Remember how OmegaDotter told me that as soon as I left for my vacation, she and OmegaDad were going to have a disco party?

Unbeknownst to me, OmegaDad was sent off by his mother, lo these many years ago when he was a teen, to actually learn to disco.

The things you find out about your spouse.  First I discover he knows all the words to a variety of Carpenter’s songs, then I am blindsided by the fact that he actually knows how to disco.

In addition, while I was on vacation, he shared this knowledge with the dotter, who has been happily disco-ing ever since.

So, since New Year’s Eve is traditionally a time to party, I decided to share OmegaDad and OmegaDotter disco-ing around the living room.  Please ignore the dawg; please disregard the large blank spaces on the walls; please do not worry:  the Christmas tree has not fallen down yet, nor has anyone been impaled by needles, nor have Christmas ornaments been demolished.

There is one spectacular cartwheel.

There is no sound track of OmegaMom snickering helplessly as she recorded this scene for posterity.

So this is my wish for you, my readers:  That your life may be filled with as many pleasant surprises as mine in 2009.  And that you PAR-TAY! for New Year’s Eve.

Every home should have a chicken in the garage, especially in these uncertain economic times.

Har.

Yes, we have a chicken in the garage.

A few weeks before Christmas, we noticed that Buffy, our Buff Orfington (yes, a highly original name for a Buff, I realize, but it fits if you use the pre-Buffy-The-Vampire stereotype, as she is a Dumb Cluck), was staying in the nest box a lot.  More than a lot, in fact:  she was pretty much camping out there.

OmegaDad, Keeper of The Chickens, became worried, and consulted Teh Google.

It seems that hens are wired to get “broody”.  A broody hen is a hen who is bound and determined–no matter what–to incubate a clutch of eggs.  First, they nest.  Then, they stay there.  They fluff up all their feathers to keep things nice and warm.  Some will pluck their chest feathers off to make the nest nice and fluffy and insulated, and to raise the humidity level underneath their bodies.

In a nice normal flock of chickens, you’ll have a rooster or two to do his studly duty and inseminate eggs; thus the broody hens can collect enough eggs, sit on them for about three weeks, and voila, baby chicks.  Once the chicks are hatched, the hen will be matronly, guide them to food and water, watch over them, and the broodiness subsides:  they’ve fulfilled their biological destiny.

Our girls, alas, do not have a handy randy rooster around.  Their eggs are doomed to never hatch.  Besides, the OmegaFamily keeps on top of things and does a nest sweep twice a day to collect eggs.

In this situation, the hen suffers from a type of infertility psychology:  They brood.  They hunker down.  They want chicks, dammit!  Everything about their bodies switches from producing eggs to hatching eggs, hormonally and physically.  A broody hen without eggs to incubate just keeps on keeping on, sitting on the nest, leaving once or twice a day to eat and get water and deposit a huge, dog-sized turd (really!) (and really stinky, too!).  They lose weight.  They start being susceptible to parasites on the chest and abdomen because of all the warmth and humidity.  They keep quiet and fluffy and start wasting away.  If you don’t Do Something, you will have a dead hen.

You may also have many hens in the same state, as it is commonly thought to be “contagious”.  My thinking on this issue is it’s probably related to the tendency of female humans to synchronize their menstrual cycles:  a broody hen is a hormonal mess; those hormones probably produce pheromones; those pheromones probably signal to other hens that Now Is A Good Time For Baby Chicks.

(Of course, I have absolutely no data to back this up, but when I came across the contagion idea, it just seemed to click.)

The best thing to do in this case is to “break” the broodiness, shock the bird out of the heat/humidity/nesting/hormonal cycle.  Some people apparently recommend dunking the bird in ice water.  My opinion:  ACK!  One person I read up on suggested putting ice cubes under the hen, as a gentler method.  OmegaDad’s thought was to move her out of the main coop, cool her down, and provide some tender loving care.

So OmegaDad hastily whipped up a temporary coop for the garage, and transferred our poor, brooding Buffy there.  The garage, though heated, is at about 50F.  The temporary coop doesn’t have a nesting box, so there was no place for Buffy to snuggle in and generate heat.

She had, by this time, definitely lost weight, and her comb was a pale grey-pink, as opposed to a nice bright pink-red; apparently all this attention to incubating leads the hens to totally ignore their own physiological processes and (if I read things correctly) shunt a lot of blood to the chest/abdomen area.  She was so weak that she wouldn’t stand up when we picked her up out of the nest, but just sort of trembled and sank back down into a squat on the coop floor.

The end result:  We have a chicken in the garage.  The temporary coop in the cooler area, away from the other hens, was apparently just what she needed.  She is now up and about, no tremors in the hind end, eating like a pig, drinking plenty of water, no more gargantu-poops, and her comb is turning bright pink again.  She is also being spoiled because it’s so cold I’m smoking in the garage, and feeding her red grapes now and then.

She is recuperated enough so that when I go out there, she burbles at me for the grapes, and she will jump up into the air to get one from my hand.  Then she squawks with irritation if I don’t give her more. 

So now we know:  If another of our birds gets broody, we’ll nip it in the bud much sooner.  It was just that this happened while I was heading out of town, and we were preparing for Christmas, etc.

Or, alternatively, “Help me, Obiwan Kenobi!  You’re my only hope!”

What OmegaMom has been doing for the past two days, while sorting and washing laundry, is quickly becoming addicted to puzzle games on the computer.  Specifically, “hidden object” games.

Let’s back up a year or two.  At one point, OmegaDotter wanted (gag!) La Casa de Dora, a computer game.  We had a trial version, which lasted an hour.  So I signed up with BigFishGames–the “Jumbo Club” option–thinking that we would be downloading games on a regular basis, and downloaded La Casa de Dora.

Then I promptly forgot about my Jumbo Club membership.

So…OmegaDotter has gotten more mature, more able to figure things out, more deft with a mouse, and a month or two ago OmegaDad downloaded trial versions of some other games for her, specifically SuperCow, The Scruffs, and Feeding Frenzy.

Once again, the trial versions expired.

The dotter really liked SuperCow.  I really liked The Scruffs, a hidden object game with a sense of humor.  I decided–o brilliant idea!–to buy her these games for Christmas.

But when I went to BigFishGames, I tried signing up with my regular email address, and The Powers That Be told me I was already registered.

Whoops!

But!

But!

I now had 9 game credits!  Woot!

So rather than spending $10 per game (with the super-de-duper holiday game savings coupon), suddenly they were free!

I promptly downloaded the three games, and then spent hours the night before Christmas working my way through The Scruffs.

And then I decided I wanted another “hidden object” game, so I went to the game site and found “Mystery Case Files:  Ravenhearst”.

And then on Christmas day and the day after Christmas, I went through Ravenhearst.

And then I decided I wanted another Ravenhearst game (because I had seen it on the front page of the game site) and I downloaded it.

And I have been playing these damned games for days on end.

This is not good.  I need a magic word (like “Xyzzy!”) to transport me away from this sudden addiction.  Or I need a rescuer, like Obiwan Kenobi, to fight off the Dark Side of the Force.  I have a real life, dammit.  I have a dotter (who is enjoying working the puzzles with me, at least, so we’re doing a Family Fun Time Activity).  I have a husband.  There are errands to run.  There are stairs to shovel, because we’ve had a foot of snow on top of older snow, and 45-mph winds blowing the snow hither and yon.  We have a broody hen segregated in the garage (more on that later).  I still have laundry to do.

…but I still need to free the twin girls’ ghosts and find all the objects and figure out all the puzzles, and it’s calling me.  (Cue ominous music.)

Santa says, “Merry Christmas!” to you.  Isn’t he cool?!  The dotter made him “freehand”.

The dotter also, after great and careful thought, got me this for Christmas:

I’m sure you’re wondering, “What the hell is it?!?!”  It is a beanbag chair for my office; I have been wanting a chair to sit in and read while OmegaDad is playing Scrabulous Lexulous or pool on the office computer.  What does it look like when someone is sitting in it?

Okay, well, that’s two people.  But I was very impressed with how the dotter (a) came up with the idea herself, and (b) apparently pretty much paid for it herself.

So I hope all my readers had enjoyable holidays and are sick and tired of eating and drinking and gifts and family and whatnot, and ready to get back to Real Life.

(Hm.  In looking at that picture, I think there’s an area around my face that may actually be background.  I’m not sure.  Hm.  Anyway, the chair is very comfy.)

I am back in the snowy North, arriving back from the snowy Southwest.  But this doesn’t seem to be any different from the rest of the United States:  it’s snowy everywhere.

I haven’t felt like writing anything for a week now, and it doesn’t really seem likely to change soon.  So, in the meantime, herewith is the tale of the Gingerbread Inferno.

First, we have the original gingerbread house, GH v. 1.0:

There was more:  a sleigh…trees…decor on the door…a flagpole.  But, as I wrote before, OmegaDad forgot it was sitting in the oven awaiting finishing touches, and he torched the thing accidentally, leaving it looking–as he said–like a classic “home burnt in a California firestorm”:

The back wall had fallen.  The roof collapsed.  The peppermints had melted into puddles of goo.  The candy puffs outlining the walkway had puffed up, like Peeps in a microwave, rather than melting.  The M&Ms had split.  It was a sad, sad sight.

So OmegaDad and the dotter pulled themselves together, like all fire victims, and rebuilt:

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.  We are pulling together various gifties for the dotter and for each other, and having a marathon wrapping session.  There is Santa’s present to put together, too, which required just a wee foretaste of Things To Come…the dreaded wrangling the wrappings…as we decided to have a soft pony straddling the package since there was no room for it inside the box.  This required de-tangling the beast. 

I have written about packaging and Christmas before.

Suffice it to say that I think Amazon.com, Best Buy, Sony, and Microsoft are doing A Good, Good Thing in deciding to nix the ultra packaging in a “frustration-free packaging” initiative.  Woot!

More later, I promise.

I am sitting in GrannyJ’s office, watching it snow.  Nothing is sticking here, but up the hill in Small Mountain University Town they have actually closed Small Mountain University due to “severe weather”.  Everyone–from the desk personnel at Budget Rent-a- place to the family friend we had dinner with last night–has made jokes about how “cold” it is here.  I just goggle at them, thinking, “You keep saying that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

(By the way, GrannyJ says that I needed to precede the previous post with the all-important words “After I got off the plane in Phoenix”, so that folks know where I am.  I am here [at GrannyJ's], and OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are back home.)

Even with the “winter”, though, and its associated cloudy skies, I am getting twice as much light here as at home.  Here, the sun rose today at 7:2 a.m. and will set at 5:22 p.m.; back home, the it came up at 10:13 a.m. and will go down at 3:34.  In essence, I get double the daylight.  Woot!  It makes an amazing difference.

In all, it’s just quiet and pleasant and relaxing, which is what I have been needing.

Back home, the first disaster was the Gingerbread Toast.  We had a lovely gingerbread house.  It was still being decorated, bit by bit.  It was awaiting the final touches at the hands of my husband and dotter, snugly stashed away in the oven.

You can see where this is going, right?

OmegaDad decided to make “hot dogs on a stick” for the dotter Sunday night.  This requires the broiler.  Alas, he had forgotten that the gingerbread house was in the oven.  The end result:  toasted gingerbread house, with charred decorations.  He has promised me that he took photographic evidence, so when I return home, I will post before and after pictures.

Tomorrow, I write about homework again…

I had promised GrannyJ that I would stop at Trader Joe’s on my way up to buy her some lemon-dill sauce and some tuna steaks.  I had a plan:  I would go to the TJ’s I know, at 99th and Thunderbird, then head on up the hill.  No problemo; the route was engrained in my head.  So I pulled out of the rental car complex and let my autopilot take over:  turn this way, turn that, get on I-17, drive, drive, drive, turn off on Thunderbird, drive, drive, drive.

I arrived at 99th and Thunderbird, and there was the familiar shape of the TJ’s mall.  But it looked different. Where were all the cars?  I turned across the intersection and pulled in, realizing, with a sinking feeling, that TJ’s was gone. Yes, I had the right spot:  there was the familiar shape of the TJ’s store front.  But where the “Trader Joe’s” sign had been there was only a fading memory burned into the creamy adobe by the sunlight, a dim shadow of where the letters had been.

Oops.

So I pulled into the Wells Fargo parking lot, pulled out the phone, called mom.  Sorry, I said.  I’ll be there in about an hour and a half.

I decided it would be fun to drive up 99th (the Lake Pleasant Road) up to the Carefree Highway, though I knew it would be painful.  The last time I had done the drive, the encroaching ticky-tacky boxes had been pushed further north, but surely there would still be some desert out there that I could drive through in the setting sun.

I drove up 99th, just getting into the swing of things, and was abruptly stopped at a T-intersection where 99th ended.  Before me was a mall, a swanky earth-colored eminence with neon lights advertising eateries and clothing stores.  The cross street was called “Lake Pleasant Parkway”.

Say what?!

I had to make a snap decision, and was not in the left-hand lanes…goodness only knows how things had changed further, and perhaps the better thing to do would be to just turn right, head back to I-17.

As I was driving the broad new parkway, expecting to head towards the highway, it started curving.  I noticed a cross street:  Beardsley.  Say what?!  That’s not right, I thought–doesn’t Beardsley intersect with the highway?  I kept on, but started looking ahead for cross-street signs.  And I realized that the setting sun was no longer behind me, but off to my right.

There ahead of me was Union Hills.  ACK!  Yes, I was right:  ”Lake Pleasant Parkway” had morphed from a possible intersection with the highway into something heading directly south–back the way I had come.  I turned on Union Hills, and saw that LPP had, at some point, turned into 83rd Avenue.

But despite this unexpected detour–which had taken an extra 30 minutes–I soon made it to the highway, and was motoring north through the edges of Phoenix…and passing yet another “Photo speed enforcement zone”.  They were littering the area on all the highways, and they were new.

I passed Deer Valley and hit construction:  a long, long passage of arrows pointing left, then pointing right, the highway lanes swinging this way and that, the Arizona Department of Transportation widening the highway and rerouting it.

I passed an intersection labeled “Jomax Road”.  Once, only 10 years ago, Jomax Road was a small dirt road that fed into 99th Avenue in the middle of the desert, a lonely sign on a 2-lane road, that led into an area of old 2-acre spreads with dowdy ranch houses.  Now, it was big enough to warrant an entrance to the interstate.

I passed the construction on the new, expanded interchange with Carefree Highway.  It was dark now.

The newness passed away; now I was on familiar ground.  Coming up on my bete noire, a development called Anthem.  Once upon a time, the road there was called Desert Foothills; now it was called Anthem Way.  Once upon a time, there had been a (for the desert) lush forest of palo verde trees, one of my most favorite spots to drive through in springtime, as the wildflowers carpeted the ground and the pale chartreuse leaves popped out on the trees.  When Del Webb came through and raped the desert to install its huge development out by New River, they made very sure to keep all the saguaro cacti–it was required by law.  But all the palo verde trees?  The thing that made that spot unique?  Poof.  Gone.  See, they weren’t required to do anything with them.  So they brought in their bulldozers and ripped them out of the ground to make way for hundreds of square adobe-colored McMansions.  McMansions purchased by people who wanted inexpensive housing near to Phoenix, out in the desert where the nights were an endless expanse of darkness filled with hundreds of stars.

Of course, now that those McMansions are there, with their associated street lights and porch lights and their carefully saved saguaros, the velvety nights with the tiara of brilliant stars are no more.

I’m sure the people who had lived in New River for years beforehand were pleased to have their night skies removed like that…

Most of the drive between Anthem and Prescott was the same, thank heavens.  Long sweeps of emptiness with a blob of lights around Black Canyon City, and scattered spots of light marking old houses out in the chapparal.  A small spot of newness at the entrance to Prescott, where ADOT is remodeling the old highway interchange, but not too much difference.

The past ten years have changed so much about this land I love.  The relentless expansion of Phoenix has chewed up an amazing amount of the desert, and it saddens me.  It especially saddens me to realize that–according to reports I have heard–many of those new houses, built to cash in on the real estate run-up of 1997-2006, are empty or on the verge of foreclosure.

Ah, well.  I am at mom’s house.  Her street is the same as it has been in the past ten years; the changes came here before that.  We spent yesterday visiting the local Gingerbread House Village, hanging out, and going out for dinner.  It’s quiet and relaxing, and I find I miss my dotter very, very much.

Every Monday through Thursday, the dotter brings home a folder.  In that folder is a page or two of math homework each night.  Every Tuesday, she gets a new book to read out loud (courtesy, though she does not know this, of a nefarious scheme concocted by OmegaMom and Ms. Nicely at the last parent-teacher conference).  Every Monday, she gets a packet of spelling words to spell multiple times, alphabetize, place in “word boxes”, use for fill-in-the-blank sentences, and–bonus!–a few sentences made up by herself using those words.

Being a mean mommy, my routine is:  I meet the dotter at the bus stop.  We walk home.  The dotter kicks off her boots, drops her jacket, dashes up to the bathroom, and begs for a snack.  I strike the Mean Mommy Pose and ask what’s next.  She mutters “chickens”.  We go check the chickens for eggs.  We return.  She begs for a snack.  I strike the Mean Mommy Pose and ask what’s next.

Homework.

I get her a snack.

We pull out the folder.

I collect the “graded” work (”Wow!” “Awesome!” “Super!” and suchlike, with here and there a 33/35 with circled blank answers).  I try to toss some out, but these days, she insists on going through them and keeping the majority in her “school box”. 

I read various notes from the school.

She asks where her erasers are.  I say I don’t know.  She looks for them.

I wait.

She comes back.  She asks where her pencils are.  I say I don’t know.  She looks for one.

I wait.

She returns.  She grabs some markers and writes her name in alternating orange and green letters.  I clasp my hands under the table.  She asks me to sharpen her pencil.  I cock an eyebrow at her.  She asks me to please sharpen her pencil.  I sharpen the pencil.  She has started coloring in turtles on the math homework with her orange marker.

She starts her homework.  “What am I supposed to do?”  I shrug and say, “I dunno.  Read the directions.”  She reads the directions.  “Oh, that’s easy!”  She counts the turtles and the butterflies that are in problem 1 and 2, carefully sorted into groups of tens and ones.  “Is this right?” she asks.  I shrug and say, “What do you think?”  She checks again.  (Har!)

She bounces in her chair.  She turns her math homework sheet upside down.  I strike the Mean Mommy Pose and suggest she focus.  She reads the story problem (”There are 6 boys in the tent.  There are 8 boys outside the tent.  How many boys are there all together?”).  She starts drawing six tents.  I mention that it’s boys she’s supposed to be counting.  Oops.  She erases the tents.  She draws a boy.  She writes “boys” above the boy, and “6″ beneath the boy (thank heavens–a few weeks ago, she would have insisted on drawing every.  Single.  Boy.  Differently.).  She climbs up onto her chair and squats on the seat.  She draws another boy and writes “boys” above that one, and “8″ beneath.  She puts a plus sign between them, an equals sign at the end, a blank box to hold the answer, and the word “boys”.  She counts.  She draws in “14″.  Then she puts “14 boys” in the (provided) answer space.  She grabs the orange marker to color in some more turtles.  I strike the MMP again and announce, “No more coloring turtles until you’re done with your homework.”

Now it’s time to draw ten-lines and one-dots to a specified number.  She asks what she’s supposed to do.  I shrug and say, “Read the directions.”  She reads and thinks.  She has three problems, stacked on top of each other.  She draws a ten-line all the way down and giggles.  I ask what problem that ten-line goes to.  She looks at it and giggles again.  She erases the bottom part.  She turns around in her chair.  She erases the second third.  She bounces off the chair and grabs the orange marker to color some more turtles.  I ask, “Are you done with all your homework?”  She giggles and says no.  She erases the rest of the ten-line.  She says, “Now what was I supposed to do?  I forgot.”  I tell her to read the directions again.

She draws another ten-line.  She dots it with ten dots.  I ask her what she’s doing.  She says she’s making a pretty line.  I suggest, somewhat wryly, that the whole idea behind ten-lines and one-dots is that it’s much quicker.  Oh, she says.  She finally draws six ten-lines and 4 one-dots to represent 64.  I clutch my hands together beneath the table again.  She jumps off the chair and runs off to get something.  I holler, “Focus!  Homework!”  She runs back.  She climbs on the chair.  She whips out the remaining two problems.

I pull out the spelling homework.

She grabs the orange marker.

I give her the hairy eyeball as she quickly sneaks in two or three orange turtles.

She starts to work on the spelling.  But first she puts checks in the checkboxes for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Bonus.  I object, saying that she hasn’t done that work yet, and she can put checks in after she does that part.  She erases it.  She gets back into a squat up on the chair seat, and bounces up and down.  She finishes the spelling parts and re-checks the boxes.  (Yes, I know it’s anal of me, but she doesn’t necessarily do the stuff she’s planning to do, and I want her to get used to marking it off when it’s done.)  (Harrumph.)

Now it’s time for reading.  She swivels on her chair and drapes a leg over the back of it, with the other foot on the floor.  She bounces on the floor foot.  She reads a page.  She turns around to show me the page, teacher-style.  She turns the book sideways and reads another page.  She points out some funny things in the picture.  She slides out of the chair and backs into me while reading.  She starts climbing up on me.  She climbs off.  She climbs onto her chair.  She turns the book upside down and reads a few lines and laughs.  She turns it right-side up, reads some more, and goes “WORMS?!  Ewwwwww!”

She finishes her reading for the day.  I heave a sigh and roll my eyes and start putting her homework back into her folder.  She shrieks, “My turtles!”  Oh, dear, my bad:  yes, she must color in the turtles.  And the butterflies.

All told, this routine takes an hour.  Or an hour-and-a-half.  This is something that could take fifteen or twenty minutes.

Please give me my halo and wings.  I deserve it.

(For those who wonder why I don’t make her sit still and focus focus focus…Um.  Hm.  Well.  It’s a sort of philosophical thing with me.  She is a very physical child, very sensory oriented.  She has been this way from Day One, with the foot thing.  The bouncing, the spinning, the turning things this way and that–it all seems to help her.  Also, I don’t want to make homework a horrid dull chore.  So long as she’s doing it, getting the concepts, and (generally) having a good time with it, I will grit my teeth and practice patience.  Intense patience.  The patience of saints.)

In the meantime, today is our Metcha Day.  Yup, six years ago.  Whoa.  It doesn’t seem possible.  That little girl–up above–is now this little girl, staging a rolling-pin fight with OmegaDad.

My other potential title for this post was “As cold as ice”.

I’ve mentioned the horrendous winds we get here on a regular basis.  This morning I was woken by one, bright and early (okay, dark and early), a half-hour earlier than I normally get up.

The wind continued throughout the day; currently we have sustained 17 mph winds with gusts up to 37 mph, but it topped out some time this afternoon with sustained winds at about 30 mph and gusts up to 44.  The forecast says gusts up to 70 mph tonight.  Usually with a wind like this, the Big City forecast will have a wind warning.  Today, none.  Why is that?  Why, because the winds were nowhere near Big City this time, just on our side of the inlet.  So there we are, with 60 mph winds where OmegaDad works, and no wind warning.  Elitist snobs.  The weather folk, that is.

The wind was strong enough that while I was home the lights were flickering and dipping in and out at various times during the day.

The wind was strong enough that while I was out, it was blowing my big honkin’ piece of iron also known as a Ford Freestyle.  This is quite rare.  The Big Honkin’ Piece of Iron is, at its heart, stable.  Sedate.  A soccer-mom’s type of car.  It takes a goodly bit of moving air to rock this car on its axles.

One of the problem was that when the wind blew while the car was on the icy side streets, the car would fishtail.

Such fun.

See, we had boatloads of snow earlier.  We’ve had snow piling up since early October.  The last big snow, after Thanksgiving, was icing on the cake.  Or coals to Newcastle.  Or ice to an igloo.  Or something like that.  So the side streets were solidly packed snow, which is generally good driving.

Until you get about five days in a row where the temperature hovers around 33 or 34F, complete with misty rain, during the day, and goes down to 28F at night.  The top layer of packed snow melts then freezes.  The misty rain puts a slight layer of water on top of the ice that results.  Then you have what I consider “a lovely mess”.

Getting out of the cul-de-sac today–or getting back into it–was a nightmare.  It was solid ice from our garage door, down the driveway, up the cul-de-sac, down the intersecting street in both directions, and on the intersecting streets with that street.  Once you got to the more major roads, you finally hit bare concrete and asphalt, and suddenly got traction.  But until you reached that point…

…and if you had the Winds of Hell blowing…

…even in a great Big Honkin’ Piece of Iron…

Well, let’s just say it was A Grand Adventure.  There.  That’s the optimistic point of view.  We’ll just gloss over the moments of sheer heart-pounding terror as BHPOI was buffeted by the howlin’ winds while on the side streets and slid (slooowly, because I was driving like a 75-year-old) this way, and then slid that way as I corrected, and finally (finally!) settled down again roughly pointed in the right direction…

…only to be buffeted once again.

Ugh.

By the way–the day was completed by having to sit around the tire dealership for a couple of hours (there were a lot of folks who needed tire work today), only to be told that letting Fix-A-Flat sit around in a tire for more than a day was A Very Bad Thing and that Fix-A-Flat rots the insides of tires so that patches won’t stick well and “compromises the integrity of the tire” and, say, lady, did you know you need a new tire?  To the tune of $168.  Harrumph.

I am still questioning whether I was taken or not.

It doesn’t help that yours truly, who has been quite mellow lately, unlike last year, bouyed by lots of nice bright snow and relatively clear days and a truly stupid private daydream, has suddenly had the daydream yanked away (reality bites sometimes), the clear days disappear, and the mellow abruptly morphing into the galloping blues, just like last year’s blues.  Except much shorter, hopefully, as the solstice approaches quickly, as does my one week in (gloriously sunny) Arizona.

Wah wah wah.  I promise to have a more spritely post tomorrow, filled with Christmas-tree and gingerbread-cookie goodness.

Context is everything, right?

So I just posted a one-liner and decamped yesterday; it was late, I was tired, I had just spent a while snuggling with the dotter, and I wanted input.

So Beth and YouKnowWhereYouAreWith responded, and I thank you both very much!

The thing is:  Ages ago, pre-dotter, while I had drunk the Kool-Aid extensively, I thought Ms. Brown was a bit much.  Her emails tend to be…um…harangue-y.  And in the workshops, she’d take the kids off by themselves and not tell you what they did!  Ack!

But here we are now, almost six years after the first time we held the dotter in our arms.  She’s almost seven (Ack, indeed!).  And every so often, I have to cuddle her at bedtime and listen to her missing her birthmother, and I have to tell her that while OmegaDad and I can certainly sympathize and understand, we can’t know exactly what it’s like.

Jane Brown is coming to Big City this spring, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to try to register us for the playshop/weekend.  I asked the dotter last night if she’d like to go to an activity where there were lots of other boys and girls who were like her, who didn’t look like their parents, who were adopted, who missed their birthmothers, and there was someone who would do plays and skits and artwork and help the kiddos talk about missing their birthfamily and being sort of the odd one out.

She said yes.

Sooo…That’s why I was looking for input.

In the meantime, the dotter produced this artwork this morning.  I thought it was grand:

Anyone have any experience with one of Jane Brown’s adoption workshops?

Pool.

OmegaDad discovered an online quick-fire pool game the other day.  As a result, he and I have, at varying times, been found in front of the computer at odd hours, trying to beat the clock shooting virtual pool.

Step with me back to the days of yesteryear.

When I met OmegaDad, back in the mists of time in Los Alamos, we spent a lot of time hanging around Ashley’s Pub with the kids.  As we were, at 34 and 29, the oldest of the group–the rest were all dewy-eyed fresh-faced college kiddies–and we were wildly in love, we spent all our time together there.  We’d all drink beer and shots and mixed drinks of varying foofiness, eat burgers and chips from the restaurant, and crowd into the pool room, shooting pool.

OmegaDad was short and scrawny and wiry and lean, with a tight little ass, a lop-sided chin, a blonde mustache, and below-the-ear wavy blonde hair that was whitened by the sun.

He was hawt, guys.  Oh so hawt.

And he could play pool.  Dayum, could he play pool.

He’d swagger around the pool table with a cocky little strut, glance around, and suddenly lean over the table, cue in hand, pop off a shot with arrogant ease, and sink that puppy into the pocket while he was turning around and laughing at something someone else was saying.  He always seemed to vibrate, like a plucked violin string, sizzling and fizzing with life and zest and interest.

It was a mighty fine sight to see.

I hadn’t played much pool prior to our getting together, but so much of our time was spent there that I soon was enjoying myself greatly.  Let’s not mention that, since he was ostensibly “teaching” me to play pool, I often found myself wrapped in his arms as we leaned over the table edge, his head next to mine, his mustache tickling my ear, his hand on mine, guiding the pool cue…

Um.

Excuse me, is it getting warm in here?

Anyway, this cute little computer time waster has brought some memories rushing to the forefront.  These days, we don’t play pool; we haven’t been to a bar or pool parlor in umpty-ump years, and we’re staid old married folk.  But when he sits down at the computer to play him some pool, he’s still got that nonchalant ease.  I struggle to get an accuracy rating of greater than 50%; he regularly hovers around 83%.  I have managed to get a score up to around 3,500; he has managed to get a score up around 12,000.

What can I say?  The boy obviously has pool in his blood.

But suffering from a sinus infection which has decided to grace me with an ongoing headache that makes me nauseated and have sparkles in front of my eyes.  Sort of the pseudo-migraine of the sinus world.  Ugh.  So I finally had OmegaDad swing me by the doc-in-the-box and am now outfitted with antibiotics and decongestents and hopefully I will be feeling more like a real live human being tomorrow.

I have some ideas for posts, but nothing is gelling.  Right now, it’s just amorphous ideas drifting through my head; a paragraph or two plus an idea of where it will go, but nothing that is coalescing into anything worthwhile putting down on paper (or putting down on the screen).

Ugh.

Anyone want a Christmas card & letter from me?  Email me. 

Who is this young lady?  The one who looks all grown up?  The one who makes me think that in just a few years, we will be beating off the boys with sticks?

Today was supposed to be our annual trek to the Nutcracker.  We were going to take the dotter’s friend K. with us, as well.  But yesterday the weather gods decided it was time to dump a big ol’ load of snow on the area, around 12 inches.

Now, in Small Mountain University Town, where they regularly get 26-plus inch snows, they have clearing the highways and byways down to a science.  Yes, readers from SMUT, they really do, though you may not think so.  Anyway, a 9- to 12-incher wouldn’t phase the county crews from SMUT; they’d have the snowplows parked by each highway exit, engines running, when the snow reached one inch…and then those plows would be cruising the highways over and over and over again, scraping things down, so that the afternoon after the snow began to fall, it would be fairly clear.

Hereabouts…well, it doesn’t seem very intuitive:  Here in Alaska, Land Of Ice And Snow And Bitter Cold, they’re not quite as good about it.  Oh, in a few days, the highways will be clear, but in the meantime, driving on the highways would be an iffy proposition.

So at 11 a.m. this morning, I wimped out.  OmegaDad is still sick, hacking and coughing and not being very happy, so it would have been just me with the two girls.  And I had foolishly gotten tickets for the 5 p.m. show, which would mean driving both ways in the dark.  In the cold dark.  In the snowy cold dark.  In the snowy cold dark on snow-packed and icy roads.

In a word:  Yuck.

The dotter, when informed that we were wimping out, climbed into my lap and let the tears roll.  But a promise of hauling her and K. off to the bouncy haus for a few hours of good clean bouncin’ fun, plus a chance to dress up in her fancy new holiday finery for a few minutes so mom could take a picture, made up for it.

So there she is.  That girl is only six years old.  I swear!  Really!  But doesn’t she look…um…mighty damn fine?  And like she’s on the verge of teen-hood?  Dayum.  It’s scary.  I swear it was only yesterday that she was shorter than the dining room table, and we could keep things safe from her by pushing them towards the middle of that same table.

It breaks my heart.

Something else that breaks my heart:  When doing the Right Thing is all wrong for a child.  The picture at the head of the story says it all to me.  I read about Anna Mae and my heart sinks.  Oh, she’ll adjust in a few years, and she’ll be a fine young lady when all is said and done, but I think of my dotter having to leave our family at the age of 8–only another year–and it just makes me miserable.  The whole story was so horrid, in every way, and I wish that both sets of parents had found some way, very early on, to resolve things.

Damn.  Now I have to find some way to cheer myself up…

OmegaDad is sick.

I French-braided the dotter’s hair.

The dotter and I went off to the Bounce Haus and bounced our heads off.  In other words, the dotter wore me out.

I also discovered that my bladder control is dreadful.  There is nothing more quietly embarrassing than realizing that if you jump up and down in a bouncy castle–like you should–that each time you hit the bounce floor, you leak.  This is not a realization I shared with the dotter.

The dotter and I went off to the St0ne C0ld Creamery and chowed down on ice cream.

The dotter and I then went to El Cheapo Hair Salon.  The dotter who a day ago insisted she didn’t want any kind of haircut now insisted she have a “very tiny” trim.

After months of not having a hair cut–and my hair growing down to my shoulders and flattening out as it always does–I relented and returned to the same ol’ same ol’ haircut I have been getting now for about 20 years.  I read bloggers who are going off to hair salons and getting new hairdos all the time.  This makes me envious.  My hair is thin, wispy, fine, flat.  If it’s longer than a few inches, my face starts looking horse-y.  If I get a perm to solve the flatness issue, one side will be perfect and the other side will be frizzy.  Or else I will end up looking like a poodle.

But hope springs eternal:  every few years, I find myself growing my hair out in the hopes that this time, it will morph into a glorious mane, full of body and wave, bouncing enticingly off my shoulders.  And every time, without fail, I reach a point where I look into the mirror, heave a heavy sigh, and say, “Oh, dammit, let’s just chop the whole lot off.”

Now my head feels light and airy, and the slightest breeze makes the short hairs stir about in interesting ways.  It will take a few days at least before I become accustomed to it.

We will not discuss the ongoing alien effect, wherein what used to be deep mahogany brown locks floating down to bedeck the plastic salon cape are now wildly speckled and striped with white.  That’s not related to being forty-mumble years old; it is, obviously, some creature from light years away who is now living in symbiosis with my scalp and sucking the vital juices from my hair follicles for sustenance.

So yeah, tomorrow is this United States holiday called “Thanksgiving”, in which all and sundry are supposed to take a moment or two away from their busy lives (watching Macy’s parades and NFL) to soberly reflect upon the Good Things in their lives.

Since I am at the moment dying ten thousand deaths from a virus that my dotter very generously shared with me, and sporting a fever and eyeballs that feel like eggs fried on a summertime Phoenix sidewalk, “giving thanks” is not what I want to do.  Frankly, if it didn’t take way too much energy, I’d like to throw the Mother Of All Tantrums.  Or just grump.

But, hey, “thankfulness” is the meme of the day, so here goes:

OmegaDad:  What can I say?  I am sooo thankful I ran into this scrawny, geeky Oklahoman with an accent lo these fifteen years ago in Los Alamos.  He is kind, thoughtful, sweet, loving, intelligent, introspective, silly.  He makes me laugh.  Regularly.  He is an unending font of deliberate malapropisms that leave me in awe:  How can anyone just spout off these gems of silliness, one after another, so fluently?  There are times when my love and awe overflows, and I seriously consider doing an autopsy on him when he’s dead to see if there’s an area of his brain that is clearly labeled, outlined with purple neurons, that says “Here lies whimsy”.  On the other hand, he spoils the dotter dreadfully.  Hmm.  Oh, well, he spoils me, too, so I guess it all evens out in the end.

Seriously.  This man is way kewl.  He may not be what my Dream Fella looked like oh-so-many-years-ago, but he’s damn fine.  And he makes me–in all my late-40s mommy spread, frumpy and plump–feel sexy and hot.  Man.

OmegaDotter:  She is amazing.  She’s smart and funny, too.  She’s learning to read by leaps and bounds, and is at that stage where she’s trying to read anything that passes into (and out of) her sight.  She regularly illustrates her math homework with grand drawings, which drives me nuts on the one hand and pleases me outrageously on the other.  (The nuttiness is because these drawings make one problem in math homework stretch out to ten minutes.  Homework that could be done in the course of twenty minutes thus ends up taking an hour.)  She is tall and muscular, and is learning to do backflips and bridgeovers in gymnastics.  She can take a few pieces of paper and tape, and build a house for her dolls.  She can turn two Kleenex boxes into a poodle.  She can fill an entire piece of college-lined paper with hearts, flowers, and “Drake!  Josh!”  (Oops.  Okay, I’m not thankful for that, but definitely very amused.)

GrannyJ:  My mom is amazing.  She’s now 81, but is still trekking about Prescott with her camera, finding interesting aspects of the most mundane of things, illustrating the ins and outs of life in a small mountain town.  She is a friend, as well as my mom, and most of you can understand what a wonderful thing that is; many people love their family members, but don’t necessarily like all of them–my mom is someone who is just plain interesting, loving, and fun.

I’ve got more:  Even though I feel at Death’s Door right now, in general we’re all healthy and hearty.  We have a house, we have jobs, we have transportation, we have this opportunity to explore The Great North…

Here’s wishing all my readers a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.  Enjoy.

First, as requested by some of my commenters, a picture of the oh-so-cute itty-bitty Silkie eggs:

Of course, you can’t really tell how itty-bitty and cute they are; it’s the two light ones up top, and they are about half (or less) the size of the others.  We’re getting about one Silkie egg a day, and still four of the other girls’ eggs daily.

This actually has something to do with my title.  We are, it seems, right on the cutting edge of popular culture.  Once again, we have dipped into the Ur, the Jungian gestalt of the United States, by having chickens.

There is a “Chicken Underground” in Madison, Wisconsin.  There are urban coop-ists in New York City.  The website BackyardChickens.com logs 6 million page views per month and has more than 18,000 members in its forums.

Whocoodanode?

Of course, this is not cheap.  One thinks of chickens as cheap and easy, but, alas, they are not.  One can compare our coops and the dotter’s egg money similarly to, say, the U.S. agriculture system.  The government subsidizes the infrastructure (OmegaMom and OmegaDad purchase and build the coop).  The government subsidizes the ongoing process (OmegaDad visits the local feed store once every month to buy chicken feed and fluff).  In return, the farmer (that would be OmegaDotter) takes care of the livestock (with help from the gummint–a constant reminder to go out and check the chickens twice daily), cleans the coops (with intense help from the gummint), sells the eggs to neighbors, the government (Chez OmegaMom) and government-sponsored entities (that would be people like OmegaDad’s coworkers, who trade frozen fresh-caught halibut or salmon for a few dozen eggs).  In the end, everyone is happy and well-fed.

Right?

Anyway, to get a glimpse of this new underworld of chicken lovers, read up on “The Craze for Urban Chickens“.  I’m sure that it will be spreading even further, as people decide that keeping chickens and growing gardens helps in this dismal economy.

In the meantime, OmegaMom and OmegaDad can rest assured that, once again, they have their fingers firmly on the pulse of America.

(ETA:  This is just too cool.  You click and drag the big box of bars over the stripes to the left.  Do it slowly.  What do you see?  I just had to share it as quickly as possible!)

On the whole, the woman blogging contingent came in much more “E” than “I” in their blogs.  In fact, an overwhelming number of the blogs tested out as ESFP–”The Performer”, which I find very interesting.  Anyway, some of the ladies said that it was “spot on” or close, whereas the rest were typically INTP/INFP/ENFP.

Susie suggests that the very act of blogging lends itself to the “ES” type, and Becca suggests the same, then goes on to suggest that the Typealyzer is actually just throwing random results.

I don’t think it’s random, because when I go off to ScienceBlogs and check out the science bloggers who ran the Typealyzer, there were an overwhelming number of “IN” or “IS” blog types.

Which leads me to think that the Typealyzer actually is looking at two things:  vocabulary (splitting it into “thinking” versus “feeling” words, “extroverted” versus “introverted” vocabularies, and length of words) and verb tense (active tense=more ES, passive tense=more IN/IS).  I’d be very interested to actually see their algorithm.

It seems that the people who responded to me are typically using their blogs to talk about family things, “emotional” things, living life, whereas the folks who do science blogging are typically using their blogs to talk about science or politics.

One thing I personally do in my blog that may have an influence is regularly use active verb tense, and use short, choppy words.

All in all, a very interesting experiment.  Here are the results from my commenters:

I’ve purchased the tickets, and will be off to visit GrannyJ for a week before Christmas.  This leaves poor OmegaDad holding the reins of the household (and OmegaDotter) whilst I am gone.  He, being a wimp when it comes to Causing The Dotter Emotional Distress, said I had to tell her I was going.

So on the way home from swimming the other day, I broached the subject.

It was not taken with Emotional Distress, oh no.

“Yay!  Daddy and I can do whatever we want while you’re gone!”

I winced inwardly, imagining returning to a home more like a tornado has gone through it than normal.

“And we can have a party!  A disco party!”

I do not know where that came from.  Har.

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.)