at my best in the mornings.  Having the tantrums applied to my morning grumpiness just doesn’t help.

However, I had heard that socks was one of Those Issues that bedevil kids with sensory problems–and their parents.  So, at the end of my rope one day, I consulted Teh Google, to wit:  “socks sensory disorder”.

I followed links.  I found, at Amazon,

(Whoops.  ‘Scuse me.  While looking for my link to the Special Socks, I got sidetracked by some recommended titles.  Seems that one of my fave kids’ writers, Dianne Wynne Jones, actually has a couple of new Chrestomanci novels out.  I know what I’m buying today!)

…Ahem.  I found, at Amazon, TicTacToe seamless toe socks.   I ordered them.  I waited, yearning, for their delivery.

The dotter, after being informed that I was trying to find her socks that didn’t hurt, also waited, yearning.  She doesn’t like the morning scene, either.

I was, frankly, dubious.  But the reviews?  Holy cow.  Lots of parents who also had dealt with unending morning tantrums, and found the special seamless toe socks to be the only thing that would end the howling.  (What is, you ask, a “seamless toe”?  It is, actually, not seamless, but it is a sock where the toe seam is hand-linked.)

The socks arrived.  The dotter waited while I opened the package.  I eyeballed the socks.  I eyeballed the dotter.  I said, “Oooookay, kiddo, let’s try these things out.”

She tried them on.

She didn’t howl.

She put on her shoes over them.

She said they didn’t hurt.

She has worn them now for three days.

We have had no morning tantrum. 

(We have, however, had other tantrums, sigh.  And I can’t say she is in love with the things, because still her preference is sock-free.  But she puts them on in the morning and puts her shoes on and isn’t sobbing or shrieking.  This is a Good Thing.)

So.  If you’re dealing with a kid with sensory issues, and having the morning shoe/sock problem, I give these socks two thumbs up.

(On the donation front:  We have now fully funded the stapler gal.  Woohoo!  I regret to inform my readers that I didn’t do my donation before writing the post, or else I would have been able to tell everyone that the minimum donation is $10.  Sorry for that missing detail!)

Over at ScienceBlogs, they’re doing a blog challenge with DonorsChoose.  The Questionable Authority has an especially impassioned plea.

DonorsChoose is an organization where teachers across the country can submit a project with a wishlist for funding.  Donors can shop the projects, select one that resonates, and then provide funds–any portion of the requested amount.

DonorsChoose is doing a blog challenge for the month of October, and yours truly, OmegaMom, has decided to toss her hat into the ring to see if I can get my readers to pony up some funding for some very simple requests.

I’ve selected three projects.  One is a teacher who would like to have a heavy-duty electric pencil sharpener for her classroom.  Another is a teacher who needs staplers.  A third is a teacher who needs dry-erasers for her whiteboards.

Now.  Just sit there and think about this for a little while.  Pencil sharpeners.  Staplers.  Dry erasers.

We’re not talking particle accelerators here.  Nothing fancy.  Nothing that requires large amounts of money.  Pretty basic supplies.

In fact, the amounts needed for these projects are so small that it makes me sad.  My stapler teacher needs $134 for a bunch of heavy-duty staplers to use in the classroom.  The teacher who wants the pencil sharpener has used manual sharpeners and has previously snagged one from a closing school (!!), and they keep breaking.  The dry-eraser person made his/her own white boards for the students a few years ago, but needs a constant supply of markers and erasers.

Help OmegaMom buy staplers, pencil sharpeners, and dry erasers at DonorsChoose.  I’m going to stick my donation thermometer over in the sidebar.  OmegaMom gets an average of about 100 readers per day; if each of my readers dropped $5.20 into the donation bin, these three teachers would get their projects funded.

Don’t get me started, though, on the sad commentary this makes on the amount of money spent on, say, NCLB versus plain teaching supplies…grrr.

(Ahem.  Just realized that this could be construed as an attempt to guilt my readers into dropping $$.  Naw, please don’t feel pressured, it’s an experiment.  Whatever we collect will be more than $0 [I'm dropping a few dollars myself], so that’s all too the good.)

(Also, I’d like to clarify #34 in my last post–it reads as if I were saying that bloggers who are similar in thought/tone as yourself [me] aren’t interesting.  Ahem.  Not at all what I meant–I meant to include the second group as “interesting bloggers who are not similar in tone or style or thought as yourself”.  Now I’ll go somewhere and write 100 times on a blackboard, “I will try to write more clearly.”)

Y’know, like cow-tipping?  Hyork hyork hyork.

So OmegaGranny got tagged with this list for bloggers.  You’re supposed to star the ones you think are most important, and add a few of your own.

Here they are:

1. Look, read, and learn.
2. Be EXCELLENT to each other
3. Don’t let money change ya!
4. Always reply to your comments.
–>5. Blog about what you know & love.
6. Don’t use filthy language-buy a dictionary.
7. Blog about something educational.
–>8. Be yourself; others will follow.
9. Don’t have too many blogs that will become a chore to maintain.
10. Keep it simple, user-friendly, interesting and organized!
11. Keep the blog simple and sweet!!!
12. Share with others your thoughts and don’t be shy!
13. Never ask for link exchange. Blog hop to increase traffic.
14. Don’t clutter your blog with ads all over the place. IT’S IRRITATING.
15. Don’t comment for the sake of commenting. Some looked too fake and it’s a big turn off!
16. Share something interesting and you will gain more readers.
17. Show that we care to all bloggers, treat each other as friends.
18. Pictures say a million words. Keep them coming!
–>19. Blogging should be fun or you’ll get tired of it pretty soon.
20. Don’t think people will come to your blog if you’re not willing to pay a visit to them.
21. Everyone loves read short posting and, best, illustrated with a picture.
22. Try not to publish more than 5 posts in one blog a day. Even if it’s from feed reader, it’s quite hard to digest and catch up reading everything.
23. Blog: the other window to peek into people’s life, minus the trouble. Keep a certain level of privacy to yourself.
24. Never tell your readers that you are going on vacation. That’s basically telling them to not visit your blog for a week. Instead, write several posts, and take advantage of the timestamp feature.
–>25. Try and write with people in mind that are somewhat similar to you. Allow your audience to identify with your blog and feel at home.
26. The key to a good article is a good introduction. A joke, a question or a picture does wonders.
27. If you are looking to earn an income blogging read StevePavlina.com and Problogger.net, you will be amazed at what you can learn.
–>28. Write for yourself first. Remember that it takes time, effort, patience…and above all, daring.
29. Photos for your blog should always be shot in the RAW! No, not in the buff, but in RAW format. That leaves you a lot more room to play with your subject.
30. Blog about what you’re interested in, and what you want to share. And it’s your blog, you make your rules.
31. Scared of the new digital camera? Go out, take lots of pictures, slowly learn the bells & whistles. Enjoy!
32. I disagree with Rich — until you’re ready for heavy-duty PhotoShopping on a pro basis, stick with .jpg’s. Easier to handle.
33. Resize your pix before downloading to the Internet; you won’t eat up your on-line storage space nearly as fast. Remember, too, that the resolution on most screens is 72 pixels/inch. I resize all my pictures to 6″ wide x 72 pixels/inch (and hype the contrast — the Internet flattens pix). If you have a picture good enough to steal, it won’t have definition good enough for a commercial use; let them get in touch with you for permission to use.

Now, my additions.  Um.  So I have to think here.  Um.

I think my suggestions are themed towards building readership a bit, which isn’t necessarily what bloggers want.  But here goes:

34.  Build a community–either find other bloggers whose styles are similar to yours and comment on their blogs, or find other bloggers who are interesting to you (not necessarily the same thing).

35.  Submit posts to blog carnivals.  Or join a “blog theme of the day” group, such as Julie’s Hump Day Hmms.  Or tag another favorite blogger for a ROFL Award or Thinking Blogger Award or Perfect Post Award.

36.  Post regularly.  You don’t have to post multiple times in a day, or even a week.  But be sure to post regularly or else your readers will go *poof*.

37.  If you do decide to go the Pay-Per-Post way, please, please, please (a) don’t let it take over your blog, (b) do write your own copy in your normal voice, and (c) don’t let it take over your blog.  Did I mention, “don’t let it take over your blog”?  I have dropped a couple of bloggers who went that path.

38.  If you add a group widget, or any kind of widget, first check to be sure it doesn’t break your blog theme.  Then check to be sure the damned thing loads nicely.  Clear your cache, delete all cookies, close your browser, then call up your blog.  If it takes more than a few seconds to load, and causes your computer to slow to a crawl while it’s loading, ditch the new widget.  Also check it in more than one browser; try IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari.

By the way, even though I didn’t star #27, I have to say Darren Rowse’s blog is often fun and interesting, and he does themed post carnivals now and then as well.

So now to tag.  Who to tag?

Sheesh.  It’s hard to think of people to tag.  Hm.

Oh, now, wait.  Here’s a person who will have good tips:  Miss Cellania.  She built her flagship blog around daily joke collections, then parlayed that into guest stints at other blogs, and then managed to get herself some paying blogging gigs so that she supports herself from home.

I’ll also tag Blog Antagonist.  BA has built herself a nice readership since she started a blog to…reject all things blogging.  Har.  BA writes some nice posts.

Another one who has built up a good readership and gotten some pro blogging, too, is Julie over at Using My Words. 

There ya go, Ma.

Nope.  Permanent Fund Dividend.

The newspapers hereabouts (and no doubt the radio waves and TV ads) are chock-a-block full of “PFD Sales”.

I come from a background where “PFD” means “personal flotation device”.  Ah, but now that I am in Alaska, the Final Frontier, land of milk, honey, and oil (that’s “ohl“, chilluns!), PFD means something totally different.

Many moons ago, when the Alaska pipeline was first established, the state of Alaska got $900 million bucks for leasing the oil fields.  The money was spent in a wink of an eye.  Alaskans, irritated by the waste of the state government, installed a permanent fund to stash 25% of oil and other revenues in, invest, and (hopefully) spend wisely.

The permanent fund started with $734,000 in 1977, and is now about $40 billion.  Each year, designated Alaskans who apply (ya gotta apply!) receive a dividend check from the fund, based on an average of the previous five years’ performance of the fund.  The check has ranged in size from $331 to $1963.  You are eligible for the PFD if you’ve lived in Alaska for the entire previous calendar year, haven’t committed a felony, can swear you’re going to remain in Alaska indefinitely, and a few other provisions that I’m not going to look up and transcribe here.

This year’s check is $1654.  The checks were disbursed today.  Every eligible person in Alaska gets one of these checks.

And boy howdy, the merchants are lappin’ it up.

Buy a sofa!  Buy an ATV!  Buy a wide-screen HDTV!  Buy stuff from Sears!  From Fred Myers!  From all your local merchants!

Invest!

Put it into a college fund!

And more!  Buy, buy, buy!

The ads are everywhere.

We, of course, are not eligible.  We won’t be eligible next year, either.  However, in January of 2009, we’ll be eligible.  That’s assuming we’re here, that OmegaMom hasn’t faded away from dismal wintertude, that an earthquake or volcano hasn’t struck, that kind of thing.

I have to say, it’s a refreshing change from having to pay state income tax.  And it’s definitely nice to think of a yearly chunk-o-change to drop into the dotter’s college fund.  But I was mostly amused at the ads designed to milk the PFD checks for all they’re worth!

(In an aside:  secure websites that don’t have everything secure are a PITA in Internet Explorer.  Every darned page, you get a popup that says you’ve requested both secure and non-secure items…do you want them all to display??  Gah.  Anyone know how to turn that irritation off?)

So.  Doin’ the Snoopy Dance here.  Just proud and bustin’ out all over about it.

Jack and Annie #485,271 is called “Carnival at Candlelight”.

We finished it last night (our first chapter book!).  The dotter wanted to look at the cover.  She started sounding out the word “Carnival”.

“Kuh…kah…kaarrrr…karrrennn…karneh…karnehvvvv…karnehval…”

She sounded it all out on her own.  And then she sounded out “at” and “candlelight”.  And though she needed help with the “juh” sound in “magic”, she sounded that and “tree” and “house” out.

(It’s “karnEHval” because I was pronouncing it the Spanish/Italian way because it’s a specific holiday, rather than a carnival at the fair.)

Woohoo!

Don’t push, don’t push, don’t push, says OmegaMom to herself.  Let her do it at her own pace, says OmegaMom to herself.  Don’t push!

Speaking of pushing, Jiaozi has a great series of posts up about the kindergarden experience kids encounter these days.  Read ‘em and weep.  I am so thankful that the dotter’s kindergarden (so far) is relatively laid back–they’re doing a letter a week, a number a week, things that the dotter already knows, but they’re doing it slowly and gently and not pushing it which gives the kids time to just…be kids, get to know each other, learn the rules of the school game.

OmegaBro, my fuddy duddy brother, has a (gasp, it’s not possible!) 13-year-old and 11-year-old, and has been dismayed by the amount of homework and pushing they’ve gotten in all their school districts.  There’s a lot of debate about the role of homework and the necessity of homework and how much homework kids should do…but there’s my Ph.D. bro who doesn’t remember doing that much homework in elementary school and still managed to get three college degrees trying to figure out what is best for his kids.

I read to the dotter.  She loves to write words, so we’ve been working together on sounding things out so she knows what letters to use–”What sound starts ‘horse’?  Huh-huh-huh.”  “Rrrrr–what’s that?”  “What’s the last sound?  Horssssse.”  And suddenly she’s turning it around into looking at letters and turning it into a sound, rather than taking a sound and turning it into a letter.  I’m pleased as punch, and I’m pleased that we haven’t made it a chore or made her dislike it, and I’m desperately holding myself in check so that she discovers how much fun reading can be (once you practice it) all on her own.  There’s a small amount of dismay in the foreshadowing on her reading coloring page that she is to turn in once a month to Mrs. Shoehook–this year, the kids are just coloring in an item for each day they are read to or read; next year, we’re going to have to specify how many minutes we’ve read/she’s read, and how many pages.  Sigh.  I just want her to learn to love it.