OmegaMom

I have crawled from my death bed to scrawl this note.

(Okay.  It’s not a “death bed”.  Really.  It’s just a “bad back bed”.  An “I can’t bend over” bed.  An “If I twist this way, a jolt of fire goes down my leg” bed.)

So yesterday, while congresscritters were voting down the bailout and the stock market was crashing (only to resurge again today), OmegaDad had to have a colonoscopy in Big City.  Which meant I had to drive him there and back again.  But it was at 2 p.m.–a very awkward time, to be sure, because the dotter gets off her school bus at 3:45 p.m., and there was no way on Gawd’s green earth that we would be back in time.  And our next-door neighbor, rescuers of choice in such situations, aren’t there in the afternoons, because Mama Neighbor is now working three jobs.  Ack.  So I called on M., mother of H., in a panic yesterday morning, and M. agreed to pick up the dotter and help her do homework, have a snack, play with H., all the good things…

And, oh, by the way, was the dotter invited to S.’s birthday party?  Because it was that night at 6:30, and H. was going.

Um.  Noooo, the dotter was not invited to S.’s birthday party.

But, aside from the “I’m not invited to S.’s birthday party!” woes that this would bring up, no problemo, because we surely would be back home before M. had to drive H. off to the party.

Right?

Wrong.

Because there was an accident.  On the other side of the highway.  Which caused both directions to close down.  Starting at 5:20 p.m., right around the time we were headed towards the highway.  Which we got onto at 6:45, because the feeder road we were on was also backed up, because no-one could get onto the highway.

When we drove by the accident site, OmegaDad growled about rubberneckers backing up traffic.  I said surely the accident was on both sides of the highway. 

Surely?

Nope.  When we finally got home, after picking the dotter up and apologizing profusely, up and down and left and right, I bopped onto the local newspaper’s site, and, yup, the accident was on the other side of the road.  Grrr.

Which, of course, made me think about a lot of scientific research being done on turbulent flow and the psychology of traffic jams, none of which I feel like researching on the internet right now and posting links about, but trust me, it’s there, and both types of studies are highly relevant.

Anyway, driving all that time with a bad back has ended up making me feel like shit today.

Wah.

Pretzel asks why we don’t see stars here very often.  That’s because during the summer we simply don’t have night at all, just a long, bright twilight.  And when we do have night, we often have cloud cover, so no stars.

Mrs. Figby (now at Halcyon Mama) accidentally hooked into my self-doubt with her comment “You are such a good mama.  Challenging her, and then letting her off the hook.” about the hike.  Lemme tell you, I didn’t feel like a “good mama” at all.  At the time, I was almost panicking, because I was afraid that me pushing her to try the higher part of the butte was going to End Up Very Badly.  It was looking, at one point, like the only way we were going to get the both of us down was by me carrying her.  I shudder at the thought (and not just because my back hurts like hell).

Del posted a grand story about getting stuck in the mud delivering a bobcat to a customer, long ago and far away, when the world was young…I just thought I’d make sure people saw it!

And GrannyJ commented that the first pic in the Walk in the Woods post was very similar to one of me at the same age, also in the autumn.  Mamasan, I have to say that I took a much more reminiscent photo (and I was thinking of that exact same picture), but, alas, it was blurry.  Bah!

A confluence of events:  Clear skies plus sunset at 7:39 p.m. meant that the late-afternoon weather forecast included the forecaster saying, “There’s a good chance for stars tonight!”

Lo & behold, yes, there were stars when I took the dawg out for his evening promenade in the yard.

It’s saying something when the weather forecast includes whether you’re actually going to see stars or not.  What it’s saying is that This Is A Rare Event So Take Advantage Of It While You Can.

Sigh.  I miss the Milky Way.

Oh, thank you, Kozmik All!  A break in the rain!  On a weekend, no less!

The sun was shining, the air was crisp, OmegaDad was preoccupied with the Taj Mahal the new play structure for the dotter, so I decided to grab the girl, get into the car, and go hiking on The Butte.

Now, I know the way to get to the butte.  You take the Old Ben Highway from downtown Small Town Alaska, where OmegaDad works.  No problemo.  I had a printout describing that you drive 5.5 miles from the start of Old Ben Highway, turn on the Butte Loop Road, quick, clean, easy.

So, of course, instead of taking Old Ben Highway, I took new Ben Highway.  Oops.  My trip odometer hit 4 miles, and no butte in view.  My trip odometer hit 5.5 miles–right where I was supposed to be turning onto Butte Loop Road, and there it was:  the intersection between Ben Highway and Parker Highway, on the way to Big City.

At which point, I allowed to the dotter that I had gotten it wrong (once again…I’ve done this before, dammit!), so we’d go to the Old Ben Highway exit and drive back.

Which, of course, took us twenty or so miles out of our way, but was just as quick as getting off at the next exit and turning around.

Then, when we finally drove the Old Ben Highway, I turned off on the wrong end of Butte Loop Road.  The one where you have to drive the entire loop to reach the road to the parking lot at the bottom of the butte trail.

Then, as I’m looking for MotherLode Street to turn on, it doesn’t show.  And doesn’t show.  And doesn’t show.  And I see a turnoff without a street sign, it was missing from the stop sign top.  And ahead of me is…once again…Old Ben Highway.  So I loop a u-ie at the next street, preparing to go investigate the unnamed street.  As I do, a gentleman in a pickup slows down, honks his horn, and pokes his head out the window.

“Y’all lookin’ for MotherLode Street?”

I allowed as how I was.

“Weeell, that’s it back there–” he jabs his thumb back over his shoulder, in the direction of Nameless Street.  “There’s a guy whose last name matches that street sign, and he stole the street sign and has it hanging on his house.”

I thanked him, and we headed back that way.

Then we started up the hike.  Oh, it was glorious!  It was cool, clear, crisp.  The trees were golden.  Here and there were current bushes with red leaves, and fireweed with scarlet spikes of leaves and pink and white seed fluff at the top.  There were banks of Devil’s Club with huge, platter-sized yellow leaves and bunches of blood-red berries.  In spots on the trail it was carpeted with yellow leaves.

We climbed and climbed and went up and down and around, and finally reached the benches at an overlook.  Of course, my camera batteries had died.  Of course.  So you don’t get to see the panoramic vista, with the mountains draped with snow, the clouds hovering over them, the valley filled with autumn colors.  Trust me, though–it was utterly gorgeous.

Now, above the benches and overlook was the remainder of the butte.  There’s supposed to be a 360-degree view from the top, and it’s supposed to be stunning.  I really wanted to go up there.  But…it’s steep.  Steep enough so that at the bottom were real stairs.  I convinced the dotter to give it a go, and we started up.  And up.  And then, the stairs segued to steep trail littered with slippery leaves, with an occasional spot of informal steps (small logs placed across the trail).  We kept going, heading up a couple of switchbacks.

But then…then there was the spot where it was steep enough that they had put a knotted rope by the side of the informal steps to hold onto and pull yourself up.

At which point the dotter gave out.  Her feet slipped on the leaves, she tumbled to the ground, and she started whimpering.  It was just too much for her.

So I had to talk her into standing up, and talk her into holding my hand, and talk her through slowly working her way down all that stuff (”You’re doing it.  That’s good.  Keep it up.  Yup, there you go.  You can do it.  Good girl.”), past a few spots where she slipped and fell again, and clutched at the ground to the side going up the hill in panic.  But she made it down to the benches, and I immediately had us sit down, and had her snuggle up with me, and told her that the definition of being brave was that you do something even though you’re really scared about it, and that she had been very brave.

And then we headed back down the trail, back to the car, and she slept in the car on the way home.

Well.  Weren’t they testy?  Both of them.  And both of them just sort of danced around Lehrer’s question about what–if any–fundamental changes to their plans the current financial situation may cause.

Humph.

As for the current financial situation:  I have been watching and reading, slack-jawed, for a week.  First the bailout’s on.  Then it’s off.  Then it’s on again!  Oops, nope, it’s off.  No, it’s on.  NO!  It’s off!  And the markets have sat there, waiting with bated breath, wondering:  which way is it going to go?

The congresscritters have been inundated with angry calls, faxes, emails, letters about the bailout.  A representative from Pennsylvania (Paul Kanjorski, D), says that 50% of his calls have been “No!” and the other 50% have been “Hell, no!”  And 200 big-name economists got together and signed a letter that said “No go” as well.

A lot of people are pointing to the Community Reinvestment Act as “the” spur for our current financial meltdown.  I liked this commentary from a person monickered “Mock Turtle” in a comment thread at Calculated Risk:

“in round numbers

100 million home owners

50 million have mortgages 50 million don’t (again round numbers)

25 million issued loans in last 8 years

one third of these are sub prime; 8 million

4 percent of subprime has foreclosed: 320 thousand

—

so are you saying that all it took was

320 thousand people failing to pay their mortgages

to bring down the financial system of the United States of America???

—
or was it

…way the mortgages were mixed, tranched, sliced, diced, resold, leveraged and derivitivized that brought the system to its knees

guess you gotta choose

who is more powerful

wall street

or

a bunch of wanna-be starry eyed home owner poor people”

Another commenter wrote:  “All the trillions of investments between banks turns out to just be invested in investments which were invested in other investments which were invested in other investments which were invested in a house in California or Florida by some guy who lied about his income.”

It’s a mess.  There are people saying that Bush, Bernanke and Paulson are running a scam.  My personal feeling is that they’re terrified.  There was an anecdote going around that Paulson got on bended knee to Nancy Pelosi, begging her to help pass the bailout.

So far, in September, we’ve had:  Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailed out…Lehman bankrupt…AIG bailed out…Washington Mutual taken over, but listed as a “failed bank” on the FDIC website…and now Wachovia Bank is looking for someone to buy them out…Brad Setser says that in this month, the Federal Reserve has outlaid some $370 billion to backstop all these failures.

When you’ve got ordinary, everyday mommy bloggers posting that they wonder if they should be pulling thousands of dollars out of their bank accounts, “just in case”…Well, let’s just say it adds up to a serious loss of confidence in the financial system.

Dudes.  Get testy all you want.  But please, please give some serious thought to what you’ll do if you’re the one to walk into the Oval Office next January.

I always thought someone gave you a handout when you became a mom that listed all the strategems and cliches used by mothers the world over for various parenting situations, sort of like a study guide for Mom 101.  It would have things like, “Have you brushed your teeth?”, “I’m not your friend, I’m your mother!”, or “I’m not angry; I’m just…disappointed.”  It would, of course, make life easy if there were a Mom 101 course, and a Mom 102, a 200-level series, and even graduate work, because people like me, who are addicted to college and university courses, would have a blast.

But somehow or other, I find these cliches leaping to my mouth unaided when the time comes that it is needed.

Today, I needed the “I’m just…disappointed.” line.

Lately, we have allowed OmegaDotter to watch far too much “real” TV (versus her video library, much of which is safely kid-oriented).  Hey, when you’re building chicken coops on the evenings and weekends, having a dotter who neeeeds attention all the time when she’s with you can be difficult.  So we’ve schluffed off, and it shows.

So we told her that we were going back to the “no TV on weeknights” regime.  We got some pouts, some fusses, and OmegaDad allowed her to “trade” TV nights–which ended up not being a “trade” at all, but “extra” TV.  Hem.

This afternoon, after we did homework and checked chickens and I fed her a snack, she begged for a “trade”.  I nixed it, and then bopped into the office downstairs for a bit of my latest soap opera addiction (the continuing saaaaagaaa of the financial crisis).  She popped a video into the machine in the family room, then a while later closed my office door.  I continued reading, then looked at the time and realized we had ten minutes until I had to take her off to a sample baton-twirling class.

(Give me no grief about this.  We figure it’s another physical activity, plus her BFF K. is in the class.  Two birds, one stone, all that…)

So I open the office door and head into the family room.  The door to the stairway is closed, and the dotter is not in the family room watching her video and coloring.

I head upstairs.

She’s in the living room, watching Drake and Josh.  (Urg.  She loooves Drake and Josh.  She also loooves iCarly.  These are teenager-y shows on Nick.)

She had closed my office door, closed the door at the bottom of the stairs, gone upstairs, and turned on the TV, with the volume down.

She had snuck around so she could watch TV.

I really wasn’t angry.  I really was disappointed.  I was saddened.  I was upset.  And, lo and behold, out of my mouth came that parenting cliche:  “OmegaDotter.  I am not angry.  I am disappointed.  I told you not to watch TV, and you deliberately snuck up here and turned it on…”

And on and on.

Gah.

Then I pulled out the big guns:  No baton-twirling for you! quoth I. 

There were tears.  There was begging.  There was pleading.  There was OmegaMom saying she was going to consult with OmegaDad; no drama, no shouting, no anger, just implacability.  There was OmegaMom pulling the cable jack out of the back of the TV.  There was OmegaDad who, when informed, had the same response.  There were more tears, more begging, more cajoling.

Oy!

I don’t want to be a grown-up.  It’s a damned pain in the ass sometimes.

Bobcat:  So we bought a kids plaything with swings and slides and a tower, courtesy of some money GrannyJ provided us, plus savings from the dotter’s dollar container.

This requires installation, of course.

Which requires a spot in the yard.

Which requires that OmegaDad make things complex, by planning to dig the area out, surround it with beams, and fill it with wood chips.

All very well and good, but there’s this “digging out” that needs doing.  Yesterday a.m., OmegaDad dresses in his scruffiest work clothes, grabs his shovel and pick and wheelbarrow, and sets out, all manly-like, to do his yeoman duty.

I wander out a little later, and he mutters about how it would all be easier if he had a Bobcat.

He mutters it to me a little later.  And once more.  And I say to him, “Well, why don’t we rent one?”

After some to-ing and fro-ing, we decide to do it, he calls the rental place, they bring a Bobcat over, and he starts to work.

…

Have I mentioned it’s been raining like crazy lately?  And that the yard is soaked?

…

Do you know what happens when you drive a Bobcat around a rain-soaked lawn?

And when someone who used to be expert at smoothing out lawns but hasn’t done it for 20 years decides to go at it?

Let me just say that at a point yesterday, I was out in the yard and just peered sadly at the large hole.

To add insult to injury, it rained like crazy last night, as well.  So the hole is now a big mud hole.

OmegaDad promises me that it will be fixed and by next summer the lawn will be looking bee-yoo-tiful again.

Drama:  We had OmegaDotter’s current BFF, K., over to spend the night.  The end result was two full-on scenes with tears and misery on both sides, and one time OmegaDad asking why they bothered to be friends, since they made each other miserable, and one time OmegaMom did the same thing.  When they weren’t fiercely hurting each others’ feelings, they were busy running around and being happily noisy.  How two girls, 6 and 7 years old, can make the house sounds like it’s filled with an entire soccer team of little girls, plus a couple of elephants, I have no idea. 

More Drama:  The Mother of All Bailouts.  Treasury Secretary Paulson is running a $700 billion save-the-markets-from-total-meltdown program by the Congress and the President as I type.  The markets were down 900 points in two days until rumors of the bailout began floating, at which point the markets gained more in two days, percent-wise, than they have since…

…are you ready…

…1929.  Oh, boy, isn’t that reassuring?!

The current plan is all of one page long.  It includes this fun little piece:

“Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Ahem.  That’s not funny, folks.

This $700 billion is to be spent purchasing assets of unknown worth from faltering financial companies, then figuring out how to sell them to someone else.  The problem is that many of those assets are backstopped by mortgages on real estate where the price is still falling.  No-one knows how much that stuff is worth.  But Uncle Sugar Sam is gonna make everything all better, you betcha, and those financial companies that went blindly ahead playing with money on the assumption that real estate always goes up (wrap your head around that one for a few minutes) are going to be taken care of, all nice and tidy.

My personal preference is a conglomeration of suggestions from various commenters on various financial websites:

• Rather than create this new, sweeping agency/power backed by $700 billion, increase FDIC to $500 billion, or the entire $700 billion.
• Increase deposit insurance to $250,000 per depositor. Insure money market deposits and interbank loans for 12 months.
• FDIC judges ACTUAL capital ratios (not fakery reported on balance sheets), and seizes banks that don’t meet existing FDIC regulations.
• FDIC seizes BIGGEST weak banks first (the original commenter names a bank rumored to be very big and very much in trouble, but I’m removing that) and moves down, to maximize positive impact on public trust.
• FDIC corrals bad assets and auctions them off slowly over time. FDIC sells good assets and deposits to good banks.
• Investors in seized banks are treated as in a bankruptcy: equity is wiped out, debt is worked out based on remaining equity, if any.
• Executive management of seized banks, is fired, blackballed from other seized banks, and passed to FBI for investigation.
• Dividends of $.01 from all financial companies until things are cleaned up.
• Any “golden parachute” clauses for current financial company executives are null and void.
• Institute a website that lists each transaction purchased by the government. This could list the details of the asset, the PAR value, the selling institution, the underlying characteristics, the originators of the loans, the price the government paid (and eventual sold the asset for) and any other relevant detail.

Right now, there’s wrangling going on.  The Dems are saying, well, if you’re going to throw $700 billion at this problem, let’s add some more money to create another stimulus check.

Shee-it.

Look, the whole financial market went into a tailspin and almost froze up last week.  There are plenty of commenters at my regular blog stops who think the Paulson plan is only going to postpone things.  There are plenty of people who are terrified that if nothing gets done, and quickly, the tailspin and freeze are going to continue on Monday.  I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure I don’t really like the plan as it currently stands…

The dotter and I arrived right on time, with our sign in the car.  (The sign said “My mama ♥ Obama”, with an Obama with red, white, and blue hair hand-drawn by the dotter.)  Half-an-hour later, OmegaDad arrived, straight from work.

We spent 2 hours by the side of the highway, waving our signs.

The dotter met Sharee, a young teenage cheerleader (she was very nice, but dayum she was perky and dayum she just kept chattering and chattering and chattering), and the two of them spent the final half hour doing cheers together.  So now we have the dotter wandering around the house chanting “O-B-A-M-A!  Hurray!  Obama!  Today!”, complete with cheer moves, splits and jumps, and we expect we will be hearing it for a long time to come.

We ended up with about 70 people.  For Suburban Alaska, a big-time McCain/Palin stronghold, that was fantastic.  I was expecting maybe 12.

Within the first five minutes, we had a “F*** that n*****!” shouted at us.

One guy kept shouting from his car, “His middle name is Hussein!  His middle name is Hussein!”.  We had a couple of people shout out, “He doesn’t salute the flag!”.

About 20% of the people who honked their horns at us were non-supporters giving us the thumbs down or the finger.  Or devil’s horns.  That last one puzzles me.  Is Obama the anti-Christ?  (This is a serious question–do some people think he is?)

But we had an amazing number of folk who honked their horns and gave us thumbs up, a few who leaned out their car windows and hollered their support, some big-rig drivers who blew their air horns for us, and a few people who drove home, got their Obama signs, and then drove by again to show their support.

There were also the McCain/Palin supporters who drove home to get their signs and drive by again to show their non-support, and one brave couple who went home, got a McCain/Palin T-shirt, and stood on the corner in the chilly drizzle to counteract us.

The local newspaper apparently was there, and some photographers.

All in all, it was fun, except for the very few asshole-ish drive-bys.

Hah.  The OmegaFamily is off to help create signs for an Obama rally tomorrow…

In the meantime, the financial Grand Masters are talking some sort of “Entity” like RTC to deal with the mortgage mess.  Like tomorrow.  And the SEC is banning/has banned some/all short selling, and some folks on various finance blogs are pointing out that the Shanghai stock market banned short selling and it’s now down some 50% from its high last year.

Later, gators.

It has been raining for days.  Endless, ongoing, sometimes gentle, sometimes a downpour:  Rain.  This is what I remember from last September, as well.  Sure enough, when I google “average precipitation Suburban Alaska”, there it is:  September is the rainiest month of the year.

This afternoon when I drove OmegaDotter off to her gymnastics class, the clouds parted, and I saw Tamatuska Peak to the east.  There, on the peak and down the flanks, was snow.  Real snow, with a real snow line.  I remember this from last year, too.

We are smack in the middle of the extremely short autumn that we are graced with here.  The deciduous trees are turning gold, some of them orange; the houses in Suburban Alaska are peeping out again as their privacy drapes–the leaves–go cascading down.  Each rainfall strips yet another layer from the trees, scattering the leaves willy-nilly on the lawns and revealing, bit by bit, the structures that lie hidden in the summertime.

The Big City newspaper had a slide show that introduced me to a new term:  “Termination dust”.  Well, dayum, I thought, they’ve even got a name for the dust that comes down from the glaciers when it’s windy!  (In conjunction with the rain, we have had high wind warnings for areas of the valley.)  But reading further, I couldn’t figure out really what they were talking about, so I had to resort to Teh Google again on that one. 

Lo and behold, it’s a grim and somewhat poetic description of the first noticeable snowfalls on the mountains.  See, it’s a “dusting” of snow, and it marks the “termination” of summer, the entrance to our fleeting autumn, and a harbinger of Things To Come.

The sun is coming up at 7:30 a.m. and setting at 8:15 p.m.

The nights are getting colder, though with the rain the low end stays relatively high…we’re down into the low 40s at night, and up around 50 during the day.  When the cloud cover breaks, the nighttime temperature dips, so I expect our little veggie garden will soon be informing us that all the leafy greens are gone for the season.  We have been enjoying our sweet little carrots, experimenting with kohlrabi and rutabagas, handing out lettuce to neighbors and deliverymen and soon, probably, OmegaDad’s coworkers.  When the next-door neighbor kids play with the dotter, I send them over to the peas (our poor, measly crop this year was due to our late start in getting things planted), or pull out a carrot or two for them.

The cute stubby ones are either Parmex or Thumbelinas; the long orange and yellow ones are Kaleidoscope, and the red ones are Purple Haze.  The Purple Haze and the stubby ones are the best, sweet and crisp and flavorful.

We can expect our first measurable snowfall down here in the valley in mid-October.

(See?!  I can talk about something other than the financial mess.  I won’t mention Washington Mutual auctioning itself off, or Morgan Stanley suddenly talking to Citic, a Chinese company, about being purchased, or how the Dow Jones tanked again even after the Feds performed a miracle last-minute bailout, but I will link to an amusing hand-written sign (amusing in a gallows humor kind of way) found by a Calculated Risk reader at his local WaMu branch…)

Hey, my myriad of readers, I’m just playing around with a variety of WordPress widgets and stuff, trying out some new themes.  So things may not look “normal” for a few days while I get things hammered down.

Le Petit Coop, c’est fini!  Woot!  The silkies are in their new home; Fluff is out of the bathtub in the downstairs bathroom (yay!) and Puff is out of her jail cell in the garage.

We are regularly getting three eggs a day.

I am planning for OmegaDotter to fund our retirement with the proceeds from egg sales.

(Hah.  I just looked at the returns for my Fidelity 2020 investment fund, and it’s off 25% since the beginning of the year.  We’re gonna need those egg sales.)

Speaking of finances (dontcha love that segue?), the score is currently:  Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy.  The Dow Jones dropped 504 points.  Lynch America is going strong.  Reserve has frozen a money market fund for seven days (this has only happened once before).  AIG is currently begging the U.S. government for an $80 billion “bridge loan”; otherwise it will file for bankruptcy tomorrow, sayeth the press.  Just FYI, AIG is a trillion dollar business.  (Whoa, breaking news:  Wall Street Journal says AIG is going to get that loan and be put under government control…”The Federal Reserve is considering an $85 billion rescue for embattled American International Group that could leave the government in control of the firm, according to people familiar with the matter, though the structure of a deal remains unclear.”)  The Russian stock market was closed after it plunged 17% in a day.

Let’s look back on those days of yore, when the savings and loan crisis cost the U.S. $500 billion dollars.  Remember those?

Let’s talk about the Glass-Steagall Act.  This was enacted in 1933, established the FDIC, and forbade banks from providing investment services, in an attempt to keep banks from speculation that would drive them to bankruptcy.  Phil Gramm (currently a senior financial advisor for the McCain campaign) sponsored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1998, which fully repealed Glass-Steagall.  President Clinton signed it into law, so it was a non-partisan clusterfuck.  And now we have Lynch America, Lehman Brothers in bankruptcy, and a $1 trillion dollar company dangling by a thread.  Oh, well.

Some other chickens that have come home to roost are my various jeans purchases.

Alas, I must have measured incorrectly; all of them are too big.  The custom Lands End jeans fit the best, but they are still too big.  I am sufficiently pleased with the shape of the fit to try again, fiddling with the measurements and changing from a waist-high rise to a mid-rise pant.  We shall see.  The Gap jeans were way too big and I am returning them.  I think I will find a local seamstress and have the Nordstrom black jeans taken in.

I have truly been tied to the computer these past few days, watching the financial services sector go kablooie.  Things have been happening at an incredibly rapid pace.  I don’t know whether to be fascinated or appalled or both…

Let’s see…

Nobody would buy Lehman, so it’s on a bankruptcy watch.

Bank of America, after turning down Lehman, is in talks to buy Merrill Lynch (my favorite new name:  “Lynch America”).

AIG–the insurer of all those humongous multi-level mortgage bond marketing schemes–is “looking for capital“.

Somebody named Bob Brinker apparently said something like “get all your money out of Washington Mutual”.

(Update:  A good quick round-up of the weekend’s financial shakeups.)

All the big news sites are still talking about Ike (which, thank heavens, wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been).  The financial stuff is only a sidebar, and only one of those items is being discussed.

So tell me, who’s the economy wonk on McCain’s team and on Obama’s team?  Whoever it is had better be prepared for a long, hard ride…

SiteMeter moved to a new system.  My problems with it…hmmm…1) It won’t “remember” me as logged in; 2) every time I try to load the stats in the new system using IE7, I get an endless “Loading Reports…” screen (though it works in Firefox); 3) hitting the “Refresh Stats” button sends me back to the home page, no longer logged in.  I’ve already sent through one help ticket and am contemplating sending in another, so I go to the SiteMeter website I have open, hit “Refresh Stats” just to see if anything happens, and I get a “404 not found” error.  So I go back to the SiteMeter homepage, and what do I see?

Whoops!

Aw, man, it must suck to be on the SiteMeter development team right now…Just like it must suck to be in that high-level group of financiers that was called into a weekend-long emergency meeting by Paulson.

OmegaDad’s four-ganger box for the regular light timer, the heating lamp thermostat, the ventilation fan thermostat, and Something Else is too small.  (This is in the Junior Coop.)  He is irritated.

The good news?  The “Alaska Women Reject Palin” protest in Big City was apparently very well attended.

Back when the chicken project was still just a gleam in OmegaDad’s eyes, we had A Plan.  Part of this plan consisted of the dotter being the chicken keeper.  Ha.  I’m sure those of you with children are very well aware of what happened to that particular aspect of the plan.  The second part of the plan was that the dotter was going to collect eggs, and we got first crack (bahaha!  I “crack” myself up! [bahahaha!]) at the eggs, but she could sell the second dozen of every two dozen we got.

Now that the girls are cranking them out (hey, we got three eggs the other day!), the dotter has been hounding us to let her sell the eggs.  We have a reservation from a buddy with whom we went bowling yesterday…

(We interrupt this blog with an urgent public service announcement!  If you by any chance have wrenched your back one day, do not go bowling the next day!  Your back thanks you in advance.  We now return you to your regular blog reading…)

Ahem…Anyway, D.J., A.’s mom, would be more than willing to buy eggs from the dotter.  This is good.

We also planned to ask the neighbors.

The dotter wanted to give the neighbors a whirl this morning, so OmegaDad handed her the dozen eggs, pulled out the camera, told her what to say, and sent her on her way.

Looking at eggs:

Running up the hill:

A few minutes later, she came back.  There was one slight problem.

She had forgotten to tell them she was selling the eggs.

She gave them the eggs.

Which is, of course, all well and good; we like our neighbors, they like us, I’ve already handed them lettuce and carrots, and they’ve watched over the dotter a few times while we had to do things together (like drive into Big City for an endoscopy, say).  And I’m definitely planning to make arrangements with 17-year-old girl next door to babysit while we go off and do such wild-n-crazy things as, oh, maybe go to the symphony, or a movie, or some such silliness.

Anyway, the dotter was somewhat crestfallen.  I think a little role-playing is in order here.

In other chicken news, you will be–no doubt–surprised to hear that OmegaDad and I think we may be somewhat weird.  Why is this?

Well, you see, we now can tell whether a chicken has hit puberty, and it has nothing to do with laying eggs.

Before puberty, the chickens all had nice quiet sweet little voices.  If they were roused, they’d SQUACK once or twice, but most of the time, they queeped.

“Queep, queep, queep,” murmurs Winnie, our gold-laced Wyandotte.  And thus we know that Winnie has not reached puberty yet.

Because all the other girls (including our dainty silkies Fluff and Puff) now have raucous, riotous calls.

“Buck, buck, buck, bwaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!” hollers Angie.  And Comet.  And even fluff-brained Buffy, our “blonde” bird.  The calls are hoarse, insistent, pushy, and loud.  They still queep and do a fair amount of plain “Buck buck buck”ing, but every now and then, they start their rowdy “I’m a lean, mean, egg-laying machine!” calls.

Our dainty silkies don’t have the hoarse call.  They’re just loud.

(Did you know we still have a chicken in our downstairs bathtub?

Um.  Yes.  Hem.

That chicken is going into the Junior Coop tomorrow, come hell or high water.)

Anyway, Fluff has become quite attached to OmegaDad, who visits her with great regularity.  She has become so attached that when OmegaDad is so self-absorbed as to–Kozmik All forbid!–leave her, she starts screeching, demanding his immediate return.

We have another clue when the birds are pubescent.  If you go to pet their backs, they will…um…”assume the position”.  This entails something dismaying similar to a cat in heat, who when petted puts forequarters down and hindquarters up and begins to do some rather grotesque wiggling of the butt.  So:  The chickens.  When petted.  They crouch down.  They bring their wings up (and, I assume, out of the way), and waggle their legs and butt a bit.

I am constantly telling the girls that I Am Not A Rooster.

I don’t think it has sunk in.

Anyway, we know that Winnie is still a sweet, innocent damsel, who has never had a large calcareous orb emerge from her butt.

Or something.

Today, I decided to do some squats while the microwave was zapping my popcorn.

Bad idea.  Bad, bad idea.

Because shortly thereafter, my lower back started hurting.

And it kept hurting, more and more.

And if I turn the wrong way, it shoots down through my butt.

Wah!

OmegaDad just informed me, after reading the subject line of this post, “You’re still a hot and sexy young thang to me!”  Which garnered him major brownie points.  Then he lost them, as he continued in the “llama voice”, “…As I push you in your wheelchair down the hallway…”

(Some day I will record him doing the “llama voice” and post it on the blog.)

Anyway.  I’m watching Hurricane Ike worriedly, as it vacillates every which way.  It’s supposed to landfall around Galveston.  At the same time, it’s pounding the coast around Louisiana.  OmegaBro and family are in Louisiana…

And politics goes on.  Apparently, the use of simile and metaphor is lost in the U.S. these days, except amongst certain people.  There’s a video where Obama essentially starts to say, “What the f…?!” about the whole “lipstick on a pig” hoorah that I thought about showing, but this one from David Letterman yesterday is better, and he avoids any pitfalls with the phrase “what the…”:

I hate to let Carosgram down , but I’m sure it’s no surprise to her that I am actually planning to vote for Barack Obama, and hope to heavens that the Republicans really don’t win.  I just feel frustrated that whoever wins the election is going to get stuck with the mess that has been the result of 8 years of Bush policies, and that whoever it is, no matter what kind of job he does, is going to end up being The Mean Mom of U.S. politics and thus voted out of office in the next election.

Okay, the virus alarm was a false alarm (whew!).  It seems to have been a hangover from the previous clean-out, a few registry entries that weren’t erased.

So now we’re onto bigger and better things:  A Modest Proposition.

Let’s let the Republicans win the presidential election.

“Whoa!” I hear you saying.  “What’s wrong with you, girl?!”

My theory was that whoever wins this election is going to get into office right as the financial shit is really hitting the fan.  Now, I’m beginning to think that the financial shit is starting to hit the fan, and going to keep hitting the fan, and maybe the best thing to do is to cede the election, so the Republicans are stuck cleaning up the mess they made.  Because I think whoever wins the election is going to be a one-term wonder, tarred with the brush of the financial mess, because whoever wins is going to have to clean up the mess.  And cleaning it up is going to be ugly.

Right now, on Calculated Risk, they’re talking about rumors that Lehman Brothers (big investment firm, you know them, right?) may be going belly up, with a government-brokered takeover a la Bear Sterns to be announced tomorrow.  And Standard and Poors just cut their outlook on Washington Mutual from “positive” or “neutral” to downright “negative”.

The government takeover (de-privatization?) of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got the Wall Street markets to jump…for one day.  This was huge…and it only got the market up for a day.

I’d love to see a dollar figure on all the financial company shenanigans of the past six months.  The S&L bailout cost $500 billion.  Thousands of savings and loans failed.  So far, we’ve had only a few banks fail, but as some have pointed out, the dollar amount of the failures are far bigger per company.

So unless Obama or McCain are actually secret miracle workers, whichever one wins is going to have to work mighty damned hard to cope with the cleanup. 

And in the meantime, we have Hurricane Ike flailing about on its way into the Gulf of Mexico.  I’ve been watching the predicted five-day path for the past week, and it would be amusing to have an animation of the day-to-day (or even hour-to-hour) change in that predicted path.  Well, amusing in a world-weary, hey, I’m up in Alaska, kind of way; I have friends and family scattered around the Gulf Coast and know that to all of them, this uncertainty must be wracking.

I spoke too soon.  Virus re-appeared on one computer, and I’m scanning the other computer right now, as I type.  I am considering Desperate Measures.

In the Department of Obviousness:  I had to drive OmegaDad into Big City for an endoscopy.  We found ourselves behind a city bus.  There was an ad for the bus system on the back.  The “slogan”?  “Ride the bus” in big font, “to travel around Big City” in smaller font.  No!  You’re kidding me!  I thought you rode the bus for, say, some other reason!  (Picture OmegaMom rolling her eyes.)

You know you’re married to the right person when you both move directly to putting down the Big City Rapid Transit advertising department at the same time, without pausing to say anything like, “Did you see that idiotic ad?!”

The Chicken Coop Deux is coming right along.  It seems that having one chicken coop construction project already under his belt, doing another is a mere bagatelle.  In other words, the first took four weeks (five weeks?); this one is taking two.  Or less.

This is the Junior Coop.  It’s for the silkies, Fluff and Puff, who are bantams, and small.  It’s also in the lower section of the outskirts of the shed–the former stables–and thus the roof is low.  With our excellent 20/20 hindsight, we know that we should have made one big coop and split a portion of it off; however, we’re stuck with the configuration we have.  So, we have Senior Coop (big and with high ceiling) and Junior Coop (small and with low ceiling).

Essentially, the Junior Coop would make someone a fine walk-in closet.  I admit to standing inside it today, the roof mere inches above my head, and thinking, Dayum.  Why can’t I have a closet like this?  See…I could put the closet bar over there, and the shelves over there, and…

Suffice it to say, even though my years of closet envy are behind me, and we now have closets galore, I still found myself wisting after this chicken space as my own.

Anyway.  Back to the topic at hand:  Doors.

Two chicken coops require two doors.

(Whoa.  I am tracking back to this paragraph:  Senior Coop has a closet.  The closet also has a door.  The two chicken coops required three doors.)

Our first door was a first two doors were “found” doors; in the Great Pile of Rotting Lumber And Scraps, there were two doors leftover from home renovations.  We figured it they would make a fine chicken coop doors.

Of course, putting a door in requires that arcane art known as “hanging the door”.  This is one of those sweet mysteries of construction life.  It’s like the construction version of computer networking:  a black art, known only to a few, and a source of general angst and unease amongst the common folk (like me and OmegaDad).  We had hung a few doors in the old house, after fixing up and painting the bathrooms to get it ready to sell.  The actual performance is mercifully lost in a misty haze; what I recall is that it required a great deal of snarking and snapping and–just perhaps–some cursing.  At each other, and at the universe in general.

Anyway, while we were hanging these chicken coop doors, inching them this way and that, using the hammer to get the hinges together, and swearing a cussing, a pattern began making itself known to my mind.

The great secret to hanging doors?  (In my experience, only!)  You can’t get the hinges together with the door closed.  The only way to get everything to fit right so you can get those damned hinge pins in is to do it when the door is opened.  And then it happens very quickly.

Voila.  My great secret revealed.

So when the time came to Do The Door for the Junior Coop, the first obstacle to overcome was that it was going to be…short.  Like, OmegaMom-height short.  That would be five-foot-two (eyes of blue) (has anybody seen my gaaaaaal?).  A hollow-core door was out of the question.  And we had used up all our assorted extra doors.  So we had to purchase a solid-core door ($50).  Then we had to measure it.  Then we had to cut it.  Then OmegaDad had to use his way-kewl brand-new Black And Decker door-hinge/doorknob cutting set to create mortised areas for the hinges and holes for the door knob kit.  All of which I helped with by sitting on the door on top of two sawhorses, to hold it steady.

And then came time to hang the door.  At which point, as we were putting the door in (after we had trimmed an additional 1/8″ off the bottom), I remembered my great revelation about door-hanging, which I shared with OmegaDad.  He scoffed.  We tried getting the hinges together with the door closed.  I shared my revelation with him once again.  He relented.  We opened the door and I held it up in line with the hinges.  He tapped here, he tapped there, the pins went in, and voila.

OmegaDad is busy putting trim up in the Junior Coop.  We plan to paint tomorrow.  We hope to have Fluff and Puff in their very own coop, and out of the claustrophobia-inducing makeshift coop-in-a-wading-pool and the bathtub quarantine in just a few days.

I think.

I have been Fighting The Good Fight with viruses.

Not human-type viruses, but computer-type viruses.

All I can say is, what a pain in the fucking ass.

Harrumph.

(First off, I think Fluff had, indeed, bonked her head while riding in the box; she’s been walking and clucking up a storm today.  Looks like Marek’s Disease was a false alarm.  Whew!  As for the crossed beak, the vet recommends a Dreml tool.  Yes.)

Shortly before my mom left Alaska to return to warmer and sunnier climes, we noticed a few yellow leaves in the birch trees beside the kitchen porch.  Remember, this was around August 15.

I scoffed at yellow leaves.  Hey!  It’s August, I said to myself.  OmegaDad sagely pointed out that the clumps of yellow leaves we were seeing on some trees here and there must be insect damage.

The thing was…the number of yellow leaves kept increasing, slowly but surely.

At the same time, we noticed it was becoming dark at night.  Like, actual, can’t-see-in-it darkness.  No more of the continual twilight gloaming.

This week, various blogs and parenting sites have been all about returning to school, and how this means fall is on the way!

I look outside and have to admit, somewhat sadly, that fall, in all it’s glory, has arrived in Alaska; in fact, it arrived a week or so ago.  That would be–in case you can’t recall–before September.  The temperature is hovering around the same levels it was while GrannyJ was here, but the winds have started coming down the mountains, so it feels very different.  The leaves on the trees–those yellowing leaves–have suddenly become crispy, and the sound of the wind in the trees is distinctly different.  There’s a rustling and a rattling that wasn’t there a month ago.  And with every small gust, leaves patter down, slipping this way and that through the air before they settle gently on the grass.

The path of the sun has shifted noticeably in the sky.  Of course, this vivid shift in the lighting shows up everywhere I’ve lived in the fall, and I always notice it suddenly one day as it proclaims, Yes!  Autumn is here!  But right now, the sun is at its zenith at 35 degrees at 1 p.m.; my subconscious, having grown up in Chicago, tells me that this kind of light is most often seen in mid-October.  So my body thinks it’s mid-October already.

The sun is coming up at 7 a.m. tomorrow.  It’s setting at 8:58 p.m. tonight.  We’re losing almost six minutes per day; in twenty days, come the equinox, the sun will be rising at 7:45 a.m. and setting at 7:57 p.m.

In a month, I will be walking the dotter off to the school bus stop in the dawn light at a quarter to nine.

It changes so very quickly up here. 

Or, rather, let’s talk chickens.

Chickens:  the psychodynamics of chicken flocks.

Chickens:  Why Comet lays more eggs than Angie, who lays more eggs than any of the other chickens, who don’t seem to be laying yet at all.

Chickens:  Why Comet is a bitch.

OmegaDad has a soft spot for Comet; he thinks she’s spunky.  We all think she’s smart.  I think she’s a bitch.  OmegaDad scoffs, saying that his sweet Comet could never be bitchy and it’s all in my imagination.

I guess Angie’s pecked-to-a-fare-thee-well-hind-feathers are all in my imagination, too.

But now…now, I have scientific proof that Comet is a bitch.  Because it just so happens that being a good egg-layer is often coupled with…ta-da!…being at the top of the pecking order.  In other words, being a bitch.

I swear I read it today at ScienceBlogs, but I can no longer find the reference.  However, David Sloan Wilson’s latest book, “Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives“, has a section that specifically talks about an experiment performed by William Muir, a poultry scientist.  Muir bred chickens two ways, looking for better egg-layers; in one method, he specifically bred using hens who were “productive” egg-layers, and in the other, he bred all the hens in “productive cages” (i.e., cages where the overall average egg-laying was good).  Lo and behold, after six generations…

There were only three hens, not nine, because the other six hens had been murdered. The three survivors had plucked each other during their incessant attacks and were now nearly featherless. Egg production plummeted during the course of the experiment, even though the most productive individuals had been selected each and every generation. What happened? The most productive individuals had achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of their cagemates. Bill [the poultry scientist] had selected the meanest hens in each cage and after six generations had produced a nation of psychopaths.

There you have it:  scientific proof that Comet, who lays an egg a day (really!) is a chicken psychopath.

Of course, Angie, who is laying an egg every five or six days, it seems, often comes across as second in the pecking order:  she pecks the others.  But, since she’s second, Comet reserves a special meanness just for her.

Comet also has become a pushy broad who pokes and pecks at everything, jumps up in my lap when I’m trying to feed Angie from my hand, and attacks my toes if I don’t have food for her.  This is Angie, who will snuggle up in my lap, settle down, and start “purring” (kind of a low, gurgling coo).

In other, less amusing, chicken news, one of our two beautiful silkies has a crossed beak.  This means she’s ending up smaller and lighter than her sister.  This means we finally decided to take her to the vet.  So I ended up having to box her up and spend 20 minutes clucking incessantly to a frantic hen who was dashing herself against the box sides whenever I had to stop or turn the car.  I took her to OmegaDad’s office so he could take her to her vet appointment; I had to be back at home to pick up the dotter at the bus stop, feed her a healthy snack, oversee the homework, and take her off to gymnastics.

When we returned, OmegaDad had Fluff quarantined in the downstairs bathtub (the cats and their accoutrements were kicked out and the door closed), in fear of Marek’s disease, a highly contagious viral cancer that strikes chickens when they are around four or five months old.  It seems that the vet was extremely concerned because Fluff suddenly can’t walk.

I’m hoping it’s because Fluff kept bashing against the box.  I have become too attached to the chickens, and find the egg laying to be somewhat of a treasure hunt…It would suck royally to have our little flock of very individualistic birds be laid waste by a virus.

In my previous post, I deliberately left out a rumor that had been sweeping the internet, that Palin’s fifth child was actually her eldest daughter’s child.  First off, I don’t like repeating unsubstantiated rumors, and secondly–well, whoo boy, some of the “reasoning” that went on was just silly.

For instance, she didn’t look pregnant, and all women who are on their fifth pregnancy look much more pregnant than their first, and here’s a picture of her with her first, where she’s all blown up like a balloon, and no-one knew she was pregnant until she announced it in her 7th month.

Obviously, the people who used that as reasoning have never been around a woman who has gotten pregnant more than once–or else they have, and they assume that all women follow exactly the same pattern as the woman/women they have known.  Palin had her first child when she was a stay-at-home mom-to-be.  Now she’s a high-powered go-getter who likes to run.  I know someone who “likes to run” who was pregnant with twins, who didn’t look pregnant at all until she was in her 7th month.

Then there’s the “44-year-old women don’t get pregnant accidentally” commentary.  This was bolstered with deep discussion about the success rates for IVF for women in their 40s.

Excuse me while I howl with laughter at that one.  Haven’t these people ever heard of “oops babies” or “menopause babies”?  And applying statistics on IVF success rates for infertile women to a woman who had already had four children and is obviously fertile as all get out is…um…let me put this gently…stupid as hell.

What about the “Mat-Su Regional Medical Center’s baby nursery web page doesn’t show Trig Palin being born on that day!” excuse.  Somehow, the nursery web page is supposed to be equivalent to official hospital records.  ::blink::  The last I had heard, those nursery web pages were strictly a voluntary thing on the part of the parents.

We’ve got the “no woman in her right mind would get on an airplane to fly eight hours when she was leaking amniotic fluid!  She would have checked into the nearest hospital!”  Maybe, maybe not.  Maybe she’s not a panicky person?  Maybe she actually (gasp!) called her OB and (gasp!) asked what to do and was reassured that things would no doubt hold until she made it…home.  Yes, amazingly enough, she may have wanted to give birth at the hospital she was familiar with, with the doctor she was familiar with, surrounded by her family?  The birthing fascists are particularly appalled at this one, pointing the finger of judgmental disapproval at her for risking the life and health of her baaaaaybeee.  Wondering just how dire “leaking amniotic fluid” is, I approached Teh Mighty Google.  And nowhere did I see “OMG, get to a doctor right away, an eight-hour airplane flight is bad bad news, your baby may die!”  In fact, a lot of the websites I found said, “First, find out if it is amniotic fluid” and “it can be because of a small tear in the sac that can heal or it could be pre-term labor” and “then your doctor or midwife can help you decide what to do, depending on how premature your child is…”

My assumption:  She checked with her doctor, her doctor told her given the circumstances she could fly back home and s/he would see her the next day, and when she was seen, the doc said, looks like you’ve leaked a lot of fluid, and it’s probably best if you give birth today.

But, hey, that’s me.  It just amazes me that there’s a whole slew of women out there whose battle cry is “pregnancy is not a medical condition!” who seem to have gone bonkers at the mention that Sarah Palin was OMG leaking amniotic fluid and obviously she doesn’t have the judgement to become a vice president.  I would have thought that there’d be a whole slew of women who thought, “Hey, a mom who’s given birth four times, capable and competent, knows her body, knows how her body handles pregnancies, she and her doctor together think it’s okay to return home, way to go Sarah!”  Nope.

So I didn’t discuss that rumor. 

But this morning McCain and Palin decided to release the news that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and getting married because that rumor was getting so much notice on the intertubes.  Sigh.  Yes, I do think that Bristol’s pregnancy is relevant given Palin’s policy of support for abstinence-only sex-education.  Yes, I do think that Bristol’s pregnancy is relevant given Palin’s policy of wanting abortions to be illegal.  Yes, part of me wonders if Bristol has actually been given a real choice–abort, adopt out, have the baby–or was told what to do.  I sorrow for the abrupt change from carefree teenager-hood to parenthood for her, but am sure that she’ll do just fine given the support of her family.  I’m glad that under current laws, Bristol has the choice, and I will do what I can to ensure that my own dotter, when she is 17, also has the choice should she be in that situation.

But y’know what?  There are plenty of other things about Palin that should concern people who are voting in this election.  I don’t think, frankly, that the state of her family is anyone’s business.  Let’s concentrate on the issues, people.  There are oodles of issues that the two campaigns differ widely on.  Let’s not get caught up in gossipy, judgmental finger-pointing.

This public service announcement brought to you by OmegaMom, She Of The Shiny Halo.