OmegaMom

Our (green)house is a very, very, very fine (green)house

So the greenhouse is complete, except for some trim work, as of today.  We happily lugged our two “baby” chickens into the greenhouse to provide a contained greeting spot for old hens and new chickens to get accustomed to each other, in preparation to migrating the new birds into the large coop.

I have to say, the greenhouse is awesome.  OmegaDad did a wonderful job.  It’s neat, tidy, sunny, light and warm inside, roomy, has lots of beams to hang plants from, and looks like it may provide a very nice spot to hang out on chilly days that have some sunshine.  Not that I’m thinking of lazing about there in the dead of winter, mind you.  But it’s really, really nice.

To refresh the memory, here’s what it looked like before:

And this is what it looks like now:

(Pay no attention to the detritus in the foreground of the second picture–there’s a pair of sawhorses with plywood making a work surface, which is covered with paint cans, tools, scrids and scrads of lumber and foam molding, and it provides a nice place to lean rakes, shovels, brooms, etc. while they’re in use.  The whole affair is due to be removed Very Soon Now.)

I am most satisfied.

The bunny…the bunny…oh, I love the bunny

The day after our baby duckling died (I am still sad about that), OmegaDotter went off to play with some neighborhood friends.  An hour later, one of the girls poked her head around the back of the house to ask if we, by any chance, had some carrots?  Why?  Well, see, there’s this bunny that we’re trying to catch…

So I provided some carrots, and figured they’d have a grand time unsuccessfully trying to attract one of the wild bunnies that hang out in the neighborhood (some of them are very interested in our veggie garden, but we have netting over it to deter moose, and it seems to deter the bunnies as well).

An hour later, three girls show up in our backyard lugging the world’s most enormous bunny.  OmegaDad and I take one look and know it’s someone’s pet bunny, but whose?  So we stash the bunny in our downstairs bathroom, animal refuge par excellence, I print up a bunny flier with a picture, and we send the girls out armed with fliers and tape to attach same to mailbox clusters around the neighborhood.

This is the bunny:

You can’t tell, but he’s HUGE.

A day later we get a call from Kelsey, who says she thinks it’s her bunny.  Since at that point I had no idea where the bunny was–A. and G. had taken it home, then A2 and her sister had taken it to their home–I asked her to call later when the dotter was home, so we could return the bunny.

A few hours later, she called and asked if we wanted the bunny.

So now we have a bunny.  His name is Copper.  He’s 7/8ths Belgian giant, 1/8 satin, three years old, and “frisky”, according to Kelsey’s dad.  “Frisky” means he’s not neutered, and thinks people’s legs are sexay female bunnies.

He, too, is moving into the greenhouse as soon as we get the (utterly gross yucky stinky peee-yew) bunny cage and shelter that we got from Kelsey’s family cleaned up.

Fame!

In my last post, I talked about Michael Jackson’s death and how I thought it was tragic.  Please understand, I am not trying to make him out to be any sort of hero.  To me, “tragic” does not necessarily correlate with “heroic”; I was thinking more on the lines of “tragic waste”.  I just think of a boy star who grew up surrounded by people who wanted a piece of him, and not having the maturity to realize that your friends are the people who will pull you up when you’re doing something stupid and say, “What on earth are you thinking, man?!”  There you are, young and rich and talented, and you’ve got people who call themselves “friends” who are not “friends”, but enablers, and they poison your mind against the ones who want you to stop and think for a few moments…to the point where all you have around you are the sleazebags, the sycophants, the wimps who *do* like you for yourself but aren’t strong enough to pull you back.  That is the tragedy to me, that someone with so much promise went off into La-La Land.

Oh, it’s not a new story; it’s so old it shows up in fables and folk tales and (no doubt) the Bible.  But it’s still a sad story, to me.

I’m leaving on a jet plane

The dotter and I board a plane very late this evening to head off to visit GrannyJ for a few weeks.  We leave poor OmegaDad behind to cope with introducing chickens to each other, figuring out how to make a bunny hutch out of the plywood and lumber we have left over, and being left alllll alooooone.  Right now, I’m in that state of semi-frantic obsessive list-checking.  Alas, some things on the list were destined to not get done.

I’ll try to post some entries, but am not sure how often.  The first week coincides with a visit from my bro and his family, so you’re more likely to see stuff after the end of the week.

Pop culture icons of my childhood and early adulthood are dropping like flies.  Ed (”Heeeere’s Johnny!”) McMahon, Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett, and now–in a real shocker–Michael Jackson.

Fawcett repositioned herself from pop-actress and B- or C-movie star to tragic figure by chronicling her death to anal cancer in a documentary that was shown this May on TV.

Ed was, of course, Ed, all the way.  Like many others in these uncertain economic times, he was facing foreclosure on his mansion last year, but managed to re-negotiate with help from friends.

And Michael…sigh.

What can one say about a guy who started out with an angel’s voice, moved on to pop-music stardom and creative risk-taker with “Thriller” and its associated music video–which was a ground-breaker when they made it–and then became a mockery for multiple alleged cosmetic surgeries and accusations of pedophilia…?

A tragic figure all around.

I am finding all of this somewhat shocking, and a nasty reminder that we’re all getting older.  McMahon was 86 and had lived a long and full life; Fawcett was 62; Jackson…?  How old was he?  Oh, that’s right, he was 50 years old.

Wait a minute.

I am 50 years old.

Whoa.

So there it is:  my youth is officially over with.  I can start reading the obituary pages of the newspapers, scanning them for names I know.  Next up is starting to drive slower.  Then I’ll be saying, “Eh?!  What’s that?!  Speak up, sonny, I can’t hear you!”  One foot in the grave already…

(That last part is mostly meant in jest.  Mostly.)

Life has been busy here, Chez OmegaFamily.  I have tales of the China Camp finale, the sad tale of how Ruby the duckling died, the rockin’ and rollin’ earthquake (5.4 magnitude) we had this morning that actually caused me to duck down beneath my desk, the bunny that OmegaDotter and her neighborhood girlfriends found, and further progress on the villa/greenhouse complex.

But right now, I just want to protest.

Remember how I gushed about Mr. L., the elementary school music teacher who is leaving for greener pastures, and how worried I am about who will replace him?  Well, we have now encountered a music teacher who is diametrically opposed to him in personality. 

I have been taking OmegaDotter in to summer camp around 9 a.m.  The first day of the second week of camp, as I chivvied the dotter in to the facility, we were greeted by all the kiddos lined up, hands on their hearts, and a middle-aged battle-axe of a lady playing the national anthem on the piano.  Now, I have little against the national anthem aside from the fact that it’s horrible to sing, and it actually makes me sad to hear it played so…so…mechanically is not quite the word I am looking for, but it comes close.  Every note played perfectly, but no rhythm, no swing, no soul.  Give me a musician who botches notes left and right, but does it with verve and joy any day!

I stood there with the dotter, feeling somewhat awkward, while the kids and counselors sang.  Then this lady moved right into a lecture about how it’s our duty to remember all the sacrifices Our Men In The Service have made, and that they have fought for the Right To Sing This Song.  And then she led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I am not what you would call a highly patriotic person in the normal sense of the word.  I really love my country.  I love the fact that we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness (in general*), and regard countries such as Italy (which had something like 40 governments within the space of six years at one point) with pop-eyed sympathy and a genteel shudder about the instability of it all.  I don’t like totalitarian governments, and cheered with everyone else when the Berlin Wall fell.

But bombastic “My country, right or wrong!”, “America!  Love it or leave it!” patriotism just isn’t my schtick.

So Miss Liza has two strikes against her in my book from the get-go:  she radiates rigid self-righteous belief in country, and she massacres music.  She sets my teeth on edge.

In other words, I took an immediate and violent dislike to the woman.

The problem is, it turns out that she is the “music teacher” for half an hour every morning at camp.

I am hoping and praying that she doesn’t kill all the joy in music for these children while she has them in her oh-so-patriotic clutches.

Today was the dotter’s first day back at her regular summer camp.  There was a handout next to the sign-in book.  I grabbed one and glanced at it.  It was a letter from Miss Liza.  It ensured that I think not only is she an uptight bitch who slaughters music, she’s pompous to boot and can’t write well (though she probably thinks she can).

The subject of this letter was first off how “we are gaining an understanding of rhythm and melody, by taking notice of the various applications and integrations, of those two fundamentals”, and how important music is in our lives.  So she asks that children bring in a CD each week to share with the class (just part of one song).  BUT…Miss Liza will judge the appropriateness of the music, and expects parents to help out by making sure their children avoid music with “inappropriate language, or subject content”.  This includes such things as (of course) drugs and alcohol, and also “mutilation” or “death”.  THEN she adds that they are “exploring musically the area of service and the effect it has had in shaping our country”, so the kids are asked to bring in pictures of family members who have been in service in some way.

Well.

I’m sorry, folks.  A lot of these are things that I think are just fine and dandy–that I agree with if presented thoughtfully and allowing questions–but this woman has set my back up and the entire tone of this letter set the hackles on my neck rising.  So of course, I had to show it to OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love this guy?

Y’know why?  The very first thing he did after reading it was to tell me we needed a good selection of protest songs to send in with the dotter.  Then he googled “protest music for kids”.  Then we spent an hour batting around songs that we thought we might be able to get in past the “inappropriate language” taboo (alas, they probably wouldn’t make it past the “mutilation or death” filter).  We thought of some classic folk songs from the 30s, war protest songs from the 60s and 70s, I tossed in U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and Midnight Oil.

OmegaDad really wants to do this.  I just feel like withdrawing the dotter from camp…

(*Yes, there’s a certain amount of irony in that “we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness” statement coupled with a protest video portraying the Chicago riots in 1968.  But–hey.  Look.  The riots died down, people voted, Nixon won, and America went on.  And when Nixon was brought down by Watergate, the country didn’t dissolve into chaos–Jerry Ford moved into the White House, Chevy Chase made a fortune with his “bumbling Jerry” routine on SNL, and America went on.  Part of what made it go on–perhaps–were these very protests.)

We now have a wild duckling in the garage.  It’s name is Rhubarb, Ruby for short.

I arrived home late from the morning trip to Big City, having dumped the girls at China Camp, dealt with Miss Emily telling me about coping with OmegaDotter and others who were…shall we say, enthusiastic, with the kung-fu instructor, to the point of being annoying.  “Enthusiastic” means climbing all over him, swooning on him, teasing him, following him–you name it; Miss Emily did not have to tell me in any detail, because I immediately knew what it was like.  OmegaDotter still has a lousy sense of other people’s personal space, and when she likes her instructors, she hangs on them.  Literally.

Anyway.  OmegaDad had planned to take the day off to attack painting the interior of the greenhouse, so that we can put up the poly-plastic sheets that will let the sun shine in.  I fully expected to get home & find him off in the back yard, doing his thang.

Instead, when I drove up, there he was in front of the garage, with heaps and piles around him, and making strange faces at me through the window of the car, gesturing for me to get out ASAP.

I thought he had decided to remove the last of the detritus from behind one side of the villa complex.  I was vexed, because I thought the plan had been for him to wait to do this until Sunday.  I was all prepared to grump at him as I emerged from the vehicle.

At which point, he informed me he needed help, and did I notice that all the various boxes, pieces of wood, etc. were making a makeshift corral around the rhubarb plant?  (Um, no.  But now that he mentioned it…)

“Oh, by the way, there’s a baby duck in the rhubarb plant.”

…

I knew, immediately, what this meant.  This meant that we were now the proud owners of a duckling.

As soon as we could get it out of the rhubarb plant.

For those who think this is an easy matter, let me remind you of the effects of 20 hours of sunlight and 4 hours of twilight upon vegetation.  This is not your ordinary rhubarb plant; there is no such thing in the state of Alaska.  This is a monster plant, a jungle unto itself, with leaves the size of an HDTV, rearing up taller than the dotter and almost as tall as me.

ONE rhubarb plant.

Anyway, I stood guard outside the OK Corral while OmegaDad rummaged in the rhubarb jungle for the duckling.

The tale was that he had heard the dawg going nuts while he was in the shower.  He emerged to hear all the neighbor dogs going nuts out front.  He peered out the living room window to see what the ruckus was (usually a moose).  He saw Bad Dawg, from next door, pestering something on the ground while an adult duck fluttered and squawked and attacked it.  He went bounding out the front door, snapping out a loud and firm, “LEAVE IT!”  Bad Dawg retreated, and lo and behold, a duckling rocketed up our driveway and into the rhubarb forest by the corner of the house.  So he quickly began making the OK Corral out of whatever he could lay his hands on from the garage, and waited for me to come home.

So we could capture the duckling.  Which was supposed to be about so big (hold your hands two handwidths apart).  Which turned out, when OmegaDad captured it, to be practically newborn with its egg tooth still on, and about the size of the palm of my hand.

Newborn wild ducklings, let me tell you, are quite jumpy.  As in, at a day old, they can escape from Chicken Prison in the garage, and we find ourselves searching through the garage for small, dark hiding places.  Chicken Prison has now been turned from a minimum strength leisure spa into Mad Max maximum security as a result. 

Here’s a lousy picture–she won’t hold still for pictures at all.

So there you are, an astronaut on the International Space Station, just motoring along, doing your job, and you get a call from Ground Control.

“Say, dudes!  Lissen up!  There’s this Russian volcano blowing its top, and you dudes are scheduled to be somewhere nearby overhead today…can  y’all take a picture for us?  Dude, that would be sweet.”

So as time approaches the rendezvous with this volcano, from a few miles overhead, you fish out your handy-dandy HD camera and point it out the porthole (or whatever astronauts really do when they’re taking photographs manually, which I know they can do)…and you grab this photo, very early on in a big eruption:

Which then proceeds to absolutely wow various folk around the world, including volcanologists.

And including me.  I immediately tweeted it, but just in case my faithful blog subscribers aren’t also Twitter followers, I thought I’d better mention it here.  It’s just too, too cool for words.  (For those who are interested, a bigger version of this picture is available at NASA’s Earth Observatory website.)

I have been driving one hundred miles a day this week, hauling OmegaDotter off to China Camp in Big City.  Luckily, we hooked up with another local family sending their daughter to the same camp, and we’re splitting chauffeuring duties–I drive the girls in, A’s dad picks the girls up and drives them home.  The girls seem to be enjoying the camp, and are learning lots of fun things and getting lots of “OMG, I’m not the only person in the room who looks like me” reassurance.  But I have to say, getting up early and schlepping the girls into town, then hauling ass back home so I can log in to work is, frankly, wearing me out.

So I thought I’d put together a post on an interesting issue I am having with photography and our Olympus digicam.

While we were out on our (wonderful, relaxing, fun) road trip a week and a half ago, we encountered some lovely lupine clusters in the woods by the side of the road.  I got close-up and personal with the lupines with my camera, expecting hoping for some gorgeous pictures.

Take a gander:

Isn’t that blue absolutely lovely?  Isn’t it almost celestial?  All those little slippers with those little purplish tips.  Ahhhh.  It’s breathtaking.  I have done not one thing to this picture except to reduce the resolution so it works on the blog.

I’m not happy–even though I love that picture and find the blues delicious.  Why?

The problem is that those lupines did not look like that to the nekkid eye, at all at all.  They were not that lovely, heavenly, celestial blue with bits of purple on the tips.  They were purple.  Mostly.  Even close up and personal, they were purple.  After a great deal of fiddling around with color replacements, this is more like what they should look like.  Sort of; it’s very fake-y because I used a lot of “replace color” and there are still some splashes that needed the color replaced but I had gotten tired of fiddling and the overall cast was similar enough to the real live flowers that it suited for this demonstration purpose.

This is not the first time I’ve encountered this problem; way back in late October, when the dotter decided she wanted to be a cheerleader for Halloween, I took a picture of her in a purple cheerleader costume–which ended up looking almost navy blue.  No other colors behave this way with our Olympus digicam–just purples.

Anyone have any ideas as to (a) what causes this response and (b) what to do with the camera to avoid it?

(The roadsides around here are filled with purplish flowers.  On one road, we have cascades of lupines.  To the side of the highway in to Big City is a field overflowing with wild iris.  The local streets have some type of lavender-purple bellflowers.  I don’t want to be taking pics of all these things if I’m going to have to dick around inside my photo software to get some vague semblance of the real deal.  Harrumph.)

OmegaDad was painting the trim on the villa/chicken coop/shed/greenhouse.  I was watching him up on the ladder whittling away at an old nail that was sticking out of the trim beneath the roof.  Something on one of the beams caught my eye, so I switched my attention…it was a dragonfly, happily sunning itself right at eye level.

I, of course, didn’t have my camera.

So, sending a quiet prayer up to the Kozmik All, I dashed across the yard, up the stairs to the kitchen, grabbed the camera, and came back.

The dragonfly was still there:

And then, as I was fiddling with my macro settings, worried that my original picture was fuzzy, he flew off, straight into my face.  Which, of course, resulted in a high-pitched squeak from me, which resulted in an alarmed “WHAT WAS THAT?!” from my husband, which required a certain amount of conversation to reassure him that all was well.

I never had a “passion” for anything, or nothing that I would call a “passion”.  My brother knew at about 11 or 12 that he wanted to go into biology, and he planned his life accordingly.  He currently works for the Dark Service as an ecologist.  A friend, two years younger than I, realized in early high school that he was really, really into theatre and special effects and lighting.  Many many years later, he is a professor of lighting technology who has written “the” theatre lighting textbook.  Another friend wandered from job to job for quite a while, decided to go back to college to get a degree in creative writing, and had an epiphany due to a breast-lump scare that switched her from her almost-degreed creative writing focus to pre-med, med school, and a current career as an emergency room doctor.

Me?  I kind of floated.  I wanted to write historical romances for quite a while, but my first year of college scared the snot out of me, so I dropped out.  Also, there was this miscommunication with my parents…Then I spent years in and out of college, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, until the ongoing interaction with computers in every job I was in lured me into a career in programming and software support.

Lurking behind all of this was the fact that my parents never, ever pushed me.  They never told me, “You must get a job as a doctor/scientist/journalist/what-have-you that will allow you to make lots of money/gain fame and fortune/load you with prestige.”  They let me work my way through all these adult decisions, trusting that somehow, some way, I would land on my feet and be–if not famous, filthy rich, and winning the Nobel Prize–at least happy and satisfied.

Sure enough, there I am, relatively happy and satisfied with what I’m doing.  Fer cryin’ out loud, I am paid to do puzzles!  I get to puzzle out what’s wrong with people’s computers.  I get to puzzle out how to grab just the right data from a database.  I get to puzzle out how to make the computer Do What I Want It To.  I get to do logic puzzles.  It’s fun!  I like it!  And they pay me!  Well, heck.  How could I not be satisfied with that??

But there are lots of parents out there who don’t follow the philosophy that my parents followed.  Parents who want to aim their children–like arrows–at a particular career.  Parents who will do everything in their power to make their children go into that career–whether that’s what their children want to do or not.

Sometimes this works out well; I am thinking of Johnny, whose parents made him get a degree in electrical engineering, and who is now happily working his 20th year (I think?) at MegaloCorp, currently doing project management.

Other times…

Well, what brought this post on was a post on PostMimi (how many times can I use the word “post” within one sentence???).  “Mimi” means “secret” in Chinese, and this is a sort of PostSecret specifically for AsianAmericans.  Today there was a post that read:

This is what i was doing with my life
MUSIC/OPERA/CLASSICAL BY DAY
A course away from GRAD
WORKING AS A CHEF BY NIGHT
Working with some of the most amazing/professional people i’ve ever met.

I was happy and excited at the direction it was headed
PERFORMANCE OPPORTUNITIES
A once in a life time chance to perform all over Europe
A CHANCE TO LEAD A FULL KITCHEN
A position i have been working up to.

My parents wanted none of it
“You will end up teaching…failing…wasting money…”

I am now forced to go back to school to Major in Sciences, something i never wanted to do.  I have just given up on a happy life.

It breaks my heart.  I want to shout:  “STOP!!  Don’t do it!  Don’t let your parents rule your life!  Live your passion!!!” 

But I don’t know this person’s life.  It’s quite possible that this person’s parents are paying for college, and refuse to pay any more unless s/he goes into sciences.  It’s oh-so-easy for me, from my perspective as a (gasp!) 50-year-old looking back, with a (gasp!) 50-year-old’s self-confidence, and my personal experience of no pushing from my parents, to say “follow your dreams!” to this young college student.  But when I look back, and think of my passive personality, if my parents had been like that…would I have had that courage?  Would I have been able to toss my feelings of comfort in my family, my utter belief in their utter belief in me, to the winds?  I don’t know.

At the same time, the thought of someone going into the sciences, or medicine, or teaching, or the humanities, or any career, against their wishes and with no spark or desire (or even an absolute dislike) for those subjects, makes me both sad for the person and sad for the others in those areas of expertise.  Do you want a doctor treating you who went into medicine solely because their parents said, “This is what you will do, or we will not pay for college/disown you/never love you again”?

There is certainly plenty of room in every profession for people who don’t have a passion, that’s true.  Plenty of people have gone into various fields with no great love for them, and done well.  But it sounds like this young person has worked hard to start a life in a particular set of creative areas where you have to have passion, you have to have that spark, or else you won’t do well.

Anyway.  I hope I remember this when the dotter is in college.  I hope I never push and push her in a direction she doesn’t want to go.  There are so many ways of making a living as an adult.  I know that she is passionate about art; she is always drawing and painting and creating.  It’s not easy to make a profitable living doing that, but it is easy to make enough.  So if that’s what she wants to do as an adult, trust me, I will do my best to say, “Do it!”

On the other hand, if she wants to be a rock star, I’m going to make sure she has some type of backup plan…;-)

They were celebrating Founders Days in Small Town Alaska this weekend, so we sashayed over there to enjoy some good old-fashioned carnival fun.

First, there was a pony ride.  Even though last weekend’s road trip included a spur-of-the-moment (sort of) and expensive real horseback ride for an hour, a pony ride around in a circle was still A-okay with OmegaDotter:

Then we had to feed ourselves with Fair Food, which means cheap food sold at not-so-cheap prices.  We plopped ourselves down in the shade and drizzle-protection of a circle of small trees and ate.  Then the dotter demonstrated the muscles that she has garnered from gymnastics, and proceeded to climb a tree.

Only a few years ago, tree-climbing was beyond her abilities.  But now that she has matured a bit, she can plan ahead, scoping out the best way up, and she has those muscles (hard-as-a-rock muscles in her legs, if you please) to grasp and propel her way up.  Not that these were very big trees, but still, she enjoyed it.

Then we had to check out the rides in the carnival.  OmegaDad does not like carnival rides, so it’s up to me to accompany the dotter.  First we did the spin-the-apple ride:  first we watched the folks before us and determined that it was much more fun if you got the apple spinning as fast as you could.  Once we climbed in, we figured out how to do it, and we were soon spinning merrily along, enough so that I was incredibly dizzy when the “apples” came to a halt.

Then the dotter and I had to do the mini-roller coaster.  One of these days, I will have to take her to a bigger fair or carnival type thing, where she can have a real roller coaster ride; in the meantime, this will have to do.

I think that the picture was actually taken before we started moving; a set piece, as it were.  We have video, but I’m not going to inflict it on you.

Of course, the dotter had to buy some things, and this is what we came home with:

So, sitting in my comment approval queue for the past, oh, two weeks, has been this delightful little tidbit:

{Hey|Hi|Hello|How are you doing|What’s up|How’s it going|Nice to be here}, I {liked|{love|enjoyed}|read} the post. {Recently|Of Late|Lately} {I’ve|I have|I’ve become} been more {interested|engaged|curious} in chickens and {coops|henhouses|hencoops|chicken coops} myself. Been {looking|searching|looking for} around for a {coop|henhouse|chicken coop|hencoop}, or more {information|info} {so|therefore|and then|and so|thus|indeed|hence} anything that is {putting|setting|placing|positioning} me in the {right|good|correct|adequate|proper|faithful|true|accurate} direction is {very|really} helpful. There is a {lot|heap|great deal|tidy sum|bunch|plenty|mass|mountain} of {information|info|data} out there to {sort|screen} through.

Some dude or dudette has this script, see.  S/he’s supposed to troll the net looking for blogs about (subject), which, in this case, is chicken coops.  Then s/he’s supposed to select only one of each group of word choices.

But s/he was lazy, and this is what I got.  I found it amusing.  Now that I’ve shared it with y’all, I can safely delete it.

What do you do when the power goes out?  If you’re like me, you wait a minute or two before you do anything, because you know it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  If it lasts longer than a few minutes, then it’s time to haul out the candles and lamps, and maybe give a call to the local electric company.

What do you do if it’s not just your house, your neighborhood?  What if it’s your city?  Well, folks who have been in hurricanes or earthquakes know it’s just a matter of time before the services come back on; the news is filled with folks telling you what’s caused the outage, estimates of how long it will take to get things working again, where the evacuation centers are, and passing on the information that people out of the area are working hard and it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  The realities, of course, are often different than the estimates, but you are assured that someone’s taking care of things.

What if it’s not just your city?  What if it’s everywhere?  What if, at the same time as the (electric) power went out, all batteries went dead, all internal combustion motors died, gunpowder stopped working…everything stopped working?

Imagine living in, say, Los Angeles.  Or Phoenix.  Or the East Coast metroplex stretching from northern Virginia all the way up to the middle of New England.  Imagine realizing, fairly quickly, that there is no power, that no-one can fix it, and there’s no way to replenish the food at your local grocery store–if you’re lucky enough to live near enough to walk or bike to it.  Imagine 40 million people all getting hungry and thirsty, and all very, very scared.  Add in the fact that no fire engines work, no police cars work, no ambulances work, and every single airplane in the sky has just become a plummeting bomb filled with thousands of gallons of flammable liquids…Top it off with ravaging illnesses in a few weeks, as unsanitary living conditions spread (40 million people pooping and nowhere to put the poop).

Now imagine it happening worldwide.

That’s the premise set up in the first chapter of S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire: A Novel of the Change.  News of a strange, enormous electrical storm affecting the island of Nantucket is immediately followed by radios, lights, everything going dead.  The world changes in an instant.  Is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  No-one knows.  The novel follows one woman, Juniper MacKenzie, a Wiccan who leads a group of survivors from Corvallis, OR, and one man, Mike Havel, who was piloting a puddle jumper for a rich man and his family through the Idaho mountains when the lights went out, manages to crash land, and leads them to safety.

Food is a big issue in the novel–the realization by modern people of just how much work is involved in getting food on the table, and how important it is to survive.  And violence.  Lack of order leads to lack of law leads to violence.  (Warning:  graphically described violence–you may get tired of hearing about how people’s bowels let loose when they get thrust by a sword.)

The main focus is how they survive, and how their communities develop and cope with a larger, more ruthless community led by Norman Arminger, a former history professor who is now living his dream of resurrecting post-Norman-Conquest medievalism in the city of Portland.

The next two novels–The Protector’s War and A Meeting at Corvallis–take place nine years later.  All three communities that were the center of the first book have stabilized and grown, and it’s obvious that the younger generation is taking things that most of the olders consider “pretend” morale boosters much more seriously.  MacKenzie’s clan–started almost as a joke–has become more and more “clannish”; Havel’s younger BearKillers, who were just kids when The Change occurred, revere him as a leader and warleader; youngsters who grew up in Arminger’s Protectorate are internalizing the huffy formality of court life.  And there’s a war.  But the bad guys aren’t necessarily as horribly bad as they seemed…and there’s a growing sense that the deus ex machina that caused The Change is interfering in a mystic way with some folks.  Just a bit.

The next two novels–The Sunrise Lands and The Scourge of God–take place twenty-one years after The Change. Juniper’s son, Rudi, who was the focus of a prophecy at his dedication ceremony at the end of the very first book, is now an adult, and facing a Quest–to go to Nantucket Island, source of the mysterious storm that caused The Change.  New characters are introduced, but old characters are there as well.  Old enemies now work together as somewhat comfortable allies.  New enemies appear.  Nantucket is a mysterious place that bends the space-time continuum in weird ways.  Some of the old survivors are dying off, while those that remain are befuddled by how the youngsters have internalized the makeshift morale boosters used to get through the crisis, turning them into a way of life.  The youngsters, in their turn, regard the tales of “before The Change” as so much mythical mumbo jumbo and roll their eyes when the older folks go into reminiscing. 

The mystical clues get thicker and happen more often…is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  Is Rudi the reincarnation of King Arthur?  How can some of the eeevul Prophet’s folk become essentially zombies?  You have to wait until the final volume is published in September.  I hope.

In the midst of all the blood and gore were some really intriguing ideas and amusing byplay.  MacKenzie clansfolk heading to the battlefield with their longbows, riding bicycles.  A social taboo against singing “The End Of The World As We Know It”.  Teenagers who take Tolkein literally, and start the Dunedain Rangers as a do-gooders’ association supported by payments for escorting caravans and a retainer for ridding the land of bandits–they speak High Elvish amongst themselves, and have had to cobble together ways to curse and talk about menstruation.  A society based on leadership of a bunch of yogi who were having a conference in the Tetons on how to use the newfangled internet to advertise their businesses when The Change occurred.  The Society for Creative Anachronism pops up all over the place as people who could adjust to the new world just a little bit easier.

I enjoyed the books.  You do have to suspend your disbelief at the mechanics of The Change–even his characters note that its effects happen only on the surface of the earth–but I assume the deux ex machina has taken care of that.  Some readers have commented that they don’t like Stirling’s descriptive style, so be warned:  he spends a helluva lot of time setting the scene, incorporating sights, sounds, smells.  I like it; you may not.

Since we’re still having gorgeous, clear, hot weather, OmegaDad is taking some days off from work to paint the formerly-stable-soon-to-be-greenhouse.  Here’s what it looked like before he started his work, a month ago:

Pretty cheesy.  I have photos of the whole process, but here’s what it looked like this afternoon:

In this picture, OmegaDad is hosing off the shed portion of the “villa” (as he calls it) in preparation for primer, which has already been applied to the greenhouse framing.  Looks a lot better, doesn’t it?!  We’re going to paint it to match the house; dark blue-gray with light blue-gray trim, and we’re going to put a square deck in the area between the two “wings”.

ANYWAY.  This is all preface to what is the main point of my post.  The dotter (shown in her painting T-shirt, which once upon a time was OmegaDad’s painting T-shirt) has been painting on pieces of plywood with the white primer.  Yesterday’s painting was of a horse (of course).  Today, though, when I came out to see how things were going, the dotter was working on a different painting.  This one:

Which I just think is very cool.

Big City has a proposed ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.  Today is the city council review, with a public comment period.  Big City’s Big Preacher has bussed in bunches of folks from Suburban Alaska to oppose the proposed ordinance.  There are hundreds of people there; the streaming media of the session is overwhelmed; and there is commentary on the Big City Newspaper’s article on the affair.

Amongst the comments are a bunch akin to “Hey, I don’t care what you do in private!  Just don’t flaunt your sexuality at me!”

No doubt, they’re really against overt PDAs, but I also think they count “normal” behavior as “flaunting” when it’s applied to homosexuals.

If I were to walk down the street hand-in-hand with OmegaDad, no-one would think I was “flaunting” anything.  If Joe and Jim, in a gay relationship of equal length to ours, were to do the same thing, they’d be getting the hairy eyeball about “forcing your sexuality on others!”

If I drop my husband off at work, peck him on the cheek, and say, “Bye, Babe!”, no-one in the parking lot there would bat an eye.  If Lois and Louise, in a lesbian relationship of equal length to ours, were to do the same thing, they’d be considered to be “flaunting their sexuality”.

If I put a picture of me and my husband at our wedding on my desk at work, it would be an opening for (a) people to say “Oh, what a lovely daughter you have!” (this actually happened to me once, grrr), (b) people to ask where we got married, (c) people to ooh and ahh at how cute we were, (d) requests for advice on weddings.  Bill or Bert, having married in New Hampshire or Iowa, are often afraid to do the same thing for fear of being fired.

If I call OmegaDad’s office and someone else picks up the phone, I can leave a message for him to call home, or have him say “I love you” to me in closing without any repercussions.  A gay or lesbian couple can’t do the same thing, for fear of responses from homophobic coworkers.

The folks who rant about homosexuality being a sin and a perversion, anti-discrimination ordinances being “special rights”, gays holding hands to be “flaunting” it, and homosexual marriage “devaluing” normal marriage just don’t get it. 

First off, I’ve said before, and will say again, that I think people who are afraid of promiscuity and the instability of modern households should be all for homosexual marriage–they’re settling down, they’re promising to love each other and cleave unto each other.  Wouldn’t that promote stability?  Doesn’t the desire for marriage for homosexuals imply that marriage is something special to them that they would cherish?  Aren’t two-income families better for the economy?  Don’t they have more disposable income?

As for “special rights”.  Sheesh.  All they want is to be able to do normal, everyday things–things that every heterosexual takes for granted so much that it isn’t even noticed, without being fired, or banned, or shunned.

And the “flaunting” question?  My god.  Homosexuals are faced every day with evidence of heterosexuals’ sexual relationships–in-your-face evidence. Few heterosexuals consider it “flaunting” unless it’s homosexuals doing the same thing.

I think that the people who were bussed in to protest it should be allowed to speak, but their opinions shouldn’t count in council members’ considerations of the ordinance.  They’ve got every right to their opinion, but they don’t live where the ordinance applies.  Their actions are akin to the out-of-staters who financed the “No on Prop 8″ group in California.  Let the people who are affected by such ordinances be the people to speak out and make the decisions.

It was gorgeous.  Sunny, warm, light breeze.  A little hazy, but, eh, I can live with that.  We had a grand time.  More later.

So I’ll check in later with hot post-apocalyptic science fiction, ‘k?

OmegaMom opens the door and peers into the bloghouse.  She’s carrying a feather duster, which she uses to quickly dust off the blogroll.  She tidies up the BlogHer ads, re-arranges a few Twitters, sits down on the sofa, and sneezes at the poof of dust that she stirred up.  She looks around, frowns, taps her teeth with a fingernail, and says, “Hm.  What we need are some flowers!”

“I think I’ll put some lilacs here.  It’ll make things smell so lovely!”:

“This spot here needs a close-up of some of our wild rose.”:

“Tsst, tsst, tsst…hm…what next?  Ah!  Let’s put some trollius over there.  That’ll make that spot bright and cheery!”:

“Now, to keep the wildcats away, let’s bring in the Leopard’s Bane.”:

“And I think I’ll finish the decorating by putting some sprigs of this mysterious blossoming tree right here.”:

Well!  It’s been a while, hasn’t it?!  Ahem.  I was brought back to my blog-ly duties by a plaintive email from my Unka Bill, who was wondering why every time he visited my blog and hit refresh, it was still showing May 27.  Um.  Well.  Yeah.  See, I’ve been busy enjoying the flowers and the sunlight and the rain.  And yard work.  And being chief cook and bottle washer for OmegaDad whilst he rebuilds the formerly-stable-soon-to-be-greenhouse.

Then there was the pizza party, when OmegaDotter’s friend A. came over to spend the night and we made homemade pizza.  He was a hoot (as he always is), and we had a grand time, though he and the dotter stayed up incredibly late.

Then I found a new author and series.  Um.  Seven books in about ten days?  That sounds about right.  I do love me some hot post-apocalyptic science fiction!

Then I got sick.  Not badly, but enough to put me in bed for a day and a half, sleeping it off.

And then I was turned onto Broken Picture Telephone, a game which is like the classic game of Telephone, except with notes and pictures instead.  I have been busily scribbling and writing notes for two days now.

Anyway:  HI!  I’m back!  Didja miss me?!