OmegaMom

• Bah.  Our thunderstorm fizzled–we ended up with a little bit of drizzle, and the thunder and lightning disappeared.  Today, to demonstrate the amount of moisture we had that resulted in our monsoons, we have had gray skies all day, and rain.  We need the rain, but…oh, well.  I really wanted that thunderstorm to be a biggie.
• I tried–unsuccessfully–to avoid the homemade Rice Krispie Treats we have on the kitchen counter.  Some people are made of strong stuff, and can Resist; I cannot.
• The dotter is now in summer camp.  Woohoo!
• Which means she is encountering new people again.  Woohoo!
• Which means, in our rednecky area, another encounter with a kid who says “I don’t like Chinese people.”  This was apparently announced to the dotter and to R. and her brother H., who are also adopted from China.  That’s the bad part.  The good part is that the dotter found her favorite counselor, Mr. Zane (who is incredibly cute and sweet) and told him.  Mr. Zane then pulled the youngster aside and told him, “Hey, man.  That is so uncool.”  And no doubt a bit more.  The other good part is that the dotter told us at the dinner table and was suitably scornful, and talked about it easily.  Damn.  I hate this stuff.  I really wish there were a way to protect the dotter–and her friends–from such idiocy.  Anyone have any thoughts on a low-key camp-style diversity curriculum that I can pass on to the counselors?
• What possesses people/kids to say things like that, anyway?  Goddamn.

I grew up in Chicago.  It’s in the Midwest, for those of you who don’t know (har!).  The Midwest is blessed (or cursed, depending upon whom you ask) with magnificent thunderstorms.  Huge anvil-shaped cumulonimbus monsters build up, with accompanied by a build-up of oppressive humidity, until the air falls still and heavy and weighted and you feel almost like you’re swimming through it.  Typically, there’s a period of fitful breezes gusting one way and the other, before they die down, and you know IT is going to come through at any moment.  And then IT hits:  A wild burst of sustained wind coming from one direction, bending all the trees’ branches before it, tossing and turning the (ever-present) trash on the city streets.  With the wind comes an abrupt change in temperature–it can drop 20 or 30 degrees in a few minutes–and then the lightning starts, and the cracks of thunder, and the torrents of rain, and the wind always dashing it this way and that.  That’s the time to sit in your house near a window, so you can hear and see all the drama, and watch the water crashing against the windowpanes, and be happy that you’re safe and warm.

Rather than, say, walking to the El station without an umbrella, as it dumps water at the rate of an inch an hour.  Or driving, when you realize your windshield wipers aren’t up to the job, even at the top speed.

You also got tornado weather.  You knew it was tornado weather because the bottoms of the clouds, and the light filtering through, all turned an eerie greenish-gray color.  This was when you’d turn on the radio to be sure you heard of any tornado warnings–though it was extremely rare that you’d get one in the Big City; cities, it seems, tend to produce heat islands that cause updrafts that disrupt the beginnings of tornado formation.

Then I lived in the mountains of Arizona, which was blessed with monsoon season, a time when the storms would build up over the mountaintops and valleys over rivers, spreading outward, producing small thunderheads with powerful punch.  The storms wouldn’t sprawl over the countryside the way they do in the Midwest, but would produce–just like the weathermen say–”widely scattered thunderstorms”.  You can drive between them, and see the thunder, lightning, and rain being produced by one off in the distance, while being dry where you are.  But even though they’re small, compared to the storms in the Midwest, they’re intense, and filled with drama.

Then I moved to the Bay Area.  This is a place that has never seen a thunderstorm, so far as I know.  My need for weather drama went totally unquenched for years.

Then I moved to Lubbock, Texas, a benighted place where people think a row of tulips planted arrow-straight in front of their yellow-brick boxes is a “garden”, and where there’s no topography to speak of for hundreds of miles in any one direction.  BUT!  But Lubbock had three things going for it:  the spring and fall goose migration, wherein you would see, and hear, thousands of geese flying overhead, going north in the spring and south in the fall; incredible sunsets because of the dust and the aforementioned lack of topography–you could see the sunsets for an hour, a vivid array of golds and pinks and magentas and reds; and Wrath of God thunderstorms.  These were storms to conjure with, preceded by a wall of dust that would sweep through the neighborhood, covering everything with reddish loam, and then, when the storm hit, turned to instant mud spots.  Lubbock is in Tornado Alley, so not only did I get the drama of the storms, but lots of tornado weather.

Another stint in the mountains of Arizona lasted for ten years.

But here in Alaska, where we live, the rains are mostly long, slow, and dreary–no thunderstorms to speak of, normally.

This May, however…ah, it’s been glorious:  warm (almost hot), dry, clear, sunny.  And today?  Today, we are going to get rain.  Because the sky over the mountains to the north of us has been brewing monsoon clouds, like we got in Arizona, and now it is dark, threatening, lowering silver-gray and the thunder has been rumbling for an hour, getting closer and louder as the clouds build down to the valley where we live.  An hour ago, the clouds were still to the north, and I was sitting in the yard in the beating sunlight, listening to the sturm und drang behind me…now, the clouds have grown overhead and to the south.

Last year, we didn’t have any thunderstorms at all.  The first summer we were here, we had two or three; they are very rare.  In fact, the various write-ups of weather for these areas specifically mention that “even though you may have heard there are no thunderstorms in Alaska, it does happen…”

I was so excited, I called OmegaDad at work to breathlessly exclaim, “We have thunder!  And a huge anvil cloud!  And it’s coming our way!”  He laughed at me, and said, “I was just talking with M about thunderstorms, and telling him you would be so happy that we’re having one!”  Apparently, in one of those cosmic coincidences that make life interesting, I called him just after he announced that…Then, of course, he went on to claim that I was only happy when disaster was brewing, which made me pout, which made him laugh…

Anyway, I’m happy.  Thunderstorms do this Midwestern girl’s heart good.

Yesterday was spent ferrying the dotter off to a “Fun Meet” at her gymnastics place (what the heck do you call it?  “Gymnasium” doesn’t quite work.) for the entire morning.  Everyone who participated got a trophy (at least the ribbons were awarded based on points).  Oy!  None of my photos turned out well.  Oy!  The dotter had fun–hey!  And even though she needed prompting as to what came next, her floor routine was the best of her group.

Gratuitous video:

Today…today, OmegaDad and I spent scaring ourselves by removing the old wall to the outer part of the “stable” and framing in the new wall.  Why bother?  Well, just as a quick graphic showing the reason, we have the “foundations” of the two pieces on either side of the “door”:

It’s a miracle that thing has actually stayed upright (note, I do not say it has actually been plumb, or level.)  Not to mention that the cross-bracing on the back of these pieces of wall were cribbed* to within an inch of their lives by the previous horsie tenants.

Anyway, tomorrow’s post is going to be a pictorial history which will no doubt bore my readers to tears, but it’s history, dammit, and we have a very bad habit of taking dumpy stuff and turning it into nice looking stuff, and having no “before” or “during” pictures to point to.

While we were doing this (by “we”, I mean that OmegaDad did all the manly-man work, while I climbed ladders, held boards, helped measure, and fetched and carried pens, hammers, crowbars, drills, nails, and screws), we came across a surprise inside the upper portion of the wall–to wit, an ancient, dried-up hornet nest:

It was so pretty that I had to take close-ups:

Inside this splendid creation were dead old yellowjackets, mummified eggs, and the honeycomb-shaped cells:

I thought it was fascinating.  Believe me when I say I do not find a live hornet or wasp fascinating; they terrify me.  Yellowjackets I can cope with, and a long-abandoned nest filled with wasp-y cadavers actually makes me feel very good:  they are dead!  DEAD!  AND GONE!  Bwahahaha!

The dotter was very patient and hardly whined at us at all (it’s that maturity thang coming into play), so I rewarded her by hauling her off to the local lake for an hour.  Unfortunately, while it was toasty warm at our house, sheltered from the breeze as it is, the lake area was breezy and a bit cool, and the lake itself was still icy cold.  Given that three weeks ago, there was still ice there, this is no surprise.

*Non-horse folk:  “Cribbing” is when a bored horse chews whatever it can reach with its mouth. 

OmegaDad joked that, between us, we have “a glass”.  That’s because he sees the glass as half full, I see it as half empty.

As an example:  This evening I have been doing the annual round o’ gifties for various teachers and what-not at OmegaDotter’s school.  Tomorrow is her last day of first grade (OMG!).  But this year’s gift round is bittersweet, because we are losing two people at her school who I think are Just Awesome:  the principal, and the music teacher.

Before the dotter got into school, I mainly thought of a principal as just an administrator–someone who made the decisions and got things done, but who wasn’t really important in the grand scheme of things.  But Mr. Big, the current principal, has made me aware of just how much influence the principal has in creating and maintaining an environment, an atmosphere, in a school.  OmegaDotter’s school, under Mr. Big, has been warm, caring, nurturing.  It’s a good school (even if I find myself irked that the front-desk workers have [gag] Thomas Kincaide screensavers with Bible quotes on their computers).  There are ongoing “fun” things being done, that make the kids feel part of a large family, like the sock hop and the family movie nights and the welcome and farewell barbecues.  There is good communication with parents.  (Mr. Big endeared himself to me forever with his response to the “Chinese girls are mean!” incident last year; he knew just how much that would hurt the dotter and her family.)

So he’s going.  A new school has been built, and he gets to start it up next fall.  We’re getting a new principal, who seems like a boring Marine type.  We’ve met him, but had no real interaction; in my typical “glass half-empty” way, I’m sure he won’t be as good as Mr. Big.

The music teacher, Mr. L., came to us last fall fresh from his music education graduate degree.  He’s young, cute, enthusiastic, and he has a true gift for teaching children about the joys of music.  He instituted school-wide concerts, one in the winter and one in the spring.  He taught beginning band to fourth- and fifth-graders.  He started a special chorus for those who wanted to join and do the work.  The dotter came home after her music days humming and telling us about digeridoos and drums and trumpets.  In the concerts–well, it was amazing how well he did with the fourth- and fifth-graders playing recorders.  The younger kids all sang in tune and together.  The older kids demonstrated that they could sing multiple parts and fortissimo and pianissimo.  And the tunes he selected were just plain fun.

Then there was the time he challenged the school kids to bring in their coins for a special charity by saying that he was going to shave off his long locks and the kids who brought in the most money would be able to do the shaving.  Four of the dotter’s classmates were amongst the kids who got to do the shaving, and it was great fun for everyone.  (I did miss the long hair, though; sigh…)

He’s going too, to follow Mr. Big to the new school.  It’s a fabulous opportunity for him, to be able to set the tone for the school music program and make it his own.  And I, being “glass half-empty”, am feeling like there’s no way on earth to find a music teacher as good as he was.  OmegaDad, of course, regales us with tales of the new music teacher in his elementary school, and how the new teacher was So Much Better than the old one.  The difference here being that, in his case, a new young teacher was replacing an old, worn-out teacher who was retiring…

So it’s bittersweet.  Tomorrow the dotter goes off to her last day of first grade, then we swing into summertime activities, and the fall lurks ahead like a great unknown…

I am seriously going to miss Mr. Big and Mr. L.  They were part of what makes the dotter’s school so good.

OmegaDad, after watching a co-worker deal with the frustration of purchasing new software, sent this on to me.

1. Ask ITS for new software. ITS will ask you to fill out “The Form”.
2. Spend hours filling out The Form. You may need help answering some questions on The Form, but there is no form to get help with The Form, and no human knows the answers. (Certain questions were put on The Form as a cruel joke. There are no answers to these questions. YOU MUST ANSWER ALL THESE QUESTIONS.)
3. Route The Form for signatures. Everyone must sign The Form. There are 1.8 million people employed by the US Government. Most of these people will notice that you have made some error on The Form, thus they will return The Form to you. Correct the errors and resubmit the form.
   1. Only 7 of the 1.8 million US government employees understand how to work the postage machine.
   2. 6 of these people are at Team Building Training and cannot be contacted.
   3. The 7th person is currently recovering from injuries received while trying to repair the postage machine.
4. Once The Form has be routed for signatures, it will be returned to your ITS Representative. Your ITS Representative will notify you that The Form is now out of date. Please complete the New Form and repeat steps 2 through 4.
5. Prior to approval, the New Form will be placed in a clearly marked 8.5 x 11 file folder. The File will be stored in a secure location. Remember that scene from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ where they stored the Ark of the Covenant in that huge warehouse? That it where The New Form will be stored.
6. A Transient Form Specialist at ITS will be notified that your Form has been filed. The Transient Form Specialist will be instructed to email you regarding the disposal of your New Form. Transient Form Specialists are temporary employees hired through the Americorps Program. As such, Transient Form Specialists do not have access to government computing networks. This is a Department of Homeland Security requirement. Please be patient while the Transient Form Specialist finds a local public library with Internet access.
7. Contact HR for instructions on how to transfer oversight of The New Form to the person who will replace you at retirement. If you wish to acquire new software in order to do your job more efficiently, this is the most important step. DO NOT FAIL TO CONTACT HUMAN RESOURCES FOR TRANSITIONAL FORM RETIREMENT COUNSELING.

P.S.  If you decide to pass this on, and you know our Real Names, please don’t use his, eh?

I have come to a momentous conclusion:

When telling people when to visit Alaska, I should say, “Come in May.”

Rain?  What’s that?  Sunshine?  Oooh, lots.  Greenery?  Yup.  A few flowers–not as many as later on, but at least there’s no drizzly, chilly, rainy days.  It has just been glorious, and I highly recommend it to non-Alaskans as a good way to get to know Alaska.

The dotter tried to do her homework in the hammock this afternoon.  First there was the flat-on-her-back approach:

Then there was the sitting-up approach:

It ended up not working.  Too many distractions, too much sunshine, the breeze kept blowing her papers around, and then there was the problem that her pencil’s eraser was worn down.  Which, of course, meant she couldn’t do her work.  Oh, well; it was a fun afternoon anyway.

I might note that this is my hammock, now dangling from my new Pawley Island hammock frame, a Mother’s Day gift from the hubby and the dotter.  The hammock was my gift many years ago, and was hung between two trees in the back yard of our house in Small Mountain University Town.  Here, however, I was adamant that I needed a frame, rather than putting the hammock between trees; I wanted to be able to grab the sunshine, and anywhere we had two trees properly spaced, we didn’t have sunshine, or else it was right next to the next-door neighbor’s driveway. 

The lilac buds are proceeding apace.  The one bush is loaded with buds on every branch:

The other two bushes are just beginning to get their leaf buds, but I fully expect them to do just as nicely.

The pasque flower that was a bud last week is now fully open:

My other Mother’s Day gifts were a cake, decorated by the dotter:

And, of course, the obligatory hand-made Mother’s Day card:

Note the nascent cursive writing.  She’s not supposed to be doing cursive at school, but is busily producing her own version.  This will probably cause problems next year, or whenever they introduce cursive (if they do at all?)…

I would do Deep Thoughts about Mother’s Day, but will just give you the gist:  Mom’s day is one of the hardest holidays an infertile woman can cope with.  To all my readers who are still struggling with infertility, all I can say is that I hope you, too, will one day be getting the hand-made cards and the gifties made at school.  Another Mom’s day thought is that I found myself thinking of OmegaDotter’s birthmother a lot; the girl is so damned amazing and fun (and irritating and whiny) and smart (and capable of doing incredibly silly stuff), and I wonder what her mother is like, and feel sorrowful that she’s missing out on such a cool kid. 

Follow-up:  Not only did the New York Times quote OmegaMom, but Inside Edition emailed me, wanting to know about flu parties.  Since I don’t know diddly about flu parties, I passed the query on to one of my Tweets, who was interested in doing one.

A few months ago, yet another TED talk came across my radar.  This one was given by Aimee Mullins, a young lady who was born with missing fibula bones and had her legs amputated at age one.  Mullins went on from there to become a super-achiever–she received a full scholarship from the Department of Defense to attend Georgetown University, and became a record-winning athlete in Georgetown’s track team.  She competed in the paralympics, received modeling contracts, has acted in motion pictures, and is a motivational speaker.

At the TED talk, she spoke of disability being a chance to be “more”:

I came away from this video excited, thrilled, wondering “what’s next?!”

At the same, time, however, in the midst of all the gosh-gee-golly-wow that I felt, there was also an overwhelming feeling that this woman’s excitement for the future of prosthetics and the possibilities they open up for her and other was…well…a function of a position of privilege.

See, she’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s obviously wildly intelligent and vividly motivated.  She has people falling all over themselves to show her their latest-and-greatest prosthetic advances so that she can be a spokesman–albeit tangentially–for their new product.

Let’s look at a different amputee, shall we?

Let’s talk about D.  D. came down with diabetes–severely–in his thirties.  It could have been due to his addiction to Dr Pepper (doubtful, but it was a serious addiction!); one version is that his diabetes was caused by a severe blow to his abdomen from his on-again, off-again common-law wife and mother of his children, which deposited him in the hospital with trauma to (among other things) his pancreas.  But diabetes definitely runs in his family; his father had Type II, his grandmother had Type II, his cousin developed it in his forties, and no doubt there will be others.

Although the doctors were–as I understand it–overwhelming in their insistence that he needed to care for himself as a severe diabetic, including watching his blood sugar with an eagle eye, D. lived in denial, continuing his Dr Pepper addiction and sort of waving the diabetes away.  In his forties, he began getting severe foot infections.  He didn’t take care of one, and didn’t go to the doctor for a long time, and then there was a question of whether his doctor was a quack (one point of view) or whether he just wasn’t following doctor’s instructions very well (another point of view).  Anyway, as is common among diabetics, the infection in his toe turned gangrenous, it had to be amputated, and then things didn’t heal, so he had to have the foot amputated.

A year or so later, the other foot had to come off too.

D. was on Medicaid (I believe).  The insurers were reluctant to purchase prosthetics that were any good; oh, they’d buy the cheapest of the lot, but those (as I understand it) didn’t fit very well, were hard to walk with, and, what with one thing or another, D. ended up wheelchair-bound.

D. was not young.  He was not attractive–not ugly, but not attractive.  He was definitely intelligent, but rather than being a go-getter, he was the kind of guy who was always looking out for ways to “get around”, “get by”.  (This was, I must say, a severe frustration for the remainder of his family.)  He was the kind of guy who was irritated by other people trying to make him do things, like, say, the cops; but when someone else trespassed on his turf, he was indignant when the cops didn’t do anything.  Nobody was pounding on his doors offering him bigger-better-faster-more prosthetics.  And his insurance certainly wouldn’t offer anything but the basic.  In the end, his being wheelchair-bound cost him his life; his house was set on fire, he was upstairs and unable to escape, and he died.

There are 80,000 to 84,000 foot amputations each year in the U.S. due to diabetes.  A basic leg prosthesis starts at $2,000, with additional costs from physicians and prosthetic specialists raising the cost up to $10,000.  As someone commented on a Digg posting about Mullins’ TED talk, “most of her prostheses are likely already on the market (all except the arty ones, which appear to be custom designed). no prosthesis is “mass produced” they all have to be individually fitted and cast, sometimes more than once… below the knee prostheses average $8,000 - $16,000. the ones that are for running start at around $22,500. prosthetic limbs are horrendously expensive. an above the knee prosthesis can cost as much as $32,000. it is a huge problem facing the disabled community because health insurance almost never fully covers it or repairs, alot of coverage is as low as a $1,500 annual limit for prosthetics, which in most cases doesn’t even cover repairs.”  Steve, at My New Leg, takes you through the process of (a) getting a new prosthesis, (b) the complications, (c) dealing with insurance; his process starts here.  All the comments I read from either amputees with prosthetics or health professionals who deal with them made it very clear that it’s very expensive to get good prosthetics and it’s very difficult to get insurance to actually cover it.

Aimee Mullins is excited by the possibilities in prosthetics.  She has twelve pairs of legs; she can switch between any pair any day she wants.  (Which sort of reminds me of Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz (chapter here), who was able to switch heads depending on what she wanted to look like each morning–Langwidere wanted Dorothy’s head for her collection…)  Mullins is passionate about the future, about how people who need prosthetics can pick and choose what their new abilities are going to be.  But in her talk, she glosses over–actually, she leaves out entirely–the fact that her situation is far from the norm; she, by virtue of her go-getter personality and good looks, has a much better prognosis, prosthetics-wise, than, oh, 98% of the amputees out there.  My brother D. was one of those 98% who live in the real world.

Other commenters on the issue…

Reminds me

Andy Warhol famously said everyone is world-famous for 15 minutes.  Ah, fleeting celebrity!  I have touched upon it.  Yes, me–your very own OmegaMom–I have been mentioned by pseudonym in the New York Times.

Okay, it’s not like I was interviewed or anything (thank the Kozmik All!), and in context it sounds like the dude writing the article assumed that I was some type of epidemiologist or physician or something (I don’t even play a doctor on the Internet, folks!), and it was merely cribbing a comment I wrote on someone else’s blog.

How-some-ever.  It’s pretty cromulently KEWL to see my very own ‘nym on the pages (hey, a web page is, technically speaking, a “page”, right?) of The Gray Lady herself.

The context:  Towards the beginning of the whole swine flu H1N1 pandemic, one of my Twitterers asked if it made sense to deliberately expose oneself and offspring to the new flu now, since it seemed like a mild flu here in the U.S.  At the time, I thought it was a totally, absolutely, horribly lousy idea.  Now I just think it’s a lousy idea.  Anyway, knowing that Revere at Effect Measure was a Good Source of epidemiological answers, I asked in a comment if he’d speak to the “insanity” of doing such.  I got a bunch of responses that boiled down to “NO!  DON’T DO IT!”

Apparently, now that the swine flu H1N1 pandemic is really seeming to be a generally mild virus (so far) (cross your fingers, knock on wood, throw some salt over your shoulder, and maybe even pray to the Kozmik All), the whole “flu party” idea is spreading, enough so that the NYT got wind of it and decided to check it out with The Experts.

Being a modest sort, I didn’t find this thing on my own; however, Effect Measure got a trackback link out of it, so decided to check it out and report on it.  So here’s his take on the question, in more depth.

There it is:  My brush with fame.  Excuse me while I go hide from the paparazzi.

The dotter is suddenly missing One And Only True Love with great intensity.  I had found his mother’s phone number a few months ago, but never wrote it down; at the dotter’s behest, I tried locating it today online.  Surprise!  It wasn’t there any more.

Insert great sinking feeling here.  I am deeply afraid they have moved away from Small Mountain University Town, and we may not have any way of finding them.

So tonight, at bedtime, after our normal routine, the dotter was snuggled down in bed and I had pulled out my book and was reading, when I heard…

Crying?

Oh, dear.

Sure enough, the dotter was crying.  A little gentle prodding, and I got, “I miss C.!” from her in quiet sobs.

So we spent an hour with her on my lap, crying, and missing her old friend.  It was a very helpless feeling, as there was nothing I could do except sympathize.  I am distinctly reminded of an occasion when I was suffering from a broken heart and sobbing my eyes out on my mother’s lap while I sat on the floor of a van filled with relatives on our way to my brother’s graduation.  I’m sure my mom had the same exact helpless feeling.

OmegaDotter’s school has a revolving “extra” class each day–one day it’s gym, another it’s music, and the third is a visit to the school library.

She tends to bring home horse books of one type or another, with, every once in a while, a Jack-and-Annie book or a topical book (The Halloweiner for Halloween, for instance).  Today, she brought back “How To Draw a Horse”.  She was very perturbed, and claimed it didn’t really show “how” to draw a horse.  So while she was spending a lot of time on the phone with her best buddy A., drawing a thousand dollar bill for her and A. to use in their restaurant (A. was similarly drawing money on the other end), I opened up the book and started following the instructions.

Herewith, a horse head:

And a Welsh pony (I think; it may have been a Shetland):

I think they turned out rather nicely.  If the dotter keeps up with her art books, I may end up learning something.  That’s what kids are for, dontcha know?!  Fergeddabout the hugs and kisses and snuggling and all that–it’s a way to learn things you carefully avoided for many years.

The blog has suffered intensely because we’ve had spectacular, wonderful, gorgeous weather.  Yesterday our local Mesonet station hit 82F; today it hit 78F; on Friday, it was in the low 70s.  These have been record-breaking temperatures.  The sun has been shining, the birds have been singing, and I have been raking.

And raking, and raking, and raking.

I am, as a result, achingly sore in my shoulder, arm, and hip muscles.  I also have a fantastic sunburn.  Wah, wah, wah.  Pity me:  We’ve had weather to die for, and I’ve been outside for three days straight, playing in the yard, and discovering that, yes, Virginia, Alaska sunlight can give you sunburns.

A week ago, the snow was all the way down the mountainsides; now, it’s melted up two-thirds of the way.  A week ago, the trees were brown and bare; now, leaves are exploding everywhere you look and our neighbors’ houses are fading away behind the greenery (as is our kitty-corner, catty-wompus sliver of a view of the smaller mountains to the north of the valley).

This time of year is called “break-up”, because the ice encasing the rivers finally breaks into chunks and is swept downhill, down to lakes and the ocean.  There are bets and lotteries based on when various rivers will break clear.  There is also the problem of ice dams–where the chunks of ice manage to get snagged on something, then snag more chunks of ice, which capture still more, until you have a jumble of ice damming up the river.  Wayfarer Scientista has a lovely description of break-up in her area; Bill Hess was up in Wainwright, helping some native Alaskan whalers prepare an ice ramp for their whaling ship; AKMuckraker, over at Mudflats, took a walk along a creek today, along with some great pics; and Hig, at Ground Truth Trekking, has been using the (lovely, wonderful, long-awaited!) sunlight to play around with Fresnel lenses.

Our lilac bushes are putting out leaf buds and what looks, to me, like the beginnings of lilac blossoms (?):

Some fresh new trees leaves catching the sunlight:

And our pasque flower survived the winter, too, and is about to bloom:

So, essentially, everyone in Alaska is making up for six months of winter weather by soaking up as much sunlight as possible.  It’s amazing just how much being able to be outside and just bask can change one’s disposition–I am practically manic with delight at the joy of springtime.  Anyway, something has to give when one is obsessively enjoying the weather and the yard and the leaves and flowers and and and…and in my case, what gave is the blog.