OmegaMom

…OmegaDotter and I were boarding an airplane with two cats and three turtles (very carefully packaged turtles), on our way up to Alaska.

Then we spent a month in The Shoebox.  We bought the first house we possibly could, just to get out of The Shoebox (okay, it was also very cute, bigger than our old house, didn’t need work, had an acre of land…).  I managed to think I was dying of a heart attack, and spent a few days in the hospital.  The dotter started kindergarten.  We moved into the new house.

I missed Arizona.  But we settled in, and life went on.

Here we are, two years later.  OmegaDotter is now 7-1/2 years old, a very different young lady than the little girl she was when we moved.  OmegaDad has totally revamped the back yard and I have been informed by our next-door neighbor (she-who-works-80-hours-a-week-at-three-jobs) that our back yard is the envy of the neighborhood.  I’ve survived two winters of darkness, and OmegaDad has survived two summers of The Gloaming.

It’s astonishing how quickly the time has passed.

Today, I picked the dotter up early from her summer camp, right after her gymnastics class, and we motored up to Small Alaska Town to go to the farmers’ market-cum-festival that SAT holds on Fridays in summertime.  There were fresh, ripe strawberries, and freshly-shelled peas, both of which found their way into a bag in our car.  Then we went daytripping up the Kmik River.  The river is wall-to-wall water, rushing and pouring and dancing down to the inlet, higher than we have ever seen it before.

We went up to a bridge that crosses Glacial Creek, which pours out from Small Glacier and tumbles down the mountainside to join the Kmik.  The creek, too, was higher than we’ve ever seen it before, a torrent of glacial “flour” rampaging underneath the bridge from pylon to pylon.  We clambered down to the edge and walked down the creek, seeing evidence that it had been even higher just a few days ago.  The sun–which had been hiding away for a few hours–popped out while we were there, and everything was bright and sunny and beautiful.

On our way back home, we passed a roadside stand selling fresh raspberries.  They had two kinds–ordinary red raspberries, and the most wonderful, sweet, juicy golden raspberries.  A pint of each also found their way into the car.

It’s still July.  But we saw oodles of alders whose leaves were already turning yellow, and The Gloaming is almost over–we actually need the lights on at midnight, now that we have “nautical twilight” back again.  Notices of registration periods are arriving in our mailbox…school, dance, gymnastics.  Autumn is whirling down on us, too soon for me, and within a few months we will have snow.

Our fair state’s governor, Sarah Palin, announced her coming resignation while the dotter and I were frolicking in Arizona.  I actually heard about it moments after it was announced, because I was sitting in the office with my boss and my replacement trying to fix things (which I bollixed up), and my boss was cruisin’ the news sites.

And what a surprise it was!  Whoa!  Our very own Joan of Arc, our crusader for Truth, Justice, and the Amurrikan Way, quitting?!  I thought she wasn’t a quitter?!

There was a flurry of speculation as to why.  She was tired of people taking potshots at her kid, Trig, via photoshopping–though the people were actually taking potshots at her. She was tired of “frivolous ethics complaints”–even though the one that was most serious and cost the most was initiated by Palin herself.  She was tired of being a media punching bag–even conservative media and Republican pundits were on the bandwagon.  There was rumor of a possible indictment, but that one got cleared up right away, with the FBI taking the unusual step of actually commenting on the possibility, or lack thereof.  She wanted to position herself for a presidential run in 2012.  (Given something she said in her final speech today, I think this one is on the money.)  And on and on.

She says she wanted to write a book and make money, and be the focal point of a New Conservative Coalition.  (Sound the trumpets!)

Well, today is the big day.  After a farewell tour of Alaska–I think she saw more of Alaska in the past two weeks than she had in the prior year and a half–and a trio of farewell barbecues, one in Anchorage, one in her hometown of Wasilla, and one in Fairbanks, she is officially no longer the governor, and Sean Parnell is in.

Sean who?!

I’m sure he won’t be as entertaining, though he supposedly espouses the same viewpoints as Sarah herself.

Sarah will still be on Twitter under a different account starting tomorrow; rumor has it that the new account is AKSarahPalin.  Currently, the account is protected.

Today we thinned out the beets.  We had two sizes–itty bitty embryonic beets, and almost-beet-sized beets.  We ate the mess of embryonic beets, cooked with their greens, and it was yummy.  Tomorrow or the next day, we will eat the almost-beet-sized beets.

Sunday, OmegaDad made homemade peach ice cream, brownies, and bread.  Saturday, he brought home two pints of the best blueberries I’ve had in ages.  It’s been a few days of eatin’ around here!

ETA:  Oh!  I forgot!  Today was the anniversary of the first moon landing.  I don’t remember it very well, but do remember watching it at my grandmother’s house down in Jacksonville.  We were telling the dotter about it, and she kept asking, “He was the first man ever to walk on the moon?!  EVER?!”  Then she asked who was the first woman to walk on the moon.  We said no woman has ever walked on the moon.  Now she wants to be the first.  Anyway, in honor of this occasion (warning:  language, but quite appropriately inappropriate!):

We have returned.  We had a lovely time visiting with GrannyJ and OmegaBro and family.  We swam, we walked, we visited, I worked (multiple days, bah, but it was mostly my own stupid fault), we hung out, we got lots and lots of sun, and OmegaDotter now is no longer scared of bugs but is busy collecting them (courtesy of OmegaBro and Niece and Nephew).  I got lots of dark nights (yay!) and some stars (yay!) and lots of clear electric blue skies, ponderosa pines, and monsoon storms.

But I will discuss those things in more detail later.  Maybe.

The most important thing, though, was that I managed to locate and contact One And Only True Love’s family in secret and managed to get the dotter up to Small Mountain University Town for a visit with him without her knowing what was going on.

I lied my head off to do this.  I told her I had looked them up in the phone book and couldn’t find them.  I told her the surprise I was working on didn’t work out.  When I said we were going up to SMUT, with a stop at Slide Rock State Park, and she asked if we could please, please, puh-leeze find a way to meet up with OAOTL, I shook my head with a sad smile and reminded her that I couldn’t get their information and didn’t remember where they lived.

Hah-hah!

So we did Slide Rock, then motored on up the hill to SMUT, and she fell asleep–worn out from playing, and I had to drive out one of my favorite roads hoping I could time her rise from her nap to coincide with us getting back into the right neighborhood at the right time.

Which I did.  (Picture OmegaMom with a smirky, triumphant grin right now.)

At which point–she was awake and excited to be back in SMUT–I said, “Hmmm.  Now I think I can remember where he lived–wasn’t their house down this way?” and turned off the road onto another, and then another, and she started recognizing things and got excited.  I pulled the car to a stop across the street from their house–which had been painted so I couldn’t recognize it when I went scouting–and she said, with great excitement, “That’s it!  That’s his house!” 

I said, doubtfully, “Hmm.  I’m not sure, love, it doesn’t look the same to me.  But maybe we could knock on the door and see if they know where he lives now.”  We went across the street, up the deck stairs, to the door, and before I could even ring the doorbell OmegaDotter was trying to open the screen door, and OAOTL’s mom was there, and OAOTL was barging out saying, “OMEGADOTTER!“

At which point, OmegaDotter became quite suddenly still and stiff and shy, which she has been doing lately.

Um.

Now this I had not expected.  I had expected her to swarm all over him like a crazed monkey.  I had expected her to stand with her hands clasped at her waist with a particularly goofy grin that she has when she’s over-the-moon happy.  I did not expect awkward silence.

At this point, I was terrified that everything was Going To Go Wrong.  But she pulled my head down and whispered into my ear to ask if this was my surprise, and said, quietly shocked, “You lied!  Oh, you bad mommy!”

So she and OAOTL sat, awkwardly, on different spots on the sofa while OAOTL’s mom and I made small talk.

OAOTL produced the most lovely, sweet drawing with “I LOVE YOU OMEGADOTTER!” written on it, and huge hearts, and two pictures of two kids holding hands, one in a boat.  OMG.  It was simply not the sort of thing you’d expect from a seven-year-old boy.  (OAOTL’s mom tells me that all of his “girlfriends” have looked just like her, and his latest had said something like “OmegaDotter, OmegaDotter, OmegaDotter!  I am so tired of you talking about OmegaDotter!” shortly before she stopped being his friend…)

The kids, however, were still not smiling or touching or anything at this point.  It was…just plain awkward.

Luckily, we had made arrangements to take them off swimming at the swanky new aquatic center.  By the time we got there, the awkwardness had evaporated: the dotter and OAOTL were chattering their heads off, and once we were in the pool area, she and OAOTL sprinted off to the waiting line to go down the immense water slide.  We hung out there for an hour, and then headed off for pizza at the cheap Chuck E. Cheez clone, and then back to OAOTL’s house for trampoline jumping and playing, and then it was time to go…

Both kids swarmed into OAOTL’s bedroom, scampered up onto his bunk bed, and started bouncing onto and off of each other and shouting “NO!” and “Can’t I spend the night?!” and “When can she come back?!”

OmegaDotter later told me I was the very best mom ever, and it was the greatest surprise ever.

Here are the kids towards the beginning of the visit, just beginning to warm up again:

And here they are when trying to avoid her going back to GrannyJ’s:

I now have address, phone number, and email address safely sent–via email–to all three of my email addresses, so there is no way we can lose them now.