OmegaMom

A snippet of correspondence:

This a.m. I was starting to heat water for OmegaDotter’s macaroni & cheese, in the blue enamel pan, when I noticed that water was pretty much pouring out the bottom on one side.

Upon inspection (holding said pan up to the light), there were three holes finally eaten through the pan bottom along the edge.

Let us take a moment to remove our hats and remember the glorious lifetime service of the blue enamelware pan…

I have interred it in the garbage can.

exohme

The response:

NO!!!

Don’t throw it away….

That was the first piece of cookware I ever purchased… 27 years ago. I still remember the time/place where I bought it. (Hardware store, Blair Oklahoma, Late Summer Afternoon, May 30, 1982.)

Can I keep it… Please?

Xxxoooxxxoooxxxoooxxxooo, OmegaDad

Further:

You, my dear, are the world’s most sentimental dude, bar none.

I will retrieve it from the garbage. You will put it somewhere, like in the garage, where you can gaze upon it now & then and think back to Blair, OK.

I love you, but I am rolling my eyes.

exohme

OmegaDad and I have an ongoing…discussion…about whether we are going to keep the baby bottle we bought in China to feed a wee OmegaDotter for the first time.  If the dotter ends up being a packrat, I will know who to blame.  (Mostly.)  (My sentimental stuff tends to be letters, Christmas cards, photos.  His tends to be things.  Letters, Christmas cards, and photos take up a helluvalot less space.)

Ash fall actually hit us last night; while it was, apparently, pretty dreadful to drive in, when we woke up in the morning there wasn’t a huge amount of it. 

Enough for OmegaDad to haul both cars off to the carwash to remove same, but mostly–as the Weather Service said–a “dusting”.

And now it’s time for Stupid Mommy Tricks.

This afternoon, OmegaDotter got on the computer while I was shifting various loads of laundry, and started up Wilber Pan’s Wuha video.  When I got back to the office, she was in kung-fu pose wanting to do some “Wuha-ing” of her own.

I got the bright idea to show her a move that I thought might actually work.

I did not have the bright idea to, say, warn her ahead of time.

I just had her give me her hands, took them in mine, reached forward with my right leg, hooked it behind her left ankle, and pulled towards me, pushing her away from me at the same time.

Hey!  Guess what?!  That trick really works!

And if you’re not expecting it to work, you get yanked off balance and are sent tumbling forward right onto your “opponent”.

In this case, that would be me smashing into OmegaDotter.

She landed on her back.  I managed to bash her eyeball and nose with my arm and elbow.  It all seemed to be happening in slo-mo; I managed not to get her in the solar plexus with my knee by somehow twisting around and getting my knee off to the side.

Which means, while I was whacking her a good one in the eye and nose, I was also whacking my knee something fierce on the floor.

There’s a particular feeling of oh-my-god-ness to the realization that you may just have really hurt your very own child.  I was terrified that I had broken her nose; she was curled in a ball crying, and I was pulling at her going, “Omimgod baby are you all right omigod baby I didn’t mean it I’m so sorry omigod are you all right sweetie talk to me?!?!“

After a twenty-minute bout of crying snuggled in my lap, and me carefully poking at her nose and waiting for a nosebleed or swelling or purpling, I managed to make her laugh somehow, and all was well.

Except for the fact that my knee is now swollen and quite painful.  She, of course, is doing fine.

So there’s your PSA for the evening:  Don’t play around with faux martial-arts moves when you don’t know what you’re doing; you might actually hurt someone.

Dudes.  What is with our culture?!  Seriously.  Isn’t it good enough to be invited to participate in the state science fair?  Does every damned thing kids participate in require that every tender ego be protected from negative vibes?

All the kids at the State Science Fair got “participant” ribbons and a certificate.

Ah, well, it’s all for the chiiiiillllldrrrruuuuunnnn.  We must spare them any and all psychic harm, dontchaknow?

Bah.

That said…OmegaDotter came home with an official second-place ribbon, and we’re as pleased as punch with that.

The venue was a brand-new middle school in Big City.  A really pretty brand-new school.  With two art studios!  And a dance studio!  And an atrium filled with dangling glass mosaics in rainbow colors!  Holy cow, it looked like the set from High School Musical–there were balconies and swathes of glass and the principal’s office was a two-story high-ceilinged affair!  Man, we felt like we were in Swank City while we were there.

Friday evening was filled with standing in lines.  There was the line to check in to get a project number.  There was the “media release” line.  There was the line for the free T-shirt.  There was the line to pay for registration.  There was the line for the judging information and time selection for judging (for elementary students–older students had to be there for a full four hours).  There was the line for the FAQs (really–why on earth didn’t they just hand it out with the project number?!).  There was the line for the Safety Check, which in essence said that if you brought anything that could possibly, in any way, harm someone by giving them a boo-boo, it was out.  THEN, when all those lines were visited (older students also had the line-to-submit-abstracts and the line-for-human-research-protocol-checks), then you could visit the line where they told you where to put the project.

But even with all the lines, it only took us an hour.  Then we went off to dinner at a local Korean restaurant, overate, and went home, to return again this a.m.

These are the hanging mosaics at Very Bright Shiny New Middle School:

This was part of the scene in the gymnasium where the exhibits were displayed:

OmegaDotter talking with the judge.  We had walked her through various questions and answers beforehand, but were not allowed to be anywhere near her during the judging.  The gymnasium had an upper-level track around the periphery, so we went up there and spied from above.  Yes, it’s a bad picture; I zoomed too far and things pixilated.

Madame Scientista posing in front of her project:

One of the middle schoolers on the other side of the gymnasium also had a dissolving-egg-shells project; theirs was much more complex and involved measuring the thickness of the egg shells using calipers after four days of immersion, and they used Sprite instead of Dr Pepper and Pepsi.  The dotter was very interested in seeing their project, and they had to ask her if she bounced the nekkid eggs–which, of course, we had done.

Then we had five hours to kill before we could pick up the projects, so we drove down the coast of the inlet to Ski Resort Town, which we had never visited before.  I was astonished at how much snow they got there; OmegaDad kept telling me that this was the Rain Shadow Effect In Action.  Thank you very much, Herr Professor My Love!

We were intrigued by the effect of tides on ice in the inlet; there were many small iceberg-lets stranded on the mudflats at high tide, and the ice was not a solid sheet, but carved into canyons and mesas by the action of the tides (we assume).  Nothing like the ice on Lake Michigan in winter, which I remember very distinctly as a solid mass, with excellent frozen wave action on the edges (no waves in the inlet, so none of that here).

As we drove back, there was this large grey cloud to our left.  OmegaDad and I kept eyeing it, and we finally decided it must be an ash cloud from the volcano.  Note the brownish tinge to the bottom of the cloud layer at the top of the image below:

When we arrived home and checked the Alaska Volcano Observatory, sure enough, there had been yet another eruption (another day, another eruption; this is becoming almost routine by now), with an ash fall advisory in Big City.  Another eruption occurred after we got home, and this time the ash fall advisory is right here in Suburban Alaska.  So OmegaDad is outside taping up the cracks around the chicken coop.  Ah, life in Alaska…

As an aside:  last year, there were pictures of way kewl lightning around the eruption of Chaiten volcano in Chile.  Tonight, I am able to provide links to similar pictures of our very own volcano!

Oh, and greetings to any Mudflatters who are visiting.  Look around, kick the tires, see if you want to stay a while!

I’ve been anonymously blogging for about three and a half years now.  I was anonymous on boards and listservs before that.  Oh, not anonymous anonymous–anyone who really wants to figure out who I am and where I live can probably do it.  Part of it has been a general sense of “there are some Real Whackos out there, so it’s a good idea to keep the whackdom at arm’s length”, and since I started blogging the main reason for the anonymity is so that the dotter won’t find her name spread far and wide on the ‘net when she starts googling it.  (Also so her friends and enemies in high school won’t find same and start the taunting circuitry a-jangling.)

There are plenty of good reasons for people to be anonymous on the internet.  I have encountered at least three situations that made it plain why:

1. Case A - blogger who was adopting from China realizes she has a problem with drinking, announces her joining AA and doing outpatient therapy on her blog, someone forwards that info to her agency (this was prior to China having a stated policy against same), and her agency dumps her and her husband like a hot potato.
2. Case B - blogger who was adopting from China riles up a reader by posting pictures of equipment used in the adolescent sex education classes she taught years prior; said reader tracks down her info, contacts her agency saying she’s “unfit to be an adoptive mother”, and, as a result, the blogger’s adoption is put on hold while she undergoes extensive additional interviews by a hostile social worker.
3. Case C - This is an amalgam of at least four cases I know of where someone with an ax to grind called CPS on someone who was posting on boards, and it took forever for those situations to be sorted out.

There’s always Dooce as another reason; to be “dooced” is to be fired from your job due to something you’ve written on your blog.

Then there are angry or crazy ex-spouses, or ex-in-laws, or former lovers, or just plain sick stalker types who, when finding clues about their former spouse/in-law/lover/victim, are quite avid to return to their prior ways.

On the whole, my approach when reading a blog is to first check the quality of writing, then to check the quality of the thinking behind the writing, and then to see how well that first impression is maintained as time goes on.  In other words, I judge a blogger by his or her output, not by whether the blogger posts using a pseudonym or a “real” name.  I gained great respect for CalculatedRisk long before his name was revealed, and the same for his (alas, now deceased) co-blogger Tanta, because of their excellent writing and news summaries on the real estate bubble, its inevitable bust, and the inner workings of the mortgage industry.  The Rumor Queen got my respect with similar clarity and detail about what was going on as the wait in Chinese adoptions grew longer and longer.  I never knew who Miss Snark was, but I learned a helluva lot about the business of being a book agent from her blog while it was extant (do yourself a favor–go read her blog in its entirety…I was devastated when she closed up shop).  I have no idea what Johnny’s real name is, but I always find him an interesting read and know that he says what he means and means what he says when he posts.

I discovered AKMuckraker’s blog, The Mudflats, back when Sarah Palin was first announced as John McCain’s running mate.  I wanted to know what reactions were to the nomination in my own state–Sarah Palin’s state.  I figured I knew, but I’d check anyway.  And lo and behold, there was a well-written, well-thought-out series of posts by this anonymous blogger.  I subscribed, and kept reading, and nothing ever tarnished my impression of that blogger as interesting, funny, pretty even-handed.  AKM helped spearhead a coordinated relief effort for the villagers of western Alaska when nothing was being done by Alaska’s elected officials.  I respected AKM, and respected his/her decision to remain anonymous.  Not only respected it, but understood it completely.

All of this is in preface to the sad news that Democratic State Representative Mike Doogan of Alaska has taken it upon himself to first discover, and then publish in his legislative newsletter, the identity of the person behind The Mudflats. 

In correspondence with a constituent, Rep. Doogan further compared AKMuckraker to a member of the KKK because of her anonymity.  Rep. Doogan’s rationale for the outing was: “My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name.”  

Um.

Okay.

I’m sure the people who decided to make the ballot secret can see the wisdom in that…

I’m sure that Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, an anonymous tract against the political rulers of the day, was in agreement…

I’m sure that Publius, anonymous author of the Federalist Papers (revealed afterwards to be Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay), thought the same…

I’m sure that the medical researchers being harassed and targeted at universities across the country are in total sympathy with the outing and publicizing of their names to PETA forums and other such places, the same sort of thing that Rep. Doogan has done here…

Politics is an emotional topic.  Things can get very heated when it comes to Palinistas versus Obamanauts.  When you’re a member of a minority political group in a sea of the others (a Democrat in a sea of Republicans, in this area of Alaska), it’s very easy to be a target, and intimidated.  Perhaps Rep. Doogan, safe as he is in more-progressive Juneau, doesn’t realize what kind of atmosphere it is when one is the lone Democratic voter in, say, a set of gymnastics bleachers, surrounded by hordes of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” buttons.  Having stood out in the rain and cold waving an Obama placard on a very busy road in Suburban Alaska, I’m quite aware of some of the frothing anger against Democrats from a small subset of people.  I’m hoping that that frothing anger doesn’t get turned against AKMuckraker as a result of Rep. Doogan’s actions.

Once upon a time at the dotter’s elementary school, the science fair was an “official” science fair, with formal judging.  But then, Fifth Grade Teacher (name unknown) informs me, things just got too…unpleasant.  It seems that there were parents who were doing most of the work for some of the kids, and that some of the parents were competitive and/or defensive, and things got Ugly.  So the elementary school just ditched the idea of formal judging entirely.

Which is why our cruisin’ and perusin’ of the science fair last night, during “public viewing” hours, revealed to us that it was yet another instance where everyone gets a ribbon.

There were some cool projects–like the one where the kid tested his dog’s intelligence by freezing vinegar, water, and beef mush into ice cube trays, then presenting the dog with one of each arrayed at a random distance.  Alas, the boy reports, his dog just went for whichever one was closest, whether it was (ew!) vinegar or (yum!) beef mush.  Then there was the project where the kid experimented with whether listening to rock and roll or classical music would help her do homework better.

But we also had pretty lame projects.  The kid whose mummy poster session was printed out direct from the internet, for instance.  Or the poster project where the thing was done in PowerPoint printed on high-gloss paper, using words that no third-grader would use.

And hanging off each one was the little blue ribbon…

I left feeling somewhat grumpy that our culture requires everyone to get a trophy.

But then, when I picked up the dotter this afternoon, she was all aglow:  she not only got the “participation” ribbon–she got the honkin’ big “Master Scientist” ribbon (woot!) plus a recommendation that she enter her project in the state science fair in Big City this weekend (double woot!).

And then, as she was leaving her gymnastics class this evening, her coach was handing out packets to selected kiddos in the class, and one was handed to her, too:  an invitation to join the Level 3 Pre-Team.

And then, at family night at the school book fair this evening, OmegaDad managed to put in the highest bid in the silent auction on a huge stuffed horse, which is now ensconced on the dotter’s bed and graced with the name of Zoe.

A big day for the dotter.  I am fairly bustin’ with pride.  She done good.

In other news, the volcano blew up again and sent up a big plume this morning.  The ash fall went south, instead of north like last time; so far, we have been blessedly free of ash fall here in Suburban Alaska.  OmegaDad’s agency closed the Homer office for the afternoon, as one of the guys phoned in and said it was raining ash there.  This is a groovy cool satellite picture of the ash plume extending out into the edges of the atmosphere, and this is just a purty picture of the volcano smoking.

I’m not a Fan of Sarah.

Yes, Alaska, strike me dead now:  I repeat, I am not a Fan of Sarah.

The latest real issue I have with our dearly beloved Momma Grizzly is that (according to rumor) she and the state legislators had worked out exactly what the state was going to accept and not going to accept in terms of the federal stimulus package, everyone was in agreement, and then, 24 hours later, she came out with a grand fanfare saying she was going to reject a heckuva lot more–as in 30% of the package offered to Alaska.  “In essence we say no to operating funds for more positions in government,” quoth Sarah.

The rumor mill claims that she did this last-minute change of heart at the behest of SarahPAC, the group that is positioning her to run for President in 2012–rejecting gobs of the stimulus money would look good for GOP voters in the upcoming election, as would playing up “rejecting” big government.

Then there’s the fact that it took six weeks of effort from bloggers, local legislators, and eventually some spots on CNN, to move our Momma Grizzly to actually take some notice of the problems that western Alaska villages were facing due to high fuel costs, low fuel supplies, and an intense and long cold snap.

Not to mention the stonewalling on state scientists’ positions on how warming is affecting the polar bear population…

And Troopergate, which really does provide some interesting insights into how the Alaska First Family likes to operate…

And charging the state to provide transportation dollars for her kiddos to trek along with her as she swung around the U.S. “promoting Alaska” and (oh, by the way) promoting her VP candidacy.

So:  No love lost here.

But, really, this latest “ethics complaint” just leaves me rolling my eyes. 

So, here’s the story: Momma Grizzly’s hunka hunka burnin’ love, First Dude Todd, gets sponsored by Arctic Cat for his IronDog snowmachine competition to the tune of $5,000.  And Momma Grizzly shows up at the opening of the race to drop the flag clad in a “Team Arctic” jacket, with the Arctic Cat logo emblazoned on it.

That’s it.

In a nutshell.

WTFOMGBBQ!!!!  Strike her down now!  Evil, evil woman, accepting money and advertising while acting as governor!

Um.

Excuse me if I’m not prostrate in horror at this egregious lapse of ethics.

I mean, c’mon, folks.

We have better things to rant about.

I’m pretty sure the majority of Alaskans–Sarah Fans or no–can quite easily separate the “excited wife of many-time IronDog winner” from “high-level government official”.  In other words, cut Sarah some slack; she wasn’t advertising Arctic Cat–she was advertising First Dude Todd.  She wasn’t endorsing Arctic Cat as The Official Snowmachine Of The State of Alaska.

This is a waste of money.  On both sides.  And a waste of judicial time and energy.  On both sides.

In other news, the volcano has simmered down, and the weather has warmed up.  It was above 40F today Chez Omega, and the snow is melting swiftly.  I’z a happy camper, dudes.

Sunday I spent with the dotter, pulling teeth interviewing her so we could get the egg-speriment down in (pretty much) her own words.  At one point, I had her doing her own typing, but that swiftly became a case of flibbertigibbet-ness wherein she was typing gobbledegook while I was backspacing over it and we were having a race and it kept going and she was giggling wildly and I was giggling and getting frustrated…

So I ended up typing it up.  But still, most of it, as I said above, is in her own words.  After I gave her very pointed questions.

And then I printed the typing out carefully overlaid on a large egg shape.  She cut out the typing eggs.  I traced and cut out bigger egg shapes of various colored construction paper.  We searched (in vain) for glue sticks.  We found old Elmer’s Glue containers.  She tried de-booger-ifying them, but we still couldn’t squeeze out glue.  She located some paintbrushes.  We had a grand old time painting glue on various pieces and pasting them down.

There was glue everywhere.

There was enough glue to soak through the pictures, so that you could see the carefully looped streams of glue that had dribbled off her paintbrush in the middle of the backs of the pictures.

At some point I gave up, drove off for glue sticks, and returned; this also served the purpose of giving her a break.  We then attacked things with glue sticks.

Glue sticks, if you don’t know, don’t stick as well as dribbled-on Elmer’s glue.

Anyway, here’s the finished project:

We trekked off to school with this behemoth this a.m., and encountered many other kiddlies bringing in their science projects.  There were many clay volcanoes being hefted by parental units; very timely, given our neighboring smoking mountain’s antics this weekend.

And there was the kiddo lugging in the poster board with a great big artsy “TNT SODA!!!” banner slashing diagonally across his project.  I am assuming that this is evidence of what is the science project du jour:  Sodas and Mentos, mixed explosively.

The science fair is Wednesday evening.  I informed the dotter that people would be asking her questions about her project.  She blinked at me in a panic, and asked me, “Can you give me the answers?!”  I further informed her that she should be able to answer the questions about her project.  She promptly called me a meanie.

Yup.  That’s me:  Mean Mommy.  Har.

The dotter staged this picture of my big red lips beanbag “reading” a book; I barely cropped it at all.

So there I was, relaxing and reading a few blogs’n'boards’n'things late this evening, and I decided to do my recent hobby:  checking in at Alaska Volcano Observatory’s Redoubt website to see how things were a-cookin’.  Things were definitely a-cookin’, to the point that I kept checking in at the seismic webicorders as it became obvious that the volcano was really thinking of doing something this time.

And then, between one moment and the next, suddenly the color code of the volcano watch changed from ORANGE-”watch” level to RED-”warning” level, and the descriptor over to the side changed to “RED: Eruption is imminent with significant emission of volcanic ash into the atmosphere likely OR eruption is underway or suspected with significant emission of volcanic ash into the atmosphere [ash-plume height specified, if possible]. WARNING: Hazardous eruption is imminent, underway, or suspected.”

So I switched to Twitter to send out a notice to whoever might possibly be listening to my intermittent blatherings, and as I was typing, @alaska_avo sent out a tweet that Redoubt was erupting.

Now, before anyone gets worried, concerned, scared, etc., please be aware that this volcano is a hundred miles away, and it looks like a short eruption (seismic stuff has already cooled down after going off the charts).

But still…so cool to be able to monitor this stuff in real-time.

Here’s what the seismometer was doing at one of the seismic stations; the red square at the bottom left corner is an indicator that the seismicity was off the chart, unable to be measured by that seismograph, during those minutes.

Spring.

Rumor has it that spring is arriving in various parts of the U.S.

While we still have snow and cold, there are hints of spring peeping up here and there in our area.  Specifically, snow is melting.  The sun is rising at 8 a.m., and setting at 8:20 p.m. (yes!), and we now have twilight until a little after 9.

And!  And!

I drove off Friday to Big City, to provide some supporting documentation for our first PFD (Permanent Fund Dividend) (which this year could be anything from a little over a grand per person to a whopping $68 per person, due to the economic mess).  It was sunny, it was warm, there were people outside with no coats on!  And shorts!  Woot!

But the thing that really gave me a foretaste of spring, that made me optimistic that endless winter is on its way out…

Certain stands of trees were showing the very faintest, tiniest, almost not noticeable, tinge of greenishness, mostly on the trunks.

And other trees, here and there, as I drove through Small Alaskan Suburb, had fluffy white flowers at the very topmost branches.

So, in honor of Friday’s equinox, I pronounce it SPRING!  Woohoo!

There comes a time in life when you realize–quite suddenly–that it really can be totally random.  That a bolt from the blue can happen, and it can be disastrous.

So last night, during the “feeling game”, OmegaDotter asked me what if something like what happened to Buffy were to happen to mommy and daddy.

Oh, boy.

So I explained to her that we had made arrangements, that we had talked to her uncle D. and aunt G. back before we adopted her to take her in if something happened to us.

She wanted to know how they would know.

Oh, boy.

I started to say that we would make very sure that nothing would happen to us…and then I realized that I couldn’t say that, because she was in the middle of this great life-altering realization about randomness and bolts from the blue.  All I could do was hold her hand as she fell asleep.

It seems somewhat ironic that this happens because a chicken died…

There is a bad side effect of naming your chickens with similar names.

OmegaDad and the dotter were going out to check the chickens and take a new bag of chicken feed out to Le Grand Coop; I sat down at the computer to listen to some Chinese pop singers on YouTube and read an intense description of freezing almost to death.  While I was sitting there, suddenly the dotter pops up at the window, thumping on it and yelling, “Come quick!  Daddy needs you!”

WTF?  Hunh.  Okay.  So I schlep out to the garage door, put on boots and jacket, whap the garage door opener, and start out, only to be confronted with a teary dotter and a somber OmegaDad.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Buffy’s dead!” the dotter cries.

The bad side effect I mentioned up above comes into play here:  I thought–given that Puff has been broody lately–that it was Puff who was dead.

OmegaDad hustled us into the house, where I promptly cuddled up with the sobbing (sobbing!) dotter on the futon in the family room.  While I was surprised and slightly upset, I wasn’t quite understanding why the dotter was in such tears; Puff, though quite cute, isn’t really the most lovable of chickens.  (Not bad, mind you, but not exactly an overwhelming personality.)

I was nonplussed and feeling guilty:  my very own OmegaDotter was collapsed in tears on my lap and I was feeling…well, surprised and slightly upset.  So I’m patting her and cuddling her and stroking her and saying I’m sorry, and feeling overwhelmed with the question of How To Deal With A Griefstricken Dotter.

OmegaDad returns and explains that it seems that the chicken appears to have been flying and flown into something and broken her neck.  I’m sitting there thinking it’s broody Puff who has died, and the last I knew (a) Puff can’t fly and (b) she’s broody, and broody hens don’t do anything approximating the amount of energy it takes to fly.  So, in addition to being nonplussed and surprised and slightly guilty, I’m now puzzled.

And the dotter is sobbing in my lap.  And then crawling over to OmegaDad to be snuggled and cry in his lap.  In my confusion, I mutter something about how I knew she was broody, and was he sure it was an accident and not broodiness that did her in?  In his confusion, he asks, “Broody?!  Buffy was broody?!”  And I’m still hearing “Puff”, and this orthagonal conversation continues until there’s a blinding light in my brain as the neurons finally connect, and the word “Buffy” connects with “beautiful apricot colored chicken who is a total sweetheart who loves to cuddle and likes to sit on top of OmegaDotter’s head” and Oh. My. Gawd.  Buffy’s dead!

At which point, I understood the dotter’s grief, because Buffy, fluffhead though she was, was the OmegaFamily’s absolute favorite of the chickens, and suddenly I wanted to start crying.

Obviously, we are not cut out to be farmers or pioneer types.

Anyway:  OmegaDotter was truly in distress for quite a while this evening.  And even after calming down, and all of us going out to dinner (whilst OmegaDad surreptitiously disposed of the corpse) and having fancy desserts and chardonnay for me and a Shirley Temple for the dotter, at the late, late hour of 10 p.m., when the dotter finally was put to bed, she needed to do our nightly Feeling Game ritual, and needed to talk about Buffy.

Sometimes being a parent just blindsides you…

This afternoon, the dotter and I went swimming.  When we went to the pool, the sky above us was grey and cloudy, but the mountains in the distance were beginning to reflect some sunlight.  When we left, though…oh, how beautiful the mountains were!  Snow covered, reflecting the afternoon sunlight, with bands of lifting fog floating in front of them here and there, and banners of wind-blown snow drifting off the peaks in other places.

Of course, I didn’t have my camera.  And even if I did, the batteries are dead, because I was taking documentary pics of Important Stuffed Animal Surgery.

But this is what always happens:  I see a really kewl pic opportunity, and I don’t have my camera, and I want to smack myself on the head.  It happens to OmegaDad, too.  So what we should be doing is carrying the damned camera with us everywhere.  In our hands.  At the ready.  So we can capture those lost opportunities–like when your kid does something unutterably cute, and the next instant is standing there looking dour and grumpy.

Right?

OmegaDad and I have taken to joking that what we need is a RetinaCam™ for all those instances, a camera embedded in our eyeballs that we can point and, say, tap our cheekbones, and we’d get a picture.

Now, people have been experimenting with cameras embedded in eyeglass frames, which is getting close.  But I’d think such a contraption would be somewhat lopsided feeling, and obtrusive.  We want something akin to what the Six Million Dollar Man had–something in the eye that has zoom capability and more.

Guess what?

Someone is working on that right now.

Yes!  OmegaDad was listening to NPR on the way home from work the other day, and heard an interview with a filmmaker who has only one eye, plus a prosthetic eye in the other socket.  This filmmaker is trying to develop an embedded, wireless camera in his prosthetic eye.  This is his website.  And this is a video of where his project is at right now:

EYEBORG– The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

This is just too cool for words.

I was finishing off a book last night, so I sat in the dim living room reading it, then plodded off to bed at 12:45 a.m.  I snuggled up against OmegaDad, then had my nightly just-after-going-to-bed hot flash and cooled off, snuggled up again and had finally started that interesting, dreamy descent into sleep…

When the phone rang.

I was jerked awake.  OmegaDad jerked up, with a muffled, “Wha-?!  Wuff.  Wha-??”

I looked at the clock.  1:15 a.m.

Immediately all the possibilities–all of them dire, of course–began running through my head:  Something had happened to mom.  OmegaDad’s Uncle B.–in the hospital due to a massive stroke–was dying.  If this had been about 20 years ago, I would assume it was one of my buds in the middle of a horrible break-up.

Look:  In my world, people don’t call at that time unless something bad is happening.

I staggered out to the living room, fumbled around in the dark, grabbed the phone, and peered at the caller ID.

Not Arizona.  Whew.

Not Oklahoma.  Whew.

“Alaska Digital” caller.  WTF?

All of this had taken a second or two.  I punched the button to talk.  “Hello?”

“Hi.  Can you tell OmegaDotter that I called her?”

Okay.  WTF?  “Who is this?”

“It’s S.”

Of course, I already knew it.  S. calls at terribly inappropriate times, but this was the worst.

“::Sigh::  ::yawn::  S., sweetie, it’s almost 1:30 in the morning.  Sweetie, this is a bad time to call people.  I will tell OmegaDotter that you called, but please don’t call us this late again.”

“I’m sorry.”  Small voice.  “But please tell OmegaDotter that I called.”

“Okay.  I’ll do that.  But, S., please don’t call this late.”

“Okay.”

I said goodbye, I hung up, I went back into the bedroom.  OmegaDad was sitting on his side of the bed, wide awake, and said, “Let me guess.  It was S.”

So we talked about S.  S. is the gal whose mom and step-dad had a rather abrupt parting-of-the-ways about twenty minutes before the dotter was due at their house for a playdate.  Since S. had called five times that morning about the playdate, when I heard the phone ring, I assumed it was S., and just let it roll over to the answering machine.  Besides, OmegaDad had the dotter out shopping that morning, and was going to deliver her to her playdate on the way home.

Alas, when they got there, it was awkward, because the step-dad had to invent a family emergency on-the-fly and the dotter was miserable at not getting her playdate.  And then the next day, we got a call from S. where she told the dotter that–surprise!–she was moving to Big City, and could the dotter come play with her there?

Um.  Since then, S. has called at very odd hours.  We have the dotter on a pretty regular schedule; she’s in bed and asleep by 9 usually, even in the bright summer hours.  OmegaDad and I get some alone time, she gets plenty of sleep.  This is a Good Thing, because if the dotter doesn’t get enough sleep, she is hell on wheels and a major pill to be around.  This seems to be an early bedtime for a lot of her buddies, apparently.  S. calls at 9:30, 10, 10:30…and now 1:15 a.m.

OmegaDad was judgmental about the parenting she’s getting as a result; this afternoon, I realized that if our dotter were to wake up in the middle of the night, we probably wouldn’t know it and she might even be moved to try calling one of her friends.  But I still worry about S. in general and hope she’s all right…

In the midst of a whole slew of things I’d like to write about (hoping that my brain-to-typing-fingers connection reanimates itself sometime), today’s is The New Dora.

Crash course:  Dora–to those not in the know, aka “non-parents”–is a bilingual first-grader/kindergardener who lives in the jungles of Costa Rica, wears orange shorts and a magic backpack (and, of course, the omnipresent PINK top), has a monkey as a pet, and encounters a variety of adventures.  She climbs, she swims, she hikes, she boats, she uses a map and compass–she’s an outdoorsy kinda gal.  Not my most favorite of TV characters, to be sure, but she’s not yet another girly-girl with floofy clothes and high heels.

So–Mattel has purchased the rights to market The New Dora, and Nickelodeon will create a show for The New Dora.  The New Dora is supposedly a middle-schooler aimed at tweens.  All well and good; corporations will be corporations, and, hey, having captured fifty kazillion preschoolers through first- or second-graders (though the latter is doubtful, as the dotter has taken to calling Dora “for babies” lately), they want to hold onto those kiddies as their purchasing power starts growing.

In an act of super-coyness, the two companies released a silhouette of The New Dora, who features long, flowing hair (rather than Dora’s current bob), a short skirt (rather than shorts), and ballet slipper-like shoes (rather than sneakers).  No backpack, and probably no monkey, either.  No more jungles of Costa Rica–she’s moved to the big city.  She likes shopping and jewelry.  Oh, and technology.  Sort of tacked onto the description…

Le shit has hit le fan in mommyblogs the blogosphere (As Liana so rightly points out, “mommybloggers” is a pretty stereotypical label, and I apologize!).  Grumps about sexualization and what-not–all of which I tend to agree with–plus a petition to Mattel and Nickelodeon to back down, mofos!

On the other hand, we have two women scientistas, Dr. Isis and Sheril Kirshenbaum over at ScienceBlogs, who look at it in a different way:  This doll is saying (they say) that smart can equal pretty!

The problem I have with that is that the description of The New Dora doesn’t sound like the “smart” is what’s being emphasized; what’s being emphasized is Yet More Expansive Consumer Goods, with (as mentioned above) the “technology” being added as an afterthought.  Note that “technology” does not necessarily equal science, nor does it necessarily equal exploration, nor does it necessarily equal adventure.

Sure:  Smart can equal pretty!  Woohoo!  Some of us do wish this particular meme made it out into the general pop-culture consciousness.

But.  Dayum, does that new silhouette make me think of all those movies where the “smart girl” is suddenly seen as attractive because she takes off her glasses and pulls her hair out of the ever-present businesslike ponytail.  *Poof*!  As soon as the glasses come off, and the hair comes down, whammo-blammo, the “smart girl” is wearing eye shadow, lipstick, and sexy clothes, her popularity soars through the roof…

…and, very often, the “smart” side of her vanishes into the woodwork.

It’s not offering a new option to the girls out there.  It’s not being accepting of who they are, really.  It’s saying–in a sneaky way that passes right by the dewy-eyed interest of tween girls–that to be accepted, you have to look pretty and tone down your smarts. (But, of course, not too pretty, or too mature, as Dr. Isis points out, because then you’ve crossed The Line and are now a target for being called “easy”.)

Look, there are oodles of shows and dolls and what-not aimed at getting girls to buy clothing and jewelry and makeup and accessories and “look pretty”.  There are not oodles of shows and dolls and what-not aimed at letting girls be not interested in those things.  I was a geeky, awkward teen.  I wasn’t interested in that stuff.  I was interested in Star Trek.  And science fiction books.  And writing.  And geometry.  And history.  Trust me–there wasn’t anything out there in pop-culture land that matched my image of myself.  And prior to that, in what is now called “tween”age, what I was interested in was playing cops and robbers and Good Guys and Bad Guys and hanging out at the playground with buddies and going to camp and stuff like that.

‘Course, I’m not sure anything in pop-culture land would have interested me, but it might have been nice to have a TV show that featured a girl who wasn’t into those things.

Dunno.  I’m sure my dotter (suddenly into flippy short skorts) would love The New Dora.  But as a mother, I’d like to aim her at other things, other shows, that don’t emphasize the outside so much and do emphasize other things.

(Various notes:  Pretzel made a joke about how I’d soon be complaining about the moose eating our vegetables again.  As fate would have it, that very night we had a moose come dining at our perennial flower bed.  Har.  In the meantime, spring seems to be trying to spring here in Alaska; we have had two days of 40 degree weather.  Yay!  The snow is melting!  This is impacting the Iditarod race, because soft snow plus high temps equals bad mushing conditions.  Our doctor, Doc SledDog, is racing in the Iditarod this year, so I am [vaguely] keeping track.  All in all, things are looking up, except for my paycheck, which will be going down in two weeks, because my new, shorter, work hours started on Monday.)

I have been in a truly bitchy mood all day, and one of the reasons is that it’s snowing yet again.  Another nine inches.  Sigh.

The other day, we passed a bank sign that excitedly proclaimed, “The pussywillows are here!”  I don’t believe them.  Oh, I guess it’s true; moose have been congregating by the roadsides, nibbling on the branchlets with the rising sap, and I swear I saw some leaf buds on the trees lining our streets.

But now they’re covered with snow.

OmegaDad claims that in a month, it will all be gone.  Please mark your calendars:  April 5.  No snow.

Right?

Springtime is coming.

Right?

After all, this weekend is Daylight Savings Time weekend.

And in a few weeks, we hit the Spring Equinox.

So even here in the frozen north, spring must be coming.

Right?

Please tell me it is so…

One of my little pet peeves about the blogosphere is that people can use Teh Google to do a search on a particular phrase, find a particular post on a particular blog, and extrapolate a whole boatload of stuff from that one post.  Usually the people who do things like this are people with a bee in their bonnet about some particular Issue.  An example:  A PETA person performs a search on “animal experimentation”, finds a post on a medico’s blog about an experiment in which the medico makes one comment that could be considered complimentary of one particular experiment that involved animals, and goes nutsoid.  Or a super-attachment parent–the kind who proclaims that CIO (crying it out) is child abuse, that baby-wearing is The Only Way To Raise A Child, and co-sleeping is Da Bomb–finds a post on a mommy blog that says that particular mom writing that particular blog in that particular post found CIO to work for her, and posts a comment excoriating that mommy blogger up, down, left, right.  Or similar examples.  (Please note that these are just pulled out of my ass as examples, with no specific blogs or commenters in mind.)

The other day, I logged into OmegaMom’s admin section, found an unapproved comment was listed, and opened it up to look at it.  It was a comment on this post.  Note that this post is two years old.

The comment was:

She ‘chose’ you? She had no choice! Any child would chose their natural mother and country! She settled for you! Please acknowledge her feelings later when they are not so easy to manage. ;-(

Well.  Boy howdy, am I ever chastened.  My outlook on life and adoption has been totally turned around by that one comment.  Goodness knows that prior to Dolly’s little contribution to my love fest of two years ago, I was not introspective about adoption.  Nosirreebob; I am one of those folk who think that adoption is the be-all and end-all of family building approaches, dontchaknow.  I do my very best to squelch any and all mention of my dotter’s birthparents; I refuse to talk about China and her life before we brought her home; I glory in the phrase “Gotcha Day!”; and, of course, I am the kind of person who would gladly go into adoption in a corrupt regime with my eyes closed and my fingers in my ears, singing “La la la, I can’t hear you!”  But now that Dolly has so graciously informed me about the ins and outs of adoption issues so succinctly and precisely, I am A Changed Woman.

Ahem.

That was, in case you didn’t realize it, a wee tad of sarcasm.

Just a wee tad.

The context:  We (the Omegas) were discussing the day we met OmegaDotter.  OmegaDotter was, at the time, four years old.  We told her that the people in the CCAA in China had chosen her for us.  She said a cute little, sweet little, “I chose you!”, which I thought was sweet, adorable, loving, yadda yadda yadda.  I hugged her, kissed her, told her we loved her, and promptly wrote about it in my blog.

(In between various posts like this, and this, and this.  And all of these.  That last specific one, by the way, was all of nine days after the one Dolly so kindly commented on.  Post that sometimes really disturb some of my readers who are not in the adoption world, and make them feel I’m paying too much attention to adoption issues…)

But, hey.  I guess what I should have done was to grab my four-year-old by the shoulders, stare into her eyes intently, and tell her that no, she didn’t choose us, that she had no choice, that she “settled” for us, that she needed to face her deep-down feelings right then, right there, and she didn’t really love us anyway, we were just a poor substitute for her real parents and birth culture.

Obviously, Dolly doesn’t have a four-year-old. 

So, folks, do me a favor:  If you chance upon a blog that says something you really and truly disagree with, read a few other entries in that blog, like a month’s worth, just to see what that blogger might really be about.  If, after doing that, you feel like the blogger is still lower than the lint in a worm’s navel, go right ahead and post your comment.  Otherwise, regard it as one of those internet exercises in restraint, like the one where after you write a blistering email in the heat of fury, you save it as a draft, go for a long walk, and then return to re-read it before hitting the “send” button.  Almost every time I do that, I end up deleting the draft and substituting a pretty toned-down “I disagree” version instead.  Or just not sending the email at all.

Because, at the end of it all, while I’m miffed at Dolly’s presumption, I’m also amused.  Because I am so not her target.  She’s aiming at a fictional version of OmegaMom, and when she fired, it went off about 180 degrees away from her intended mark.

My memory is not what it once was; this, alas, is the fate that awaits almost all.

To wit:  I chanced upon the film “Kindergarten Cop” at the local DVD-aria, in the “buy it cheap” bin.  I remembered it as being quite fun and cute, so purchased it.

The dotter pestered me to watch it this a.m., so we snuggled on the futon with the sun reflecting off the snow in the back yard into the family room, and turned on the DVD player.

Well.  Okay, then.  I remembered bits and pieces of it, all the ones with Arnie in the classroom.  What I should have remembered is that, even at his cutest and funnest, Arnie tends to have blood-and-guts movies with bad guys being beaten to smithereens in all sorts of odd places (such as a beauty salon).  That there are strung-out hookers and street sleazoids who use rather rank language.

So there we are, snuggled up, with “shit!”s and “asshole!”s and “motherfucker!”s being tossed hither and yon, OmegaMom wincing all the way and hoping its moving fast enough so the dotter doesn’t really catch them.  The dotter is requiring an ongoing explanation of the various shenanigans–who is doing what to whom and why–and producing a running commentary.  Then Arnie hits the classroom filled with 6-year-olds.

And the dotter turns to me with shocked eyes, and hisses at me, “Ooooh!  He used the ‘S-word’!”

I’m sitting there thinking to myself, “Shit!  Yes, he used the ‘S-word’ many, many times!  Damn!  She noticed!”

And she continues, sounding the forbidden phrase out: “Sh-uh-t uh-p!  We’re not allowed to use that in school!”

So there ya have it:  the various incarnations of the infamous Nine Words went right in one ear and out the other, but Arnie shouting–three times, very loudly!–”SHUT UP!” to the kiddies in his class roused the shocked Victorian in the dotter.

As an aside:  Really, I should remember for future reference that any Arnold Schwartzenegger movie is going to include blood, guts, gore, people being beaten, guns firing loudly, and, in this case, a terrorized mommy and child.  Um.  I did not win the Good Mommy award with this one; the dotter spent about ten minutes in my lap with a blanket over her head, asking when she could watch again.