OmegaMom

I bought a Very Special Gift for OmegaDotter this Christmas.  It was very small.  So I decided to do the box-within-a-box-within-a-box approach; I wrapped the VSG, put a bow on it, and a note saying it was the last box, dumped it all into another box, gift-wrapped that one with bow and note, etc.  The end result was nice and big.

I was actually rather nervous about doing this:  either she would think it was funny, or she would get horribly frustrated, and I had no idea which way she would lean.

Anyway.  Since she opened it first, I wasn’t ready with the camera, so the settings were wrong for the first box:

Second box—she was kind of perplexed:

Third box—she was getting the hang of it, and was amused.  I have a picture of her laughing, with the box already unwrapped, so we’ll use this one:

Fourth box—she’s giggling:

The VSG revealed—I think she likes it:  she screamed!

What was it?  An iPod nano, filled to the brim with songs I knew she liked.  She has since wandered the house with it connected by umbilical cord, belting out various songs—in particular, Fireflies by Owl City, which has been an earworm for both of us, as well as various Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus songs. 

Now, onto the consumer review:  OMG.  Apple has the “user-friendly”, ergonomic approach down to an art.  Or a science.  When I was setting it up for her, I pulled it out of its little box, plugged it into the computer, and *boom*, it hooked to my iTunes and started walking me through it.  Once it was loaded with music, *boom*, I was using it.  I am truly, truly impressed with the ease-of-use of this gadget—the dotter had figured out all the buttons (in particular, how to replay Fireflies over and over and over again) within a short time.  Now I want one…or maybe an iPhone, which does all the same stuff, plus.

The flurry of Christmas wrapping is done, and the presents are under the tree.  OmegaDad has almost completed his piece de resistance, the gingerbread barn, which is awesome.  Tonight’s dinner:  salmon and potato fans—yum.  The dotter has demonstrated to me—many, many times—just what technique she is going to use to jump upon me and OmegaDad tomorrow early in the morning to wake us up for Santa presents.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, peaceful Kwanzaa, and a joyous Festivus to all my readers.

I could so easily become a true pagan here in Alaska.  I woke up this morning and knew it was the day of the winter solstice…and I felt like dancing.  I felt like carefully nursing a flame awake from a coal saved the day before, in symbolic token of the flame in the sky that will grow again.  I felt like turning somersaults, or zipping from room to room yelling “YIPPEE!!!”, or just jumping up and down in incoherent glee.

I posted it on Facebook.  I posted it on Twitter.  And here I am, posting it on the ol’ bloggeroo.

I have so much sympathy and understanding for all those northern European folk who were really into winter solstice celebrations.  Yes, this is the official “start” of winter.  Hereabouts, though, winter has been here since early November (much later than usual).  Yes, winter will hang around for four more months.  But at least the darkness will disappear!

Just for general information, here’s what the sun was doing today:

At its height—around 1 p.m.—the sun got a whopping 5-1/2 degrees above the horizon (as noted in the graphic).  Flip the graph over and that’s what it’ll be on the summer solstice (or thereabouts).

I’m happy, happy, happy.  Yeah, it’ll still be dark for a long time tomorrow.  And the day after.  And after that.  But y’know what?  By mid-January, the day will be getting longer by leaps and bounds—five or six minutes per day.

To celebrate, go check out Starts With A Bang; he’s got some really cool pictures—time-lapse photos of the sun at winter solstice, plus a nifty year-long time-lapse showing the analemma that the sun moves through over the year.

We have had a series of foggy, foggy nights here in the Valley, and with the fog comes a beautiful after-effect:  hoar frost.  The fog hangs in the air, the icy nights precipitate the fog onto any nearby surface, and the droplets of water freeze and build upon each other into an airy, fairy coating on trees, branches, signs, fences.  Then the sunlight comes out, and in all directions you see a sea of frosty white.  This time, instead of just one night, we had many nights in a row with the fog, and instead of breezes blowing the delicate frost formations off the surfaces during the day (which usually happens), they have stayed and the next night’s precipitation can build upon the last night’s.

The fog, of course, is not homogenous; you have areas where the fog is thick and areas where it drifts and blows and thins out…all of which shows up in the amount of frost that deposits on the surfaces.

This phone pole, for instance, didn’t get much frost:

It looks just like kids’ experiments with crystallizing sugar or salt.

This batch of trees on a ridgeline caught the sunlight; on our side of the ridge, it was dark:

A little later in the day, I wandered by Suburban Alaska Lake, and was able to photograph this lovely set of little trees, all covered with the frost:

A closer look reveals the leaf-like structure of the frost sticking to the branches (dig that vibrant blue sky!  We don’t see that very often around here!):

And then I went all macro:

It really is both beautiful and fascinating.

This was the view across the lake.  See how all the trees along the right side of the picture are covered, while the trees on the left side are only covered halfway down?  The frost never got that low on the left side:

When I got home, this was the view in the backyard:

The frost doesn’t cling to the evergreens the way it does to the deciduous trees; I’m not sure why.

I had to drive off to our neighborhood crossing of the Little Lady river, to see what it looked like in this fairy frosting:

You can see how the sunlight only hits part of the view; that’s because the sun doesn’t get high enough in the sky to light up the whole area, since it’s in a little dip.

So:  This was the post that was supposed to get done yesterday.  Hah.  The broken nose makes me realize just how mobile my face is; I am constantly lifting an eyebrow or twitching my nose, and each time I do that, it hurts.  It doesn’t look like much, really—I am not sporting the advertised raccoon eyes, which surprises me.  All I have is a few scrapes and the swollenness, but even that isn’t much compared to what it could be.  The part that hurts the most, actually, is my neck and shoulders—I plowed in face first, so jammed my head.  Call it “face plant whiplash”!

Many thanks for all the readerly sympathy! 

I was going to post pics of the lovely frost we’ve had recently…

Or maybe post pics from the Christmas parade and fireworks show this evening…

But instead, I decided to trip in the garage, face-plant myself, and break my nose.  The ER doc says I will be sporting a fine pair of black eyes tomorrow.  In the meantime, I am zone-y on Percocet and not really capable of any writing of any depth or clarity or wit.

Manana, folks.

OmegaDotter and I are slated to go visit GrannyJ between Christmas and New Year’s.  OmegaBro will be there with his family, so we’ll have plenty of fun—lots of visiting, good eats, hanging out, playing with cousins, day trips.

Last year, my visit to Arizona was before Christmas.  The year before, it was before Christmas.  This year, it is after.

And, oh, lordy, what a difference it makes.

I have hit the wall.  I am drowning in the darkness.  I held out as long as I could, and was in fairly good spirits.  Somewhere in the past week, however, my body recognized that It Is Dark, and shut down.  I wake up and am totally, absolutely exhausted.  I could sleep all day long.  When I’m awake, I feel like I’m just going through the motions.  And today the tide of darkness swept over me, and all I felt was miserable.  Totally, absolutely, miserable.  Lead ball in the stomach miserable.  Bitchy, snappy, petty, angry, and underneath it all, on the verge of tears miserable.

Yes, the Magic Light helps.  Yes, the little blue pills help.  But they’re not enough.

Yes, the solstice is coming, and soon the light will be growing and the darkness will be shrinking.  But right now, that doesn’t help.

This is the time when I need to be going somewhere with more than six hours of daylight, with the sun more than 6 degrees over the horizon.  Rumor has it that the Nords and the Swedes are grim and gloomy during the winter—I can totally relate.

Just four weeks.  I can handle four weeks.  Two weeks to the solstice, three weeks until I’m in Arizona for a week, then back here and the days will start getting longer.

Then:

Now:

It doesn’t seem possible that seven years have passed.  Seven years ago, right now, we were on our way to Nanning after a lovely dim sum breakfast in the Guangzhou airport.  We actually signed the papers around 5 p.m. on December 8 in China, which would be around 7 a.m. here, and we met her around 6 p.m., which would be 8 a.m. here.

She’s pretty amazing.  We’re pretty damned lucky.

OmegaDotter had a silver crown put on one of her molars more than two years ago.  In the meantime, she has lost baby teeth and gained adult teeth, and her teeth are pushing on each other in various ways.  As a result, her silver crown started bothering her, and the night before last she told me as we were putting her to bed that it was poking into her cheek and hurting.

So I called up and made an appointment, which happened to be this morning at 9 a.m.

We drove in through the early twilight.  The mountains were just visible against the pink and lavender and purple clouds and the deep blue sky.

It took a little over an hour to remove the crown and put in a new filling (the dotter is very happy that it doesn’t hurt anymore, but sad that her shiny crown is gone).  I dropped her off at school.  Then I just had to get the camera and try to capture the skies.  I drove off to the Valley Resort, on the shores of Lake Suburban Alaska, noticing as I made the turns and peered through the trees towards the mountains that, OMG, the sun was actually rising, and if I didn’t get there soon, I wouldn’t be able to take that picture.

I got there just in time–10:25 a.m.  Five minutes later, the curve of the sun was over that saddle, and I would have had to fiddle with ISO settings to keep the sunlight from drowning everything else out.

(Sunrise was officially at 9:55 a.m., but those mountains were in the way.)

Our snow on top of melting snow and ice produced a phalanx of icicles hanging down from the roof beside the kitchen.  I liked the repeating vertical lines behind and in front of the fluffy snow-draped firs.

For your viewing pleasure:  The Big Picture once again does a Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar for December; go enjoy the purty pictures and remember to check back each day!

For more viewing pleasure:  absolutely incredible renderings of a 3-D Mandelbrot set.  Think of a 3-D fractal…Mathematics made beautiful!  I particularly like this one, which the creator has described as “shell life“.

I am enjoying the new C-Pop singers–thank you very much for your suggestions!  Since the dotter is mostly into bouncy dance-type music, I will wander through them picking and choosing (no Deserts Chang, alas!  But I think she’s groovy!).  Fantasia is also a great idea.

To finish things up, here is the world’s very best Poker Face parody, called “NeutraFace”, starring bearded designer geeks having fun.  Enjoy.  (I now want to have bearded nerds emerge from my bathtub):

The sun rose at 9:49 in the morning, and will set at 3:51 p.m., just a few more minutes.  We had a visit from the Pineapple Express yesterday; it is Alaska’s answer to the Polar Express.  Where the Polar Express is a blast of frigid Arctic air that swirls down into the Midwest following a huge dip in the jet stream, the Pineapple Express is a blast of warm air direct from Hawaii that barrels into South Central Alaska, melting the snow and ice and producing precipitation of one form or another.

First we got the melt.  You’d think this would be great, wouldn’t you?  But, alas, what it does is denude the forests of the one thing that keeps it bright in the wintertime, and leaves the skies gray.

Then we got the storm.  Where the Omegas live, it came as a day of rain–we were up to 40F.  But to the west, only about 30 miles away, the temperature was low enough that it came as snow, a huge snowstorm on the Lady River that dumped 30+ inches of snow in the hinterlands and in Small Alaskan Tourist Town That Prompted Northern Exposure.  A substitute school secretary in SATTTPNE said they had enough snow that the littlies, kindergartners and first-graders, were disappearing into the snowdrifts.

And then the weather turned cooler here, and our rain turned to snow.  So:  we had wet streets, car, trees, that iced up, then got snowed on.  Then the skies turned clear.

When I drove the dotter in to school, the full moon was hovering over the trees in the west side of the school parking lot.  The sun was just barely beginning to light up the skies to the east.  I dropped her off, ran to the convenience store, and drove home…but that lovely picture of the moon looming over the trees called to me.  At home, I ran into the office, grabbed the camera and drove back to the school, determined to get that picture.

Alas, it didn’t quite work out the way I wanted–I wanted that moon in the trees to be as crisp and clear as it was to my vision.  Since I haven’t worked out the ins and outs of the camera workings, I couldn’t figure out how to make everything in focus and not too bright.  So what you see above is what you get:  Moonlit trees slightly lighted by the first, faint blush of daylight.

It was beautiful.

That is what I live for, up here in Alaska during the winter.  Moments like that.  Because there is so much darkness at this time of year, and my annual bitchfest about the ever-encroaching darkness is revving up.  I talk to people on the phone…they say, “How d’you like the cold winters in Alaska?” with a bit of laughter in their voices.  And I talk to them about The Darkness.

It’s just a month or two that it’s bad, mind you.  I know that the winter solstice is fast approaching, and that three weeks after that, we will settle into the long cold bright time of year, where the days get longer but the chill of winter settles in deeper.  The cold is okay, really.  Because the sun comes out more and more each day, and sparkles off the snow and the mountains and the ice covering the inlet and the rivers and the waterfalls, so it is beautiful.  And behind it all is the knowledge that The Dark is Dying, the sun is coming back, spring will be here soon, and we will be into the Season of The Gloaming.

But that month and a half to two months where it just gets darker and darker?  It gets to me.  The sun was 6.8 degrees above the horizon today at its height.  That’s low.  That’s like “late afternoon just before sunset” low.

(The solstice is coming.  It’ll get here.  The dark will go away.)

I’ve got a little list of music to buy the dotter for Christmas, to go with her Big Present from me.  We’ve got some Don Henley, Elton John, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Petty, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, Feist’s “1-2-3-4″, Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, Taylor Swift, Kidz Bop, a Beyonce, some Chris Rock, a Sean Kingston, some High School Musical and Shrek…and to fill in the Chinese pop section, we have some Wilber Pan, Angela Zhang, S.H.E., and Jolin Tsai.

But I need some suggestions for classic or older rock, more C-pop, and new American stuff.  So, parents of 8-9-10 year olds:  What are your kids listening to?

Peach said, in response to my Dear Diary post:

I have to admit that when I read your response to her questions (maybe not given to her, but the ones you expressed ~ about it being unlikely that she could find her first parents, or her poster could get her parents in trouble?), it bothered me.
As adoptees we grow up completely believing what our adoptive parents tell us about the circumstances around our adoption. But when we become adults and find out more information (more than our parents said was available) it brings with it emotions that “just is” ~ nothing our adoptive parents could say or do will take them away or keep us from having to walk through the grief, no matter how hard they try. And it even more invalidation when we sense our adoptive parents are trying so hard to do this for us ~ to take away our pain, through their answers, honest or not.

It’s a hard balance.  I admit that I am a glass-half-empty person a lot of the time–one way of looking at it, though I prefer to think of it as “pragmatic” or “realistic”.  I do think it unlikely that, given what information we have, we could find anything, due to the fact that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.

Or at least, the information we were given says that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.  Which is one of the problems:  that information could be made up of whole cloth.  And we don’t know.

How do you carefully get this across to an almost-eight-year-old?  We don’t know.  Anything.  For sure.  How do you tell a child who hasn’t experienced a really big city just how many people there are there?  How do you explain that what information we have is a grain of sand on a big beach?  How do you say, “Even what we know, we don’t know that it is true”?

I have been very careful, all along, to say, “We think” or “we were told” or “the orphanage says” about these things.  But what one person says, another person may not hear, or may hear through a filter.  I say, “We think it must have been very hard for your birthmother to leave you.”  OmegaDotter may hear, “Your birthmother was devastated.”  I say, “The orphanage says you were left at the gates of XYZ.”  She may hear, “That is where you were left.”  How do you tell a child that adults lie about things like this?  She’s still at a stage where hearing me say “Bullshit!” accidentally when we’re playing B.S. (a card game–quite fun, taught to us by Aunt L. and cousins K. and I.) makes her gasp and say, “Oh!  You said the b…sh… word!  That means cow poop, but you’re not supposed to say it!”

Yes, I want to protect her.  Yes, I know it doesn’t help, in the end.  But the things that are wrapped around these questions are…well, more mature issues, questions of honesty and decency in adults, questions of the general ethics of international adoptions, questions of the problems of involving large amounts of money in the transferrence of responsibility for a small human being, questions of “human trafficking”.  I want her to know about these things, but in an age-appropriate manner.  So I start small.  I use weasel words, semantics…”we think”, “we were told”, “the orphanage says”…all of which are true, and all of which mean “this is information but it’s not the biblical truth”.  I have, in talking about her birthmother, told the dotter about the one child laws, and how they have changed; I have also mentioned that it’s possible her mother was young and unable to raise a child.  As she gets older, the more nuanced versions come out more.

Youngsters are concrete thinkers.  But as the dotter is getting older, she is becoming more aware that black-white thinking doesn’t always fit the world around her.  International adoption–hell, private domestic adoption, even adoption through the state–all of these have shades of grey on all sides.  So as she becomes more able to shade her own thinking about the world, so can we start offering more shades to her own story.

There are people who have searched for Chinese birthparents, with some successes.  Brian Stuy, of Research-China, has interviewed some birthmothers, and in Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China, Kay Ann Johnson also found and interviewed a number of Chinese birthmothers.  So birth families can be found, and some people have located their own children’s birth families.  Then I have heard tales of birth parents who have anonymously contacted people trying to locate them, pleading with them to not continue, because they are afraid of the repercussions.

There have been tens of thousands of children adopted from China in the past 15 years, and the number of located birthparents is still very small.

So:  How to say, “we will help you look” without it turning–in a child’s magical way of thinking–into “we will find your birthmother NOW”?  How to instill a realistic view of the probabilities?  How to find that balance?

The subject of international birth parent searching has also recently been discussed on This Woman’s Work and today on American Family.  Let me know what y’all think, too…

It snowed last night, a heavy, wet snow, unlike our normal dry powder.  This was the kind of snow that lingered on branches and made the area look very Currier and Ives-like.

We had small branches draped with the stuff:

We had the pea cables and posts topped off with white confection:

(The pea cables are a particularly proud piece of work from the hands of OmegaDad.  They don’t quite work the way we had planned, but they do provide a scaffolding for the pea plants to climb up–so long as we remember to get out there and start lacing pea runners properly early and often.  Otherwise our peas end up turning into viny clumps.)

This little lovely–a snow-covered rosehip–was in a very awkward spot.  I tried shooting it without the flash, but the light was dim enough that it needed to have a slow shutter, and the awkward spot made it so that every time I tried without the flash, my hands shook just enough so it was completely out of focus.  But the flash shot makes it pop, and it was so pretty, I thought I’d include it anyway:

The rosebushes here in Alaska have great big fat rosehips, the size of the last joint of my thumb.  We tried making jams from rosehips this summer; alas, the rosehips themselves have a pretty blah taste.  One would expect them to be zappy and zingy in flavor, but, no, they’re just very bland.

Our back yard:

The pictures were shot at about 3:30 p.m.  It was cloudy and still snowing, and the sun is setting at 3:58, so everything is rather dim.  Rumor has it we got six inches of snow; this is enough of a snowfall to warrant its own listing of snowfall totals from around the area on the National Weather Service forecast page.  We are still about 11 inches short on normal snowfall–we got plenty of precipitation in the form of rain earlier in the fall/winter, when the weather was still unseasonally warm.

It’s very pretty.  The kids (the dotter has her best friend A. over to spend the night) got cold and soaked from an hour of playing in it.

The real estate agent who helped us find our house (and is a dear, close, personal friend of our ex-governor’s) is a relentless saleswoman.  We get letters in the mail with helpful tips and tricks!  We get–at irregular intervals–a coupon to a local ice cream store or dollars off on purchases at a locally owned business.  And, this Thanksgiving, we were given a pie, apple or pumpkin.

So, we now have a store-bought pumpkin pie for free, sitting in our fridge.

We have a turkey thawing out, alternately in the sink and in the fridge.

We have lemons and rosemary and garlic to stuff the turkey with.

We have taters, parsley, and cheese for OmegaDad’s trademarked Green Smashed Potatoes.  (Om nom nom!)

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

All that’s left is for us to put together the feast.  I will provide chopping and dicing; OmegaDad is le chef and I will do only his bidding in the kitchen.

It is time to list the things in life that make us thankful.  Really, it would be a good idea to do this on a regular basis; maybe the world would be a better place for it.  So long as it’s quiet and private and not trumpeted to the world.  My tidbits of thankfulness wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the world; they’re all small and personal and, face it, pretty damned selfish.  What I am thankful for, someone else may find picayune, and vice versa.

Number one on my list is OmegaDad.  This guy is an endless font of incredible spoonerisms and malaprops that leave me laughing at the same time as I am left in gaping awe at his inventiveness.  I have asked how he does it, and he shrugs:  it just sort of “comes out–I don’t do it on purpose…”  We have been together for almost 16 years, and I still find things to talk with him about, still find him gentle and sweet and thoughtful and intelligent.  And, dayum, he cooks up a storm, dontcha know!  This year’s focus has been bread, and we have been the recipients of yummy flatbreads, lavosh, pizza dough, challah, plain white bread, breadsticks, French bread, tortillas, and homemade hamburger buns.  Wow.

Next is OmegaDotter.  She’s just amazing.  OmegaDad recently challenged her to finally pin down her back flip, offering a differing amount of money depending on how long it takes her to get it solid.  In the course of a week, she has managed to reach the point of always flipping over and 75% of the time ending up on her feet again.  (The practice is on our bed.)  She is reading by herself, and we alternate nights when I read to her with nights when she reads to me.  Every once in a while she will bestow a piece of artwork on us that makes my jaw drop.  And she’s beginning to bring out more and more unasked-for flashes of empathy and moral grounding.  Yee-haw!

Then there’s GrannyJ.  She’s 82 and still going strong, walking her small town, taking photographs, blogging and nourishing a local blogging community, and challenging me with new and interesting science fiction authors all the time.

We have our health.  We have our house.  We have friends and family.  We have a standard of living that would make 70% of the world gasp in awe.

We had Kai for eleven years–that’s good.  We’ve discovered that chickens, though they may be pretty damned dumb, still have a lot of personality.  Our garden overflowed with vegetables, even though we were moosed at times.  We have long, lovely hours of sunshine in the summer to balance out the cold dark months of winter.

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. friends and readers, and generally thankful warm fuzzies to my non-U.S. followers!

Some thirty years ago, I got sick.  And sicker.  And sicker.  So I finally hauled myself off to a doctor somewhere (I do not remember where, or how) and got diagnosed with mononucleosis.  And tonsillitis.  And strep throat.  All at once.  It hurt like hell.  So this doctor prescribed antibiotics for the items that were bacterial, lots of rest for the mono, and some kind of painkiller so that I could actually swallow the other items.

I was supposed to pop the painkillers every four hours.

By the time a day had passed, I was having psychotic delusions that there were giant white rats and cockroaches crawling up the walls of my apartment.

This was not, I am guessing, the intended result.  I ended up calling a friend in the middle of the night, sobbing, and asking that she help me walk the stuff off, or at least keep me company until it wore off.  We flushed the remainder of the pills down the toilet.

This was my first introduction to the idea of idiosyncratic reactions to drugs.

Last Thursday, I got a sudden backache in an unusual spot–mid-back, right below my ribs.  I’ve had an on-again, off-again urinary tract infection, so worried about kidneys.  When the backache didn’t go away, and I kept getting sharp pains in two points directly over where my kidneys should be, I decided to haul my butt off to the doc-in-a-box Monday morning.  (The DIAB offices were quite full and it took forever.)

No bacteria showed in my sample (?!), but the doc decided to treat it empirically:  if I felt like it was my kidneys, probably the best thing to do would be to do some antibiotics and some UTI drugs.

Oh, and while we’re at it, here’s some Tramadol for the pain (”non-narcotic pain relief” quoth the doc).

So I sashay off, get the prescription filled, come home, and pop some pills.

Fifteen minutes later, I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open.  I staggered into the bedroom with a book, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.  I sat at the dinner table in a daze, ate a bite or two of food, then wandered back to bed.  At 7:30 a.m., the phone rings, it’s my wake-up call for the day from OmegaDad…I spend an hour awake–in a daze–getting the dotter up and breakfasted and out the door and realize it might be a good idea to email work.  I open up the email program, start typing my boss’s name.  Except I can’t type; it’s gibberish.  I take a deep breath, reposition my hands, and start typing again.  This time it’s only half gibberish.  I take a deep breath, reposition my hands again, and start typing one.  Letter.  At.  A.  Time.

And then I went back to bed.

The end result:  One pill.  Twenty-one hours of deep sleep.  Four hours after that of space-y zoniness; awake, but totally unable to be, say, productive or coherent.

Oh, I woke up here and there.  Let’s see:  the pain-killing portion ran out about six hours in, I know, because I came to enough to think, “Hunh.  It hurts again.”  And I woke up around 11:30 p.m., rested my zoned out eyeballs on the clock, and thought, “I really need to get up to write a filler post for NaBloPoMo.”  Fifteen minutes later, I did the same thing.  Obviously, nothing got done.

So now I know:  no more Tramadol–or related items–for me.

Maybe next year I’ll actually complete NaBloPoMo.  So close!  Wah!

The antibiotics seem to be helping, though.

(And I am totally amused that no-one commented on my defiant liking of Lady Ga-Ga.  I must have stunned everyone into awed and appalled silence.)

One of the joys of Teh Intarwebz is that you can hover on the cusp of current culture, dip in and out like a hummingbird, and still live your own old boring everyday life.

For example:  I have taken to watching shows on Hulu.com.  Alas, I am also aware that Hulu.com is talking about becoming a subscription-only (that means $$) service come sometime in 2010; having found Hulu, I am about to lose Hulu.  Anyway, enough grief; I have found that I can watch Glee and Stargate: Universe on Hulu if I miss those shows the night before, and am happy.

In addition, when brouhahas such as Kanye West’s drunken outburst disrespecting Nice Girl Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Video awards occur, I can scour the web the day after to (a) see what actually happened, and (b) get down with all the nominated music videos.

Which leads me to my headline.  Actually, “led me to my headline”–I watched the nominated videos and found…

There’s a new Star (use your joisey accent on that:  “Stah!”) in the pop music firmament name of Lady Ga-Ga.  Lady Ga-Ga sings catchy pop songs that drip sexual innuendo in music videos that are pop art celebrations of out-and-out (::gasp!:: ::OMG!:: ::catch me while I blush and faint::) lewd sexuality.  She wears nude body suits.  She feels herself up.  She feels up guys.  They feel her up.  She wears outre makeup.  She wears outre clothes.  It is a wild Warholian act; it’s also a wild dionysian act.

And damn.  I love her.

I am aware that some of my readers absolutely positively thoroughly despise her.  (I’m talking to you, PAgent!)  I am aware that my cachet as an intellectual pseudo-counter-cultural ex-almost-hippie is tarnished beyond repair by saying it, but there it is.

I think she’s hilarious.  I love her over-the-top persona, her over-the-top hair, her over-the-top makeup, and her over-the-top music videos.  (I will admit, however, that these are music videos I do not want the dotter seeing.  When the dotter arrived home one day humming the tune to “Poker Face” and saying she had to show me a video, I practically plotzed.  Who the #@!& was showing this smutty stuff to my seven-year-old daughter?!?!  And then she started singing the words, and I realized that she was smitten by a parody video.  Whew.  Crisis averted!)

Then I discovered some interviews of her.  And I loved those–she’s snarky and snotty and playing the interviewers and leaps upon sexism.  And I discovered plenty of YouTubery where she’s doing her hit songs in live venues, small clubs or radio stations, one-on-one, just her and her piano.  I loved those, too–she sings like a torch singer, then switches off into a staccato singing silliness, then back to the torch singer.

Lady Ga-Ga is a mix of early Madonna, Elton John at his most flamboyant, and…and…oh, damn, give me a name of a torch singer from the forties, please.  She is a character and a half, and I go ga-ga over her.

Here’s the parody:

Here’s the original–no embedding, bah.

And here’s a live version:

I’m busy reading Predator, by Patricia Cornwall.  It’s creepy.  Really creepy.  And confusing.  Judging by the reviews on Amazon, lots of folks feel the same way.  But, still…

Mid-day yesterday, my back started hurting right beneath my bottom ribs.  I have no idea what I did to it, though given the location worry about kidneys and stuff like that.  It kept on hurting throughout the day.  When the dotter came home from school, I grumped about it…the next thing I know, she brings me an ice pack from the freezer and asks where to put it.

Later that night, in bed, I was still hurting.  Half asleep, half awake, middle of the night, I sort of mumble an “ow!” or two.  The dotter has been sleeping in our bed while OmegaDad is out of town, in a nest of sleeping bag, her favorite “Chix rule!” blankie, a down comforter, her roll-up pink fake-fur kitty cat pillow, and a stuffed duck.  So there I am, dazed and asleep and hurting, and suddenly a hand reaches out, pats me three times, strokes me gently, and she whispers, “There, there.  It’s okay.”  And I go back to sleep.

Aw, man.  She’s a Good Kid, dammit.

Instant negotiation mode:  Anyone who has been a parent can recognize that.  It’s when the child asks for something, and you give an answer that isn’t what that child wants, and the child immediately starts pushing the boundary back.  It’s how “maybe” or “I’ll think about it” gets magically re-arranged into “yes” in a child’s mind.  It’s how “next Saturday” becomes “tomorrow” when there’s talk of a friend coming over, or “one piece of candy after dinner” turns into “three!  now!”

So we have told the dotter that we will be visiting China when she’s 10 or 11.  This immediately gets turned into “why not when I’m 9?  Or 8?” whenever it comes up.

Why not?  Well, there are finances.  A trip to China is spendy:  there are the flights, the hotels, the meals, the tours, the museums, the tour guides, more.  This means saving up money.  (Sigh.  Really.  I actually looked just now at real, current prices for heritage tours, plus prices for air fare.  So, yeah, 10…that would give us enough time to save up the dough.)  In addition, there’s the question of maturity.  A trip when she’s 8 is likely to become a blur when she’s an adult, whereas a trip when she’s 10 is more likely to leave specifics in the memory.

A trip to China when she’s young is not an “if”, though it may have seemed like it to some readers.  A series of trips to China is an “if”.  In a perfect world, we would have enough money to traipse across the continents whenever the whim took us, but this is not a perfect world.  (Actually, in a perfect world, she would have been raised by her birthparents, and this would all be moot.)  We are able to say “Yes, we will take you to China” once; we cannot guarantee more than that.

My international adoptee readers may not like that, but that’s the way it goes:  We can schedule one trip, we may schedule two, and it would be really nice but very unlikely to do more than that before the dotter hits college age and starts wanting to make her own travel itineraries, probably including such parent-pleasing destinations as Ft. Lauderdale or Baja California during spring break.

(Excuse me while I start hyperventilating and practically faint at the very thought of my darlin’ innocent dotter in the midst of the heathen sun-loving, fun-loving, drinking & debauching freshmen and sophomores who crowd into the resorts during spring break.  Specifically male freshmen and sophomores who might be eyeing her with lustful intent.  ACK!  La-la-la, I’m not thinking about it!!!!)

Ahem.  Back now.

My non-adoption-related blog readers may think we shouldn’t do it at all.  That’s what’s interesting being the parent of an internationally adopted child in these days of Ye Olde Interwebz:  one can read all the mutterings, meanderings, thoughts and rants and dispassionately logical layouts of adult adoptees, and become assimilated into the Adoption Borg–but not quite enough, at which point the non-adoption people in one’s life think that you have become totally and absolutely obsessive about adoption and you’re going to turn the child into a neurotic wanker as a result. 

The upshot of all this:  none of your audience is completely satisfied.  Well, phooey on that:  We’re doing what we can, the best we think we can, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go suck lemons.  Or something like that.  Mainly, we’re tootling along in life doing what we think is best, and trying to keep adoption issues and Chinese culture an open item to integrate into the family dynamic without turning it into the be-all, end-all, and still doing the normal school- and summer-camp- and gymnastics- and holiday-gatherings- and family-visits-balance in life.

November keeps going, and I keep posting.  But by this point in time, it starts dragging.  I open up the blogging software and stare at a blank page, thinking, “There must be something interesting to blog about!”

Oh, there is.

I have my little list of questions to answer, from earlier in the month.  There’s still the “did you ever think of a sibling for OmegaDotter?” and the “There are people who deliberately cut off the culture of heritage?!?!” questions.

There’s also the comments on my “Dear Diary” post, which I do mean to respond to.

I also have a “great ladies of the family” series of posts in mind, talking about my great-aunties and how really nifty they were.

Plus a few more book reviews.

But right now, here’s the reality:

OmegaDad is out of town, at Chena Hot Springs (very cool place, by the way!), doing a work retreat/training/study combo.  I am left at home, holding down the fort.  This makes me realize just how very nice it is to have both of us here, together, functioning as a family, each of us (including the dotter) doing different things to keep the family rolling right along.  Not necessarily a lot, mind you, but each of us contributing enough to keep the rest from feeling like there’s just too much to do and not enough time to do it.

For instance, when OmegaDad is at home, I can take an hour earlier in the evening to putter about, think about things, and have something to start with when I face that blank page.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the parenting schtick, which takes time away from the blogging schtick.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the pet schtick.  Right now, that means checking on the chickens to be sure none of the other girls are coming down with The Chicken Plague.

With OmegaDad away, if I have a sick headache (like I did this afternoon), there are only two choices:  suck it up and deal with things while I’m feeling like puking and crying, or else (which I did) retreating to the bedroom, napping, and (a) letting the dotter play ToonTown and (b) letting the dotter watch TV until I wake up feeling better.  The dotter was a dream, making sure that she only did ToonTown for an hour (the Rule) and making sure that, when she turned on the TV, she turned it down and closed our bedroom door so it didn’t bother me.

It all boils down to one word:  Wah.  Or a command:  Pity me!  Har.  As if.  The world is full of single moms, and I salute them, because I don’t think I could do it all on my own, all the time.

I’m very tired.

I’ve spent the day putting small amounts of medicated water into the beak of a very very sick chicken, who wasn’t eating and wasn’t drinking.

And now I have to wrap up a dead chicken and figure out what to do with her.

Then I have to figure out how to let the dotter know that yet another of our pets has died.

Somewhere in there, I want to go to bed and sleep for days.

Chickens may be dumb clucks, but they have personalities and character.  Sarafina was a very sweet bird.

…Goes one of our chickens.  She’s been coughing and pretty languid for a couple of days; when we checked the chickens this evening, she had a bloody nose.

Dr. Google didn’t help.  But after some digging, the only things I could find that produce a bloody nostril discharge in chickens were avian influenza (ack!) and a piece by the USDA that said “serious avian disease”.

I was meaning to respond to some comments made by new readers to my post Dear Diary, but that will have to wait.  (Thanks to TonguMom for the link!)  Time to go out into the 17 below zero Fahrenheit weather and haul a sick chicken back into the garage…

Long ago and far away, when I was a teen-seguing-into-young-adult, I worked downtown in Chicago.  A block away from my office was Carson Pirie Scott & Co. (…sigh…), there were glamorous stores galore on State Street, and half a block away was the wondrousness that was Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore.  The paperback books were downstairs, and the science fiction area was tucked away in the back righthand corner.  It was a glorious spot for me to hang out in on rainy or snowy days, either during lunch hour or after work.

For a few years, I noticed a book on the shelves called “The Forgotten Beasts of Eld “, by a lady named Patricia McKillip, but never purchased it.  It had a stylized tapestry cover, with a white-haired girl surrounded by huge Beasts, and I would pick it up, read the back cover blurb–all of a paragraph long–and put it back, never being really tempted enough to buy it.  At the time, my 60 cents was better spent on Andre Nortons or (Oh, please don’t despise me!) Barbara Cartland (I swear, I swear, I stopped buying those things, really, truly, before she started writing in paragraphs one sentence long.).  (God, I can’t believe I am actually admitting to having purchased that woman’s books!)

Anyway.  One day, I broke down and bought the book.

I have been hooked on Patricia McKillip’s writing ever since.

The writing is lyrical, poetic, spare, sometimes haunting.  It is as if someone had taken an old myth, sung and storied for hundreds of years, and written it down as a novel.

Sybel is a witch, living isolated and alone on the top of a mountain, the daughter and granddaughter of cold, emotionless wizards who lived apart from humanity and “called” to whatever they wanted–including female companionship.  She has inherited a collection of Beasts, magical, wondrous creatures from myth and legend, who were “called” by her father and grandfather to live upon the mountain.  There is the Cat Moriah, there is the Falcon Ter, the Lyon Gules, the dragon Gyld, and most wondrous of all, the white-tusked Boar Cyrin, who speaks in riddles and koans.  (”The giant Grol was struck once in the eye by a stone, so that it turned and looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there.”)

All Sybel wants is to live her life with her Beasts and to find the Lyralin, a huge white bird with trailing wings, and “call” it to her.  But one day, her life is upended by a man in armor pounding at her gate.  He is carrying a baby.  He insists she take and rear the child, because it is the only place in the world where the child will live.

She takes in the child, saying she has cared for Beasts before, and surely caring for an infant can’t be that much different?

The warrior returns over the years at uneven intervals.  And between these visits and the growth of the baby, Sybel becomes drawn into the loves, hates, dramas and wars that pervade the outside world.  All the while, she is searching for the Lyralin, and begins being stalked by a mysterious, dark, foreboding being called Blammor. 

Darkness and light, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, isolation and immersion, and the nature of being true to yourself are all balanced in this book, written in a murmuring, poetic manner.

It’s short, it has absolutely no Dark Lords or elves or we-must-stop-the-end-of-the-world quests, but it ended up winning the World Fantasy Award the year it was written.  It was out of print for many years, and apparently McKillip does not regard it fondly, but it has been re-released.  I love McKillip’s later books as well, and would recommend any of them, but her writing is more…um…mannered now.  Beasts is McKillip as a fresh young writer, finding her voice, and it knocked my socks off 30 years ago (almost forty?!).

Okay, not the dark.  But definitely the cold.

The local school district had H1N1 vaccinations for registered students.  Having read tales of people waiting in lines for three, four hours to get the shot, I determined we should get there early.  We got there, not the first, but close to it, and waited inside the outer doors, but were not allowed inside the inner doors until it was Time.

In the meantime, more people came with their kids.  And more.  The airlock filled up with people.  And then still more came.

And these idiots propped the door open.

It was 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gah.

But once the time came, we got in and out within ten minutes.  The dotter and I went off to lunch together, then off to her gymnastics class, and then home again.

Not a sign of pain in her arm, not a whiff of fever, not a single side effect.  She was happy as a clam all day long.

“I’m as mad as hell, and I can’t take it anymore!”

Ahem.

What prompts this, you may ask.

This morning, after doing my exercise routine and showering, I sat down at the keyboard and started my telecommute sign-in process.  First, sign onto the VPN (virtual private network).  Next, start up the Remote Desktop Connection.  Then comes Outlook and, finally, Microsoft Communicator–the corporate kin of Microsoft Messenger, which requires a log-in to the campus network.

At which point, Remote Desktop bings and tells me it couldn’t connect.

So I try it again, and start reading my e-mail.

Then Remote Desktop bings again, telling me it can’t connect.

So I try it again, and keep it up.  This time, I get through to my “your password expires in three days” message, click on “no” to changing it, and go back to my e-mail.

Then Microsoft Communicator bings at me.

Then Remote Desktop craps out again.

Then Outlook shows a little message that says it’s “trying to connect…”

I snarl.  I send a message to my co-worker, saying there’s a problem with the network.  I finish reading an e-mail.  Microsoft Communicator politely informs me that it was unable to deliver my message.  I snarl again, and disconnect the VPN, to see if the problem is with that…I pull up my browser, try connecting to my blog, and sit and wait.  It brings up the main article, but not the sidebars.  The little whirly circle keeps whirling.

I reboot.

I pull up the browser again.  Same thing.

At which point it became obvious that I had to pull myself together and attack The Unholy Mess of Wiring behind the TV upstairs.

The Unholy Mess of Wiring is hidden behind an end table that has the TV on it, sitting in the corner of the living room.  The dotter has long since appropriated this area for her…um…let’s call it a “creativity corner”.  Every once in a while the unsightly heap of scrids and scrads of paper, various small toys, pictures, beads, markers, and what not overflowing the table, the wiring, the carpet becomes too much for me, and I corral the dotter into cleaning it up.  It invariably turns into a Horrible Chore that takes forever.

This time, I was on my own.  This time, I went through the whole area from top to bottom.  I threw out a half a garbage bag of scrids and scrads (no toys), some loose beads, string, wrappers, the backing from old stickers–you name it, it was there.  Then I pulled the table out from the corner.  I swept.  I windexed.  I re-arranged.  I got some clear tape and a Sharpie marker, located twisty-ties in the Anything Drawer, pulled out a variety of power cords from various techno-boxes, and started de-tangling, identifying, organizing, and tidying up the strands of cords and wiring.

The whole affair, from start to end (with a break in the middle for some bagels and cream cheese), took four hours and twenty minutes.

The network works again.  I was unable to figure out what the problem was, but it works again.

I now know which cord goes to which box.  All the cords are labeled.  The extension cord is secured in a nice small bundle.  The various cords are no longer a knotty maze, but easy to follow from electrical outlet to box.

But what a bloody pain in the butt it was.  Grrr.

Anne wanted to know if I’ve read any SF or fantasy that I might be willing to recommend (or pan!) to my readers.

I gulp fantasies.  Oh, mostly they’re all cliched and formulaic, but, dayum, I likes me some Dark Lord-on-the-surge/homebodies-who-get-caught-up-in-the-grand-quest/doomed-ancient-hero-families combos.  Then again, there are some fantasies that I’ve read that either take on the Dark Lord with a twist or a new viewpoint, or else have a totally different focus.

You get those in later posts.  (Hah!)  Today’s post is for hard SF.

As is usual, at my last visit to GrannyJ, I loaded up with some of her SF.  I have no idea where she gets these things; every time I visit the book stores lately, what I see is row upon row of vampire/paranormal fantasy (eh) mixed in with a few fantasy authors who specialize in fifty kazillion books all based on the same world, or even the same series (sometimes like, sometimes don’t), plus a plethora of military SF (which I actually love).  But mom is always coming up with New! and Different! SF books and authors who I have never seen.  This may be because the bookstores I have been patronizing are all chain bookstores aimed at peddling the SF-flavor-of-the-month (or year), and the devil take the offbeat or different.

So.  This trip, GrannyJ passed on a trio of books by a guy name of Richard K. Morgan; Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, also known as the “Takeshi Kovacs novels”.  As usual, again, her comment was, “You might like these.”

Call them SF noir.  The setting is about four centuries into the future.  Mankind has expanded to the stars, due to finding a slew of old arcane machinery…and associated buried cities…left behind on the planet Mars by a mysterious and long-gone alien race.  Really alien race, as in, “if you try to understand these sapients–or their architecture, or even their technology–you may end up going utterly and absolutely bonkers.”

At the same time, humanity has developed the ability to “re-sleeve” dead humans.  Sort of like an organ transplant, except it’s your consciousness that gets transplanted (after being carefully recorded by a cortical stack).  Taking Larry Niven’s concept of “organleggers” one step further, Morgan’s future is one of a society that gets new bodies for “deserving” people (aka “rich” people or “connected” people) by borrowing them from convicts, whose consciousness gets decanted into a holding pattern.  If you’re lucky, in a well-kept-up virtual reality; otherwise, a poorly-kept-up VR, or even nothingness.  Oh, yeah, and the criminal rings will steal bodies for use in re-sleeving.

Oh, yeah, there are criminal rings galore in this future.  Corruption pervades society from the bottom to the top.  Take Takeshi Kovacs home world, Harlan’s World (a nod to Harlan Ellison?).  It was originally settled by Japanese, some Mafia families, and Eastern Europeans, each ethnicity bringing with it its own take on the underworld.

Takeshi Kovacs was a low-level thug on his home world, until he was recruited into the super-elite Envoy Corps, whose mission in the end is to help the governing elite of the various worlds to maintain the status quo.  This sometimes means starting a war in order to put down revolutionaries who might actually, say, help the downtrodden regain a bit of dignity.  The upside of being an Envoy is being regarded as heroes by the upper-class, and as unstoppable by almost all.  Oh, yes, and you get a never-ending supply of re-sleeves.  The downside is that the military, knowing they can resurrect you, can send you into horrible situations over and over and over and over again.

That was then.  This is now:  Kovacs has long since left the Envoys and is now a sort of free-lancer, a mercenary-cum-detective.  He’s cold, cynical, hard-bitten, vicious, callous–and underneath it all, very idealistic and learning empathy.

The books are vivid, harsh, violent, profane, full of (to me, damned well-written) sex scenes.  There is a growing crescendo of anti-governing classes sentiment that starts (relatively) low at the beginning but blossoms and explodes by the third book.  There’s also the question of the ethics of re-sleeving (on both ends–the “sleevee” and the “sleever”) and what it means to be “you”.  What makes you what you are?  How much of who you are is based on your physical body?  Is love a physical thing or a mental/spiritual thing?  Underlying it all is the mystery of who were the Martians, how did they live, why did they disappear, and can anyone truly understand them?

Lots of interesting questions.  I highly recommend these books, but only if you’re able to handle really graphic violence and sex, and lots of it.

My father was a veteran–he joined the Army at the end of WWII, and spent a year or two in Japan as part of the Occupation Army.  My uncle, too, was a veteran, who was also in Japan at the same time.  I never knew whether dad joined first, or Uncle C.; they were best of friends beforehand, and Uncle C. returned home to marry my father’s sister.

My brother joined the army as a way to pay for college.  For two years, he was stationed in Germany and wrote long, funny letters to anyone who would send a letter back, illustrated with little comic characters and drawings.  Since I was one of the ones who wrote back, I got a lot of letters from him.

Just a thank you to all the veterans out there.

One of my Christmas cacti bloomed, the pink-and-white striped one.  The Christmas cacti live in my office window, in the window in the front landing/entryway, and some babies in the kitchen window.  They provide a bright splotch of color at odd times; historically it seems that we can get them to bloom by stressing them (in other words, by forgetting to water them for a while).

So I took out my new camera and fiddled with it for a while, trying for some macro shots of the blooms.

And, as always with macro shots, if I had a composition where most of the flower was on one plane, it turned out well:

But, alas, when I tried a different angle, where the camera was aimed down the lovely shimmering throat of the flower, and the yellow pistols dusted with pollen were fountaining towards the camera and the purple stamen was drooping away from the camera…well, it didn’t work.

Bummer!  I want more depth of field!  Those dainty translucent petals came through very nicely, though.  (Those are actually two different flowers above, but the last picture, directly above, is a different view of the first in the post.)

It would work, I think, if I had a narrower aperture (f-more-than-8, which is the limit on this camera).  So I am investigating the CHDK (Canon Hackers Development Kit, I believe, though I couldn’t find it specifically defined), in hopes of getting a higher f-stop.  If that won’t work, they have auto-bracketing, producing multiple pictures with different focal points which you can then merge into a single file with a program called CombineZM.  The CHDK was recommended by Jen From Alaska in one of the comments to my first post about my new toy–many thanks, Jen!

It’s such a pretty flower!  I really want to get it all the way!

OmegaDotter has been gifted over the past year or so with many, many notebooks.  Each of them has been christened “my diary”, with great plans to write in it every day, and then, usually the day after, *poof* goes the idea, floating away with the wind.

Recently she dug up one of those notebooks and started actually writing in it.  Every day.  She has been writing at bed time, after I read (or she reads), and after we play the Feeling Game.  She stashes it under her pillow, and earnestly tells me that “it’s secret!”

Yesterday, she decided to make me read her entry.  It was about how Buffy died.

Tonight, she made me read her latest entry.

It started out:

Dear Diary - I relly miss my birth mom.”

She told the story of how “I became separated from her”, how her birth mother had not been able to keep her, because in China you can’t have more than one child.  (Okay, I have told her the whole “one child if a boy, two if the first is a girl”, but I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet.)  And how her birth mother kept her for a week, then left her by the side of the “rode”, and a policeman picked her up and took her to the “orfinije”.

There was a little drawing underneath, a framed picture with “I ♥ my birth mom”, sort of scrapbooking style.

So I climbed into bed with her and snuggled and talked about how it was okay to miss her birth mom, and it was okay to talk about it.  That we would be taking her to China for a visit when she was 10 or 11, and maybe we’d try to take her there every few years.

Our little lawyer immediately tried to negotiate the visit for 8 or 9 instead.  Ahem.

Then she wanted to print out posters with her picture on them, with the Chinese for “lost girl” on it, to take with us.  At which point…sigh.  How to explain to her that something like that could get her birth parents in trouble?  Or that it probably wouldn’t do much good, because, face it, where she was found is a city, a big city with 1.34 million in the urban area?

I suggested we could write a letter to the orphanage.

Then she made me read another entry she had written, about a dream about Kai, where I had taken his bones and made him come alive again.

Deep waters.  Each of these entries has dealt with “loss” in some form or another.  I told her I thought that writing down what she was feeling in her diary was a good idea, and that she could always talk to me or OmegaDad about her feelings.  And I told her that it was her diary, and I wouldn’t read it unless she wanted me to, and that she didn’t have to let me read it if she didn’t want to.

I must point out that there was a great deal of (normal, accustomed) squirming and twisting on her part, and some teasing on my part, wherein I told her that her birthmother would make her do her chores and her homework.  Plus some tickling, and, interspersed in the midst of it all, her trying to put her ankles behind her head.

(Once upon a time, I was able to do that.  I was able to put both ankles behind my head.  I told her ages ago.  She has tried to do it ever since.)

But still.  Deep.

In 2008, our first real snow was October 7.

In 2007, our first real snow was sometime in early October.

This year has been warm.  The lakes froze over only a week or two ago.  What precipitation we’ve had has been rain.  But mostly, it’s been grey and chill, but neither cold nor snowy.

Tonight, after putting the dotter to bed, I peered out a window, and noticed…was it?  Could it be?

Yes!  It’s snowing!

In a comment to yesterday’s post, Meri asked:

Since you are originally from the SW, how hard was it to adjust to the dark winters? and driving in snow!

The dark winters have been a real problem for me.  The past two years, I have made sure to visit my mom, GrannyJ, in mid-December so that I can get a dose of sunshine right around the winter solstice, when the days are shortest.  Our first winter here, I was utterly miserable.  GrannyJ sent me a variety of sculpted suns to cheer me up.  Bless her!  I had allowed my prescription for little blue happy pills (Zoloft) to expire, which made everything worse.

So, in January 2008 I trekked off to the local Doc-in-a-Box and got a new prescription.  That, plus the rapidly lengthening days, helped pull me back into a more sanguine state of mind.

Last year, OmegaDad bought me a Magic Light for Christmas, and it seemed to help some, too.  But I may be simply adjusting to the (horrible, awful, miserable) darkness, where the noonday sun is about as high as a late spring afternoon back in the Lower 48.

As for driving in the snow.  Girl.  I may have been in the southwest, but it was the mountains of the southwest.  We regularly got more snow in Small Mountain University Town each winter than we have gotten here.  The main difference is that in Small Mountain University Town, the snow came down in Great Huge Heaps, all at once, then melt.  We would end up with 24 to 36 inches per storm.  Here, a ten-incher is a big snow–however, once it starts snowing, the snow doesn’t melt until, oh, April.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that I grew up in Chicago.  Even though I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was about 23 or 24, I had plenty of experience driving in snow after that before I moved west.

In sum, the snow and driving in the snow is no problem, but the lack of light is a killer.