OmegaMom

OmegaDad has become quite proficient with building edifices out of gingerbread over the years.  And his dexterity with piping royal icing has become quite deft.  And, frankly, anyone who can figure out how to color icing dead black and bright orange deserves an A+ for ingenuity.

(Actually, it turns out that the way to do it is to buy the expensive food coloring at the local gourmet kitchen store.  Alas for my shattered illusions!)

He found out how to make ghosts out of fondant on the internet.  He came up with a way to make tombstones out of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies and white chocolate chips.  He is a dab hand at outlining windows and creating spiderwebs out of icing.

The piece de resistance was the roof, a square slab of homemade sugar candy, colored orange.

Behold!

We have ghosts.  We have tombstones.  We have little pumpkins on the steps.  We have spiderwebs.  We have gables.  Also, notice the way the side looks like a face…

I am most satisfied.  This one came out way cool.

A close-up of the path (made of rock candy) and front door (made of chocolate wafers):

Tombstones and a ghost:

The “ground” is Cocoa Crispies.

The “tree” is some twigs blown down by the incredible winds we have been having yesterday and today, anchored in a squished up caramel.  (We’re supposed to have gusts up to 75 mph tonight; when I took the dotter off to school this afternoon for “Trick or Treat Town” the mountains across the inlet, over by Big City, were obscured by what could have been fog, except that it was coming down through the passes, rather than up from the inlet.  The pseudo-fog was, in fact, dust being scoured from the various glaciers by the winds.  Big City was under an air quality advisory as a result.)

Some fun Halloween links:  The very best Mrs. Incredible costume…jelly jar candle jack-o-lanterns…a real-life Transformer costume (watch the video!)…an incredibly punny Halloween tale from Miss Cellania.

Enjoy your spooky day!

OmegaDotter long ago decided that she wanted to be a Rock Star for Halloween.  This would be, thankfully, a generic Rock Star, not, say, Miley Cyrus or Lady GaGa or anyone in particular.  We tossed around ideas for a while, finally settling on a long-haired wig, an electric guitar, camouflage pants, and a jacket.

All, of course, in the dotter’s favorite color:  PINK.  (Oy.)  (But, hey, someday she will decide that PINK is, like, so totally boooring–like her mother–and come to like some other colors.  There are hints that she will welcome other colors beginning to burgeon, so I have hope.  Maybe by the time she is 13 or 14…)

I had seen pink camo pants on Target.com, so assumed they would be available at our local Chez Target.  We set out for a shopping trip.  Much to my dismay, there were no pink camo pants to be found.  So we scrounged around the store and finally settled upon a pink and black leopard dress, and the Rock Star transitioned from a hard-rocker (though PINK) to a more glam-rocker.

The dotter had been hankering for months after a Barbie play electric guitar; I sniffed.  Barbie.  Humph.  Play guitar.  Humph.  So, to counteract this, I told her she had to buy it herself.  Our shopping trip was her chance; she raided her money jar and quite happily purchased this plastic faux confection.  Much to my amazement when we got home and I had liberated it from its multiple-tie-down jail, it turned out to be fairly cool–once one got past the huge Barbie logo and the PINKness and the whiteness and the daintiness.  It has pre-loaded tunes.  It has the ability to do some rockin’ screamin’ guitar noises.  And it has a “wa-waaaa” lever to emulate the guitarist sliding her hands up and down the guitar strings.  All in all, much more tolerable than I had expected.

Then there was the wig.  We purchased a wig, even though I knew it wasn’t what she wanted.  But it was blonde and it was curly and it had some Disney princess or other on the package, and the dotter oohed and ahhed.  Hey.  It was nine bucks; what harm was there in purchasing the darned thing so that she could try it on and discover it was…well, not the look she wanted.

So the question remained:  what to do about the wig.  Amazon, of course, came through with a long-haired hot-pink wig with bangs…but I forgot to order it.  The dotter kept reminding me at the wrong time–say, as we were getting out of the car at gymnastics, or as she was doing her daily homework, or while we were out shopping.  Since my mind is a sieve these days, these reminders didn’t do much good; she would tell me, I’d nod and say “Yeah, will do!”, and then, a few minutes later–Oh!  Look!  Something shiny!

Somehow I managed to remember it last week; I believe the dotter wised up and reminded me as she was falling asleep, so that I would get online afterwards.  So after getting her down to bed, I wandered down to the office and ordered the thing, paid for it, and then figured all was well.

Until I bothered to actually read the confirmation email, which mentioned, rather nonchalantly, that the delivery date was anywhere between October 27 (good) and November 3 (ooops!).  I read the email on Tuesday, when I was wondering when the darned thing would arrive.

I didn’t tell the dotter about that November 3 date.  Nope, nosirree.  I figured if it didn’t show up, we would figure something out.

But today it arrived, and as soon as the dotter arrived home from school we went into full-fledged dress-up mode.

She tried it on first, of course, in her school clothes, then I had to try it on while she dashed upstairs to get the rest of her outfit:

And then she pulled everything together, like so:

The pink flannel pants are more orange-y, so we’re considering whether leggings might work instead.  Anyway, there you have it, the Saga Of The Rock Star.

We have also carved the pumpkin, OmegaDad and the dotter have been putting together a gingerbread haunted house, we have made fondant ghosts, and it seems that A. is on for Trick-or-Treating again, thus allowing me to avoid the whole K. question.

(Oh, yes.  The dotter did deliver her apology notes this evening at gymnastics, which went over very well.  She got an approving nod from Coach John and a hug from A.  Afterwards, while she was starting her session, I saw them comparing notes and chuckling over the idiosyncratic spelling…”Couch John”, and she was sorry she “heart A.’s arm”…)

The questions that trouble a parent shift and change as the child grows.  At first, the troubles–though they seem huge and insurmountable–are actually pretty straightforward:  kiddo cries, you figure out whether she’s wet or has pooped or needs Orajel or is tired or sick, take care of things, and voila, the problem is solved.  Then you move on to “why is she waking up two or three times in the middle of the night??” and the concurrent “Oh.  My.  God.  I am soooooo sleepy I think I may just collapse right here in the hallway at work and take a little snooze; I’m sure no one will mind.  Right?”  You’ve got the kid biting…or being bit…or both.

Then it’s time to worry about just how soon the kiddo is going to realize just what the words she is singing to the song on the radio mean.  You wince when “Greased Lightning” is playing while she’s watching Grease, and hope that she never turns to you and asks, “What’s a ‘pussy wagon’?” or “That’s weird:  why would anyone say ‘the chicks’ll cream!’?”

Ahem.

(As she gets older, she will start singing more popular songs from the radio, and you’ll realize, after waxing nostalgic for the good ol’ rock songs of your yout’, that you’d have to go back in time about 100 years to find songs that you don’t find yourself casting the hairy eyeball at…It’s amazing the amount of slang devoted to sex and violence, and the amount of popular music of many eras devoted to sex and violence as well.  Just look at all those folk songs.  People are having sex and dying violently all over the place in those.)

Anyway…

To get back to my original subject:  Trouble.

These days, I find myself worrying about friendships.  The dotter has, for some reason, decided she doesn’t want to visit her best bud A.–who OmegaDad and I find absolutely charming.  She’ll hang on the phone with him for hours, playing (ugh) ToonTown, but ever since she returned from an overnight and immediately developed the Not-Flu, she has been avoiding his house.  (There is also the question of dogs.  A.’s mom is a vet for a no-kill shelter.  Their house is filled with dogs and cats.  I have wondered if she’s not subconsciously upset by all the dogs reminding her of Kai.  Then I figure I’m just overanalyzing things, and it’s just a phase.)

A. was supposed to come Trick-or-Treating with us.  Now A. is not.  The dotter immediately suggested K.  K. is the diametric opposite of A.  K. is female, a year older than the dotter, lazy, and snotty.  She’s also the girl who has her finger directly on all of the dotter’s buttons, including adoption issues.  OmegaDad and I don’t like K.

Ugh.

BUT.  That wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about; it just came pouring out in the stream of consciousness brought on by the word “trouble”.

My original point with the word “trouble” is that the dotter got in serious trouble this evening at gymnastics.  Coach Christina had given her group a water break, and they came barreling across the gymnasium floor in a thundering herd, led by the dotter, who was not looking where she was going.

At the same time, A., the oh-my-gosh-she’s-powerful-and-damned-good young gymnast whose team practices at the same time as the dotter’s, was starting a power sprint aimed at a rolling dive flip into the foam pit.

The two paths intersected right by the side of the foam pit.

The inevitable bad and painful collision was only avoided at the very last minute by some extremely quick thinking and movement on A.’s part, with the result that, rather than her normal perfect flip into the pit, she angled into the pit and came crashing down on her arm.

After the gasps of horror and brief adrenaline rush was over for everyone, Coach John (the head coach at the facility) gave the dotter quite a dressing down.  Since they were a distance away from my perch on the bleachers, I couldn’t hear, but there was finger-shaking involved.  She proceeded to the water fountain.  When she was done, I gave her quite a dressing down, of the “Don’t you ever, ever do something like that again!  You need to pay attention to where you’re going and what’s going on on the gymnasium floor!” type.  There was some “You could have been seriously hurt!” and “You could have seriously hurt someone else!” mixed in there, along with some finger-shaking on my part too.

She was suitably subdued afterwards.

On the drive home, I told her she needed to write a note of apology to Coach John and to A., who spent the next half hour favoring her arm.  This worried me; A. is really very, very good and I’d hate for her to be out of commission for a few weeks due to this…total and absolute inattentiveness.

Much to my surprise and amazement, right after we got home, the dotter retreated to her bedroom, then returned a few minutes later, said, “I’m done!”, and handed me two very contrite notes for Coach John and A.

Now all that’s left is for the dotter to deliver them to the recipients herself, on Thursday.  (She wanted me to do it.  Har.  As if.)

Damned episode scared the snot out of me.  Someone could have been very seriously hurt.  At the same time, while one part of me is still seething about the aforementioned total and absolute inattentiveness, the other part of me is just slumgustered at the immediate note-writing and the well-written apologies.  Bit by bit, she’s growing up.

(I won’t mention the zits.)  (Maybe in my next post.)  (Yes.  Zits.  Not a lot.  But, still…)

The dotter having been declared broken-toe-free via x-rays on Monday, she returned to gymnastics on Tuesday.  She wanted me there, so I took along my new toy to play with.  What I learned:  the auto-focus can often fixate on something you don’t want in crowded conditions–causing your intended target to be fuzzy, while a bystander is clear and sharp.  Hmm.  This also happens with videos.

Obviously I need to play more.

But what I mostly did was play with patterns that captured my eyes.

We have worn paint on the bleachers that I was sitting on.  There’s a message in there, somewhere, I know it!:

The HVAC system, looking very science-fiction-y:

Beams and boxes of various colors and shapes:

A mish-mash of equipment surrounding and behind one set of rings:

All in all, it was fun.

This arrived via UPS today.  I am a happy camper.  I have been fiddling with it all evening long (with a break for us going out to dinner, and having a glass of chardonnay, yum).

So…herewith are some play shots.  All have been cropped and resized.  You are more than welcome to skip down to the very last paragraph, because the pics are not particularly interesting or artistic.

First–speed of 1/3200, looking at water dripping into an aluminum bowl:

Next–A close-up of cat hair, from about 2 inches away.  The cat was moving, alas!

The dotter’s colorful “cactus”, also from about 1-2 inches away.  I am not sure what kind of “cactus” it is; it may actually be one of those African succulents instead.  Obviously I need to work with the macro shots to determine how best they work, how to focus them properly.

The sun sculpt GrannyJ sent me two years ago, when I was mourning the lack of sunlight in the wintertime.  This was shot across a dim living room, so it’s a sample of low-light photography.  There is absolutely no comparison with my old digicam; trying to get a shot like this from the old one would have been a lost cause.

A trio of shots of Wooly the cat.  The first is from a bunch of “continuous mode” shots I was taking late this evening, once again in low light.  It takes a photograph for me to realize just how darned pretty he is.  The flash shadows edging his legs are a bit harsh.

The cat in sepia tones.  He moved, of course:

The cat in black and white (the focus was on his shoulder):

Goodness!  He looks grumpy!  But he wasn’t, he was in the middle of washing himself and was in the act of looking up towards me from his paw.

So.  What I need now is a good teach-yourself-photography book.  Can anyone recommend one for me?  Preferably one that focuses on digital photography and composition, and talks about shutter speed, aperture settings, depth of field, etc.  ‘Cause I can play with all of that with this camera!  Woot!

Carrots.  Really!

We planted many carrots this year.  Many many many carrots.  And all our carrots grew.  We have spent the summer happily pulling a few carrots here and there and snarfing them down.

But now it is mid-October, and more than past time to be clearing out the veggie garden before the soil freezes and it becomes impossible to remove the veggies.  So OmegaDad spent the afternoon today pulling carrots.

Many many many carrots.

The picture above is one hod of carrots.  We had more than that.  (The moose did not get the carrots; the veggie beds are protected by PVC pipe-and-netting contraptions, covered with translucent plastic since things have started getting chilly.  The moose ignored the veggie beds entirely.  Alas, our brussels sprouts were not in the veggie beds.)

We also had a sink full of carrots:

We spent the afternoon trading off the task of cleaning carrots.  This is the end result:

You will note, above the sprawl of carrots, a bowl.  In the bowl is a loaf of bread.  This may give you some context as to how many carrots there are in the picture.  I might also add that the heap is about four inches deep, up to six inches deep at the center.

It’s a lot of carrots.

They’re very tasty–the frosts we have had in the past few weeks have sweetened them up amazingly.  They are almost candy sweet.

But, still.  It’s a lot of carrots.

(The song, of course, refers to bananas.  Mashed bananas.  “There were thirty…thousand…pounds…of mashed bananas…of bananas…of bananas…!”)

I had been kicked off my computer by the dotter, who wanted to play ToonTown with her best bud, A.  For hours.  This does not please me, mainly because it consists of the dotter getting on the phone and talking with A. and playing ToonTown and hogging my computer.  The other computer, upstairs, is too slow.

Anyway, I was reading upstairs, when I heard an uproar.  Slowly it was decoded as “Mommy!  Mommy!  Come quick!  Come and see!”

So I ambled down the stairs to see OmegaDad at the office window and OmegaDotter standing on the office chair and the moose above, right outside the office window.

He was eating our yarrow.  Great big honkin’ mouthfuls.

And our black-eyed Susans.  And our Shasta daisies.  And…and…and.

So I dashed upstairs to get the (old) digicam and the dotter and I quick shot some pics while OmegaDad barrelled upstairs to grab a cherry bomb and a lighter.

I was so outraged at the moose-alicious munching going on that I opened the window to yell.  The moose moved off a few yards:

The OmegaDad got to the bottom of the stairs and started chasing the moose off.  It ambled, gathered some steam, and then stopped at the edge of the grassy area, turned around, and laid its ears back.  At which point OmegaDad decided that just shouting and chasing wasn’t going to do the job, that the moose was about to charge, so he lit the cherry bomb and tossed it.  The moose ran off.

The toll: 

• My forsythia!  Chowed down to a foot from the ground!  Argh!
• The aforementioned yarrow, black-eyed Susans, and Shasta daisies.
• All the new leaves on our lilac bushes–though none of the stems, thank heavens.
• Our sunflowers by the greenhouse.
• All our almost-ready-to-harvest brussels sprouts, also by the greenhouse.  Wah!

Harrumph.

Good lord.  Has it really been almost 2 weeks since I last posted?!  I apologize profusely.  Dunno why, but this year I have been in a total blogging doldrum; I come up with ideas for posts and then, like fog melting in the morning sunlight, they drift away, never to return.  Part of the problem, I think, is that Twitter posting has taken the place of my one-off blog posts, the quick-and-dirties that point to a news story or a very cool picture or what-have-you.  The other part is that I think my ability to think Deep Thoughts is atrophying.  This is not good.

But in the meantime…!

I have a new toy wending its way across the country to our doorstep.  I lamented a few weeks ago about trying to do any wildlife photography with our current point-and-shoot digicam, and said I wanted a STUDLY optical zoom.  So I hopped online and started researching.

This is what I ended up ordering:

It’s a Canon SX200 IS, with a 12x optical zoom!!!  Woot!  It is what is called a “prosumer” digital camera, halfway between a point-and-shoot and a digital SLR.  Judging by the reviews on Canon’s website, I will either love it or absolutely hate it.  There doesn’t seem to be an in-between.  What is most consistent is that everyone kvetches about the flash popping up whenever you turn on the camera–this is something I believe I can live with.  What is most amusing is that the people who love it say the low-light performance is awesome, while the people who hate it say the low-light performance is dreadful.  Hmm.  Our current camera’s low-light performance is utterly appalling, so this has to be better!

The Digital Camera Review called it “a solid, better-than-average performer in most respects”, and then went on to say it was a little bit “boring”.  That 12x zoom is not “boring” to me! 

It has automatic mode, but it also has manual control over the aperture and shutter speed, and supposedly can do ISO 1600.  I will be exploring that, to be sure.

Originally, I was supposed to get free shipping, but one of the drawbacks of living in Alaska is that many things that are available to folks Outside (e.g., “the Lower 48″) just aren’t available here.  Ground UPS service from Camera Kings is on that list.  So my carefully garnered rebate form is going to pay for 2nd day air.  On the one hand:  Humph.  On the other hand:  Kewl!

It should arrive Monday, I will start playing with it, and I will report further.

Onto other items:

First, Revere at EffectMeasure says you should get both the H1N1 vaccine and the seasonal flu; the rationale being that the H1N1 may slow down/fizzle out, leaving the normal seasonal flu to start doing its stuff in January and February.  So I am changing my mind on recommending only the H1N1 vaccine.

Secondly, I am finding myself missing Kai more than I thought.  In particular, whenever the urge comes upon me to go hiking (which it hasn’t much in the past few weeks due to illness and recuperation), I realize that we have been hiking together for 11 years…

Thirdly, the “not-flu” is the gift that keeps on giving.  OmegaDad is dealing with a “mild” case of pneumonia and finally seems to be doing better.  After a week’s worth of coping with a wonky stomach, I am now off my favorite Frappucinos–every time I drank one, it made me feel nauseated.

The dotter suddenly wants the computer so she can go play ToonTown, so I am off…

If you can see me, you will see me waving a little white flag of surrender.

We none of us had the flu–officially.  Luckily, the dotter’s pediatrician eyeballed the accuracy rate of the rapid flu tests as determined by the CDC (40% to 70% accurate–almost as good as tossing a coin) and her history of pneumonia, and prescribed Tamiflu. 

Alas, the same did not happen for OmegaDad and me.  OmegaDotter started feeling sick on Sunday (with a bang!), OmegaDad and I started feeling sick on Monday.  We are now eyeing Day 8 of fever and/or general illness.  The dotter, who started one day earlier, and got Tamiflu, has been fever-free for three days, and had energy enough to do cartwheels, handstands, and walkovers today.

I, on the other hand, managed to do dishes and check the chickens in a fit of woohoo-I’m-over-it! energy, which promptly depleted any vestige of fuel my body still contained and I collapsed for the rest of the day in bed feeling like death warmed over.

This is seriously nasty stuff.  At the height, I was running a fever of 103.5F.  The one good thing about the Not-Flu?  I had no hot flashes, ‘cuz I was hot all the time!  Har.  (There was another good thing about the Not-Flu that I thought of, but it has vanished into the mists of vagueness that surround my brain these days.)

You may have noted that I am very dubious about the claim of Not-Flu.  You betcha.  Reading that the flu tests are essentially no better than flipping a coin is enough to tilt my skeptical eyebrow up, sure ’nuff.

In my quest for mindless entertainment, I searched Twitter for H1N1.  (For reference, it’s actually 2009 (a)H1N1.)  Oh, boy.  The woo is strong on this subject.  Let’s see:

• Various claims that a “friend” got the H1N1 vaccine, then promptly came down with it and died.  Let’s just avoid the issue that the vaccine is just now being delivered across the U.S.  There’s a little timeline problem there.
• A person saying she wouldn’t get the H1N1 vaccine because a little kid died of H1N1 around here the other day!!!!  Folks.  That’s what the vaccine is supposed to help prevent.
• People saying they would get the seasonal flu vaccine, but not the H1N1 because it’s too “new” and hasn’t been tested enough.  Okay, this one requires two sub-points:
• FIRST:  Take a look at CDC data.  Ninety-nine percent of the flu cases that are being diagnosed are H1N1.  One percent is “seasonal” flu.  If you were asking me, I’d go for the H1N1 vaccine, not the seasonal flu vaccine.
• SECOND:  Okay, this takes a little longer.  Flu vaccines in general have been around since World War II.  The way the vaccine is developed each year is that WHO epidemiologists take an educated guess as to which flu strains will be prevalent in the upcoming flu season.  This happens around January.  Then it takes the manufacturers of flu vaccines about six to eight months to create a vaccine and get the production rolling on it in time for seasonal flu shots.  This time around, H1N1 showed up in April–months after the regular seasonal flu vaccine process gets going.  However, they had plenty of good virus samples very quickly, and epidemiologists from across the world were rapidly made aware of how novel this one was (like within weeks).  So, the only difference between the H1N1 vaccine and the “normal” seasonal flu vaccine is that (a) they knew exactly what flu they wanted to vaccinate against, rather than a crap shoot of three guesses, and (b) it was a few months later than normal.  But there were a lot of scared governments that pulled strings to get some of the production switched over to H1N1 rather than the seasonal flu.
• Why were they scared?  Because this is a “novel” flu, meaning there are very, very few people who have any immunity to it.  Apparently there was a similar flu in the mid-1950s, so people who are older than that may have native immunity.  But everyone younger than that?  None.  Nada.  Zilch.  The seasonal flu that we normally contend with is usually similar to a flu from the previous year or before, so that most people have had some exposure to it.  This time, a similar flu hasn’t been around for more than sixty years.  To get an idea of how it’s affecting people now, take a look at this chart of “influenza-like illnesses” reported to the CDC within the past few weeks.  I look at the down-tick at the very end of the red line and am hoping it continues, but the kind of upswing shown in the past few weeks is what normally happens in December/January, not September.  So far it seems about as virulent as normal seasonal flu (this is good!), but given the possible numbers of people who could get it at once, the end result could be bad.  Imagine all the hospital ICUs filled with folks on ventilators from the H1N1, and then, oh, a school bus crashes into a tour bus and those people need ventilation and the ICU…where do they go?
• OMG, it contains SQUALENE!!!  It causes CANCER!!!  It kills people!!!!  It has mercury!!!!  And on and on.  Sigh.  Oh, yes, and it’s all a PLOT by the NEW WORLD ORDER…I can’t address them all.  A good resource is EffectMeasure, on ScienceBlogs.

The end result:  the Internet is a marvelous tool.  But if you’ve got no ability to sort B.S. from real information, you’re a sitting duck for the more scary memes out there.

I personally think we all had the flu.  Given the percentages, if we had the flu, we all had Teh Swiney FLOO.  But when that vaccine comes around, I am dragging the dotter in to get it first, and then myself and DH when we’re in the ranks of those who can get it.  (It seems that they’re going to be giving it to kids and pregnant women first, as those are the folks who are most susceptible.)

Anyway, this is just a lot of rambling.  It’s taken me about six hours to write this post, because I have to keep stopping to rest.  Hah!

Hopefully, OmegaDad and I will also soon be feeling better, and no longer like a pair of old damp washrags that have been wrung out and hung out to dry.