So Dr. FreeRide, over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, posted about The Typealyzer, which purports to take the URL of your blog and tell you what “type” (as in Myers-Briggs type) your blog is.

Let’s just gloss over the question of whether a piece of writing can have a Myers-Briggs type.  Ahem.

Anyway, here’s what The Typealyzer had to say about Omegamom.com:

ESTP - The Doers

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.
The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

My response?  Bahahahaha!  OMG.  I must use a totally different area of my brain when writing than when, say, living my life.  Every single time I take a Myers-Briggs assessment, I end up being typed as an INTP.  Every once in a while, since the dotter has entered my life, I type as an INFP.  (Oh, well, at least I got the TP out of it…)  This is so far off from my own personality type that it’s like night and day, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

If you have a blog, you must run it through this little black box, and come back to tell me what “type” your blog is, and whether it is as far off from your “type” as this one is for me.  I’ve just gotta know!

Those are the dreams that everyone has, where they are, say, giving a speech and suddenly realize that they’re standing up at the podium fully unclothed, and everyone is staring at them.

Or, as my husband related when I told him of my anxiety dream, the one where you know you have to take a final for your class, but suddenly realize you have no idea where the class is being held, or what the class was about.

These are classics.

Mine was a bit different:

I was at work in the cubicle farm (the physical venue was from waaaay back when, when I worked on the magazine in the suburbs of Chicago), tap, tap, tapping away at my keyboard, when I heard a ruckus from neighboring cubicles.  Someone was complaining about “the bug in the program!” and how it needed to be fixed.

I knew that this was a program I had written for J, in the Campus Supply department.  J had left, and someone else was taking over her work.  This meant taking over the program.  But, as someone else explained (loudly), “the bug in the program!” had been there all along.

So they called in this guy from the IT department, and he was getting the info from these other folks.  They were discussing it quite loudly, so I overheard.  I was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of guilt–how on earth could I have not fixed that bug yet?  But I had been putting it off forever, and now…now it was coming home to roost.  So I rushed out to intercept them, telling the IT guy that I knew exactly where the bug was, and it was easily fixable, and why didn’t we just grab a computer and I’d show him where it was and how to fix it.

We appropriated an empty cubicle, that just happened to have a computer in it.  I sat down at the computer with him sitting at my side.  He was wearing a contemptuous, sneering look.  This was a Very Important person from IT, who everyone knew had gotten his degree from A Very Prestigious University.  I started up the computer, and realized I couldn’t find the program.

I couldn’t even get the mouse working right.  The mouse had a heavy-duty industrial electric cable that attached it to the computer, there were heaps of junk around it on the desk, and the cable kept getting tangled in the junk.  Worse yet, the cable was short, so I had to yank it and yank it to try to get enough cable to get the mouse moving properly.

All this while, he was just sitting there, sneering.  Finally he muttered something about “you must be a CIS major” in a dismissive tone, and I found myself babbling about how I knew he had gone to Very Prestigious University and was very smart, but I had a degree, too, from Cal State, and it was a CS degree, not a CIS degree…

But I couldn’t find the program, and I couldn’t get the mouse to work, and I had never fixed the bug, and he was just sneering…

And I woke up from that nap in a very, very anxious mood.  Depressed.  Miserable, actually.  It was just as bad as the time I had (foolishly) decided to play Fur Elise–which I had just started learning–at a piano master class with a visiting master pianist, instead of the piece I had been practicing forever, which I knew backwards and forwards.  I had that exact same sinking feeling, the absolute and total desire to just sink down into the ground and vanish and Not Be There, a feeling of utter humiliation, the worse because it was self-inflicted.

Ugh.

Over the snow-covered valleys of Alaska, as the sun begins to rise, they gather.

Mist wreaths the peaks as the fog rises, and the half-moon glimmers overhead.

A wind collects the top dusting of snow and scatters it joyously in the air, where it sparkles and shimmers, then falls to the ground.

This…this is the morning ritual.

The harbinger of change is heard in the distance, chains rattling and brakes squealing.

Join us as we watch…The Running of the Moms.

The small fry circle around the nest.  The mother patiently watches for the signal that it is time, time for the migration.

The swift, the brave, the leaders:  they will catch the signal early, and their young will be waiting.

The slow, the sloth-like, the sleepy:  Their young will be left behind, to struggle to their destination and arrive late.

This leaves the ones in between, neither swift, nor sloth-like.

They are the ones who watch for the signal, ready to run, but not quite realizing that the signal they are paying attention to is delayed, or that the gathering, the preparation for the migration, will take too long.

They wait.  They see the signal.  They gather their young.  They prepare the small ones.  They dart here and there, collecting necessary items.  They chatter their warning cries, and their young, being young, dawdle and delay.

Finally, they are ready.  They emerge from the warm, safe nest, where they have bedded down for the night, and peer out into the slowly lifting darkness, eyes blinking, breath frosting the air.

The entrance to the nest is barricaded again.  The mother and the offspring swiftly move to the gathering place.

Or, at least, the mother swiftly moves to the gathering place; the young, in this case, dawdles some more.

The messenger, the leader of the group, is heard approaching, like the thunder of a herd of buffalo.

The adult picks up speed, protected feet crunching rapidly through the days-old snow.  The young follows behind, distracted by the glittering snow, by the ice-covered branches, by…who knows what.

The time is coming, fast, and they must make it to the gathering place in time, or be left behind.  The adult, hearing the leader, breaks into a run, feet sparkling, breath huffing, galloping up the hill to the meeting place.

The young one drifts behind.

The adult calls out, an urgent noise, beckoning forward.

The young one dawdles.

The monstrous beast comes to a halt at the top of the hill, and–miracle of miracles–waits!  The soft rosy pink of the dawn gleams through the windows and silhouettes the driver of the bus.

The adult, worn and tired by its journey, staggers to a halt by the lumbering messenger, and waves a limb in greeting.

“Hah.  It’s always the moms who run; the kids, they take their time,” says Carmina, who is used to this.

And the dotter, suddenly realizing that, oh, maybe she should be moving her feet a little bit faster, breaks into a run at the very last possible minute, and climbs onto the bus.

I sometimes wonder if salmon are the same way.  If mother salmon are darting to and fro around their young, off to spawn in the streams, urging, “Do you have your eggs?  No?!  Where are they?  I told you to get your eggs ready!”  And then swimming before their offspring saying, “Are you sure you have everything?  C’mon!  We need to get going!  It’s time!  No, you don’t have time to poop, dammit!  We’re late as it is!”

Har.

So a few days ago, I was majorly bummed that the Hanna Andersson clothes on sale were all sold out.

And Lizard (an old internet buddy of mine, whose dotter E. is six months younger than OmegaDotter) commented saying she lived near the HA outlet store and maybe we could work something out…

A few emails later, and now she is all set to do some vicarious shopping.

Booyah!  And woot!

Of course, this all assumes the dotter will like the dresses.  This is not guaranteed, which is why I was so hot-to-trot in regards to the sale prices.  I’m more than willing to experiment with the kiddo’s tastes when I’m spending $19, but not willing when it comes to a $50 price tag.

Just so everyone knows, I am still keeping track of the Ongoing Saga of the Global Financial Meltdown.  I note that (a) Bush is saying that Paulson’s blank check for another $350 billion is not going to be spent in this administration thankyewverramuch (thus pushing it off onto Obama’s watch), (b) today’s news is that GM is not going to get a bailout (but that could change at the drop of a hat), (c) Goldman Sachs has a research note out that says that GDP could shrink (that would be decline) by up to 7.8% this quarter, (d) and recent photos of Obama show that his touch-o-grey has expanded rather rapidly in my opinion.  I have asked my boss to send me a copy of my resume (I only have an extremely out-of-date hard copy from my files) so I can update it and have it on hand; there is no specific news to warrant this, aside from the fact that the state I work for is currently $700 million in the hole.  However, everywhere I turn on the ‘nets, I hear from this person or that person that they know someone (or a spouse or parent or offspring) who has been laid off.

I’ve been using email and the Internet (in varying forms) since 1992.

While I’m really not good about replying to emails, I’m very good about sending snippets out and about, to OmegaDad, to GrannyJ, to varying friends and relatives.  A link here (”Oooh.  This is interesting!”), a photo there (”Hey.  Here’s the dotter’s school pic.”), reminders (”Pick up some milk on the way home, and we’re out of cat food.”), a kml file (”Look at the aurora map!”), a YouTube video (usually a funny one).

I read the news online; I have the local blatt bookmarked, so I know what’s going on around Small Alaska Suburb and Big City, I have Small Mountain University Town’s newspaper bookmarked (though I haven’t been reading it much lately, which is an indicator of finally moving on, I guess), I have MSNBC and CNN bookmarked.

Every morning, I check out Nielsen’s daily Top 40 news stories and Technorati’s “Popular in News” listing.

I am on IM during the working day, so I can communicate with my boss and coworkers.

When we move into a new home, one of the first things I do is set up the utilities.  These days, Internet access is a “utility” to me, and it has been for years.

All of that said, read about another child of the connected age, being forced to isolate himself from his connections.

Think about it.  You’re used to the connectivity.  You’re constantly in casual touch with friends, relatives, coworkers.  You’ve even gathered together a community that spearheaded your election victory with “MyBarackObama” social networking.

And now…now…your security officials are telling you you must give it up while you are the president.

Ooog.

I couldn’t do it.  Give up my email?  My IM?  My blog?  No more quick dips into the Internet stream to see what the daily zeitgeist is?  No zipping over to Los Angeles news sites to see what the status of the SoCal fires is?  No link to the weather?

It’s one thing to turn it all off while on vacation; that’s just a week or two.  But for four or eight years?!  Ack.  No.

You’ll get my Interwebs from me when you pry it (them?) from my cold, dead hands!

There was this heap of magazines and catalogs and things (*ahem* bills *ahem*) that I hadn’t looked at for about a week.  I needed some reading material in the library, so grabbed the catalogs.  There was a Hanna Andersson catalog.  It was a dress sale.  They had their “It’s a Playdress/It’s a Daydress” on sale at $19!!!

Woot!  And holy moly!  I haven’t seen a price that good on pd/dds ever!

And I still had a day for the sale!

Double woot!

So I sashayed down to the office, pulled up the Hanna Andersson website, and took a look.

And now I’m bummed.

Because they’re all sold out in bigger sizes.

Wah.

I was so ready to drop a whole bunch of money on some of those dresses for the dotter.

Anyway, those of you with kids in smaller sizes might be interested; it’s a really good deal.  I’ll just sit here and sulk.

Today, two separate sets of astonomers released news that they had photographed planets in other solar systems.

Of course, one’s immediate thought is of Apollo- or shuttle-style photos of big blue marbles.  Alas, no; that’s a long way off.  What we have is one real-light image of a large planet circling Fomalhaut (nicknamed “The Eye of Sauron” because of its lovely red ring surrounding an unblinking bright pinprick pupil), looking like just another dot, and not one, not two, but three planets circling a star gracefully named HR8799 (which sounds like one of the multitudes of operating procedures put out by, say, a university human resources department), photographed in infrared.

Oh, man.  It is just so kewl, even if they are still just dots.  We’ve come a long way; astronomers are finding evidence of planets everywhere they look, it seems, whereas just a few decades ago there was serious discussion that planets might be a rarity in the universe.

From the sublime to the wonderfully ridiculous:  Last year, some scientists arranged something called “Dance Your Ph.D.”, in which scientists were asked to do an interpretive dance of the subject of their Ph.D. thesis.  This resulted in some splendid dances (which you can see here).  The winner was a stylized primitive hunt of antelope, followed by the hunter sharing the feast afterwards, illustrating his thesis titled “Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking, and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa.”  The contest was such a success that this year the AAAS is sponsoring the 2009 Dance Your Ph.D. contest.  Go visit and watch the videos; there’s a tango about electrons and lattices, some mice sharing pheromones, marine animals being caught in nets and dying, insulin growth factors binding proteins, and more!

All of which makes me want to remind you:  Science is Fun(damental)!

Well, bullshit.

Sorry to be so crude, but we’ve got two senate races now that are real squeakers–one right here in Alaska!–and a third that is still undecided.

Right now, Mark Begich is three votes ahead of Ted Stevens, he of the “tubes” description of the Internet.  Stevens is being called “convicTed” by liberal voters because of his recent conviction; I can tell you that our neighborhood was filled with “Republican for Mark Begich” signs, so that’s an indicator of some sort.  For some reason, Alaska still has not counted some 30,000 votes; they counted 60,000 or so today, all mailed in or provisional ballots.  Before this, Stevens was ahead by a few thousand.

In Minnesota, Al Franken and Norm Coleman are doing the do-si-do:  first one’s up, then the other, then the other.  Right now, Coleman is ahead by 204 votes, well within the required automatic recount that Minnesota law provides when races are closer than a certain margin.  The official recount begins next Wednesday, and is expected to last until December.

In Georgia, neither Saxby Chambliss (the Republican) nor Jim Martin has the required 50% plus one (the Libertarian candidate siphoned off the additional votes), and they are looking at a runoff election in December.

If all three Republicans in these races end up losing…then the Democrats would have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.  (Whether this is a good thing or not I leave up to my readers to decide.  I, personally, do not want the FBPM; I like the checks and balances and negotiations that would be required to court the two independent senators or lure a Republican over.)

Your vote does count.  Yes, it does.

(ETA:  The difference is now Begich up 814 votes.)

As a young lass, I lived in Chicago and had numerous relatives around and about (or at least what I considered “numerous” relatives).  It so happened that Grandpa and Grandma W lived in Evanston, in a lovely, large, rambling duplex on a quiet tree-lined street; I spent a great deal of time there, weekends on and off, a Saturday or Sunday afternoon once I was fluent with the El, holiday dinners, Halloween trick-or-treating.

It was an interesting house; two stories with a finished attic and a dim, dismal basement, a large, open stairway to the second floor in the front, with a secret “servants’” staircase in the back, hidden away by doors at the top and bottom, the brass dinner bell hung in the entry hall at the bottom of the stairway, the old safe stashed away in the walk-in coat closet.  There were books in various spots all around that house.  There was the complete collection of Dickens up in the glass-front bookcase in the attic (both of which are now in my possession).  There was the set of lawyers’ bookcases that was endlessly fascinating to me, solid and heavy, which now graces OmegaBro’s home.

There was great-grandfather W’s steamer trunk up in the attic, from when he was in the merchant marines.  It was filled to the brim with old Halloween costumes and party dresses from when my father and his sisters were young, and even from the childhoods of earlier relatives.

The house was heated with forced air that emanated from elaborate foot-square (or larger; it’s hard to tell looking back) cast iron grates in all the rooms.  The grate in the living room was one of the most excellent places to stand on cold winter mornings as the house was heating up; the grates in the attic, alas, gave mere wisps of heat, anemic from the air’s journey from the basement up to the third floor.  This made the row of windows in the large main attic room a splendid place to examine frost, because every winter there was a 1/4-inch layer of frost on the insides of the windows, and you could add to it by breathing on the glass, and watch the feathers of frost swirl outward from where you breathed.

Tucked away in a small bookcase on the second floor, next to the doorway to the stairs to the attic, was a collection of Time-Life books.

They were fabulous books, with titles like “The Planets”, “The Oceans”, “The Human Body”, “The Mind”, “Mathematics”, “The Atom”, “The Universe”.  I spent many a quiet hour with those books, leafing through them, admiring the illustrations, reading the captions, and rarely (if ever) reading any of the essays that started each chapter.

The one that sticks in my mind the most is, coincidentally enough, “The Mind”.  There were chapters on madness, on illusions, on perception, on how the brain works, on what the brain looks like.  It fascinated me, and I kept returning to that one, over and over again.

On chapter that arrested my attention was the chapter on madness.  The illustrations for this chapter opened up with this illustration by Hieronymus Bosch, “The Extraction of the Stone of Madness”, which was quite delightfully gruesome and scary.  It proceeded through Munch’s “The Scream“, equally lurid in a different manner.  Then, when discussing schizophrenia, it examined the paintings of a man named Louis Wain, who had made a quite pleasant living providing rich bourgeoisie with paintings of cats, both portraits and fanciful situations, until he started to go insane later in life (which is suspected, these days, to be the result of toxoplasmosis).  The paintings featured started with a relatively ordinary looking cat, then a cat with somewhat unnerving large green eyes, then to a cat with demonic red eyes and fur outlined in jaggedy red paint, until he ended up with “cats” that were–essentially–just an abstract, neon notion of “catness”.

The books on space and the planets were filled with wonders, too:  glorious color photographs of stars–the Pleiades as a smoky glimmering nursery of stars, the Crab Nebula, the rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s red spot, the sun, the moon, the Ring Nebula.  There was a chapter on the development of rocket ships.  There was a diagram of the varying sizes of suns, the life cycle of stars, eerie illustrations of what the origins of the solar system might have looked like.  There were medieval outlines of the constellations.  There were cutaway diagrams of the sun, and the earth.

These memories are smatterings of what was in the books, but they leaped full-force into my mind prompted by one of the commenters on the science books thread that I tabulated; he wrote that the Time-Life book series had instilled in him a love for science from a very early age.  A few nights ago, OmegaDad and I were talking about it, and he wondered just how many grown scientists were originally prompted by books like those, or specifically that one series.  He remembered it as well, and how wondrous those books were to him as a child.

So we’ve decided to scour the used bookstores in our area to see if we can find some of those books, so we can put them on the bookshelves in our house for the dotter to wander through, now and then.

My stupid machine keeps bombing on me and I don’t know why; I’ve already lost this post twice.  Grrr.

So there you have it:  the Top 10.  Go forth, buy, read, and be blinded by science!

(P.S.  If this shows up as horribly formatted, I apologize; the left-right-left approach to the pics may not work very well.  Also, it occurs to me that my NaBloPoMo problem–which apparently showed up earlier than I thought–may have to do with the fact that my blog software still thinks I live in Arizona.  Both the “skipped a day” posts were posted here before midnight.  Harrumph.)

A few days ago, Pharyngula (PZ Myers) asked his readers “What science books ought a bookstore stock?”

In my cold-bedimmed fog, I have been tabulating the answers from the 438 responses that question got, carefully entering them into Excel.  I have finally listed them all and tabulated the results, but now I am just tired, tired, tired and I have x’s in my eyes, like a cartoon character.

So you get the Top 10 tomorrow.  It’s an interesting list.

I’m just posting this so I get in under the wire for NaBloPoMo, and to tease you all.

(ETA:  Well, damn.  I didn’t get in under the wire after all.  So *poof* goes my attempt at NaBloPoMo.  Bah.)

The “lice incident” was not.  The school nurse moaned to me about how that class has driven her nuts because a few parents are paranoid about lice; the dotter’s reportage was garbled, thank heavens (she had said that Nurse Lady had found cocoons in her hair!!!!! ACK!).

The award was for creative writing and art.  No surprise there!

Obama had a press conference today which served to indicate a few things:  1) He is not president yet, which he reiterated three times to my counting; 2) he takes the economy issue very, very seriously; 3) Paul Volcker was standing to his left and was shown during almost the entire press conference, so that’s an indicator of the type of economic advisor he’s going to tap; 4) he’s not going to discuss his security briefings; and 5) the new White House dawg will need to be hypoallergenic.

Some fun stuff:

• Election cartograms, very kewl.
• Behind the scenes on the campaign trail, also very kewl.  Read all seven chapters.
• The Obama team is quite hip to the Internet:  Here’s the set of Creative Commons pics of election night; the team also had “Change.Gov” ready to go.  Remember, he plans to have a cabinet-level Chief Information Technology Officer to advise him.

I had other stuff to post, but can’t remember it.

Off to do some NyQuil.  Drugs are good.

Six years old.  You can see her tooth gaps.  I like it.  Tomorrow we are told to show up at the first quarter school general assembly because the dotter is supposed to be getting an award; I suspect it’s something like “perfect attendance” or something like that, but we’ll be there.  Then there’s the “lice letter” that showed up from the school nurse.  Ahem.  Eeek?  I have to call her to find out more info; it merely says there “was a lice concern” about the kids in the dotter’s class, and that all the kids were examined and “cleared for school”.  However, a question or two put to the dotter revealed some info that makes me really want to talk to the nurse…

A big thank you to all my commenters; your long and thoughtful replies have made me feel a bit cheerier.  I will write more substantive stuff tomorrow; tonight I’m just pooped and have a headache and want to go to bed.

It’s great.  It’s historic.  Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey teared up on national TV.  The first black American president.

He was my candidate.  I’m glad he won.  But…Now he’s stuck with the job. 

And here comes my cold-water, wet-blanket, pessimistic post.  Sorry.  If you’re still feeling giddy with happiness, go somewhere else and don’t read this post until a few months have passed; I don’t want to rain on your parade.

I had a draft post entitled “the Janitor-in-Chief” (based on John Mauldin’s column, “Electing the Janitor-in-Chief“) which I never published, all about my (usual) dismal outlook on the economy, and the mess that the president-elect (whoever he might be) would inherit, and I’m afraid that my pleasure in Obama’s victory is highly tempered by that outlook.

It’s a mess.  It’s a royal mess.  I reiterate my prediction that the new president will be a one-termer.  I hope not, but the economy is racing down the toilet, and there’s a helluva lot more bad economic news to come.  Auto industry executives have been quoted as saying it’s the worst their industry has seen since World War II; Goldman Sach’s investors’ outlook note leaked today says that they’re revising their unemployment estimate upwards from 250,000 jobs lost in October to 300,000, and they expect it to keep getting worse; commercial real estate investment is drying up; the ISM factory index is the lowest it’s been since 1982; real personal spending–which fuels 70% of U.S. GDP–plummeted at an annual rate of 3.9% in the month of September; and on and on and on.

I’d love to think that the hearts and flowers and joy and luv-luv-luv will win over the 53 million people who voted for McCain, but given some things I’ve read on the ‘net today, and some things I’ve heard on boards and in emails, we’ve got a whole slew of people out there who think that Obama is a Marxist/Leninist/socialist/communist/jack-booted thug who is out to tear down the structure of the United States and RUIN US ALL.

(Hey, it’s the right-wing’s version of the liberals’ dreaded October Surprise, the staged terrorist attack that would give BushCo the excuse to call for martial law and suspend the elections…)

Yup, Barack Obama, who the lefties think isn’t left enough, is too moderate and centrist, is a communist thug.  Sigh.

And I sit here thinking to myself:  What?!  Why on earth would anyone want the job?  Why on earth didn’t we let McCain take it, and have him get stuck with the tar and feathers, the anger and frustration and disillusionment that will greet the upcoming years of cleaning up the mess that BushCo left us with?

Gah.  Maybe I’m feeling like this because it’s November, and the light is vanishing fast, and it’s been cold as hell.  Or because some folks who I really love and respect are taking this…um…not well.

(Edited to add:  Okay.  That’s it.  The last.  I was so excited.  So happy.  So thrilled.  And realizing that intelligent, sensible people whom I know and love are scared just shocks me to the core and makes me want to cry.  I see hope; they see fear and hatred.  I see trying to change some of the gawd-awful stuff that BushCo has done; they see destruction.  I see an intelligent, moderate, quiet man who will do his best to do a competent job; they see a Hitler-like demagogue.  And I want to cry.)

Anyway, to read a better (less pessimistic) take that looks at the practicalities, go read John Scalzi’s post, “Reality Check“.

And really, truly, I’m very happy Obama won.  I watched the speech and teared up.  We made OmegaDotter watch with us, telling her it was a historic occasion that she would remember all her life.  It’s amazing that the U.S. was able to actually vote–clearly and decisively (though not a landslide, as some would claim)–for a black man as president.  Forty years ago, one would never have imagined this day.

I waited for OmegaDad to be done with work, then we schlepped over to OmegaDotter’s school to pick her up from “Mad Science!” class and vote.  No line, so we were in, voted, and out in no time at all…Not that it’s likely to make much of a difference here in Palinland. 

Also I delivered these red, white and blue cookies to the school election day bake sale first thing in the morning:

Now all that’s left is to bite my fingernails while waiting for the election results.  Actually, I think we’re going out to dinner, which will take an hour or so, and by then it will be called, I’m sure.

California’s Proposition 8–the “marriage is to be defined as one man and one woman” amendment to the state constitution–is running neck-and-neck (sigh).

So the Prop 8 folks have spent $$ on Google Ads to show up on blogs.

So far, I’ve run into three blogs, on wildly diverse subjects, that have had to post disclaimers about the ads, because they have no control over which ads show up on their blogs.

I thought it was interesting that enough readers complained that the bloggers had to do this.  Too bad all those people don’t live in California…

As for the proposition itself, and my feelings thereon?  In a word:  Ugh.  OmegaDad and I have been together now for 15 years (yes!).  The idea that giving someone who is gay or lesbian the same marital rights as we have will somehow destroy our marriage, cause our country to slide into moral decay, and lead to our dotter being OMG TEH GAY!!! just makes me roll my eyes.

I can’t remember where I read it, but it seems that the institution of heterosexual marriage is so devastated by having legalized gay marriages in one of the Scandinavian countries that…

…the heterosexual marriage rate has increased.

Whoa.  Those bad, bad gay folks!  Lookit what they’ve done!

John Scalzi, over at Whatever, has a number of good blog posts about the whole affair.

And it’s the cutest little thing, too.  Actually, the silkies have laid two eggs, but we’re keeping that from the dotter, because OmegaDad happened to…um…step on the other one.  So we have one itty bitty egg sitting in our egg carton in the fridge, and one itty bitty egg all squashed to bits in Le Petit Coop.

Visit NaBloPoMo
Eh.  I’ll give it a try this year.  Last year, I forgot all about it until it was a couple of days into November.  Oops!  The year before, I was doing great until the last two-thirds of the month, in which I tried a timed post which got posted too early because of time-zone differences.

Bah.

But–into the breach, dear readers!  Let us try, once more, to conquer November!  Woot!

That said, November started off badly, to wit:  OmegaDad left the garage door open all night long.  It got down to zero last night.  The water pipes froze.

BUT!

Luckily for OmegaDad, there is that “but”.

He caught it in time!  He closed the garage door, turned the garage heater on full blast, fiddled with a valve, and we sat around for hours waiting for a plumber, sans water, fearing the worst…

Only to be told by the plumber that OmegaDad had actually left the valve closed.  So the plumber opened the valve, and voila!  Water!  Gushing out of open faucets all over the house!  Woot!

The plumber says that, yes, the pipes had frozen.  Just barely.  And the garage heater had thawed things. 

Then the plumber suggested to me, as I was writing the check, that it might be a good idea to get a thermostat alarm thingummy (which he wasn’t sure where to get, but he kept meaning to find out, because he thought it would be a good idea to stock them, because of people like OmegaDad).  It just so happens that I had been suggesting the very same thing to OmegaDad!

So all is well that ends well.  OmegaDad is showering as I type.  Shortly I will be able to wash clothes, clean house, do my normal weekend-ly things.

And there is no husbandly body stashed under the front stairs.  This is a good thing, don’t you think?!

What does it spell?  Halloween!

The dotter decided she wanted to be a cheerleader this year.  (This was after first wanting to be a princess, then wanting to be a “really mean witch!”)  So I looked at cheerleader costumes online, and got more and more frustrated, because it was either cheesy cheap faux cheerleader costumes from High School Musical or another TV series, or trampy cheerleader costumes.  Nothing in-between.

So I went to a cheerleader supply store online, got her a purple cheerleader outfit and pom-pons, and we went with that.  She was delighted.  (Yes, it’s really purple, but the camera got blue, and the editing software made it slightly bluer.)

She’s actually wearing a shirt under the top, and leggings, ’cause it’s c-o-l-d here.  Like, “tenth coldest October on record” type cold.  Bah.

Let’s see a cheer jump, why don’t we:

We made our ghost tree, but never put it out. 

The plan–yes, we had A Plan–was that we would go to her school to do the Halloween Town trick-or-treating, then go swing by her buddy K’s neighborhood, then would go to Small Town, where OmegaDad’s office is, to do T-or-T-ing there.  Why not here?  Well, because we’re in a neighborhood of one- to two-acre lots, and it’s a pain in the butt to even think of T-or-T-ing here.

But when we got to K’s house, her mom invited OmegaDotter to go trick-or-treating with them.  So OmegaDad and I went out for dinner, and never got around to putting out the ghost tree or the jack-o-lantern.  Bad folks.

Anyway, goodness knows whether we had trick-or-treaters or not.  It’s not like our old neighborhood, which really wasn’t any great shakes for kids, but at least was better than this one.

I owe people emails; please don’t think worse of me for putting things off.  I’ve been feeling kind of punk lately, and just doing the minimum to get by for the past week.  Aside from a rant or two.

I watched Obama’s half-hour TV ad.

Then I bop online, and find people who were moved to tears.

I wasn’t.

I was irritated.

We saw families “down on their luck”…but not really down.  I’ve got to say, if my husband’s job were cut to one week out of every two, and I were laid off, why on earth would we be going out to eat?  Equally to the point:  why on earth would Obama’s campaign film a family in such straits doing such a thing??

Then there’s the fact that…um…look, I know they were playing to the moderate white vote, but my overwhelming feeling in this ad was…it was very white.  I suppose it wasn’t PC enough for me, har.

Then Obama says he voted for the bailout and is hoping to Do More.  Aaarrgghhh!  Right now I feel like the financial gurus are busy pulling cards out from under one side of a tottering house of cards to shore up a different side.  What we need is for the U.S.–and all the other countries who joined us on the drunken binge of borrowing and spending over the past ten years (dear lord, I am using Dubya’s very own phrase, just shoot me now)–should stop trying to get banks to loan and people to borrow, and start encouraging savings and investment in real goods.

Over the past six months, at an increasing tempo, the U.S. has flung fictional money this way and that, to the tune of:

• $700 Billion – The bailout bill; U.S. Treasury to purchase toxic mortgages and other non-performing assets from financial institutions.
• $50 Billion – To guarantee principal in money market mutual funds.
• $10 Billion+ – Treasury purchases of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in September.
• $144 Billion – In additional MBS purchases by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.  (With a limit of $850 billion…whoop-de-do).
• $85 Billion – AIG bridge loan giving the Fed a 79.9% controlling stake in the firm.
• $87 Billion – Repayments to JP Morgan for providing financing to underpin trades with the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers.
• $200 Billion – $100 billion capital infusion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the Treasury.
• $300 Billion – Provided to the FHA to refinance failing mortgages into new, reduced principal loans with a federal guarantee as part of the housing bill.
• $4 Billion – Provided to local communities to purchase and repair abandoned homes due to foreclosure.
• $29 Billion – Financing for JPM’s takeover of Bear Sterns. The Fed takes $30 billion in non-performing assets as collateral.  (Goodness only knows how much those “assets” are worth now.)
• $200 Billion – Currently outstanding loans to banks through the Fed’s Term Auction Facility.
• $150 Billion - Stimulus checks.  Remember those?
• Not to mention a whole slew of additional multi-billion-dollar chunks o’ change being handed out to GM and foreign countries…

Just where is all this money going to come from??  A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there…That’s almost two trillion dollars.  And now they’re talking about another $50 billion to guarantee up to 3 million mortgages where the mortgage-holders are underwater (more than a month late).

Look.  My husband and I aren’t poor, but we’re not rich.  We’re not the best money managers around, but we managed to put a fair amount down on this house, pay off debt, purchase two cars outright, and keep up with our mortgage payments.  We won’t see that help.  And that makes me angry.  Yes, there are people who were bamboozled into bad mortgages at the last minute, but the majority of the folks who are in foreclosure used funky mortgages to buy more house than they could really afford based on teaser rates and the assumption that their houses could only appreciate in value.  They get help; my husband and I, who deliberately looked at houses where we could afford the payments on a plain vanilla fixed-rate 30-year mortgage (even though we’d have loved to get more house) won’t.

I think I was looking for more of a “Fireside Chat” approach.  Something with more substance, and something that came straight out and said “The next few years are not going to be easy.  We’re all going to have to tighten our belts.”  What we got was fluff, violins playing, and warm-hearted shots of Obama shaking hands, giving and getting hugs, and holding babies.

It didn’t move me to tears.  Or at least, not in the way that the ad writers wanted.  And I’m voting for the man.

Just think what the people 40 years ago, funded by DARPA, looking at a new way to (a) protect communication in the face of a nuclear strike and (b) share research quickly, would think of if they looked at the ‘tubes of today.  I’m sure they would have never conceived of a world where people could buy just about whatever they wanted without leaving their computer, or the way that the music industry has been rocked to its core.

Definitely, they would never have envisioned the lively political debate that it has fostered.

Oh!  Did someone say “political debate”?! 

And I’m sure those intrepid internet pioneers would never have considered a world where such joys as this are available:

I do.  I truly do luuurve Teh Intarwebs.  They rawk!

Yesterday afternoon, OmegaDad came to me as I was folding clothes, and said, in an urgent, worried voice, “Come upstairs and listen to this!”  I grabbed some clothes on hangers, planning to drop off the jackets in the coat closet, listen to his mystery noise, and then drop the remainder in our closet.

He was very perturbed, and almost wouldn’t let me stop at the coat closet.  “Do you hear that noise?  In the corner?  Over by the TV?”

I listened, and smiled, a world-weary, tolerant smile.  Tap.  Tap, tap, tap.  Tap.  Tap.  Tap, tap, tap, tap.  Tap.  Tap, tap, tap.

“It’s our woodpecker.” I said.

“Our what?”

“Our woodpecker.  He’s pecking the house.”

“Our what?  We don’t have woodpeckers!”

“Yes, we do.  I swear I’ve told you about it before.  We get woodpeckers who peck at the house, up by the eaves.”

“Nooo!”  He sounded astonished.

“Yes!”

So he had to go outside to look, and the dotter had to go with him, and sure enough, just like I’d said, there was the woodpecker.

Now, mind you, I’m not happy about a woodpecker pecking at our house.  We’re going to have to have the eaves inspected next summer, just to see what sort of damage the beast has been doing.  But I certainly wasn’t surprised.

What I was surprised by was the woodpecker decided to move to the other side of the house, and then move over to the birdfeeders.  And then stay there as the dotter and I oh-so-carefully opened up the kitchen door, and I oh-so-carefully aimed the camera, and I oh-so-carefully got the picture before the bird flew off due to the blinding of the flash, which I had not oh-so-carefully turned off.  Oh, well; at least I got the one good picture.  He is, I think, a hairy woodpecker; the downy woodpecker has some black spots along the outside of the tail feathers which this dude is missing.

So that’s the nice stuff.  Onto other things:

My post yesterday stirred up a bit of emotion.  The first commenter was a regular reader and commenter who was offended by my characterization of those who believe in the Rapture and in the anti-Christ as “bat-shit crazy”.

Sigh.  I have never hidden my lack of religious belief.  I have actually written posts about it in the past.  I may not say things like what I wrote in yesterday’s post except once in a blue moon (or, more accurately, once in three years and three months), but I have to admit, I think it on a regular basis.  I typically avoid discussing religion for that very reason; it is worse than politics, in my books, because some of the nicest, friendliest, smartest folks just go…daffy…as soon as religion raises its head.  Magical thinking takes over, and rational thinking flies out the window.  People who believe “other” are suddenly seen as “less than” simply because their magical over-being is different or because they don’t believe in a magical over-being at all.

I said that it was not tolerant of me.  It’s not.  The mindset baffles me.  It baffles me that groups that profess to follow a set of “loving” precepts use that belief as an excuse to hate others.  It bothers me that there are people out there that believe, since I don’t follow any religion, don’t believe in any religion, that I can’t be moral.  Or good.  Or kind, thoughtful, gentle, blah, blah, blah.  And, believe me, there are plenty of folks of religious bent who actually write columns that get published in national newspapers that say exactly that, and additionally say that the only thing that holds all of humanity back from being greedy, rapacious, murderous, thieving, vile, sociopathic, psychopathic bastards is religion.  This has been written multiple times, in multiple columns and magazine articles, from followers of different religions.  It is, to be blunt, a bunch of horse hockey and a sad commentary on people’s viewpoints of humanity in general.

I think humanity is much, much better than that.  I don’t think we need an omnipotent magical parental figure overseeing our every waking and sleeping moment to keep us moral and striving to do the right thing.

Furthermore, I feel there are plenty of existing things that hold people apart without adding belief in mythology into the stew.

If any generic reader feels that knowing this about me means you can’t read my blog any more, I certainly accept that, and wish you well. 

Remember how I asked here whether Obama is supposed to be the anti-Christ, because some folks were giving us rally-ers the devil’s horn, as opposed to the finger?

Well, apparently I’m just a sweet, innocent naif from Alaska, wide-eyed and gobsmacked, because, yes, Virginia, there are folks who think Obama is the anti-Christ and that’s why they’re not going to vote for him.

Really and truly.

I was whacked by a 2×4 alongside the head with this realization when reading a 400+ comment thread on A Little Bit Pregnant.  One commenter flat-out said she wasn’t voting for Obama because he fit all the characteristics of the anti-Christ, and another one said she was pretty sure she was voting for McCain because she was merely worried that Obama might be the anti-Christ.

Setting aside the whole question of “OMG so you really believe this stuff?!”, I find myself puzzled by this approach.

Surely, if you think Obama is the anti-Christ, then you’re likely to be a person who believes in the End Times, in the Rapture wherein all good and righteous folk will be sucked up into Heaven to sit on the right-hand side of the lord, complete with halo and harp.  And you’re likely to believe that this is preceded by the second coming of Christ, which is preceded by the rise of the anti-Christ.

So wouldn’t it be logical to, say, vote for Obama in that case?  Wouldn’t that be hastening the aforementioned series of events?  Like, almost guaranteeing it?  Sing hosanna, vote Obama, get me to the Rapture on time?

(OmegaDad, when I broached this thought to him, told me that maybe these people secretly aren’t sure they’re going to be sucked up into Heaven come the Rapture, and that’s why they don’t want to vote for him.

Hmm.  This is always possible.)

Moving on:  No doubt someone will tell me that the reason for not voting for the anti-Christ is that the rise of the anti-Christ is supposed to be a time of terrible turmoil and misery for the world, and that no-one with a kind heart would want that to happen.  But…but…I thought all of that is gonna happen anyway in that world view, no matter what you do.  One way or another, the whole row of dominoes is supposed to fall; it’s all predestined.  So surely the faster it’s done, the less turmoil and tribulation, the quicker the Rapture?

I can’t wrap my head around this stuff.  I really can’t.  Here we are, living in an amazing world filled with man-made miracles, living lives of ease due to technological advances, a world where people are taking photographs of the further ends of space and the amazing intricacies of microscopic things on our own world, where people are living longer lives through the application of science, where practically every single instant of our days is touched, in some way, by science, technology, or the rational thought process…

…and there are still people out there who (first off) really, truly believe that there is such a thing as the anti-Christ, and (secondly) really, truly believe that Obama is him.  When I come across people like this, I think to myself (and come mighty darned close to saying out loud, or typing out), “You are just bat-shit crazy.”  Whoops!  There goes any pretense to tolerance I have.  Sorry…but there it is.

It’s a Bizarro World, indeed.

A few years ago, I produced a lame-ass lifebook for OmegaDotter.  I did it in Word, I cribbed pics from clip art and random websites, and managed to confuse her the first few times we read it together because there was a picture of a Chinese woman, and the dotter automatically assumed that she was her birthmother.

Um.

Okay, so it didn’t work out too great.  I’ll have to find it and re-read it to her, see how it goes; it was definitely aimed more at a 4-year-old than a 6-year-old-on-the-verge-of-16.

Anyway, one thing about the lifebook that I was very proud of was that I had a (cribbed from the web) diagram of a fetus inside a woman’s uterus, which prompted all sorts of intensely interested dialog, including the dotter deciding that she was going to demonstrate to all and sundry just how a baby comes out of its mother.

Um.  Ahem.  It provided OmegaDad and me with some hastily-subdued amusement when she would wander into the living room, squat down, go, “EEEAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!”, and then produce a baby doll from between her legs, then brightly announce that this was her new daughter.  At least I managed to explain to her that she needn’t do that at pre-school, thankyewverramuch. 

Anyway, I’ve been on the lookout for sex-ed books aimed at kids, and finally found one that seemed to fit the bill:  It’s Not the Stork!: A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families and Friends (Robie Sex Books) talks about everything on a 6-year-old’s level, gets the basics covered, talks about good-touch/bad-touch, and isn’t boring.  After two tries at the local bookstore, which supposedly had it in stock, I finally gave in and ordered it through them, then waited around for the phone call, then forgot it was there, then remembered one day while off at the grocery store getting Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake Cookies to feed my addiction that it was there, at the bookstore, and the bookstore was two doors down, and hey, I had some extra time…

So I finally got it home a few weeks ago.

The dotter took one look and was immediately demanding I read it to her.

She was thrilled to get the info, interested in all the “right names for things”, and so eager to read it that she ditched Ramona for quite a few reading nights in favor of this book.  She giggled and exclaimed, “EW!” at the anatomically correct drawings of boys.  She kept demanding to see what was next.  I found myself blandly talking about pen1ses, test1cles, vulv@s and vag1nas and smoothly segueing into a brief description of the sex act itself without stuttering, blushing, getting tangled up, or desperately wanting to Be Somewhere Else.

We took our time going through it, doing about 4 pages per session.  There’s a lot of information; it covers what sperm is, what eggs are, relative sizes, what happens to your body when you go through puberty (though a great big gaping hole is a lack of mention of menstruation), ess eee ex, how babies are made (not the ess eee ex part, the sperm and egg part), how babies grow, a glossed-over description of how babies are born (any child who is read this book will not get the “EEEAAAAGGGGHHHHHH!” part), a quick talk about twins, triplets, and higher, a paragraph about adoption, etc.  It’s filled with cheerful cartoon drawings, shows “diversity” without being preachy about it, and has a cartoon bird and bee mascots who make smart-alecky commentary as you go along.

So, if you’re like me, ready to tackle it but needing help getting through some of the parts, this book is for you.  Highly recommended.

Okay, I have a few posts in mind, but right now I just want to pass on something that Pretzel passed on to me.  It’s in the spirit of earworms:  Once you pass it on, hopefully it’s not stuck in your own mind anymore, eh?

Boomshine!  A bubble-bursting chain reaction game.

Go forth and waste time.  I just want you to know that I made it to 336 points.  Woot!

(Posts in mind:  OmegaDotter builds a house…A review of a kid’s sex ed book…fear and loathing on world equivalents of Wall Street…cold weather…)

This morning, as the schoolbus pulled in to stop at our corner, the dotter turned to me and quickly said, “No kissy!”

It was like a dart to the heart.  No goodbye kiss?!  What?!  Is she already going through that stage of “my mommy is soooo embarassing!  Ew, no, don’t kiss me in front of everybody!”

Later on, as I was coping with the tummy cramps from whatever-horrid-bug-it-is that I’ve caught, I realized that it wasn’t a case of being embarrassed.

It was a case of internalizing warnings from mommy and daddy; to wit:  don’t kiss someone who is sick.  I had already almost sent her off to the bus stop by herself, fearing a need to dash to the bathroom toot sweet.  So she was merely protecting herself.

Much better than growing up!

Pretzel asks if it has gotten cold here.  Well, yeah, considering that we’ve had a number of snows.  We’ve had lows in the teens.  Bleah.

Sarah (MotherOfSonOfThor) asks if we used online plans for our chicken coops.  I think OmegaDad used them as starting points, but we had an issue:  rather than starting from scratch, as it were, we were retrofitting the coops into the (way off kilter, old, dumpy) stable-ish area off our yard shed.  This meant a lot of home designing.  I think OmegaDad did a bang-up job.  The nesting boxes were also designed using online plans as a starting point.  They were very easy to do, in general.  Chickens, I must say, don’t need much; give them food, water, and a nice quiet boxy space for nesting and they’re pretty happy.

Doesn’t that sound like something out of a first-grade reader?

Our silky girls, Fluff and Puff, have been subsisting in a substandard housing arrangement, to wit:  no nesting box.  They have had to deal with (o the horror!) a bunch of straw on the floor of le petit coop.  So OmegaDad finally got with the program, sanded the (previously built) nesting box, painted it white, and then set OmegaDotter loose upon it with pink and purple paint and the instructions “do whatever you want”.

“Do whatever you want” ended up including painting a big pink heart on the plastic drop cloth, then walking on the wet paint.  So OmegaDad–quick thinker, he–grabbed some of his hand condoms (disposable plastic gloves) and outfitted the girl with gloves on her feet and hands, then herded her into the house from the garage, up the stairs, and directly into the bathtub.

I got the pleasure of washing pink paint out of the dotter’s hair, which left an inordinate amount of pink paint flakes in the bathtub.  Ugh.

Anyway, this evening the paint had all dried, and dad and dotter forthwith took the new nesting box and placed it in with the silkies.  The idea being that at some point in time the silkies will actually consider laying eggs.  Word has it that silkies don’t do much egg laying; they’re too busy being pretty and fluffy for such shenanigans.  (This is The Kozmik All’s honest truth:  silkies were bred to be pets, sort of the Pomeranians or Shih-tzus of the chicken world.  They also, apparently, are “broody” and will happily hatch any eggs in their nests and raise the youngsters up.  Chicken fostering…)

The dotter with her newly decorated nesting box:

Nesting box in place, filled with straw, and being investigated:

The silkies at the feed container:

The dotter with three of the other chickens (Comet, Angie, and Buffy, l. to r.; Winnie was being shy, as usual):

We’re swimming in eggs.  We get four eggs per day.  The dotter happily collects them and takes a dozen over to the next door neighbors every so often, getting $2 per dozen.  So we don’t really need any eggs from the silkies; it just seems that they might need to lay some.  Some day.  Once in a while, when they’re feeling like it.

You will notice that the dotter is growing out her bangs; they now are almost long enough to be tucked behind her ears, but not long enough that the hair stays behind the ears for more than a few seconds.  There is, behind that head, a ponytail; the stuff on either side of her face was in that ponytail this morning, but, of course, out by the time she got off the schoolbus this afternoon…