OmegaMom

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

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

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

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

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

There is one spectacular cartwheel.

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

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

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

Har.

Yes, we have a chicken in the garage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I promptly forgot about my Jumbo Club membership.

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

Once again, the trial versions expired.

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

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

Whoops!

But!

But!

I now had 9 game credits!  Woot!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have written about packaging and Christmas before.

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

More later, I promise.

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

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

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

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

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

You can see where this is going, right?

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

Tomorrow, I write about homework again…

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

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

Oops.

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

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

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

Say what?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homework.

I get her a snack.

We pull out the folder.

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

I read various notes from the school.

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

I wait.

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

I wait.

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

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

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

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

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

I pull out the spelling homework.

She grabs the orange marker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such fun.

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

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

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

…and if you had the Winds of Hell blowing…

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

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

…only to be buffeted once again.

Ugh.

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

I am still questioning whether I was taken or not.

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

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

Context is everything, right?

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

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

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

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

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

She said yes.

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

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

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

Pool.

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

Step with me back to the days of yesteryear.

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

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

He was hawt, guys.  Oh so hawt.

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

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

It was a mighty fine sight to see.

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

Um.

Excuse me, is it getting warm in here?

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

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

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

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

Ugh.

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