OmegaMom

Well.  Who’d'a thunk it?  My commentary about my *#@!% raw data being changed had two people wanting to know more!

Here’s the scoop, interesting only to about four of my readers, maybe five:  I’m grabbing data from our campus data warehouse via a web report.  (This means that other data providers won’t work, sorry, Jane!)

Once upon a time, before there were a series of high-profile data break-ins at colleges and universities (not ours), folks like me on campus were able to just link directly to the accounting system and grab the data as read-only users.

Now, alas, the IT department is more security minded.  This is Good!  Really!  In general.  But not for folks like me, small potatoes applications systems analysts working for particular departments, that want to be able to do things with the data.

Because instead of being able to link directly to the data…or even the data warehouse snapshot of the data…now we have to use (ack gasp barf) Business Objects to access the data.  And we can’t use the desktop version of BO, we have to use the web tool.  I re-iterate:  ack gasp barf.

So what once required only an ODBC connection and some of my very own SQL statements now requires:

1. Using a generic report available to the entire campus.
2. Which can be changed at a moments’ notice.
3. Without any warning.
4. So I have to open a web browser.
5. …run the report…
6. …Then save to a local machine as an Excel spreadsheet.
7. (Though no doubt I could do the same via code, assuming they didn’t upgrade BO and change the layout and the commands and the name of the report and…)
8. Then my code has to open the spreadsheet…
9. …Run a query that collects only the data I need…
10. …massage that data so the format is correct…
11. …and insert that data into a table in my local database so that my users can see data from the accounting system side by side with data from our work order management system for reconciliation purposes.  All of which is a major pain, and I wish we didn’t need this reconciliation stuff, but due to a particular decision two years ago, we’re stuck with two systems that we need to ensure are both showing the same numbers.

(FYI:  The direct link?  I could do 9, 10, and 11, and be done.)

Dudes.  This sucks dead toads.  Not only did I find out yesterday that they changed the column names at some point in the past, so my code that queries the spreadsheet downloaded from the web doesn’t work anymore (hey, no errors–it just doesn’t insert any data, because the column I was querying on doesn’t exist any more).  But today I find out that a transaction detail report that previously showed revenue figures suddenly just ignores any revenue and dumps a zero in instead.  Because, hey, we’re a university and nobody gets revenue, right?  Har, har, think again.

Dudes.  This really sucks dead toads.

And nowhere…nowhere…in all of this was there any kind of warning that the report had been changed.  None.  Nowhere.

Gah.  Gimme back my direct link, dammit.  We can see all this stuff just fine using the accounting system’s web interface (ack gack, another web interface, slow and ponderous and irritating as hell), one transaction at a time, so it’s not like we shouldn’t be seeing the info to start with.  But Kozmik All forbid anyone should want to actually do something with that information, or see multiple transactions, or, or, or…

Grumble, grumble, grumble.  I’m going to be talking to the DW folks to see if we can have them create us a specific-to-our-department report.  What a pain.  They’ve got months‘ worth of reports to create…any request from us could take months to do.  Maybe I’ll try to learn more about BO and create my own report.  Even if it took me months, it would be less time.

Grumble.

A lot of the cool kids are doing bullet-style posts recently.  Since most of them are doing NaBloPoMo, they get a pass from me because the daily posting drains the creative well dry very quickly.

I, on the other hand, am doing a bullet-style post because I’m just plain lazy.  No NaBloPoMo excuse from me, as I’m not participating.

• It’s 4:00.  The sun is setting in a few minutes.  The sun rose today at 9:10 or thereabouts.  According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we’re supposed to have 7 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight today.  Well, yeah, I suppose we did.  There were no clouds, so we saw the sun today.  That was nice.  But the maximum altitude of the sun hereabouts was 10 degrees.  Ten.  Sort of like having sunset all day.
• I don’t care that Hilary Clinton had someone planted in her audience lob her a planted question meant to point out some of her stands on certain issues.
• I equally don’t care that FEMA had a plant in their audience at a press conference to ask questions guaranteeing that a few things got mentioned.
• I further don’t care that John McCain didn’t lambast one of his supporters when she asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” when talking about Hilary Clinton.  I thought “Can someone translate that for me?” was a perfectly good way of saying, “Yo!  That’s not nice!”
• I’m afraid to open our gas bill.  I don’t want to know what a month’s worth of heating costs, especially given that it will be much higher in the next few months.
• Context is important to me.  If a person writes an article in which she makes a comment to her adopted daughter that could indicate she has a savior complex and thinks China is a land of indentured orphans, I’d like to know what kind of relationship she has with her daughter.  If it’s one kind of relationship, it’s an in-joke about what some people say about adoption; if it’s a different kind of relationship, it’s snide and insensitive and denigrating.  Given the remainder of the article, I lean towards the former…but a helluva lot of folks in the blog world are leaning towards the latter and a kerfuffle has ensued.
• On the other hand, if angry comments on the article coming from adult adoptees were censored, that sucks.  In my read of the article yesterday, though, it looked like many of the originally censored comments were in.  ?  I don’t know.
• Thanksgiving is next week.  How the hell did that happen?!  It’s far too soon.
• And that means Christmas isn’t far behind.
• My carefully crafted code to dive into the “raw data” from a downloaded web report was foiled–foiled!–when the people who created the report went and changed the column names on the raw data tab of that report.  Grrr.  Now I have to do some figuring on how to check those column names beforehand, and have to stash them in a table so that the next time they decide to get fancy with column names, we’ll be able to catch it right away, instead of wondering for a few weeks why no new data was being imported.  Let me just say:  Duh, OmegaMom.  On the other hand, why the hell did the folks change those column names?  Raw data=stuff that gets used somewhere.  Not raw data=stuff that you can fiddle with all you want.  Or at least let people know with a popup the next time they cruise your web reports.
• Boots, snowpants, and snowgloves arrived yesterday from LandsEnd.  OmegaDotter is happy.  Winter parka is back-ordered.
• Will discuss way-kewl interfaces tomorrow.  And way-kewl prosthetic devices the day after.  Or maybe combine the two.

Actually, she’s in love with the song “She’s In Love With The Boy” by Trisha Yearwood.  So OmegaDad bought her the CD, and we’ve been listening to it.  (Let me just say, I love the idea of anime mashup with country music accompaniment…)

In fifteen years, you will see a young Asian-American country singer, I swear.  Who dances like a dream.

Emotional whiplash:  I’m staring across the dinner table at the dotter, feeling all gooey and mushy.  She’s being charming and funny and fun to be with, and is singing this song.  I’m sitting there thinking just how very kewl she is and how smart and funny and sweet she is, and how elegant and beautiful she’ll be when she’s grown up, when she turns around on her chair, sticks her butt up in the air, and lets loose with a trio of juicy raspberries.

“Pbbbbt!  Pbbbbt!  Pbbbbt!”

Oh, yes, truly elegant.

Then there’s the discussion about “she signs her letters with x’s and o’s” (another song on the Trisha Yearwood CD), and OmegaDad admits to the dotter that he and I sign our emails to each other with x’s and o’s.  I inform her that the x’s stand for kisses and the o’s stand for hugs.

She immediately gets down, grabs a piece of paper, and says, “I’m writing a letter!”

One one side, it says, “To OmegaDotter, Love Isaac”.  (Isaac is her current flame.)  (Notice it does not say, “To Isaac, Love OmegaDotter”; she’s a little unclear on the concept of “to” and “from”.)  On the other side it has a very carefully constructed Tic-Tac-Toe board with x’s and o’s filled in.

Har!

The perennial discussion about “Gotcha Day” is rearing its head once again on a China adoption site.  First there’s the person who posts a link to an article about how “Gotcha Day” is offensive to some adoptees with a “something to think about” comment.  Then some more folks post pointers to other articles.  Then someone gets offended by the offense and says it’s all PC-talk.  Someone says that the kids feel kidnapped by their adopters.  Someone takes real offense to that, saying they didn’t kidnap the kids, and should they just leave them in an orphanage?!  Things escalate, and feelings get all hurt all over the place.

Nothing new.  It’s been a topic of discussion for years.

Articles by adult adoptees who say they find the term offensive have been available for years, too.  I read those articles way back when, and posts by adult adoptees on adoption triad lists, and decided to ditch the term myself, because I could see how it could be offensive.  I “got” a car.  I “got” a dog.  No-one asks when I “got” my husband, eh?  They always ask when I “met” him.

So we’ve gone on our merry way, and I’ve trained myself to use the phrase “when we met you” to the dotter so it’s become ingrained in my psyche.  When talking about that day, I use “Metcha Day”.  But other than that, I don’t think much about it until a hoo-rah like this rises up.

A few months ago, when we were newly come to Alaska, the dotter and I had gone for a hike along Little Lady River in Margaret Pass and were returning to the parking lot.  As we emerged, my Caucasian-parent-with-Asian-children radar went off, focusing in on a guy with a bunch of boykids with him, all of whom were Asian.  At some point he hailed me and I wandered up to introduce myself and the dotter.

At some point in the conversation, he asked, “We got him” (pointing at one son) “in (some city), and him” (pointing at another) “in (some other city) and him” (yeah, there were a bunch!) “in (third city).  Where’d you get her?”

Now, he was an utterly nice guy.  The boys all looked like fine, happy, healthy lads, playing all over the place and doing boyishly romping things in and out of his eyesight.  But y’know, this was the very first time someone had ever asked me that question in that way, and it just…jarred me.  And I guess I hesitated, or something in my face showed, because he was suddenly somewhat defensively apologetic, saying, “Or are you one of Those Folk who don’t like that term?  I know some people don’t like it!”

Erg.  Well.  Um.  Yeah, I guess I’m one of “those folk”. 

Anyway, I answered that we had met the dotter in Guilin, avoiding the whole question of where I stand on “get” versus “met”, back in 2002, and yadda yadda yadda.  We talked some more, the dotter and I left, and I sort of forgot about it until the topic came up again.

I don’t know how OmegaDad feels about it.  I’m pretty sure he’d like the cuteness of “Gotcha Day”, and thinks more in terms of the daddy chasing the giggling girl, catching her, and going “Gotcha!”  Whereas I listened to the nice guy at the parking lot “getting” his boys (a pre-teen two of whom were sitting right there listening to the conversation), and just imagined going to the kid shop and “getting” one.

I dunno.  I suppose I’m turning all PC, and a lot of my readers are rolling their eyes at me and my oh-so-Victorian sensitivity to the term.  But for some reason, that meeting just cemented in me why I don’t like it, and made me understand just why some adult adoptees (and teens) might find it offensive or just icky.

(On a totally different note:  Have any of my blogging buddies gotten a slew of separate multi-page hits in a row from a new-to-them reader, all of them direct links without a referring page?  It’s just kind of weird…)

OMG.  From one extreme (non-existant but dearly-longed-for loose tooth) to the other (two loose teeth, right next to each other).

She didn’t believe me.  But there I was, wiggling one tooth with a finger, while she was wiggling the one next to it with her tongue.

Kris comments:

enjoy those straight pearly whites now…because ‘real’ teeth are not that white and can be down right crooked! when connors 2 front bottom teeth came in last fall i was shocked at their color (which while normal per his dentist was still a shock) and their position…

Yup, that’s what I’m afraid of.  Little gray crooked teeth that stick straight out.  But we shall see!

In other news, we got the equity in our house.  Finally.  So we finally bought a second car.  Used, but pricey, but still less than the sticker price (having cash is a big incentive, especially right now).  It’s an SUV…well, no, maybe it’s a station wagon?…Hm, no, sort of a minivan-ish thing…but, hey, it’s like an SUV…

It’s a Ford Freestyle, with all-wheel-drive.  It has seven seats!  The back two rows fold down!  We can get a surfboard in it!  (Not that we have a surfboard, but if we did, we could.)  We’re no longer all tied together like some weird bondage thing, and I will suddenly have an extra hour to hour-and-a-half of time per week day.

Now I’m like a soccer Mom, I guess.  That’s probably why the blog has gotten so boring lately.  I’m trying to pull my brain together to discuss love and stepchildren and adoption and stuff like that…or way kewl new brain-computer interfaces which are popping up like daisies all over the place…or how fences make good neighbors…some major differences between Alaska and Arizona…but lately, mostly all I’m doing is posting boring stuff.  Bah.  Ask me some questions, maybe that’ll spark something.

I grew up with Daylight Savings Time.  It was just another one of those things that marked the turning of the seasons.  I was just used to it, like all the rest of the folks around the U.S. who live with it.  I never questioned it, either, just going with the flow.  I thought everyone in the U.S. did it, so it was no big deal.

(A lemming.  I think that was what I was in a previous lifetime.  A lemming.)

Then a buddy of mine–one of those people whose lives are filled with drama, and it turns out that the drama is self-manufactured–moved to Indiana near the border with Michigan.  Indiana (or the area of Indiana she lived in) was Daylight-Savings-Time-free; her job, however, happened to be in Michigan, which was not DSTF, so she had the delight of dealing with two separate timezones for her life.  Of course, this provided additional fodder for her ongoing lifetime drama.  Anyway, this was all very new to me…a place without DST?

Let’s not discuss how I managed to grow up within 20-30 miles of Indiana and never knew that the state didn’t observe DST.  Life in a big city can be very parochial at times.

Skip forward a few years, to when the Omegas moved to Arizona.

Arizona is also a DST-free zone.  Most of it–the Navajo Indian Reservation uses DST, so you can drive through AZ on one time, drive through the reservation on another time, drive through northern AZ back on the first time, and then out into Utah or Nevada and back into DST.

We had to keep a mental note of whether we were ahead of our friends and family in different states, or at the same time, or behind.  OmegaDad’s cute little mnemonic trick was “In the summer, you go to the beach; in the winter, you go to the mountains”.  Thus, in the summer, we’d be the same time as California; in the winter, we’d be the same time as Colorado.

We grew quite accustomed to not having to fiddle with the clocks or resetting our internal body clocks.  OmegaDotter has never had to deal with it.

So now we’ve moved to Alaska, and back into the land of Daylight Savings Time.  Leaving aside the question of why AK bothers to use Daylight Savings Time, and the highly politicized answers and discussions attached to that, there we are, having changed the clocks last week.

This week has been horrid.  The dotter, tired enough in the middle of the week already, was practically falling asleep in her ballet class on Wednesday, and did fall asleep one minute after leaving.  Worse yet is the fact that the dotter is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.

Let me just repeat that:  she is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.

My response, in one word:  Grrrr.

In other news:  Let’s talk about really sucky people, to wit, a pair of young women (19 and 20 years old) who held up a bunch of Halloween trick-or-treaters at gunpoint and demanded their candy, shooting into the air above their heads.  That sucks.  Not only does it suck, but it’s stupid–after all, there are plenty of folks (like the Omegas) who will gladly hand out Halloween candy to anyone who knocks at the door if they’re in costume.  Not only is it stupid and sucky in that manner, it’s really stupid in general–because the police, contacted by the alert 10-year-olds who memorized the license plate of their truck, searched their homes and found (a) a trick-or-treat bag with the name of one of the victims on it, and (b) $100,000 worth of other stolen goods, thus breaking up a local crime spree that they had been working on for months.

That must have been one terrible Jones for Halloween candy those young women had, is all I can say.

About a year and a half ago, the dotter insisted that she had a loose tooth.  I investigated, I was unable to find it, but she claimed it was there, and for a week or two I believed her.

About six weeks ago, the same thing happened.  Peer group pressure, I am sure; being exposed to multiple gap-toothed kids of varying ages reminded her that, hey, having a loose tooth is a sign of Age and Dignity and Wisdom.  Once again, I was unable to corroborate the story, and that “loose tooth”, too, faded away.

Last night, as we were eating dinner and chattering away about this and that, out of the blue the dotter suddenly stood up from her chair and proclaimed:

“Omigosh.  Oh.  My.  GOSH!  My tooth!  My tooth!  It’s LOOSE!  It’s really loose!  I have a loose tooth!  Omigosh!  Really, truly, I have a loose tooth!  You’ve got to see!”

She was breathless with excitement.

Being the mother, I was forced to insert my exploratory finger into her mouth right then and there to locate the aforesaid tooth.

Sure enough, it was loose.  Not “teeny tiny just possibly loose, I’ll-believe-you-but-I’m-really-dubious-about-this loose”, but really, TRULY loose.

Of course, a cause for celebration Chez OmegaMom.  The dotter was ecstatic.  OmegaDad was congratulatory.  I, on the other hand, was suddenly swept with a bittersweet sorrow.  Wasn’t it just yesterday that that very same tooth was just coming in?  That my baby was drooling all over everything and chewing everything in sight (including my hands)?  How on earth can she be old enough to have a truly loose tooth that wiggles wildly from front to back when she pokes it with her tongue?  No, no, it’s not possible–she’s just a baby.

Right?

I was almost crying there at the dinner table.  We had to explain to the dotter, once again, about being happy-sad; one of those more confusing concepts that become easier to understand as you get older.

So sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a picture of a gap-toothed girl.  And when the Tooth Fairy slips the Sacajawea dollar under OmegaDotter’s pillow that night, TF will probably also be shedding a tear or two at the passing of another small milestone in a child’s passage to adulthood.

(Not to mention the fear of future orthodontia.  The dotter has beautiful pearly whites right now; I am quite fearful of what her adult teeth will bring as they come in.  I see to recall a pediatric dentist giving me grim warning that those nice neat baby teeth, which look so pretty, are probably too close together for adult tooth spacing…)

When we moved in, we signed up for the local cable company’s Super Duper Way-Kewl Ultra Deluxe Combo Package with SCREAMING INTERNET (INTERNET…Internet…internet…internet!) (that’s meant to be read in the way that the “SCREAMING U.S. 30 DRAGSTRIP!” echoes sound on those radio ads).

The SDWKUDC package included local phone service.

But local phone service wasn’t available here yet.  (Though it was coming!  Soon!)

So I signed us up for local phone service with the local phone cooperative.

Then, in late October, after weeks of intermittent droppage of internet connections while the cable company upgraded all the cable lines between here and Big City, I got a call from the cable company.  To wit:  local phone service was now available, and did we want to start it up?

Well, yeah, considering that the local phone cooperative is incredibly expensive.  Incredibly.

So the nice gal set up a day and time to do the switchover, and I had to confirm it with her supervisor, repeating everything I had just said to gal #1, and then had to confirm it with an outside contracting company, repeating yet again the stuff I had said to gal #1.  I do understand why it’s necessary.  Really, I do.  I had friends and family who were automagically switched from one phone company to another without their knowledge during the era of those aggressive telecomm company tactics, and it’s a scummy thing to do.  But do we really need the customer to repeat the same information three times?  How about recording the conversation, playing it back to Joe Customer, and asking Joe Customer, “Did you say this of your own free will and are you sure you want to switch?”  Much simpler.  I was forcibly reminded, in any case, of the tendency of computer programs to repeatedly ask, “Are you really, really sure you want to do this??”

The day of the switch comes and goes, and even though I’m totally devoid of phone networking savvy and still wonder how it got switched over from phone company cabling to cable company cabling without some nice hunky young technician coming to the door and having to switch cabling doodads, it seems to have worked.

I just got a phone call.

“Hello?  Mrs. OmegaMom?  This is Polly from ABC Cable?”

“Hi, Polly…”

“I’m just calling to be sure everything is okay with your phone service since we switched you over?”

Now.  Just let that particular sentence stew around in your head for a moment.

She just called me on the phone to see if everything is working okay…with my phone.

Hello?!

Does this strike anyone else as just a bit non-functional?

Like, how are they going to know if I didn’t answer the phone because I was in the bathroom or out of the house or–gasp!–the phone isn’t working?!

Gah.

This weekend, I purchased Uno for the dotter and me to play.

We’ve been non-game-players for quite a while, with a few forays into Go Fish and Candyland.  But I thought it was time to introduce the dotter to a slightly more complicated game, and figured she had reached the point where we would actually spend time playing the game, rather than me stripping it of the finer points so that she comprehended how to play it.

I was right.  We spent an hour playing Uno this evening, she and I, while OmegaDad cooked a delicious dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches and carrot and celery sticks with peanut butter.  Yum.

Anyway, the dotter thought it was great fun.  But I had reached a point where I wanted a break.  She kept pleading for “just one more game!” and I did my stock model firm “No.”  No yelling, no storming, no frustration, just plain, “No.”

And when she realized that (as is my norm when I use that “No”) I actually meant it, she said:

“Oooooh, dammit!”

My eyes bugged out.  OmegaDad’s eyes bugged out.

OmegaDotter put a shocked hand up to her mouth, with bugged eyes of her own, then hid her head in my shoulder.  Giggling.  But, yes, she realized it’s a “bad word”.

It’s the first time she’s used a “bad word” with full intent, in the right context, and with feeling.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or proud.

In a comment to the previous entry, Kate said I should try the Lindy Hop.

Come with me friends, to a time long ago, a simpler time, a time when OmegaMom was a carefree single living in Chicago…

There was (and still is) a “lifelong learning” organization in Chicago called The Discovery Center.  After many times flipping through their monthly course catalog and looking yearningly at the dance classes, I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a Swing Dance class, even though (being single) I had no partner.

It was a great class.

The teachers started out slow.  We partnered up with each other, and switched partners after every little bit of practice, and then, at the end of the evening’s class, they put on some nice slow jazz and we’d practice our mostly-klutzy-but-slowly-improving dance steps.

(Part of the idea, of course, was to introduce singles to each other.  Sort of a pseudo-mass-dating scene.)

It was an eight-week session.  By week six, Mr. Police Officer Into Nudism and I were heading out after class to Jukebox Saturday Night, on Clark Street, and tripping the light fantastic on the dance floor.  We danced well enough, I might add, that we got applause and had people asking us how long we had been dancing together.

(Let us pause for a moment while OmegaMom preens herself.)

It was grand fun.  Let’s put aside the fact that Mr. Police Officer kept a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants at all times.  And that he really, really wanted me to come to the nudist club with him for a weekend.  And that I was too uptight to even consider it.  I got some experience with a radar gun and some dates out of the whole affair, and we both had fun at the nightclub.

The problem is that this was at least twenty years ago.

The additional problem is that OmegaDad has the rhythmic competency of a piece of driftwood:  i.e., none.

The third piece of the puzzle is that, while OmegaDad actually can dance if he is very carefully handled by my cousin Sissy (I have seen this with my own two eyeballs), my cousin Sissy has the patience of a saint.  I do not.  So any practice would need to be done by OmegaDad and Someone Else.  But OmegaDad is finicky about things…for quite a while, he would get insulted if some cute thing flirted with him in the checkout line, because he was Married! dammit!  My explaining that the flirter probably didn’t see his wedding ring wouldn’t cause him to pardon her; she was automatically placed into the category of Bad Person.  Anyway, I can hardly imagine how he would respond to dancing with some woman who wasn’t OmegaMom.  Except for cousin Sissy, who is a special case.

Anyway, once upon a time, OmegaMom could dance quite well, and all the credit should go to the method of teaching, which was:  slow, steady, and practice over and over and over again.  And have fun.

Which is what I was talking about in my previous post.

And to all and sundry who said they’d take one of these courses if I started one, I will merely point out that I am in Alaska, Land of Wild Freedom, and you all are Outsiders.  (That’s what they call the Lower 48 here: “Outside”.)  It would be quite difficult to hold a class for someone who lives in Kentucky, someone who lives in NJ, someone who lives in Oregon, and someone who lives in Arizona.

But!  If we were all in the same neck of the woods…!  Hey, we’d have to just hire ourselves a dance teacher and have a grand ol’ time.

Right?

Sooooo…Did OmegaDad return home with the blue Spiderman backpack as threatened?

Well, no.  He returned home with a pink thing that, even though it wasn’t a “pully” kind of backpack, which she particularly wanted, had lots of compartments and a water bottle, so it fully satisfied the dotter.

Onto other things:  A few weeks ago, I signed up for a ballet class for adults at the dance studio the dotter goes to for ballet.  I’ve gone to one class.  Last week I fizzled at the last minute, blaming Halloween pumpkin-carving and dinner makings.  This week?

Well, I think I’m not going to go.

Why?

Um.  Y’know…I don’t really like ballet.

There.  I said it.  It just doesn’t do anything for me.  And the class was all bar work.  Lots of pliés and footwork.  In a word:  boring.

So I’ve been watching the dotter’s ballet class, and it’s fun.  Her gymnastics class is fun.  They don’t push the kids; they move them at a slow pace, repeating things, making sure they learn each new thing well, and making sure it’s just plain fun.

Why can’t they do that for adults?  The dotter won’t be stuck into bar work for another few years.  But she’s getting lots of dancing and lots of basic moves and having fun.

I wanna have fun.   I wanna take a gymnastics class that lets me bounce on a trampoline and run an obstacle course where you do lots of somersaults and walk on a balance beam (over and over and over again) at a very basic level before being asked to do more.  I want a basic class that admits that, yes, adults can be klutzes, and, like children, need to repeat the same thing over and over and over again before it sinks into the kinetic unconscious.  This is why I back out of aerobics classes or step classes that are too advanced:  they whip you from one combo to the next when you’re just starting out, and the next thing you know, while the entire class is be-boppin’ in one direction, you’re doing a box-step in the other direction.  I don’t get embarrassed by it any more, it’s just the way I am.  But I do get frustrated, and I do end up box-stepping right into someone who’s be-boppin’, and it just isn’t fun.

But, when I do get a class where they take it slow and let klutzes like me learn the basic combos a bit at a time, and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse them before moving on, I do have fun.

Klutzes of the world, unite!  We need to demand fun classes that are slow-paced in the learning aspects, but not slow-paced in movement!

Woohoo! Join me, fellow rebels!

So after complaining–mightily!–about how horrible Ms. Hyde has been visiting lately, yesterday was a day’s worth of Dr. Jekyll.  It was awesome.

First, in pursuit of the goat idea, OmegaDad had been corresponding with the Farm Lady With Champeen Nigerian Dwarf Goats.  He finagled an invite to her spread.  We went yesterday a.m.

Now, OmegaDad has an ag degree.  He grew up doing FFA and hanging with 4H kids, raised and showed pigs and bulls and other livestock.  Thus, OmegaDad knows all about birthing and hypocalcemia, the issues of thiamin deficiency, protein content of various livestock foodstuffs, how to inseminate a bull, fat-to-milk ratios of various cattle and goat lines, and acts nonchalant when a three-week-old kid starts sucking his finger.

I, on the other hand, am a city kid through and through.  I can navigate my way through Chicago blindfolded, can tell you what time of day to ride the El, where to catch the #36 bus, the free days at the various museums, and where the more obscure park statuary resides.

Everyone has his or her talents.

Anyway, the itty-bitty goat babies were adorably cute.  The older goats were pretty and laid back.  The Farm Lady was a font of information.  For instance, you need to insulate the goat stall, because goats like to huddle up together up against a wall, and when you have days on end of -20F weather, they can get frostbite.

Um.

I gave OmegaDad the hairy eyeball as we were driving away, saying, “You know I’m lazy.  I don’t want to end up having to take care of goats!”  At which he hastened to reassure me, once again, that the plan was to get the dotter used to small animals that don’t give a hoot how cute you are, but will butt or bite when you treat them roughly.

The dotter was enchanted.

Then we went searching for a new backpack for her, because her old one has bit the dust.  Just a note for the uninformed:  November is not the month to go looking for kids’ backpacks.  September is.  If your kid’s backpack goes belly up during any other month, you are SOL and your options are extremely limited.

So we had to go to Wally World.  (Cue foreboding music.)  At Wally World, the dotter and I both (for differing reasons) began getting crankier and crankier.

By the time we left, with plans to drop me off at home and the dotter and dad to go look at other stores for bacvkpacks, OmegaDad had Had It with the dotter, and laid down the law.  This included the line, “I don’t want to hear one peep or one whine or any crying.  And if I do…”  At which point, I mentally wondered what threat he was going to come up with that he wouldn’t follow through on…

“If I do, you will be dropped off at home with your mother, and I will go shopping for a backpack for you, and I’m going to find you a blue backpack, with Spiderman on it, and you’re going to use that damned backpack until it falls apart and you’re not going to complain!”

Oh, yeah, thought I.  Riiiight.  Of course, right away, the dotter starts saying something.  And OmegaDad roared, “WHAT DID I SAY?!” and OmegaDotter whines, “But I just–” and OmegaDad says, “That’s a peep.  That’s it.”

Sure enough, he pulls into our driveway, I get out, the subdued dotter sits pitifully in the back seat, and both OmegaDad and I inform her that she didn’t listen to daddy, she did continue to talk and whine, and she was staying home with me.  She followed me sloooowly into the garage, the very picture of abject misery.

Too bad, so sad.

And then, within a half an hour, she had flipped the switch from Miss Whinypants to Dr. Jekyll, my happy, helpful and cheerful companion, and she stayed that way all day long and into the night with not a single whine.

So, anyway, there we are.  We will muddle through.

Of course, the thing is, as Jean pointed out in the comments, to be consistent and provide boundaries.  There’s a certain amount of frustration in me about this; as an example, let me simply point out that the dotter fastens her own seatbelt without a fuss 95% of the time when it’s just me and her in the car, but she neeeeedsss heeeeeelllp 95% of the time when OmegaDad is around.

(Grammar hounds:  Should that be “it’s just me and her”?  Maybe I’ll just rewrite it to “me and the dotter”…”the dotter and I”???  Agh.)

Another big plus of the day is that I did not succumb to the cute little goatlets.  Damn, they were cute!

I said at the tail end of yesterday’s post that I had thought of, but discarded, the idea of doing a post based on “Teenage Wasteland”.

I have reconsidered.  I pulled that post idea out of the dustbin.

Please.  Please.  PUH-leeze tell me that almost-six-year-olds are demons sent to earth to torment us?  Please.

I love my darling OmegaDotter.  I really, truly do.

But y’know what?  Awful confession time:  Right now, I just don’t like being with her.

She is:  snotty.  Whiny.  Snippy.  Tantrummy.  Rude.  Disrespectful.  Mean.  Self-centered.  Sassy.

Just plain horrid.

Like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead…”When she was good, she was very, very good.  But when she was bad…

“She was horrid.”

She is being so horrid that even OmegaDad, in whose eyes she can (generally) do no wrong, has decided that she is whiny, sassy, mean, rude, disrespectful, etc.

I find myself thinking that we have utterly failed.  That we’ve raised a hellion.  A brat.  That we should never have been entrusted with raising a child, because we’re obviously so bad at it.

The worst of it?  Is that, apparently, she’s just a doll at school and at before/after school care.  She saves all this shit for us.  Bah.

Okay, it seems worst because it’s hurtful.  It’s actually not worst, because at least she’s not behaving like a snotty little brat with the rest of the world.

Then Ms. Hyde disappears for a while and Dr. Jekyll reappears, and all is sweetness and light and fun and pleasant.  She hands me notes that say, “To Mommy, Love OmegaDotter”, and that have little “I ♥ you”s scattered about.  She glows at me when she is done with her gymnastics class.  She sings silly songs at me when we’re driving from OmegaDad’s office to her before-school place.  She draws and builds elaborate creations.  Bit by bit, she’s reading.  She can make us laugh like crazy.

And then Ms. Hyde reappears.

My only hope is that I can recall a few younger relatives who were absolute pills at the age of five or six, and who have turned out to be model citizens and fairly nice all-around human beings as adults.

So there’s this thang going on, called NaBloPoMo, which stands for National Blog Posting Month.  The idea is, you should sign up, pledging to write one post per day for the month of November.  Various folk volunteer a variety of prizes, and random drawings are held from all the folk who actually complete NaBloPoMo so that they have a chance to win the aforesaid prizes.

An admirable goal.

Really!

So admirable that I tried it last year.

And then, right towards the final third of the month, I missed a day.  Oh, the anguish!  The gnashing of teeth and rending of garments!

Y’see, Jessica had volunteered a prize of six months’ blog hosting plus a custom-designed blog banner.  And I really, really wanted it.

But I blew it.  And gnashed and rent.

So this year, when rumblings of NaBloPoMo started surfacing across the blogosphere, I was very tempted.

Very.

They’ve also got this way kewl LOLCat badge.  That tempted me even further.

But I kept thinking of the pressure.  And the gnashing and rending.  So I decided “No go to NaBloPoMo”.

However!  Lots and lots of my regular reads did sign up, like Halushki and her sister, Quintessence, ChicagoMama, GrrlTravels, Escaping Suburbia, the Figgy ladies, and lots, lots more.  Even PAGent seems to be sort of vaguely in on it, though it might be NaNoWriMo instead (he has done a PAGent noir post).  Just check out my blogroll; if you click on a link, you’ve got a 50/50 chance of hitting someone who is participating. 

The end result:  I am blissfully free of pressure and I get lots of posts from my blogroll.

It’s very neat:  I wake up in the morning, look at my Bloglines blogroll, and there are 20 or 30 posts to read.  Every.  Single.  Day.

Woot!

On the other hand, how will I get anything done???

(TShapedGirl says of the dotter, “I just can’t believe that she is capable of stomping a foot or throwing a fit…”  May I just say:  BWAHAHAHAHAHA!  And add that today’s post was almost one titled with some play on “Teenage Wasteland”…though “Almost-Six-Year-Old Wasteland” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.  Maybe tomorrow.) 

For the past two years, the dotter has been a horsie at Halloween.  This year, however, in a break from tradition, she decided she wanted to be a kitty cat.

So I scoured the interwebs for cute cat costumes.  The problem, of course, is that what I thought of as “cute” was not what she thought of as “cute”.

There were some really spiffy kitty cat costumes available on eBay–handmade, boutiquey things.  Tiger-y.  Leopard-y.  Trimmed with feather boas or faux fur.  I liked them.

The dotter didn’t.  She said, “Find a good kitty cat costume!”  Stifling a wounded, “But I thought these were ‘good’ costumes!”, I resorted to Mr. Google and various costume houses on the ‘net.  I carefully favorited a bunch of different cat costumes for kids (no “sexy cat lady” here!), then called the dotter into the office for her to judge them.

These weren’t “spiffy” kitty cat costumes, but they also weren’t too bad.

She saw this one first.  She said, “I want that one!”  I said, “Now, dear, you need to look at some more, y’know.  You might find one you like better.”  “No.  I want that one.”  But, being a mom, I forced her to sit through about ten different cat costumes, to which I got commentary like, “Ew, no.”  Or, “Boooring.”  Or, “That’s a cat?!  Mommy, that’s not a cat.  That’s a dog.  Or something.”

Do you detect signs of a teen-in-the-making?

Anyway, she was delighted with the cat costume.  She got to wear it at her kindy Halloween party.  She got to wear it at after-school care.  She got to wear it to the Trick-or-Treat Town at school.  She got to wear it t-or-ting.  She went to school this morning with the kitty cat face still on, and the kitty cat ears.

But this morning, in the dark car on the way to before-school care, her voice came out of the back:  “Mommy?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Mommy, I want to be a horse next Halloween.”

…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.