OmegaMom

OmegaDotter is in Big City.

I am at home.

OmegaDad is off at a conference about permafrost.

Did I mention OmegaDotter (six years old) is in Big City?

That’s like 65 miles away from here.

I am not there.

A friend’s mom offered to take the gals off for the day to go to Chuck E. Cheeze and various other spots.  I said, "Sure!"  And I was absolutely fine about it until about, oh, 11:30, about when friend’s mom was supposed to be picking her up from summer camp.

Immediately, my mind started thinking of Large Moose on the highway.  You know there are lots of moose around here, right?  And that hitting them at highway speed is a Bad Thing?

Or big earthquakes.  You know there are earthquakes around here, right?  And that we had a Huge Biggie back in ‘64, and even though our oodles of itty bitty 2- and 3-point earthquakes are probably releasing tectonic plate tension left and right, sooner or later we’ll have another biggie?

Or of the dotter just getting lost.  In a mall.  And being scared and lonely and wanting mommy.

Um.

It’s a good time to clean house; no Tigger-like six-year-old bouncing off the walls and stuff.

So I do a little, then think of moose.  And do some dishes, and think of earthquakes.  And do some laundry, then think of tired six-year-olds getting tired and cranky and saying or doing something that will scandalize friend’s mom forever.  And sweep a floor, and think of bizarre electric shorts in pizza joints that send everything up in flames in mere seconds.

Damn.  This was supposed to be relaxing!

(And, of course, about 15 minutes after I posted this, friend’s mom called and said they were having a grand old time and could she take them out for ice cream etc.?)

The landscape of Alaska is a landscape of glaciers.

In the cold of the winter nights, snow falls on the mountains.  In certain areas of the mountains, that snow never melts; it just gets covered up with new snow, snowfall after snowfall.  Where most snow crystals melt into water come springtime, or even if there’s enough concentration of sunlight though the ambient air temperature is low, the snow that doesn’t melt gets weighted down by more and more snow, packing down, the crystals jigging and jogging into place, until rather than separate snow flakes, you get a mass of ice.

The pressure builds up at the bottom of the ice, and when that ice is on a mountain slope, it begins to flow, ever so slowly.  Inch by inch, ponderously and inexorably, it grinds its way down the mountainside, and anything in its way gets dragged along, ground down, dug up.

It’s a fantastic method of erosion, slow but powerful.  At the tops of mountains, the glaciers carve incredible knife-edged spires of rock–the kind that make jaggedy silhouettes like the canine teeth of some gigantic carnivore.  At the bottoms of mountains, what you get are rocks.

Big rocks.  Little rocks.  Silt.  The silt chokes the ice-water rivers that rush down the hillsides in the spring and summer, coloring the water chalk-white, or grey, or, if the stream is swift enough, an incredible cloudy aqua blue.  Boulders and rocks and fist-sized pebbles and smaller pea-gravel mix in with the settling silt, both from the rivers and from the bottoms of the glaciers.

And when the glaciers recede, the landscape is changed, carved.  At the bottoms of the mountains, or in between two mountains, you will get lovely U-shaped valleys with craggy mountainsides surrounding them.

And in the soil in those valleys, you get a rich, loamy deposit…

…intermingled with rocks.

Big rocks.  Little rocks.  Pebbles.  Pea-gravel.  And rocks that look, innocently enough, like something that may be fist-sized, peeping up through the grass in your lawn, until you decide to take a rock hammer to the soil around those rocks to dig them up.

At which point, you discover that the putative fist-sized rock is actually a little nodule jutting out from something that would work nicely as, say, the anchor of the Queen Elizabeth II.

I have an intimate relationship with glacier poop now.  I wander through our yard, peering at the ground, picking up various rocky detritus to deposit them in the pathways between our veggie beds.  This serves double-duty:  not only are we gaining enough rocks in those pathways to actually, at some point, have a path, but we are also clearing away the random outcrop that would–if not caught in time–result in a horrible choking clattering screech from the lawn tractor, and, perhaps, another incident wherein our lawn is scarred with a strip where the grass has been mown down to bare dirt due to a mower blade being two inches out of whack.

I spent an hour or so this afternoon alternately digging at rocks in the lawn and tossing a (disgustingly slobbery) tennis ball for the obsessive retriever who lives next door.  I should feel virtuous and accomplished.  Alas, I don’t–because every time I turn around, I see Yet More.  I also know that next year, more rocks that were sedately hidden away beneath the soil will be newly revealed, because the Frost Gods grant us this nifty soil phenomenon called frost heave.  In frost heave, the soil shrinks and swells over and over during the winter as the temperature rises and falls and the moisture beneath the surface becomes ice, then melts, then becomes ice again.  This slow-motion activity causes new rocks to bubble up to the surface every year.  You’d think that after a century or so the supply of rocks would diminish, and no more new rocks would surface.

Hah.

I am here to tell you:  Hah.

The black soil beneath my fingernails is here to tell you:  Hah.

It’s a never-ending task, and I’m sure some poet somewhere would have considered, very seriously, the idea of making one of the circles of Hell a place where one spends an eternity digging rocks out of a lawn, except that those poets were too posh and dainty to ever consider working with their hands like that…so they simply didn’t know.  If they had known, they would have done it.  Believe me.

The scientific method, that is.  Theories?  We don’t need no steenkin’ theories, man!  Hypotheses?  Pish-tush!  Soooo 20th century!  Experimentation?  Observation?  Oh, puh-leeze!  Who needs that stuff?  ‘Cause we’ve got data.

Gigabytes of data.  Terrabytes of data.  Petabytes.  Hexadeca-bytes.  Google-bytes, even!  (But not Google™ type bytes.)  Infini-bytes!  We have data pouring out our ears these days, thanks to the Intertubes, and so Wired Magazine has declared The End Of The Scientific Method.

‘Cause, y’see, we can take all that data, put it in a big Magic Data Mangler, shake it, stir it, decant it, and ta-da!  New science!  All these nifty correlations will spill out, neat science-y goodness just spread in front of us like a field of diamonds, sparkling and glittering and making us gasp at the magic of it all.  Kozmik All knows it’s much easier to do that than to, say, oh…think.  Who needs to look at the world and wonder "why?" or "how?" or "what would happen if we did x?"

I’m sure OmegaBro will be glad to know he doesn’t need to go traipsing off to all his field sites any more.  Why bother to investigate what happens to sawfly galls on southwestern stream willows in flood years versus in dry years?  Why spend your time counting galls on specific trees at specific sites each year?  I’m sure that information is out there in the interwebs cloud, just floating around, waiting for dear OmegaBro to write the proper program to collect it, stir, shake, and spill, and voila, he will have his community ecology interactions down to a "T".

Of course, there’s that silly little thing like, oh, deciding what to mine from the vast cloud of info out there.  And why.

As someone commented on the essay, "garbage in, garbage out"–that grand old saying about computers and data–applies here.  Given how infested the web is with spam and commercialism and outright crankery, using the "just grab all the data out there and whirl it around in some big-ass computers" approach might deposit a lovely fewmet of, say, colonics cleansing being effective at removing years-old parasites from poor haggard human bodies.  Or someone might use it to prove that Indigo Children really are an increasing influence on world politics today.

Lots of other folks have said it, but I’ll say it, too:  Theory is not dead.  The scientific method is not passe.  The Wired essay is waving its hand at statistical correlation being science, all gee-gosh-golly-wow charts-n-graphs.  But that’s not science.  It’s cool, yes, I’ll grant that.  And lots of interesting information is coming out of the expanding ability to correlate disparate groups of data and seeing what patterns emerge.  But science is asking "why?", trying to figure out the natural world, trying to understand underlying laws that drive the universe, delving into genetics and fossils and tokamaks and outer space and multi-dimensional math and gravity and thermonuclear processes that make stars burn bright…

All that kind of stuff.

Y’see, the information mining that Wired is going gaga over has–as its very basis–human beings who explored the world and teased out important basics based on theories, based on thousands of years of human beings asking questions, posing hypotheses, testing them out, deciding what works and what doesn’t, and why it works that way and not another, and how to harness the way it works to make life easier (or more complex) for humanity.  And it requires humans asking "why?" and wanting to know the answer to even decide to make the Magic Data Manglers look at one particular set of data in particular, before the MDM spills out its oh-so-pretty correlations.

So I have to say, the scientific method–theory, hypotheses, testing, experimentation, revision–is not dead yet; it’s not the red-shirted Away-Team member who always bites the dust in any Star Trek episode.

My maternal grandfather was a ham radio operator.  They had a huge antenna attached to the back of the house, and his ham setup was in his den, just off the kitchen.  My cousins and I would hang out on the daybed in his den, listening to him call out to the world and get responses from all over.  Mostly it was just chat, but he had some regular buddies with whom he’d play long-distance chess.

The code for "hey, there, is anyone out there and wanting to talk?" was "CQ, CQ, come in, CQ.  This is W4HWA, calling CQ.  Come in, CQ."

The CQ code is, supposedly (according to Wikipedia), related to the French word sécurité; the idea is that the sound of the letters CQ are like the first two syllables, and, since it originated in telegraphy, the shorter, the better.

So I’ve been under radio silence for a week now.  Mostly, it was a case of the blahs, a serious case of the blahs.  I’d wake up in the morning, and it would be grey.  I’d end work for the day, and it would be grey.  I’d go to bed, and it would be grey.  So I ended up feeling grey and gloomy, dull, dismal, uninteresting, and not wanting to inflict my "wah, wah, wah" on the world.

The blahs are such a sad excuse for depression.  My blogroll is full of people who have serious reason for complaint:  There’s Clueless in Carolina, who is dealing with a mom descending into Alzheimers.  There’s Boomerific, whose home was lost in the Iowa floods.  There’s BrooklynMama, who is dealing with a husband with cancer, and a new baby, and a four-year-old who wants to know where daddy is.  There’s Mrs. Figby, whose mom is having serious problems.  

And there I am, just stewing, for no good reason.  Hell, me, myself, just a few years ago, had a much better reason to be miserable…and, at the time, I was, and it was much worse, more agonizing.  This is just…blah.  Poor OmegaDad is at a loss, wishing I were happier.  So do I, of course.  I figure it’s a function of being in a new place, with a totally different outlook and climate, and being away from my mom and my friends, and that in a year or two, things will be much better.

Which is, of course, not much consolation right now.

So, instead of nattering on about that any more, I will merely post this lovely video, which made me smile and feel happy and warm and connected in a global way (okay, everyone, let’s start singing "Kumbayah", eh?):

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

In other words, Happy Litha!

Last night the sun set at 11:43 p.m. and it rose this morning at 4:22 a.m.  OmegaDad and I, snuggling up in bed circa 11:30, debated just how weird it was to be able to see each other, and he mentioned that the solstice was sometime within the next few days.  Lo and behold, when I pulled up the local newsrag’s web page, one of the main stories was that today was the solstice.  The claim was that it hits at 3:59 this afternoon, 12 minutes from now. 

The word "solstice" comes from the Latin for sun (sol) and stands still (sistit)–the sun stands still in the sky, halts its movement northwards, pauses, and then starts heading south.  (Okay, okay, in reality the sun isn’t doing anything, nor, really, is the Earth–it’s just an artifact of the axial tilt of our planet relative to our solar system.  It merely marks the point at which the northern point of the planet is tilted most towards the sun.)

Ah, joy!  This means summer, right?!

Well, everyone hereabouts is complaining about how wretched the weather is, how gardening is off by three weeks, and griping (just like me!) about the lack of sunlight…

And our local newspaper–with a grim joviality–pointed out that, while the summer solstice means "summer" to everyone else in the Lower 48, it means "winter is coming" to Alaskans.

Gee whillickers.  What an uplifting point of view!  Just when a naive innocent such as OmegaMom thinks "It’s time to celebrate!", here comes the uber wet-blanket, reminding me that this means in a few short months I’ll be able to bitch about how gloomy everything is.  (Not that I haven’t been doing that lately anyway, but I’m assured by Those In The Know that normally June is faboo, so hopefully any readers left by the time next June rolls around will be spared my unrelenting channeling of Eeyore.)

I assume that this jaundiced outlook on the solstice may have something to do with the fact that I could find hardly anything with "solstice" in it in the community listings on the local blatt’s web site.  (Or maybe it’s the general religious tone to the area?)  There was one hip-hop event, there was one outdoor concert.  Poof.  That’s all, folks!  On the other hand, the marketing gurus at Alaska.com claim that "Any town worth its salt has a festival, concert or race this weekend as the days reach their longest."  The only things I can find are in the first week in July.

Anyway, have a great weekend and enjoy the sunshine!  Because, as we all know, it’s all downhill from here. 

Otherworldly pictures of bubbles by photographer Jason Tozer.  Here’s how he did it.

Nothing major going on, no great thoughts shakin’, just hanging out in the sun…ahhhhhhh.

The chickens are loving the new coop.  The babies are loving their new digs in the "temporary" coop.

Our new tractor mower finally got put to use…then we promptly bent a blade on one of the (thousands of) rocks in the yard, which we discovered as OmegaDad cut a lovely swathe through the front yard where one side of the mower cut the grass 3 inches high, and the other side scalped the grass down to the ground.  Oops.

The wild roses are blooming, with lovely big pink five-petaled flowers peeping out of the greenery.  The roadsides hereabouts now have lupine blooming, too, and it’s a totally different lupine than I’m used to.  The lupines here are deep violet, with white tops; the lupines in Small Mountain University Town were blue all the way through.

In the news…

California started offering gay marriage licenses this week, and the state is looking forward to a boom as gay couples from across the country fly out there to get married…because California’s law states that these marriages are valid in other states.  (I’m not sure how it works, but that’s what I’ve heard.)  Coming this fall:  California constitutional amendment vote on a "protect" marriage amendment.  Which, as John Scalzi points out, would invalidate all those marriages being made.  Ahhh, the warm embrace of Christian fundamentalist love.

Fox News, trying to be hip, became tragically hip by accident when referring to Michelle Obama as "Obama’s Baby Mama", not realizing that "baby mama" is for unmarried moms.  Or did they?  After all, this is the network that has regularly let slip "Osama" in place of Obama, had an onscreen person seem to advocate assassinating Obama, and called the loving fist-bump that Michelle and Obama exchanged when he locked up the nomination a "terrorist fist jab" (first suggested in .  Oy!  Every time, of course, they backpedal.  I’m sure they mean well.  Really!  But for another point of view, let’s go back to Scalzi for an excellent rant.

The AP decided to start sending cease-and-desist letters to bloggers for quoting from articles and providing links.  A "quote" to them is five words.  Eh?  Whatever happened to "fair use"?  Bloggers, needless to say, are up in arms and talking boycotting AP news, using other news aggregators instead.  There was a meeting wherein AP, "backing down", offered to let bloggers use quotes at a per-word price.  A five- to 25-word quote would cost $12.50.  Oy!

The Phoenix Mars lander, at the Martian pole, scooped a hole in the ground and found "white stuff".  I look at the pictures and am taken back to Lubbock, TX, and environs, where half the places you dig, you’ll find satin spar gypsum.  In layers.  Alternating with red dirt.  Like the picture.  Alas, I can’t find any really decent pics online, though I know we have plenty in our boxes.  We also have some lovely specimens that you have to handle extremely carefully, or it will break into pieces.  Really interesting stuff.

Ah!  Forgot two items:  Boomerific has lost her home to flooding in Iowa; as a result of a "flood" of offers for help, they have set up a Target registry for replacing items lost in the flood.  And Karen (of the Nekkid Ovary) has had her lovely daughter Chloe Ellen.

Le Grande Coop, c’est fini. 

Yesterday was miserable:  it seemed the damned thing would never be done; there was always yet one more thing that needed doing before it was inhabitable.  I went in to visit the birds, reached down for my fave, Angie, and realized that Comet and Winnie were chasing her around, they had blood on their beaks, and Angie was bleeding from her foot.

Ack!  Bloodthirsty savages!

So I quick rescued Angie, and she was given free rein of the garage for the day while her foot recovered and Comet and Winnie forgot about the alluring and seductive taste of blood.

We were trimming doors down and painting doors and hanging doors and OmegaDad was wiring into the wee hours of the night, and I was sure it would never get done.  Like Sisyphus.  We’d push that damned boulder up that damned mountain, rest a night, and discover that it was back down at the foot of the mountain yet again.

But!

But the end was in sight.  And so today, OmegaDad and I hung another door.  Then it turned out he needed to do some dremeling, because the trimming we had done had trimmed off the inset where the latch plate was sunk in.  And then, when testing a doorknob mechanism on the other door, OmegaDad shut the doorknobs themselves into the coop (luckily, he knew what to do).  And it was getting later…and later…at 9:30, I was about to declare an end to the nonsense for the night, but OmegaDad claimed that All Was Well and we’d be able to transfer the birds tonight.

And It Was So.

OmegaDotter opens up the bale of fluff:

Of course, the nice clean fluff was too much to resist:

Angie and Buffy, our two sweeties, were the first to go.  I placed Angie in the box…

Then Buffy (note the dotter mugging for the photographer):

Birds in a box:

The dotter transporting chickens:

Decanting birds:

Then back to the garage to grab Comet and Winnie.  First Comet:

Then skittish Winnie tried to escape:

All the big girls at their fine new industrial-strength chicken feeder:

OmegaDad and dotter enjoying some quality time with Comet:

The reddish tint to the majority of the pics in the coop is due to the heat lamp.  Also, it appears that the lens on our digicam is getting schmutz all over it, and we have to figure out how to clean it.  Though I do like the halo effect on my pic with Angie; haven’t I said all along I have a halo?!

Our silkies are still in the garage.  They are younger, and smaller, and likely to be picked on if we put them in with the bigger girls.  In addition, they’re smaller birds in general…while the big girls will keep getting bigger, the silkies will likely only be as big as Buffy is now.  So, until we partition off an area of the coop for them, into the temporary coop they go, upgrading from the black box we had them in before.

What is needed now is:  hanging the feeder and the waterer…nesting boxes…the partition for the silkies…  So, in reality, le Grande Coop is not totally done, but it’s done enuf.  Maybe we can now have some ordinary peaceful evenings for a while, without the omigod-the-birds-are-going-to-peck-each-other-to-death-we-MUST-GET-THE-COOP-DONE-NOW urgency.

And the sun came out today.  Cue the chorus of angels singing "Ahhhhh!"

We had sunshine today.  Seven hours of it!  Woohoo!

And then it clouded over again, full-scale overcast.  And started drizzling.

Oh, yes, and it was sunny while I was working.  The clouds moved in, of course, just as I ended my work day.

Travelocity sent me an email today, saying, "We miss you!"  I flashed on sunshine and warm weather and vivid deep-blue skies and ponderosa pines smelling like vanilla in the sunlight.  So I logged onto Travelocity (hey, it was a cute email!) and searched out fares from Big City, AK, to The Valley of Death, AZ.

And then I just sat there, wan and depressed, as the cheapest I could find was $600 round-trip.

That damned email had talked about oh-so-awesome cheap deals!  A few hundred to get from A to B!  Toss in a rental car and a few nights at a hotel, and add only another hundred!  But those awesome deals don’t apply to travel from The Final Frontier…

We had sunshiny days for a week back in early May.  And one sunshiny day last week.  And today.  Today it actually got up over 60F degrees!

OmegaDad, reading over my shoulders, patted me on the head and told me that everyone tells him this is an unusual spring/early summer, and that it’s usually sunny and dry and gorgeous at this time of year.  My response was to ask him, "So I get sunshine next year, eh?"

I know that the Midwest is getting pounded with rain.  We could be dealing with tornadoes, or hurricanes, or flash floods, or miserable 99F days with 99% humidity.  But right now, it’s gray.  And I feel gray.

(Edited on Monday to add:  Gah!  To add insult to injury, some damned spammer edited my post!)

We painted the coop tonight.  Just the first coat; OmegaDad will be sneaking out back after the dotter goes to bed and doing a second coat.  Then tomorrow we paint trim pink and purple.  (Yes, pink and purple.  Needless to say, the dotter picked the colors out.  Hey.  It’s her chickens and her coop.  Even though I love to snuggle with the birds…)

So the dotter helped.  And above is what she looked like right after painting, and just before she got dumped in the bathtub and scrubbed to within an inch of her life.  We actually got all the paint out, except for a few bits in her hair and under her fingernails.  The white on her hands?  Paint, not gloves.

While I had the camera out, I told her to stand still and don’t touch ANYTHING! and ran down to the coop to snap some pics.

A shot in through the front door of the coop to OmegaDad painting the trim on the door to the closet:

You can see the angle of the roof.  Note that there is only one piece of outer insulation installed yet.  You can also note that the upright posts aren’t straight; ’s okay.  And the mess.  ‘S okay, too.

A closer shot of the hubby inside the coop:

There will be another coat, remember!

And a shot of the mashed up corner of the coop, with all sorts of interesting shadows:

See that sloping ceiling?  Did you know that if you’re painting the trim up by the ceiling on the high side, and you move the ladder, and you climb the ladder, and turn your head so that you can continue painting the trim, your hair will get covered with wet white paint?

Ayup.

Le Grande Coop is still not finished.  It required trim, y’see, to cover up some gappage.  And then, last night, under the assumption that the dotter had a playdate this afternoon and evening, so he could do a lot of work this evening, OmegaDad stopped work at 10.  Slacker!

Then the worst occurred:  The putative playdate turned into a no-show.

Now, I’m pretty flaky when it comes to social situations.  I have a great lack of social graces; my track record on thank-you notes is severely spotty; I have a slew of high school graduation cards and wedding gifts to buy and send out; my email box is full of notes that I should be responding to; and everyone who reads my blog knows just how sporadic my replies to comments are.  But I don’t think I’ve left someone with the impression that we had a date–as in, "this Wednesday after gymnastics class", as in, "She and H. can play and she can stay for dinner and I’ll drive her back"–and then turned up in a totally different city at the appointed time.

A-hem.

So I’m left with three scenarios. 

Scenario A:  I misunderstood completely.  This is quite possible.  I’ve been known to do this before.  But I really, truly thought it was a done deal.

Scenario B:  H.’s mom is a flake.  This is also quite possible, even though I had thought she was a stickler on things (such as having such a clean house that the dotter was awed when she returned from H.’s birthday party).

Scenario C:  H. doesn’t really want the dotter to come over.  This is also quite possible; a case of moms making plans that the kiddos don’t want to do.

Oh, well.  OmegaDad has finished trim, caulked seams, spackled over the spots where he was searching for beams behind plywood by drilling screws in that never found something to sink into, and laid plastic sheeting on the floor to protect the faux wood linoleum sheeting.  He and OmegaDotter have purchased (gak) purple and pink paint for the trim.  The dotter and I are to paint tomorrow evening.

So I leave you with some Interesting Stuff:

• A gynecologist doing surgery discovered his patient was ovulating right as he was in the midst of her reproductive organs.  So he got out his camera and took a few shots.
• Really neat-o keen-o pictures of Earth’s sky from various space missions.
• Send Barack Obama Your Baby for a kiss, hug, or hope.  Hope takes longer.  (One wonders how many people who have hit this site think it’s for real and have thoughts about boxing up their offspring…)
• "All My Life I’ve Been Slowly Losing Home", a lyrical look at entropy’s effect on the family and home by Zuska.

Also, will the person who stole springtime away from my part of Alaska please return it?  Three weeks’ worth of grey, overcast skies and highs of 54 are leeching my springtime spirit away…

Le Grande Coop proceeds apace.

All the interior walls are in (woot!).  Complete with insulation.  The wiring is almost complete.

No photos of the progress, however.  Every time I thought of grabbing the camera, I was in the middle of holding screws, measuring tape and stick, pens, bits and pieces of 2×4, or helping schlep plywood sheets hither and yon. 

Then I’d forget about it until about 1 a.m., so you don’t get any pictures.

You also don’t have any audio recordings of OmegaDad and OmegaMom being very, very snarky with OmegaDotter, who really, truly wanted to help, but has the attention span of a gnat when it comes to "work" and who has recently become enamored of the song "Girlfriend" by April Lavigne to the point where she kept singing "Hey, hey, you, you!  I could be your girlfriend!" over and over again until both my easy-going husband and I (much less easy-going) were ready to plunge her head-first into a barrel to stop the "music".

Anyway, it looks like the coop will be painted inside either tonight or tomorrow night, and we can start moving the poor peckish hens out of their (ha, it is to laugh!) "temporary" coop in the garage and into their swanky new digs.

Of course, we still need to make nest boxes.

And there are the exterior walls to finish off.

All I can say is that it’s a miracle no Omega-ite has murdered another over the course of this little exercise.

Firstly, there’s the fact that installing an 8′x8′ coop inside the former stable turned up a lot of interesting…quirks about the stable.  For instance, "square" was an existential thing for the previous owners, obviously.  The shed is square…the stable growing out of it isn’t.  So we had to adjust and adapt over and over again.  Parts of the coop are very square.  The parts attached to the strange interior angles of the stable are…"un-square".

Then there’s the fact that OmegaDad kept (and keeps) making dorky jokes, puns, and blatant adult innuendo about construction and sexy OmegaMoms.  All of which is very sweet, but my eyeballs are in serious danger of rolling out of my head.  There’s an amazing amount of sexual byplay that flies right over the head of a 6-year-old child, thank heavens.  There were lots of "check out my tool!", and "come hold my stick…it’s a nice, hard stick", and "let’s go out to the coop and screw around, baby!" comments.

And then there’s the problem of timelessness in the endless Alaskan cloudy days.  The light looks the same at 2 p.m. as it does at 8 p.m., which led to a number of evenings when we’d find ourselves confronted with a very hungry OmegaDotter wanly saying, "I’m hungry" in a pleading manner.

My advice, for those who plan to erect a chicken coop:  Make it free-standing, so you don’t have to cope with a sloping roof that has rafters that are at a slight angle to the main wall and you don’t have to deal with an oddly angled back wall.  And you don’t have to shovel out a gazillion years’ worth of horse manure.

I have a whole slew of news aggregators and what-not that I visit on a regular basis:  Technorati’s Popular News list, which collects news stories that bloggers have linked to; Nielsen’s BlogPulse top news stories listing; ScienceBlogs for what’s new in science; Will Femia’s Clicked column in MSNBC for off-beat items that have hit the national zeitgeist.

In a very strained segue, the title of my post has nothing to do with Will’s column.  Har.  Will’s column is named "Clicked" because…well, it’s what he clicked on today.

"Clicked" has many different meanings.

One of the ones I like the most is related to learning.  There’s a stage in learning something new where suddenly what was previously strained and a conscious process becomes subconscious and easy and flowing.  I personally think of this as moving from the front of the brain (consciously thinking of the steps to take) to the back of the brain (knowing the steps to take so well that it is ingrained).  It’s like when the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle have fit together to the point where the overall picture is suddenly visible; it’s no longer a series of discrete color blobs.

The "clicked" analogy is related to keys and locks.  You put in a key, or (if your path is a less legal one) a lockpick, turn it, hear the "click" of the lock tumblers as they fall into place, and suddenly the key can turn and the door is unlocked.  What was previously a barrier is now wide open.

The dotter knew her letters ages ago and was able to write her name at age 4.  In preschool they began devoting some time each day to a letter of the week.  In kindergarten, phonics was the name of the game…each week, a new letter sound was added, and the kids were introduced to the concept of the phonemes behind the letters and how to sound them out.  Starting in January, the teacher would send a small book home each Monday as homework, asking them to be returned on Friday.  Oh, it was agony; the dotter would sloooowly sound the words out…she’d fidget and wiggle and read a sentence or two…then she’d want to stop and hop around, or dance, or jump up and down…then she’d skew the book this way and that way and slooowly sound out a few more words…

Of course, they were dreadfully boring "books" to me, filled with sentences like "Nat has a pal.  His pal is sad.  Nat is sad for his pal.  They hop on the rug.  The rug is tan.  They hop off the rug.  His pal is glad.  Nat is glad."  The end.

Oy.

But we have persevered.  I have had the dotter (slooowly) read some of her small science-y books, which she loves; things like "The Ladybug Life Cycle", or "Hurricanes!" or "Cool Penguins", or "Awesome Walruses!"  And for months, it has been a struggle, with the same fidget/wiggle/read/hop/jump/read/skew book/wiggle/read cycle.

We have a routine for bedtimes where we alternate one night of daddy playing with the girl with one night of mommy reading a story.  Tonight, as we were heading up to bed, she reminded me, "It’s story night tonight, Mommy!"  And I said to her, "Okay.  But I’m going to start making you read to me sometimes, too!"  She caroled out, "All right!" as she took the stairway two steps at a time.

I read "Froggy’s New Sister" to her, and then she held out her hand.  I handed the book over to her.  She began to read.

She read quickly and easily.  She stopped only a few times, at works like "know" or "taught" or "wrestled" or "Pollywogalina".  She kept reading.  She didn’t wiggle and fidget.  She didn’t get frustrated and thump the book down, saying, "I’m tired!"  She didn’t have to slowly sound out words all the time, just some of the time.  She kept going.  And going.  And we both started getting really excited, because it was easy for her to read, and she was on page 17.  And then she was on page 21.  And then she was done with the book.

It’s finally "clicked".

Oh, I know there will be setbacks.  There will be times when it’s a pain in the butt to get her to read anything.  But this is a Big Deal to me, and to her, and to OmegaDad…because it’s that "ease" in reading, that "no longer in the front of the head, but in the back of the brain" mental activity that makes reading something fun and useful and exciting.  And reading…well, it’s the basis of just about everything in education from this point forward.  And there’s a helluva world of entertainment waiting for her now, a universe of new worlds imagined by other people that she can dip into now by opening up the pages of a book.

And it’s damned exciting for me.

I take two routes to summer camp.  There’s the short route–which I’m doing more these days, due to gas prices–and the long route, which is prettier.  The long route winds through our neighborhood, then debouches onto Suburb-Tiny Town Road, which I take down to where the camp is. 

The long route also passes many post office box assemblages.

Yesterday, on my way to pick up the dotter, passing one of the POBAs, I saw an orange sign that said "WARNING!" and had a clip-art illustration.  I had a suspicion as to what the clip-art was, but was in a hurry to pick the child up, so made a mental note to check the sign again today.

So on the way to pick her up this afternoon, I stopped the car by the POBA and peered at the sign.

"WARNING!  Black bear sighted on Precious Stone Street Wednesday a.m."

Precious Stone Street is two blocks away.

Ooookay. 

So we have moose; the Moose-Away seems to be keeping our neighborhood moose away from our nascent veggie garden with its tender tiny vegetative morsels.

But I think Moose-Away, made of aromatic bovine blood, may not be Bear-Away.

It might, in fact, be Bear-Come-Hither.

Welcome to Alaska.  I have now encountered in one form or another all of the wildlife that the state is famous for.  We have the bald eagles that roost near Home Debit.  We have the hordes of seagulls that came back as soon as it was warm enough and float around the grocery store and fast-food emporium parking lots.  We have the (bloody damned) mosquitoes.  And now we have bear sighting.

In other beary news, our state gummint is fighting very hard to not have polar bears listed as an endangered species.  Our lovely lady guv claims that the state fish and game scientists pooh-pooh the federal studies that are suggesting that polar bears aren’t doing too well in areas where the polar ice cap is receding.  A local newspaper filed a FOIA request for info from the state scientists…the guv’s office released one (one!) email from one (one!) scientist which said…that they thought the science behind the feds sounded pretty solid.  The guv’s office says, "Oh, that’s preliminary, and those preliminary discussions shouldn’t be part of the record."

Yeehaw.  We now have a black candidate for president, the first time in mainstream political party history.

No, really, I am pleased.  But I personally would have been pleased with Hillary, too, and she would have made history as well, being the first female candidate for president for a mainstream political party.

(We’ve had both in offshoot parties before.)

And now we have pissed off Dems saying they would rather vote for McCain than Barack Hussein Obama.

I’m left wondering why.

Why would someone who voted for Hillary Clinton prefer John McCain over Barack Obama?

There’s a bunch of folks who just plain dislike Obama, especially since he didn’t stop at the word "bitter", but went on.  As a result, people didn’t look at why he thought they were bitter–being ignored by politicians for three decades–they only got huffy about being seen as religious, gun-toting bubbas.  Which totally wasn’t the point, but, hey, they don’t like him now, consider him a condescending elitist, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Of course, there’s the strategic reason:  McCain wins, gets stuck with the mess left behind by BushCo, ends up with a one-term lame-duck presidency, and Hillary Clinton sweeps in on her white horse to save the day.

Okay.  That’s a valid strategy.  But it ignores some serious things, in my point of view.

It ignores the Supreme Court, for one thing.  McCain, being Bush Light, may not pack as many strict conservative justices in as Bush Regular would…but they’ll still be leaning on the conservative side.

It ignores his stated intention to continue the war in Iraq.

It ignores McCain’s health insurance plan, which is to do to health insurance companies what was done to credit card companies and banks in the 80s and 90s…loosening regulations in order to encourage competition.  Hey!  Look what that’s gotten us now!  Usurious credit card rates, fifty kazillion people being offered credit who shouldn’t have been, a bubble in real estate prices as a result, and the ensuing crash.  Yeah, I’d really like to see that applied to health insurance…

It ignores the fact that McCain is anti-choice, whereas both Hillary and Barack have been unrelentingly pro-choice.

I have a personal beef against McCain, which is something that lost him my respect back a few campaigns ago…when the Bush campaigners did a whispering campaign against him that insinuated that his adopted daughter Bridget, from Bangladesh, was an illegitimate bastard black child.  What did McCain do?  He did nothing.  And after his campaign was over, what did he do?  He cozied up to the Bush regime.  Pah.  So much for Mr. Maverick.  I would have voted for him eight years ago…but there is no way I can do it now.

One of the most interesting things I have read in a long time was an interview where someone was asking Obama what his first acts would be in the White House.  Obama said he would collect all the Executive Orders signed by the Bush administration and review them for constitutionality.

Woot.  I say, woot!

In the end, though, I am not hopeful.  I think whoever wins this election is going to be a one-hit wonder.  Why?  Because whoever wins will be stuck fixing the mess that BushCo has left us.  A grinding economic mess.  A grinding military mess.  And no matter what actions are taken to fix those messes, people aren’t going to like them, one little bit, and when the next election rolls around, they’re going to toss whoever it is out on his ear.

In the meantime, and totally off-topic, but perhaps explaining my sour mood:  I hate mosquitoes with a fiery passion.  The problem is that they like me.  Nom nom nom, is what they say when they scent me and home in on my skin.  We have an industrial strength mosquito herd out by the area where The Grand Coop is being built.  I go out and help OmegaDad measure and cut and screw, and the mosquitoes are chowing down on me like I’m food from a fancy, expensive caterer being dished up for free.

We did not have mosquitoes in Small Mountain University Town.

It’s not often you hear those words.

The chickens are growing apace and have become quite familiarized to people.  I am calling myself "The Chicken Whisperer", though perhaps it should be "The Chicken Clucker" instead.  I go "buck buck buck" to them and cuddle them and they have become tame enough to sit on my shoulder:

…or, in this case, the dotter’s head:

As you can see, Buffy has gotten kind of big.  Comet, the bitchy bird on my shoulder, is not as big, but Winona and Angelina are as big as Buffy.  The silkie chicks (still nameless) are no longer little itty bitty balls of down and now have the cutest little dandelion fluffs poking out of their heads and tails at random intervals. 

Anyway, they are all still living in the makeshift baby coop in the garage.

They are getting peckish.

In other words, "pecking order" is becoming the word du jour.  We have had to segregate the silkies for fear that the bigger gals will get into their box and peck them to death.

The Grand Coop is being built.  I am hoping it will be complete by this weekend.  (OmegaDad, the poor deluded dear, thought he would be able to get it done all in one weekend.  When he passed this thought on to me, I kept my mouth shut; 14 years with the same guy makes you know when to speak up and when to keep quiet.  Even if he does sing Carpenters’ songs.)  We have a nice 8-foot square floor with linoleum in a faux wood pattern, and one of two walls halfway framed in.

The birds need their space.  We need our garage back.

In other news, I was treated to a late lunch or early dinner by my regular commenter Noreen, who is in town visiting relatives.  It was great fun–we yakked about adoption and foster care and social work and Alaska and how amazingly conservative this area is (I joked that I don’t dare say anything bad about GWB, or put any bumper stickers on my car…not that I’m the type for bumper stickers, but I’d be afraid to put certain ones on…I am chicken, hear me cluck).

Thanks to all my commenters who have left me with the tunes to various Carpenters’ songs stuck in my head.  All I can say is:  I’ll get you all, my pretties!  And your little dogs, too!

I love OmegaDad dearly.  We have been together (OmegaMom pauses, counts on her fingers and toes, and continues) 14 years.  We’ve known–since the very start–that we Belong Together.

True wuv.  Ain’t it wonderful?

But I have discovered something extremely disturbing recently.  Something that made me pause, and wonder if we really, truly Belong Together.  It has shaken my world to its core.

While driving back from Big City last night, we were listening to a rerun from Kasey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown from 1974, a blast from the past indeedy-o.

We were up to, oh, number 16.  The song started.

OmegaDad started singing along with it.

(Now, OmegaDad couldn’t carry a tune if you held a gun to his head, or to my head, or our dotter’s head, and said that the trigger would be pulled if he didn’t sing in tune.  I’ve known this from the beginning.  It was, actually, directly contrary to my early musings about how any man I decided to marry must be able to play a musical instrument, sing in tune, and be able to take me dancing.  I think OmegaDad might be able to haltingly blow out a ditty on a saxophone; there was a period in his early teens when he took it up for about a year.  But aside from that, my deeply held beliefs on musicality and rhythm were knocked asunder by the Tide Of Love which swept over me when we met.  Bah.)

Those of my readers who are of a "certain age" will understand my shock and horror when I realized…

…forgive me, I must take a moment to regain composure here…

…OmegaDad knew…Every.  Single.  Word… 

…to The Carpenters’ "I Won’t Last A Day Without You."

Puh-leeze.  Oh, my eyes were rolling.  Especially since he was soulfully gazing at me (and not at the road, dammit), putting his hand on my knee (and not on the steering wheel, dammit), and crooning, "I can take all the madness the world has to give, but I won’t last a day without you".

Gak!  My good lord, the syrupy sweetness!  The pap of the bubble-gum pop! 

He also knew all the words to Olivia Newton John’s "Please Mister, Please".  (I have to admit, I knew them, too.  I called it Newton-John’s "country period".  He claimed the song didn’t get airtime on country music stations.  A few minutes later, KK said it made it to number 4 on the country charts.  Hah.)

He did not know all the words to Three Dog Night’s "The Show Must Go On".  In fact, he claimed he didn’t recognize it at all.  I, on the other hand, did know the words to that song.  All of them.

This is the difference between a woman of city beatnik heritage and a man who was raised in small-town Oklahoma.

I don’t know if I can go on living with these shattered illusions.  My life is blighted.  How can I sleep every night next to a guy who knows the words to Carpenters’ songs???  Who knows what other twisted personality traits he has been hiding all these years???  Who…who, I ask…is this stranger in bed beside me???

Whew.

Ballet Recital Madness is over for a year.  Yay!

Friday we headed off to Big City at 5 p.m., and arrived home at 11.  Saturday, we headed off to Big City at 5 p.m., and arrived home at 11:30.  Amazingly enough, there were no meltdowns related to extreme tiredness.

There’s a great cultural difference between the ballet studio we went to in Small Mountain University Town and the studio we’re going to here.  There, there were kids all over, giggling and laughing and having fun.  You could watch other classes through the one-way glass, and all the little girls loved sitting in the doorway and watching the bigger girls doing their routines.  The teachers for the littlies were pretty relaxed, and there was lots of hugging and kissing. 

This studio currently has only one class going at a time, so there’s none of that mixing.  And it’s run by–as one of the other backstage moms put it–The Ballet Nazi.  This is Serious Stuff, girls!

So it wasn’t as fun for OmegaDotter, and there’s talk of switching to ice skating instead.  Jazz dance would be more fun for her, I think, but they start at 7 years old.

The atmospheric difference also showed up in the performance.

Which is to say:  Wow.

Really.

These were some awesome dances–great choreography and disciplined dancers.  Even the younger ones.  The end result was that it was a professional performance (almost).  So The Ballet Nazi comes through in the end.

We’re all dog-tired.  But OmegaDad, though tired, is on A Mission…he’s building a chicken coop in the stable attached to the Villa. 

(The moose was still alive when the pickup hit it.  It was not alive afterwards.  Luckily, it was a young moose, so the truck and the driver survived.)