OmegaMom

I called the borough.  I talked to Jane, a nice lady who informed me "it happens all the time, don’t worry."

Look, okay, when I get something that has in big red letters "TAX DELINQUINCY NOTICE" and the word "foreclosure" on it, I get kind of hot and bothered.

But Jane said not to worry and to talk to my mortgage company.

Which was, of course, my next step.

I will not go off on a rant about outsourcing to India.  I will not.

Ahem.

Jarmesh was very polite.  Once we had communicated all the particulars, he said that everything would be taken care of.

So…Now that I know where the info is, I will be watching the escrow balance like a hawk.

In the end, I am left feeling very anticlimactic.  I hyperventilate and panic–the borough and the mortgage company act like it’s no big deal.  It damned well better be no big deal, is all I can say!

In the meantime, I leave you with the physics behind why peeling old wallpaper is a bitch (someone went to the trouble of a study to point out that peeling things slooooowly really helps a lot?!), and with Big Dog Beta, humanity’s answer to the Big Dog robot.

(No, not about taxes!)

Most of the time, I go through life thinking most people are pretty nice, that everyone (generally) just wants to get along, that the folks who get a kick out of hurting other people are few and far between.  That hackers are only interested in scoring, via macho skillz, or making money by scamming or thievery, but not interested in hurting other people.

Then I read something like this.

Hackers and spammers and what-not are branching out, it seems.  Not content with stealing people’s credit card numbers or identification, or posting 279 spam comments on an obscure blog per day for a week, they’ve now decided to target epilepsy patients, with something that hurts them.

An epilepsy support board was hacked by folks who put javascript in place to either display a seizure-inducing picture or redirect the post-reader to another website entirely that displayed a full-screen video of seizure-inducing patterns.

What kind of sick fucks would do something like that?!

I mean, really.  I can get "revenge".  I can get "personal animosity" aimed at one person.  I can get graffiti.  I can get theft.  But I can’t get the kind of personality that impersonally poisons an online medical support group with something that can actually physically incapacitate or hurt someone.  My considered opinion:  These are scum-sucking slimeball pigs with the morals of a hyena, like roaches of the internet, who should be squashed like the bugs they are.

Bastards.

A simple question:  Who is responsible for 2007 taxes on a property purchased in September, 2007?

Ahem.

More on this on Monday, when I can call the borough and the mortgage company!

Answer:  We are responsible.  For the last third.  The sellers were responsible for the first two thirds.  That money went into our escrow account upon signing the mortgage.  Further $$ were put into the escrow account each month.

But nothing has come out of our escrow account up to now.

Perhaps I am naive.  Our first mortgage experience was smooth as silk; we purchased at the same time of year, but never received a delinquent tax notice!  Because our first mortgage company, lo these many years ago, actually paid the $#@*ing taxes out of escrow without us having to do diddley.  So we fully expected the same thing to happen with this mortgage company.

But perhaps they’re up to their eyeballs in alligators, what with everyone and his sister trying to re-fi or get out of higher interest rates or walking away from mortgages that are for more than the property is worth any more or something…

I am left wondering what’s up with our house insurance policy, as well…

Grrrr.

A recent Disney film is now available on DVD.  So, since we’ve instituted "family movie night", wherein we watch a movie together and eat dinner in the family room, and since it’s a Disney movie, a fairy tale, we figured we’d get it and watch it and have a pleasant evening.

It’s a fun movie!  Really!  See, there’s this princess locked away by a prince’s evil stepmother, who’s very Snow-White-esque, singing to all the birds and animals and daydreaming of her handsome prince.  The prince hears her singing…he searches out the beauteous voice…he finds the princess…she’s swept off her feet…

And then the evil stepmother, trying to keep her away from the prince, dumps her into a wishing well that has, as it’s other end, New York City.

At which point, the movie turns from a cartoon into real life.

All well and good.  Lots of hilarity ensues when this dewy-eyed innocent Disney princess tries to cope with real-life NYC.

She meets a man.  She starts falling for the man.  The prince and a henchman of the stepmother also go through the wishing well to rescue her/keep the prince from rescuing her…

And then the evil stepmother, deciding her henchman is worthless, jumps into NYC herself.

At which point, the dotter crawled up into my lap.

And then the witch, foiled in various connivings, busts loose with lots of flames and witchery and turns into a very well-done CGI dragon lizard thing, big and scaly and scary.

"Scary" being the operative word.

Really scary for a six-year-old who has only encountered scary stuff in The Wizard of Oz (which is banned from the house for a few years) and in cartoons.  She’s quite the adept at the scary stuff in cartoons, because she’s well aware that it’s Not Real.  But CGI that’s presented in a realistic way?

Really, really scary.

I spent quite a bit of time last night in the dotter’s bedroom before she fell asleep, having to explain how it was all Make Believe.  How it was all done with computers.  How it wasn’t a real dragon lizard thing, and the witch wasn’t a real witch, and it wasn’t real fire, and it was all pretend, and everything was okay.

I felt blindsided, frankly.  I didn’t even think to research the movie beforehand–after all, it’s Disney, fer cryin’ out loud!  A Disney children’s movie.

So:  Make sure your kiddos aren’t quite as innocent about scary special effects as mine was before you show it to them.

Last night, while cleaning up bookcases to go into the family room, it occurred to me to wonder–when did the first person decide that smearing smushed up dried honeycombs on wood was a Good Idea?

I mean, really–what on earth prompted someone to do that in the first place?

It’s similar to something else I’ve wondered:  Who was the first person who decided that horseradish might be actually good to eat if it were ground up and mixed in with other foodstuffs?  What possessed this person?  One of my most memorable experiences was when my mom handed me a chunk of what we both thought was celeriac root–carefully cleaned and peeled–and I took a great big honkin’ bite.  It wasn’t celeriac.  It was horseradish.  Let me tell you:  horseradish, in its natural state, is not, repeat not, edible.  I chewed for about five seconds.  At which point, my brain told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was being poisoned.  It was ghastly.  Surely I’m not alone in that?  So what prompted some genius, in the long long ago, to decide that it might be okay if it were used sparingly?

Why is it that I suddenly have nothing I want to say?

I’ve been encountering some good discussions around the blogosphere.  They pique my interest.  I want to discuss them when I read them.  But then, a few hours later, I open up the ol’ bloggin’ software and am confronted with a blank page…at which point my brain goes blank, too.

Part of it is that we’re being very homey right now.  The house is slowly, slowly falling into place; more and more boxes are unpacked, curtains are up, bookcases are out and books soon to be placed in them.  It’s feeling like our home suddenly.  I still feel sad about leaving the old house, but am happy about having more space, and more closets (closets!!!  OMG!  I could just swoon with the joy!).  We have also–somehow–managed to stay on top of the creeping mess here, so things have their places and get put back/away, rather than accreting like a giant midden heap in various spots around the house.

We have light.  In fact, so much light that it is making me feel very odd and out-of-focus.  Twilight at nine p.m. should mean that the weather is almost hot and the flowers are blooming and the grass is green.  But right now, we still have snow in the backyard and ice in the driveway (and in the afternoons, a lovely thin layer of melting ice on top of the slick ice, which resulted in one of our cars slooooowy sliding backwards down the driveway…luckily I noticed this in time to move it back up to a non-icy spot!).  We have birds congregating around the bird feeder, but no greenery.  We have sunshine all day, but no buds on the trees.  My body keeps saying, "Sun!  Woot!  But…but…dude!  Where’s the ’spring’?!"

Then there are the various "just living" things.  Taking the dotter off to gymnastics class.  Doing teleconferences during the day.  Taking the dawg out to do his thing.  Planning a vegetable garden.  Putting up artwork.  Doing the laundry.

Anyway, right now, I open the blog, want to post something pithy and pungent, and find the P&P quotient in my brain has plummeted.

Give me some ideas!

One of the things that really bugs OmegaDad and me is when OmegaDotter doesn’t respond when we say something to her.

Case in point:  This afternoon, after putting up still more drapery hardware (the office needs some more drapery rings, because I thought 30 of the darned things would be enough, but, hey, more are on the way and I’ve learned my lesson for the time, ten years from now, that we do this thing again), OmegaDad and I joined the dotter on the futon to watch the last 40 minutes of Karate Kid.

Cool movie.  All sorts of Good Stuff about focusing, and working hard to reach your goals, and not using physical prowess to beat up skinny boys, and how you Shouldn’t Cheat, all with a few things slipped in about the effect the Manzanar camps had and the ease with which some folks use racial slurs to put Asians down.  I know that there are oodles of Asian Americans out there who get grumpy about Pat Morita being a token Asian whose acting was full of stereotypes, but I actually think the Karate Kid can prompt a lot of good discussion.

("Focus" being one of our latest, not really related to this post.  I think.  Hmmm.)

Anyway, the dotter was on my lap, waiting for Daniel to do the Crane Kick and beat the Bad Boys.

Daniel does the Crane Kick, the bad boys are beaten, all is well with the world…

I say to the dotter, "Okie doke, up you go!"  Happy tone of voice, all ready to jump up and get to work on other weekend projects.

And she sits there.  Not a word, not a twitch, no response.

I say again, "Dotter, off the lap, I want to get up!"  Still happy, though less so.

And she sits there.  Not a word, not a twitch, no response.

We’re talking a minute at a time.

Dudes, I wanted to get up.  And I did not want to be ignored.  I wanted my lap back, thankyewverramuch.  So I got grumpy, announced I was getting up, and dumped the dotter off to the side.

After which ensued a (loud) discussion about how it behooves people in the family to respond when other people in the family talk to them, yadda, yadda, yadda.  The dotter sitting and looking sullen, which is her modus operandi when she knows she’s in the wrong.  Then a talking-to from daddy.  Then she got angry ("I was getting up, it just was taking me a while!"–coulda fooled me, and besides, this "taking a while" can last up to five minutes and was repeated over and over this weekend) and broke the reins to her new poseable stuffed horsie.  And then it was waterworks time, complete with a "Mommy, can you fix my reins?"

Oy.

So I ended up sitting down with her, asking her how she would feel if she asked me to stop tickling her and I just kept on doing it, not saying anything, even after she asked me multiple times. 

At wits’ end about how to get her to actually think about it, I made her write sentences.  "I will answer when Mommy or Daddy asks me a question."

Oy!  I felt like a Mean Mommy.

So:  Any really good suggestions?

Or, more properly, the eggs and us.  Or we.  Or something.

Today was egg-dying day.  This year, OmegaDad read the instructions before preparing the dye (as opposed to after), so this year’s pink was…pink.  Rather than last year’s watery, pale, washed out color, it was deep and rich and dyed the eggs quickly.  Which, of course, suited OmegaDotter just fine, as she is still deeply into the Pink Phase of life.

Note the predominance of pink. 

This year’s egg-dying kit was a bug-themed thing with lots of unnecessary plastic objects.  OmegaDad had previously purchased a Princess egg-dying kit.  I am utterly, thoroughly, completely, absolutely over the Princess Thing.  Luckily, OmegaDad showed me his score late at night after the dotter was asleep.  I took one look at it over the top of the book I was reading, sighed, and said, succinctly, "No.  No more princesses.  Let’s find something else."  Bless his heart, he found something else last night, just about the only egg-dying kit left in all of suburban Alaska.

The dotter and I set to coloring eggs.  Note my dubious expression.  (Please do not look at the bags under my eyes.)  Note the dotter hamming it up.  (Please do not look at the holes in her OMG favorite T-shirt.)  (Also note the blue dye around the lips.  I have no idea how that happened.)

Some egg-cellent results (with pink):

The bugs were actually quite fun, once I decided to squelch my inner wet-blanket, which was snarling at the obsessive use of petrochemicals and the overpackaging of all U.S. consumer products, and join in the fun of decorating with stickers and plastic and wings and stuff.

The bugs posing:

The bugs at rest around our table centerpiece:

The dotter really wanted to hide the eggs immediately.  OmegaDad and I, thinking of the dawg and the cat that comes upstairs, and considering waking up to half-eaten eggs around the house, or considering waking up to an Awful Smell sometime in the future, nixed this idea.  We will hide them for her tomorrow, she will find them, then she will hide them for us, and we will be sure to find every last one of them.

The Easter Bunny is set to show up this evening.  The dotter has been asking me, multiple times and in multiple ways, if OmegaDad and/or I are/am the Easter Bunny.  "S. thinks that it’s the parents!" she informed me.  When she asked me if I were the Easter Bunny, I was quite happy to say "no".  Not a lie:  OmegaDad is the Easter Bunny.  He’s also Santa Claus.  I am the Tooth Fairy.  Anyway, I gave her one more year of ambiguity.  Maybe next year The Truth Will Out, but I hope that by that time she is in the frame of mind to love the magic even though it’s her (gasp!) parents doing it…

In your next life, when you meet a lady and and move in with her and she tells you, "You should go see a dentist", what will you do?

Will you wait 15 years, until your teeth are a horrible mess?

Or will you say, "Gee!  What a great idea!  I think I’ll make an appointment right now!"

I know which one I think you should do.

I think your wife in your next life will be very happy if you do that.

I know that your current wife, in your current life, is not a happy camper that it took you writhing in pain last year to finally go to the dentist.  At that visit, a tooth was removed.

And a root canal was performed on another tooth.

And more was scheduled.

But then we moved.

And you put it off for a while, until you were writhing in pain once again.  At which point, another tooth was removed.

Luckily, you seem to have finally seen the dental light.  You have been awesome at scheduling things and getting things done.

But, my love, the reason you had three teeth worked on today with the prospect of one of them being a root canal job, and are doped up with steroids and demerol, and wincing at the thought of eating right now is because you waited fifteen years to start the dental work.

In my next life, I will be sure to be a mommy if my husband says, "Yeah, yeah, you’re right…" and never goes to the dentist.  I will make sure I make an appointment right then and there, instead of saying, each year that I go to see the dentist, "Dear, you should go see a dentist."

Your loving wife, OmegaMom.

(For those who say, "Woman!  Why didn’t you make an appointment for him 15 years ago!", I say:  "Pish tosh!  The man was a grown up!  He could have picked up a phone!  I make appointments for myself and for my dotter, who is a child!"

Okay.  I’ve learned my lesson.  I’d much rather have been a mommy-type for my husband all those years ago than see him dealing with the consequences of putting things off.  The poor dear is truly in pain.  But, dayum.  Why does it take the equivalent of a mouth meltdown to finally get the wheels set in motion?!?!)

As of today.  Woot!

So, is there any evidence of this "spring" here?

Well, there’s the sunlight.

Remember, back in November and December, how I was bemoaning the darkness?  The misery of daylight that lasted only 5 hours?  The "daylight" that seemed more like an endless late-afternoon?

Hah.

I spit in the direction of the darkness, that’s what.

Because we got our curtains up in the bedrooms just in time.  This would be a week and a half ago.  The weekend that the idiocy that is Daylight Savings Time showed up.  Because now…now the dotter goes to bed while it’s still light out.  Official sunset is at 8:18 tonight–but the light lingers on for another hour.  The sun rises at 8 a.m., but we’ve got light twilight before that.

In other spring evidence, we have hordes of various chickadees, sparrows, nut hatches, and red polls swarming around our bird feeder at dawn.  We also have a songbird of some type, but I haven’t been able to see it.  There’s moss growing at the feet of trees.  And we had a week and a half of lovely weather where it got up to 50F for a while!  Alas, that passed, and we’re back down to the 20s and 30s and have had more snow.

But, yes, somewhere out there, spring is coming.

Most folks know that saying:  "A sound mind in a healthy body".

I’ve been thinking about this lately while ferrying OmegaDotter around to her various activities.

We placed the dotter, who wanted to "dance like a princess", into ballet last year in Small Mountain University Town.  She had a blast–the teacher was a wonder with children and kept them interested and involved and having fun.  So this year, we signed her up again, here in Suburban Alaska.  This time, it’s not turning out so well; the class is a lot slower, more focused on official balletic curriculum tenets, and less fun in general.  Around late November, she was whining complaining about it being boring and how she didn’t want to do it any more, but when she realized that ditching the class also meant ditching the recital (girly costumes!  makeup!  twirling around onstage!), after some bargaining attempts to get to do the recital without the class, she bowed to reality and said she’d finish off the year.  I suspect that ballet is going to bite the dust after the recital.

Towards the beginning of last summer, when we knew we were moving, a buddy of the dotter’s had a "take your friend to your gymnastics class" day.  Striving to ensure that she got as much contact with all her old buddies before she had to move, and influenced by her OT’s ongoing "you should put her in gymnastics, it would help her a great deal", we leaped on the chance.  She had a blast with that, too.  When it turned out that her before-and-after-school care facility was actually a gymnastics facility that offered gymnastics classes, I signed her up.  She loved the gymnastics so much that in November I signed her up for a second class per week.

She’s doing wonderfully.  She can do an awesome cartwheel.  (I never could do a cartwheel.  I was always a wuss about it, and I don’t know why.  Apparently, neither OmegaGranny nor Great Grandma could do cartwheels, either.)  She’s working on handstands.  The bouncing, the jumping, the balancing–all things necessary for her to get that "I want to thump into things!" modality out of her system–she glows when she’s done with class.

Now, I must admit to having had a horrible prejudice against gymnastics in general before this.  All I could think of was the horror stories about girls being browbeaten by ambitious coaches into anorexia.  It seemed a celebration of all that was "tiny" and "delicate", conjoined with a somewhat condescending "omigosh, lookit that girrrrl bounce around!"

But when I haul the dotter off to gymnastics and sit on the bleachers watching the ongoing three-ring circus of varying ages and abilities of boys and girls whirling and twirling and flipping and bouncing and climbing…

It’s a different world than I expected.

I see all these strong girls.  Flexible girls.  Girls with muscle.  (And boys, too, but as a parent of a girl, I’m much more aware of the girls defying age-old stereotypes.)  All ages, all sizes.  None of them look to be anorexic; there are, in fact, some Amazonian teens in the older gymnastic team practices, tall and lithe and muscular, well-proportioned and tall and still flipping over backwards and doing handstands and soaring from one uneven bar to the next.

The administration are always handing out flyers about good nutrition, things that emphasize the need for breakfast, for healthy snacks and proteins before a practice and afterwards.  Not a word about worrying about weight.  It’s refreshing.  And, of course, it’s totally counter to my prejudgment.

Yesterday I was focused on two girls, maybe seven or eight years old.  They were climbing up the ropes in the foam pit.  The gymnasium is two stories tall, and the ropes go the entire two stories.  There is a bell at the top of the rope; anyone who makes it to the top rings the bell, then heads on down.

These two girls–little things–worked their way up the ropes.  All the way.  They rang the bells.  Then they climbed down.

I couldn’t have been prouder of them than if they were my own dotters:  No-one was forcing them up those ropes.  No one was shouting at them to force them on, no one would have dissed them if they hadn’t made it all the way.  They were doing it because they wanted to, and they were determined about it.

In the end, I find these budding gymnasts inspiring and exciting to watch.  And when I get glimpses of the dotter, way off on the other side of the gymnasium, between the junior gymnastics team girls on the beams, or the boys on the rings, succeeding after weeks of work at a particular move on the bars–well, it makes me feel just all warm-n-fuzzy inside.

Whenever I listen to doomsagers and get nervous, things turn out all right.  K2 and Gh1f, those practitioners of the “Dismal Profession”, told me to calm down, and things did, after all, turn out all right.

(So far…)

So I’ve been struggling with TurboTax and my file of goodies from the year.  I really wanted to have a video of Robert Cray singing the 1040 Blues.  But, alas, I can’t find it.  Let me just say “job move”, “house sale”, “one spouse working for an employer in an income tax state” and a variety of other things.  It’s getting quite complex.  Oh, we don’t owe; in fact, we’ll get lots back.  Of course, we’ll have to refund a major portion of that “lots back” back to OmegaDad’s employer, because it gave us a “withholding allowance” to cover extra taxes.

In the meantime, while I’m still waiting for the bottom to drop out of the various markets (what can I say–a doomsaging addict I am), I wanted to pass on these three items:

Texas Instruments has demonstrated a way kewl proof-of-concept neckband that will transmit unspoken words over a phone line.  They are busy working on a commercial version for use by folks with MLS; having had a coworker whose husband has had a rapid decline over the past two years in his ability to speak due to MLS, I know this one would have proven a godsend to her family.  Right now the process is veeeeery slow, but give them a few more years.

Then we have the video of BigDog, a robot designed by Boston Dynamics on a DARPA grant.  This has to be seen to be believed–it can climb rock piles, regain its balance after being bashed by a person or after slipping on ice, and is generally rather uncanny.  Though at one point, it looks like something from Mummenschanz (that’s when it looks like two men carrying a mattress and walking downhill).

Another DARPA grant was to DEKA, the company run by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway.  The grant was to develop a modern, superior prosthetic arm.  I’ve seen the clips from last year, when it was early days; the IEEE came out with a video about it from a month or two ago.  They hope to have this commercially available within the year.

I love living in a time when such amazing things are happening, and when it’s easy to find news about them.

Oh, yes, and if you see a “If you love this blogger, take this survey” popping up to your left, please do take the survey…

When people are mentioning the Great Depression in mainstream articles about financial news, one tends to get a wee tad nervous.  When articles say the Fed made a move on Friday that hasn’t been since since the 1930s to bail out Bear Stearns, one tends to get a wee tad nervous.  (Interestingly, they say that, but then don’t explain exactly what the move is, how it differs from other moves the Fed has made recently, and they don’t offer the example back in the ’30s to compare to.)

Then again, I’m the one who read up on Y2K disaster scenarios and made sure OmegaDad and I had two cords of wood on hand for 1/1/00, plus a small supply of drinking water and canned food.  So I’m a Nervous Nellie in general, prone to being swept up on the tides of professional doomsagers across the internet.  That means, if I’m nervous about something, you can probably bet against it.

On the other hand, the doomsagers have been waving their hands at the housing bubble for three years now, prophesying major financial disaster once the house of cards based on outrageous mortgages and real estate prices started tumbling down.

What can one say when the Treasury of the Secretary, in one interview, says both "The financial system is more fragile than we would like right now" and "our financial institutions, our banks and investments banks are very strong".  So which is it?  Is it "strong" or is it "fragile"?  After all, on Monday, the CEO of Bear Stearns came out in an interview and said that BS was in great shape and not facing any problems.  Four days later, Bear Stearns is on the verge of bankruptcy and being bailed out by JP Morgan Stanley and the Feds.

Wasn’t Standard and Poors saying just last week that the worst of the mortgage write-downs are behind us??

Anyway, on my financial blogs, people are nervous about Monday’s market.  They are saying that a deal must be made to settle the Bear Stearns problem before the U.S. markets open.  But things have been so volatile lately, goodness only knows what will happen.

(Ahah!  Deal made, for less than half of Friday’s value of BS stocks!  Later note: Not "less than half"–$2 per share…BS stocks were at $61.85 at Wednesday’s close, $30 at Friday’s close.  Holy cow.  Talk about a fire sale…)

(Note:  I’m still thinking about the Dutch documentary on Chinese adoption.  I haven’t been able to find a transcript anywhere, or any real discussion of the actual details, and am hesitant to make any commentary unless I have real facts to base the commentary on…)

One of the Great Truths about me is that I never mastered Big Hair.  The only time I came close was when I had my poodle perm (see this post).  My hair has always been, and always will be, fine, straight, thin, silky hair that loses any hint of a curl when the relative humidity goes past 20%.  Since I grew up in Chicago, and lived there during the majority of the ’80s, perms were the only path to curldom.

Then there was the fact that, if one really wanted it, one could get Big Hair by spending inordinate amounts of time in the bathroom, fiddling with curlers, curling irons, hair spray, and teasing.  I had more important things to do, such as read.  Or write.

Anyway, I muddled through the ’80s as best I could.

Another Great Truth:  the dotter, though totally genetically unrelated to me, has that same hair:  fine, straight, thin, silky.

So last night, as you know, I subjected the dotter to soft curlers all over her head.

Of course, some came out during the night.

But!  The rest stayed in, and when they were unrolled, her hair was quite bouncy and curly.

I combed.  I sprayed.  I curling-ironed her bangs.  I didn’t do any hair-teasing because I am morally against such things.  So here’s our ’80s cowgirl, looking sassy (i.e., making a face):

It actually was big!  Here’s a close-up (the color is off and I couldn’t figure out how to correct it):

In which you can immediately tell that the bang curls didn’t do what they’re supposed to, and you can see some straight hairs that escaped the entire curler fiasco.

But the sad thing is that the dotter’s hair, like mine, immediately began to go flat.  Obviously, even though I applied what I thought was a dreadful amount of hair spray, lifting locks and spraying under them, holding them up so they’d dry a bit fluffy, it was all for naught.  By the time I haul her off to gymnastics this afternoon, the curls will be a sad, sorry shadow of themselves.  All that will be left is sticky residue.

Sigh.

The good news is that she will not be subjected to an entire decade of trying to do this every morning.

There were no shoulder pads (how could I forget shoulder pads?!  But I did!).  There were, however, jean legs tucked into the boots, and a hair pick in the back pocket.

It’s spring break week.  The dotter is at "camp" at her after-school care place, and they’re doing "Blast From The Past" as the theme this week.  Monday was the ’40s, Tuesday the ’50s, etc.  The kids are dressing up each day.  The dotter won for best dress-up on Wednesday–she had a mini skirt, a top with paisleys and funky colors, and a headband over carefully parted straight hair.

Tomorrow is the final day.  The ’80s.  Big Hair is my immediate response.  So we’ve purchased soft rollers and I plan to torture have tortured the child with them tonight, covered the result with a kerchief, sent her to bed, and plan to fill her hair with hair spray tomorrow.

From the back:

Looking winsome from the front:

Laughing:

Notice all the pink.  I spared you the picture of the dotter in her kerchief in her pink room.

I don’t really know how to do Big Hair, but we have a curling iron for Big Bangs and lots of hair spray.  I will display results tomorrow.

In the meantime…there’s talk of a Netherlands documentary about Chinese adoption, specifically that there are lots of folks these days who are having their kids kidnapped by government officials and dumped at orphanages.  There are those who are appalled and those who think it’s old news.  In the meantime, I sit here and realize that, while it was easier to think of someone reclaiming OmegaDotter when she was just a babe, she is firmly entrenched in my heart now and the thought of having someone tell me our adoption was null and void at this point would–yes–make me spend a lifetime and a fortune in court, fighting tooth and nail to keep her with us.  That aside, I will write up some thoughts on the issue tomorrow.

Gazing back into those misty, halcyon days of college, I dimly seem to remember something called "study groups".  At the beginning of the semester (or quarter), you’d collect names and phone numbers of other folks in your class who were interested in studying together, then you’d set a time, and someone would be tagged as the person to glom onto the first good study room or carrel at the university library.  You’d meet, everyone would have their textbooks and class notes, someone would bring noshes, and you’d spend a few hours going over the notes and exchanging answers and ideas about the homework.

"Y’know, I tried number 48, but I kept getting hung up!  Did anyone figure that problem out?!"

In my Numeric Analysis class (one of my favorites, really!), our prof gave us take-home tests for the mid-term and final.  He fully expected us to work in groups.  They were some of the hardest–and most fun–exams I had in my college experience.  Our study group met for hours in the library, in the break room in the basement of the math building, out on the lawns.  We worked hard.  We worked our butts off.  We thought deeply.  My mid-term response was 20 pages long; my final response was 30 pages.

We also had classes where it was probably assumed by the professor that we were working alone on homework and studying.  But even in those cases, hammering out the answers to more difficult problems with other students helped all of us understand the basic concepts better.  And those who got answers easily explained to those who didn’t, and gained from that aspect as well.

These days, it seems, such study groups often convene on the intertubes.  Specifically, at places such as Facebook.

One professor at Ryerson University, who apparently had a requirement that students were to work on assignments alone, discovered that a student had set up a Facebook study group for his class.  That student is facing expulsion and 147 counts of academic misconduct, one for each member of the study group.  His B grade was changed to an F by his professor after the Facebook group was discovered.

So many different ways of looking at this.

The professor didn’t want students working out answers to problems together. 

If that is the sole issue here, why weren’t all the other members of the study group equally penalized?  Why didn’t every student who was a member of the online group have his or her grades reduced/revoked?

As I understand it, each student was assigned different questions; since they were all different, was requesting help cheating?  Is the requirement to work on homework assignments alone a good requirement or a bad one?  Do students learn better by sweating through the problems on their own, or by helping each other find ways to reach the solution?

Different students respond in different ways to different approaches.  Some students do not like to work in groups at all.  Some students like to work in groups for some classes, but not others.  Some students work in groups all the time.  Some students work in groups to get off easily–but how does that help them when it’s time to take a test?  Some students who work in groups learn that they do all the work and others take the credit.  Some students learn better through reading, some through working through problems on their own, some through discussing, some through teaching others.

Questions of pedagogical approach aside, there are those who think that in this case it’s an open-and-shut case of cheating.  Others say that no-one posted specific answers to any problems and that mostly it was an ongoing session of tips and tricks on how to approach the problems. 

One blogger said that someone knowing they were getting the wrong answer indicates that they were cheating, because otherwise how would they know the answer was wrong?  Well, hell, I could always tell when I was getting the answer wrong–because nothing would check out when I worked the problem backwards.  Or else it just "felt" wrong.

I don’t know.  I think requiring college/university students to work alone on homework assignments is not the best approach; I think that by that age the student knows whether s/he wants to collaborate or work alone.  I also feel that the students who are actually getting specific answers from others without doing any of the work are cheating mostly themselves.  They’re the ones who will end up doing poorly on quizzes and tests.  They’re the ones who won’t be able to do the basic work when they get into a more advanced course.  They’re the ones who will constantly be scrambling to keep up or cover up as they move into the workforce.

What say you?

For a very spirited discussion on this subject, from both sides, check out The So-Called Facebook Scandal at A Blog Around The Clock.

Saturday I got out of bed absolutely grumpy.  Grumpy enough to be shouting and slamming doors.  Why?  Because our lovely dotter had decided to spend an hour pestering me and OmegaDad.

I’m not proud, but, hey, there it is:  I am a Bad Mommy sometimes.

It didn’t last long.  Especially because of this:

And then, a few minutes later, there was this:

Which, of course, made me laugh, and so I was, indeed, hapee.

This afternoon, as we were driving off to get a movie for "family movie night", the dotter had her car window cranked all the way down, and was shouting with glee out the window.  The one that sticks in my head:

"Hellooooooooo!  Hello all you nice people out there!  I don’t know your names, but I looooooooove you!"

Here in Alaska, as many people know, we have an overload of daylight hours in the summer.  We’re talking 19.14 hours of daylight at the peak where the Omega Family lives, and more up north.

That’s a lot of daylight.

Our kids don’t need to work on the crops quickly after school to get them in before the sun goes down.

So why do we have Daylight Savings Time here?

I mean, really…why bother?  In the summer, our "noon" ends up being at 2 p.m. or thereabouts, an artifact of when Alaska managed to get itself all in one time zone (except for the further reaches of the Aleutian Islands) so that the state managers in Juneau could talk to various state folk in Anchorage and other places without having to worry about time zones.  Previously, we were in four time zones. 

So why didn’t they just get rid of DST at the same time?  I don’t know, but apparently there’s a move afoot to get it on a ballot this year, though some folks grumble that Alaska will then be up to five hours off the eastern part of the U.S. during the summer.

This morning, upon waking, I stumbled through the house re-setting clocks.  OmegaDad and I are going to hang drapes today; it’s necessary because now the dotter will be going to bed while it’s still somewhat light outside.  Soon the same will be happening for OmegaDad and me–we’re gaining almost six minutes of light per day.  I can sleep in any environment, but OmegaDad can’t get to sleep if it’s light in the bedroom…

Mainly, DST is a big bother for us and the other 670,000 people who live here.

Remember that:  it’s just a model.

But this is way too cool to ignore:  Researchers performing planetary formation models on the Alpha Centauri system have found that every way they’ve run their models, they show Alpha Centauri B to have planets, and many times that happens, there’s a rocky planet within the distance to make water a liquid.

In other words, the model predicts that it’s highly likely that Alpha Centauri B has a rocky, watery planet at the right distance from one or the other of the suns to support life.

Whoa.

For those who don’t know, Alpha Centauri is the nearest star to our solar system, at 4.3 light years away.  Right now, of course, we haven’t got the technology to get there in any reasonable amount of time; a light year is a helluva long way away.  But still…

Whoa.

Time to aim Hubble or some other space telescope at Alpha Centauri, and start doing some real looking.

I am just about bouncing in my seat here!

(It’s just a model.  It’s just a model.  It’s just a model…)

Well, actually, yes we do.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my little mystery hunt trying to figure out why the vehicle reservation system in my department of Small Mountain University was on the fritz, how I discovered that the unique identifier for each reservation was limited to four digits by Nice Young Intern, and how sometime in the past few months, we had hit 9,999 and the reservation numbers started all over again at 1, causing all sorts of funky errors.

My readers in the biz were appalled.  "Where was the code review?!" they proclaimed.

Yah, well.  (OmegaMom looks aside, shuffles her feet, coughs a bit…)

I love working at SMU.  I really do.  I started in the ITS department, got chopped in the Great Layoffs, took a (much less remunerative) position as an administrative assistant while waiting for IT jobs to re-appear, and then got my position in Current Department when the job market started warming up again.  The atmosphere on campus is collegial.  There are lots of cool folk doing lots of cool things on the academic side; there are lots of cool folk doing lots of cool things on the ITS side; there are lots of cool folk doing less cool but immensely important things on the business side, and almost everyone I’ve worked with at SMU has been intelligent, interesting, fun, and good to work with.  (I can think of two exceptions over the past nine years, that’s all.)

Anyway, in the ITS department, since we have lots of folks there, many ITS things were (and are) done by the book.  Good coders, good reviewers, good interactions between everyone.  But there are only so many ITS folk to go around, and those that are tasked with helping on more complex projects outside ITS are booked solid for a year in advance.

Out in the departments, there are IT folk who are hired as departmental support.  Itty bitty departments have to make do with no-one, or sharing someone with a few other itty-bitty departments.  Bigger departments get one or two.  Really big departments get their own geek squad.

Each of those support folk have to handle a wide variety of different issues.  There’s day-to-day support:  Figuring out why JoAnne’s email suddenly disappeared.  Helping Dr. Professor Jones stitch together a master document and sub-documents in Word (and trying to explain that master- and sub-documents in Word have a really bad reputation for getting corrupted and frying your entire 417 page manuscript).  Updating web pages.  Maintaining small databases.  Developing interfaces to bigger university systems, or maintaining old interfaces that have been just chuggin’ along for many years but need a tweak or two now and then.  Arranging repair for old equipment.  Buying new equipment.  Figuring out equipment budgets for the upcoming year.  Buying color toner when something needs to be printed in color RIGHT NOW!  Crunching numbers in spreadsheets.  Putting together pamphlets or brochures or quarterly newsletters.  Getting new people set up on systems and into the university system.  Running local servers.  Maybe running computer labs for students and staff.  Providing down-and-dirty training.

Rarely a dull moment.  Always fun to help people.  Good to get to know folks in all aspects of the higher education biz.

It’s sort of like juggling.  There’s always something that is urgent.  Typically, the urgent stuff is related to ensuring that everyone in the department is able to do their work.  Then there are the bigger departmental projects…which get done in and around the "making sure everyone can do their work" everyday stuff.  You’re catching the errors on this database while crunching the numbers for that report to the board while uploading PDFs to the website while figuring out why the network has gone down for the people in room 219 while…

What ends up happening is that whoever gets handed the bigger project just bulls in and does it. 

Like the project Nice Young Intern worked on.

It gets done, it gets tossed up, people who are chomping at the bit to get to use the project start working on it (ostensibly as testing) and then suddenly it segues into being used.  And rare is the chance to get someone to give your code a review.

I’m pretty sure Johnny and SpaceMom are shivering in their boots at that mild paragraph.  Where’s the project outline?!  Where are the specs?!  Where’s the test plan?!  Where’s the code review?!  Where’s the iterative process?!

I know, I know.  At times it bothers me, too.  But y’know what?  It’s really fun work.  You get to be a jack (or jill) of all trades.  You get to help people.  And all of these "bigger" projects are really, in the course of things, small potatoes; they’re "big" in relationship to the day-to-day stuff at the departmental level.  It’s not like the small army of coders and testers and code librarians and project managers handling a Truly Important Project like the online education program or the accounting program or the human resources program.  Those projects are vital, necessary to the lifeblood of the university as a whole.  They’re handled by ITS, they’re treated like good software projects should be, they take time and money and people and organization.  Those projects get code reviews out the wazoo.  Smaller projects that ITS takes on, handled by one team or another, also get the software project treatment.  But projects handed out to departmental support folk?  Those get dropped on the desk as a "Y’know, it would be nice if we could do x, y, or z.  D’you think you can pull something together in two weeks?" 

NYI’s project started that way, and my predecessor knew that it would probably not get done in any decent amount of time unless she borrowed a student from the CS or CIS programs.  It made a good summer project for NYI, and he did think it through, provide specs, program it, and get it up and running.  Since he specified only four digits for the reservation number, I’m thinking that people talked it over and figured that the program would be replaced long before they needed to worry about it.  Sort of like Y2K.

But code review?  What a luxury that would be!

When we moved, we lost our cordless phones.  (No, we’re not on wireless.  We couldn’t receive wireless at our old house, so it wasn’t worth the price.)  (Though I suppose we might be able to receive wireless where we are now.  Hmmm.)  Anyway, we purchased a (lousy, crappy, useless) dirt-cheap corded phone from the grocery store to tide us over for a while when we first moved in.

Then the tabby doohickey that sticks out to ensure that the phone actually, say, hangs up when you put the receiver down broke off.  When it broke off, I we had no earthly idea what it was for, so I we threw it in the garbage can.

Thereafter the (lousy, crappy, useless) corded phone was iffy, at best, about when you had really, truly hung up.  And if you weren’t in the vicinity to hear the beep beep beep noise that the phone company so carefully provides you to alert you to the fact that your phone is off the hook, after a while the beep beep beep would turn off and the phone line would go dead.  Thus, when folks, say, called you up–what a concept!–all they got was a busy signal.  Or, after we got our new phone service, a voice mail box.  We on the other hand would go merrily on our day to day lives, not realizing that (a) our phone was actually off the hook, and (b) other people were actually trying to contact us and leaving phone messages…until one or the other of us picked the phone up to make a call.

Since we’re not wild and crazy social guys, that would happen every few days or so.

Then we bought a cordless phone set.

Woohoo!  Entering into the modern age, we thought!

Then a few weeks later, OmegaDad, while reaching for something in the old iteration of the office (read:  cramped, messy, filled with poorly balanced heaps) knocked the main base off the desk.

::  All your base are belong to us!  :: some kozmik kritter proclaimed.

Our base no longer worked.

Our two related cordless phones no longer worked.

One of our corded phones didn’t work.  This particular clue makes me think, in retrospect, that it was not OmegaDad knocking over the base unit that did it, but that some Evil Coincidental Voltage Spike did it instead.

Only our (lousy, crappy, useless) corded phone that was schizophrenic about whether it was actually hung up or not (thus having a hang up on hang-ups, eh?) was "working", in the sense that we could place calls and receive calls–when it was hung up.

So OmegaDad finally purchased new cordless phones this weekend.

We plugged them in and started charging those puppies up.

Last night he did all the proper registering and what-not of the phones.

Everything seemed hunky dory.  Maybe–just maybe!–this time our phone situation would last longer than a week or two!

This afternoon, OmegaDad, being a loving and sentimental fella, gave me a call.  In a graceful, swan-like dip, I reached over, grabbed the cordless phone, pressed the "talk" button, and started talking.

As I was talking, I noticed that the network had gone out on my computer.

"Hunh!" thought I.  While talking to OmegaDad, I started fiddling with various network things on the computer.  Nothing worked.  I announced to him that the network was down.  I hung up the phone, fiddled with some more networking things, and the network got back up, dusted itself off, and started working again.

I gave my computer the hairy eyeball.

That was mighty coincidental, I said to myself.

I picked up the cordless phone.

I dialed OmegaDad’s office number, watching the networking indicator on the computer.  Ring, ring.  Nothing happened.

Then OmegaDad picked up the phone.  A second later, the network went down.

I gave my computer the hairy eyeball once again.

"Dude.  When I talk to you on the new phones, it kills the wireless network."

OmegaDad thought it was the cabling (our phone lines are carried over the cable network).  I was sure it was telecommunications interference of one sort or another.  I hung up.  The network came back up.  I read the phone manual.  They made sure to tell you about other things interfering with the phone, but not a word about the phone interfering with other things.  Grrr.

I flexed my Googlemeistra fingers and typed in "wireless phone computer interference".  After reading a variety of things, it turns out that our (cheap!) cordless phones, which transmit on 2.4GHz, interfere mightily with various 802.11 wireless networking protocols, because they, too, are on that frequency. 

The OmegaFamily was very, very close to dumping the new phones.

Then I found something that talked about being able to assign a frequency to the wireless router.  Specifically, that while the majority of the bands used by the wireless router are overlapping channels, 1, 6, and 11 are unique and don’t overlap.  I logged into the router.  I fiddled with settings.  I found a way to select channel 11 (the one I remembered off the top of my head as being unique).  I saved.  I picked up the phone.  I dialed OmegaDad.  He picked up. 

And lo and behold, the network didn’t go down.

Let that be a lesson to you.  Googling rulz!

(I thought about titling this post "What’s the frequency, Kenneth?!"  Does this date me?)

OmegaDotter’s march into semi-maturity goes on.

After years of co-sleeping, or sleeping in our bedroom in her little nest, and six months of intensive propaganda about being a big girl when she turned six, she started sleeping in her bedroom in January.  She has slept there since.  Oh, she occasionally does an end run by slipping into bed with us in the wee hours of the night, when we’re both so sound asleep a marching band could wander through the room without waking us up…but, on the whole, she goes to sleep there and stays asleep there and wakes up around 5:30 a.m.

This is major, major news in the Omega household.  OmegaDad and I are still stunned.  I have kept quiet on the whole affair because I was afraid of jinxing it.  It’s blissful.

The other "when you’re six" issue, though…

Well, she sucks her thumb.  Intensely.  And she claimed, for months, that she would stop when she turned six.

The problem is that we have entered a seasonal period of skin chapping.  (Springtime…and the chappin’ is easy…)  I’ve broken out my stash of the addictive Carmex and have been slathering it on, and the dotter and I have been sharing hand lotion.  On the whole, it’s much less damaging here, where we have endless humidity, compared to back in Arizona, but nonetheless, it’s that time of year.

But the thumb.  Oh, OmegaDotter’s poor thumb.  We’re talking serious chapping here.  We’re talking a thumb with skin that splits and bleeds if you look at it cross-eyed.

We’re slathering the lotion on it.  I’m continually on her case about it, and when I call her on it, she surreptitiously slips her thumb into her fist and keeps loudly sucking, giggling slyly all the while.  She’s doing much better with it than she used to, but it’s oh-so-hard for her.  And it breaks my heart to see the white, cracked skin and calluses on her little thumb.  (I don’t worry about it causing her to need orthodontia any more, because her two adult teeth in the bottom have come in crooked from the get-go, so we’ll be purchasing braces when she’s 9 or 10 anyway.)

As a person who sucked my thumb until my teens, I sympathize.  It’s not easy to break a habit that ingrained.  I’ve suggested twirling her hair.  I’d suggest biting her fingernails instead, but I was doing both as a child and nibbling those nails down to nubbins on a regular basis, so I don’t want her to deal with inflamed, bleeding, infected nailbeds, either.

Any assvice?  Nice, gentle assvice, please?  I don’t want to do the hot-sauce on the thumb routine, though I have considered just slathering it with petroleum jelly to both protect and provide a disincentive…

OmegaMom is a happy, happy camper right now.

I sit here typing this at my new desk.  In my newly painted office, painted a bright and cheery duck yellow color with white trim.  Filled with nice, new, white office furniture from The P0ttery B@rn.  With lots of study, well built filing cabinets.

All of which made me happy enough, because now it actually looks like an office, and I feel like it’s my space now, and I can actually try to organize things and keep things clear and clean in at least one room of the house.

But the creme de la creme…the thing that is making me dance on air tonight…

I don’t know if I mentioned this in the blog at any point; I know I’ve mentioned it in a comment or two on other people’s blogs:

We had lost all of OmegaDotter’s adoption paperwork except for the original official red folder containing the adoption certificate.

Birth certificate?  Vanished.  Abandonment decree?  Vanished.  Registration of adoption?  Vanished.  Chinese passport?  Vanished.  Long since.  We had become resigned to the idea of having to spend many dollars and much time trying to recreate these items.  I was too embarrassed to talk about it on the blog.  What kind of devoted mom of a Chinese adoptee was I, anyways?!

But tonight, filled with the Urge To Organize brought on by the new (sturdy!  attractive!) office furniture, I delved into the ratty old chintzy falling-to-pieces filing cabinets and started going through files, tossing out ancient insurance certificates and owner’s manuals for things we haven’t had in our possession for years.  The bottom drawer of the first filing cabinet had been jammed shut for quite a while by the aforementioned owner’s manuals, but some determined digging and reaching and yanking out jammed pieces of slick paper finally undammed the jam.

And there, in the midst of some totally unrelated stuff…

I found the buried treasure, the Ark of the Lost Covenant, Shangri-La itself:

Birth certificate, abandonment decree, registration of adoption, and Chinese passport.

Woot!

Next weekend we put up curtains and put in bookshelves, and I will post pics.