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

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

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

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

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

In a word:  Yuck.

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

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

It breaks my heart.

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

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

OmegaDad is sick.

I French-braided the dotter’s hair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whocoodanode?

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

Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was not taken with Emotional Distress, oh no.

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

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

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

I do not know where that came from.  Har.

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

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

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

ESTP - The Doers

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

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

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

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

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

These are classics.

Mine was a bit different:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ugh.

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

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

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

This…this is the morning ritual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The young one drifts behind.

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

The young one dawdles.

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

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

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

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

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

Har.

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

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

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

Booyah!  And woot!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ooog.

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

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

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

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

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

And I still had a day for the sale!

Double woot!

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

And now I’m bummed.

Because they’re all sold out in bigger sizes.

Wah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, bullshit.

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

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

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

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

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

Your vote does count.  Yes, it does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some fun stuff:

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

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

Off to do some NyQuil.  Drugs are good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…the heterosexual marriage rate has increased.

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

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

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

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

Bah.

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

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

BUT!

Luckily for OmegaDad, there is that “but”.

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

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

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

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

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

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