OmegaMom

The dotter was “grounded” today from playing at other kids’ houses or having them over, due to yesterday’s misunderstanding.  But we did send her off to “Parents’ Night Out”, mainly because I wanted a quiet evening with OmegaDad.

We rented a movie.  He bought smoked salmon and an array of cheeses and crackers, we had grapes and home-grown carrots and sugar snap peas and dilly dip.

We watched the movie (”Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”–sweet and odd and funny).  We ate.  We joked with each other.  It was relaxing and peaceful.

I have two or three post ideas rolling about in my head:

• In extremis - I read Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer.  There was a scene in there that made me think of this last year’s Iditarod race, and how people who choose to go into an extreme situation, a possibly competitive situation, may view “moral situations” differently.
• A slew of interesting adoption posts have hit my blog reader recently.  There’s the question of “should you adopt internationally/interracially?”  There’s the question of “should international adoptive parents try to ‘open’ the adoption/perform birthparent searches?”  There’s the question of international adoptive parents who deliberately close the door on the culture-of-origin.
• Q&A - Ask me questions!  I need post ideas!

Later, gators.

Remember this?

It happened again, this evening.

So, instead of relaxing and watching some nice dark science fiction (aka Stargate Universe), OmegaDad and I have spent the past 40 minutes dealing with OmegaDotter’s social life–or, currently, lack thereof.

Once again, she started making plans with A.–as in, “We’ll pick you up at…”–without sitting down and asking us first.

It’s not a lot to ask, I think.  I’d like to have her request that a friend can spend the night, and actually talk about it with us, before she starts making plans with that friend.

Not to mention, she had already asked a different friend to come over tomorrow afternoon.  (A friend whose phone number we do not have, by the way, so we can’t call his folks and say “It’s off, sorry!”.)

Not to mention, she had already asked me if she could do “Parents’ Night Out” at her gymnastics facility.

The result:  No friends over at all tomorrow.  No overnight.  And “Parents’ Night Out” only if (a) they have space, and (b) she behaves supremely well tomorrow.

I wanted to talk about other things in my post today, but I’m grumpy and tired and about to head off to bed to wallow in being Mean Mommy.

Our neighborhood is filled with dogs.  Big dogs.  Little dogs.  Dogs that go on walks with their humans.

On the whole, I find myself thinking of Kai less and less, though when the dotter brought home “Our Daily News” (in which the kids write a snippet, it gets compiled into a sheet, and the teacher copies the sheet and sends it home with the kids) where she had not one, but two snippets, about how our dog died…well.  That one made it suddenly come back again.

Anyway, I see the happy people walking their dogs and am wracked with jealousy.  “How come he still has his dog, when our dog died?!”

Totally irrational.  But it reminds me of how I felt in the throes of infertility:  “How come she gets to get pregnant, but I can’t?!”

The dotter’s friend A.’s mom is a veterinarian at a no-kill shelter.  The other day, she called to say they had a schnauzer that needed a home, and did we want him?

Right away, it was a gut-level, “NO!”  Too soon.  Still. 

Maybe next year it won’t be too soon.  In the meantime, there I am, jealous of people with their dogs.

University of Alaska-Big City recently opened a branch of Major Chinese Philosopher Institute, whose mission is to foster Amurrikan-Chinese relations and promote Chinese language learning for K-12 schools.  This means that we have more Chinese events to go to, put on by MCP Institute, if we’re willing to drive an hour each way.  (It also seems that we may end up having Chinese lessons here! in Suburban Alaska! coming up after January 1!  This is majorly exciting; the classes in Big City run from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday nights, which doesn’t work very well for kids that have bedtime at, say, 8:30 p.m., and also doesn’t work well when you have parents who are unnerved at the thought of driving on icy, snowy highways, in the dark, both ways, for months on end.)

MCP Institute’s latest event-with-a-capital-E was a performance of snippets of Chinese opera.  For free.

Well!  That certainly piqued my interest.  So I ran it by the dotter, whose response was an enthusiastic “Yes!”

Since OmegaDad is out of town for a few days (bummer), it was the two of us, motoring into Big City, dining on exotic food at the student union, and figuring out how to get into the parking lot at the theatre.

I had figured, with the six snippets, it would be about an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half.

No.  It included the director of the opera company introducing each vignette, explaining what was going to happen, instructing the crowd on how to indicate approval and when (”Hao!” shouted out–enthusiastically–when the performers held a strategic pose now and then, or whenever you felt like the performers warranted it), all translated by a nice young Chinese lady who did a fairly good job of keeping up with him.

And!  There was audience participation!  After each segment, the director invited anyone who wanted to try something from the vignette.

One of the great things about getting older is that you lose a great deal of self-consciousness.  It seems to start around the age of 35, and increase to the point where you’re willing to do just about anything if it sounds fun, and not even notice that there’s an audience fer Gawd’s sake!  Staring at you!

At least, that has been my experience.  Last year, I danced with Native Alaskans at the Native Alaskan Center; this year, I happily scooched up onto the stage to pretend to be a dainty Chinese nun trembling in fear at getting into a boat.  I didn’t care that my hair was smashed down from wearing my winter hat, or that my jeans were lopsided from not being pulled down over one of my boots.

Anyway, with all the intros and the audience participation, we made it to two and a quarter hours–leaving while the last come-and-join-us portion was running.  The dotter was pretty game throughout; there was a certain amount of snuggling down into (my) jacket (not hers), an “I’m booored” or two, but every time I asked if she wanted to go, she would reply that she wanted to see the last performance, which was supposed to be very acrobatic and very funny.  So we stayed through the entire performance.

The first scene was the aforementioned dainty Chinese nun asking a boatman to help her chase after her One and Only True Love.  It was very funny; they did a splendid job of miming climbing into the boat and the movement of the boat; the old boatman was a flirtatious goat who tried to get the nun to give up on her OAOTL and run away with him…The Chinese nun:

The boatman:

The next scene was a young maiden feeding her chickens and then sewing.  Having had chickens for a year and a half now, I have to say you could almost see the chickens.  And her sewing was very delicate!

Then we had a face-painted general proclaiming his studliness to all and sundry.  Alas, he was moving so much that I couldn’t get a good picture of him–suffice it to say that he was quite grand.

Next up was some true opera drama:  Yet another general was on the losing side; he escaped and hid away, changing his name, marrying, settling down, and living a quiet life for 12 years…only to discover that his mother was leading an army against his new family.  He was full of lyrical Chinese misery.  He was also quite grandly costumed–get a load of those pheasant feathers in his headdress!

Next was another lyrical piece, wherein a young princess, who has been locked away for years as she grew up, is lured out into the palace garden by her maidservant, and discovers the wonders of nature:

And then, the piece de resistance, the reason the dotter wanted to stay:  a soldier is following his general–incognito–to protect him.  They stay the night at an inn.  The innkeeper notices the soldier, and fears that the soldier is an assassin out to get the general.  The innkeeper sneaks into his room in the darkness, and tries to kill him, but fails–and then there is a comic and very acrobatic fight, where they keep missing each other, then finding each other, then fighting, then losing their opponent in the darkness.  It was hilarious–and spectcular.  The soldier is resting for a moment, after–he thinks–chasing away the bandit; the innkeeper is hiding under his bed, waiting for his chance to get the assassin:

It was amazingly grand fun.  They had subtitles projected above the stage, which made following the stories much easier–though much of the physical action was stylized and very recognizable.

If you get a chance like this, by all means, take it!  It was a really worthwhile evening.

(And, of course, the audience was sprinkled with many families like ours…)

Oh, and all these pictures were taken with my new camera.  The old one would have been worse than useless!

When the dotter becomes a famous artist, I am going to go around being such a mom.  “Did you see that new painting she did?!  Isn’t it awesome?!”  “You need to buy that sculpture of hers.  Did you know she was making sculptures out of construction paper when she was a tiny girl?  It’s only $3,000!  C’mon!”

Really.  I am in awe of her talent.  My mom, GrannyJ, is very artsy; she was always doodling and drawing and making hooked rugs and making psychodelic creatures out of papier mache.  I, however, find drawing hard.  Hard, hard, hard.  At my ripe old age of *cough* *ahem*, I have the patience to be very careful and do an okay drawing of a horse if I really, really try.

But the dotter…give her paper and scissors and tape and pencils or markers, and she’s off in a dream world, concentrating so hard that she doesn’t hear you.  (Of course, that’s no great feat:  she doesn’t hear you most of the time, anyway, so you end up getting louder and louder until she finally gets all huffy and says, “I’m going!” or “I hear you!” or some variation thereof.)

A few weeks ago she purchased a SpongeBob SquarePants book at the fall book fair.  She’s been reading bits and pieces of it, under duress–she still hates to read on her own.  (Wah.)  (I keep saying to myself that someday it will kick in; my gorgeous niece also hated to read at this age, but now devours novels.)  But I discovered the other day that she has also been…well:

Mind you, these are copies of pictures in the book, so it’s not original work.  But, dayum.  I can’t do that!  Any kid looking at these pics would (a) know who the characters are, and (b) think that some grown-up had drawn them.  Heck, I thought some grown-up had drawn them…someone who snuck into our house, used our paper and pencils, drew them, then snuck out again after leaving the pictures behind.

Did I mention she’s only 7 years old?  And that this wasn’t tracing, but free-hand?

She is so artistic.  It is so amazing.  And it has been there from the beginning; she has always wanted to draw, color, paint, create things.  I’m leaving her to it, letting her figure her own way around–the school has no art classes (none), due to the reading, writing and arithmetic scheduling resulting from NCLB edicts.  They’re lucky they still have recess and their one rotating “special” class.  I’m hoping that middle school will include art classes, but if it doesn’t, by that time she will have full confidence in her abilities and we will have to find an artist mentor for her.

Because art is like breathing for her.

Saturday night, OmegaDad snuck into my office, opened up a plastic bag from the local grocery store, and showed me the bag of miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that was inside.  “These were on sale–half off!  Hide this!” he commanded.  So I slid it into the drawer to the left of my computer.

The plan was, of course, that he and I could share it, and it would be safe from the dotter.

In the picture above, you see the reality of things.  OmegaDad should be a pusher.  I can see him now, dressed in a trenchcoat, leaning against an alley wall…as I walk by, he hisses, “Pssst!  Hey, there.  Want some cho-co-late, little girl?!”

The only thing that makes me feel better about this is that a serving size for these little diet busters is five pieces.  So, in reality, this is only two servings.  Only 440 calories–the majority of which come from fat.

And there is still one left in the bag.

Really.

And it will still be there tomorrow.

Really.

What am I doing?  Oh, I’m just going to get my coat and car keys.  Why?  Oh, no real reason.  Oh, no, I’m not driving off to the grocery store for more Reese’s.  No, no, no!  Not at all!  Perish the thought!

So here it is, November 1.  OmegaDotter’s friend, A., has been spirited back to his house after spending the night here.  The dotter and A. garnered plenty o’ loot last night, since I ferried them off to the neighborhood behind OmegaDad’s office, which has lots of houses fairly close together.  Our neighborhood is filled with one-acre lots, so it’s a pretty lousy spot for trick-or-treating…we had all of three T-or-Ters this year, which tromps all over our previous two years here, when we got big fat goose eggs.  None.  Zero.  Zip.  Zilch.  Nada.  Not…a…one.

To think I used to complain about the slim pickings back in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods!

Oh, well.  As I was saying, it’s November 1.  We turned the clocks back last night, and now the sun is rising at 8:30 a.m., instead of 9:30, and setting at 4:58 p.m. instead of 5:58.  The midday light here looks just like the end of a fine, long summer’s day, the shadows of the trees and houses stretching out across the neighbors’ lots.

The Time of Darkness rapidly approaches.

And, since it’s November 1, that means it’s time for NaBlaPoMo–the blogging world’s response to NaNoWriMo, wherein the blogger commits to writing a post every day for the month of November.  (Those who sign up for NaNoWriMo, like PAgent, are committing to write a novel over the course of November.)  I have done it for the past few years, never quite succeeding.

I’ve been a pretty piss-poor blogger lately, posting very irregularly rather than my previous almost-daily routine.  What can I say?  Mainly, it’s been because I haven’t felt like writing much.

So enters the dithering.  Shall I try NaBloPoMo?  Or sit this one out?

I think I’m going to try it.

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. 

…because the dotter is sick with something flu-like.  The test came back negative for strep, negative for flu, but then the ped chatted up some other ped friends to discuss the sensitivity of the flu test, and given the dotter’s tendency to segue into she-should-go-to-the-hospital type pneumonia, the ped decided to treat it as if it were the flu.

Normally, I wouldn’t go hauling her off to the doctor right away after she got sick.  But given that there was a 10-year-old boy who died of H1N1 within a day after developing the fever up the road in Second Biggest City a few weeks ago, coupled with that aforementioned tendency to pneumonia, I figured it was time to be cautious.

The upshot is the doc prescribed Tamiflu.

(Don’t read the side effects for kids.  Just don’t.)  (I’m hoping we’re not any of the folks who get those side effects.)  (I mean, really, “may be at an increased risk of self injury and confusion shortly after taking TAMIFLU and should be closely monitored for signs of unusual behavior” just sort of raises the hair on my neck.  How creepy can you get?!?!)

The dotter has never done pills (really!), just liquid medicines and shots.   So when the doc asked, I said we should make it liquid…at which point it turns out there is no liquid form readily available, and there is just one local pharmacy that prepares the liquid form.

That pharmacy is, according to OmegaDad, The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  This is the result of him showing up at the pharmacy hours after we saw the doctor only to have them take half an hour to figure out that they didn’t have the faxed prescription, and more time thereafter to call up the doctor’s office.  OmegaDad was fuming when he got home, and said, in dire tones, that any further interactions were up to me, because he didn’t think he could keep from blowing his stack.

I call the doc’s office.  I offer to use pills, to introduce the dotter to the concept, so we can avoid dealing with this pharmacy.

The doc’s office calls back:  All the pharmacies in town don’t have the pills in the right strength, so we’re back to The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  But TWLCP can’t get the preparation done before they close. 

Oy!

It’s quite the distraction from the oh-OmegaDad-isn’t-going-to-step-on-Kai-on-his-way-to-bed feeling (Kai liked to sleep next to OD’s side of the bed).  The we-don’t-need-to-close-the-downstairs-bathroom-door feeling (Kai would eat the cat food otherwise).  The ongoing reminders.  Sigh.  Thank you all for your sympathetic comments; it has been quite helpful, actually.

In 1998, OmegaDad and I purchased our first house, in Hippy Dippy Enclave In The Woods, near Small Mountain University Town.  Our house had a fenced yard, and we said to each other, “Hey!  We’ve got a fenced yard now!  Now we can get ourselves a dog!”

Somewhere around Mother’s Day the next year, we were at PetSmart near GrannyJ’s house, and they were having an “adoption event”.  So we oohed and ahhed over the kitties, and poked our heads in at the dogs.  There was a puppy there, about six months old, who looked just plain kinda goofy.  He was cute.  His head tilted in that way puppies’ heads do.  We kept looking at him, and talking to each other, and looking at him…

And the next thing we knew, we had a dawg.

We named him Kayenta, Kai for short, because he was a rez rescue dog, a dog of uncertain heritage, one of a large number of unclaimed dogs and puppies that roam the Navajo Reservation, scions of working dogs that herd sheep on the mesas and plateaus.

We brought him home.  We took him out on hikes in the woods, through the Ponderosa pines.  We would stand at either end of a large meadow, and call, and he would run lolloping from one end of the meadow to the other, his tongue hanging out.  We took him to puppy training, and he learned to come when called (mostly), and to walk politely on the leash, and a few other things. 

He was a good dog, for us, but not a good dog for other people.  Our theory was that he had been beaten as a puppy, because if you moved just right, he would flinch, and he hated men.  Women he would tolerate, but men were Bad.  Except, of course, for OmegaDad.

He wouldn’t get into the garbage.  After the first few months, he learned that he did not get people food, and he was okay with that.  He did chew out the crotch of any pair of undies you left out accidentally, so we learned not to do that.  He didn’t beg the way many dogs did–he would just sit there erect, ears alert, and give you an “I am a Very Good Dog” look, one that said, “You know I’m a Good Dog, so you know I deserve a treat.  Don’t you?  Don’t you?”

He loved chew toys.  He would chew them down to frayed knots, and we would remove the knots when they got too smelly and icky, and give him a new rope toy.

When OmegaDotter came along, he didn’t really like her.  He never really liked her, and regularly growled and snapped at her…but he kept it within limits.  The good thing about her, he realized when she transitioned to real people food, was that she dropped food at the table, so she became tolerable.  Not one of his favorites, but definitely tolerable–enough so that she could hold the leash when we went hiking, enough so that she could lean on him (up to a certain point), and tug on him (up to a certain point).

When we moved to Alaska, he joined OmegaDad on the long drive up, getting to see bears and foxes and moose and other wild critters.  He put up with the Shoe Box and our cramped living there.  And when we moved into our new house, he delighted in the big back yard–though, since there was no fence, and we had a Mean Neighbor in the back who made singularly threatening noises the time or two Kai loped through the forest in our back into his yard.  The threatening noises included, at the end, something that sounded like “I’ll shoot him if he comes over here again!”, so poor Kai was thereafter confined to leash on his outings in the yard.

Last year, in May, Kai had a horrible bout of vomiting and bloody diarrhea that culminated in a large whitish chunk being upchucked.  We hauled him to the vet, who dissected the whitish chunk only to discover it was the knot of a rope chew toy.  We immediately threw out all the chew toys we had, and poor Kai was without them.

So we have no idea where he got the rope knot that got stuck in his gut this time.  It may have been while we were out hiking.  It may have been a piece of detritus from the previous owners.

The latest surgery didn’t work.  OmegaDad and I visited yesterday, and today.  When we visited today, poor Kai could barely walk when we tried to take him out for a pee.  When we returned inside, he slipped on the tile floor, and fell all splayed out, and didn’t get up.

The vet ran another blood test after we visited, and the results were bad.  His liver values–which were what prompted the third surgery, in hopes of finding a way to dump the bile that was accumulating–were going up again, instead of down.  The kidney numbers were surging.  When the vet put a catheter in to let him pee, nothing came out.  The end verdict:  renal failure.

So OmegaDad and I went back to the vet’s, and said goodbye to Kai.  We cuddled him, we petted him, we told him he wasn’t going to have to hurt anymore, and Dr. Shauna injected him with the two shots, and he was gone…just like that.  It was quiet, and peaceful, and we all cried, and then we came home to a house without a dawg.

For the past few years, OmegaDad has raved to me about “his” sandhill cranes showing up in the spring and fall, his special viewing place, ooh-ing and aahhh-ing about being able to go out during his (short) lunch hour, drive a few blocks, and eat his lunch while communing with nature, aka the cranes, and how pretty they were.

Today, he called me from work.  “I’ve got a very flat tire.”  Instantly, Super OmegaMom springs into action:  faster than a speeding bullet, she whizzes through the garage, grabs the battery-powered air pump, leaps into the car, and–

…waits for OmegaDotter, who had no school today, to collect all her worldly goods and chattels in preparation for an overnight with A., her best bud.

At which point, Super OmegaMom grabs the Halloween artwork done by OmegaDotter for donation to A.’s Halloween decorations, flips the back seats down, rolls out the bicycle, manhandles the bicycle up into the car, schleps the dotter and all her worldly goods and chattels off to A.’s house…

…and then goes to rescue OmegaDad.

As I delivered the air pump, I suggested we go visit the dawg at the hospital…

Oh!  Didn’t I mention this?!  One night home, and the dawg was once again throwing up everything, we couldn’t get any meds to stay down, we were worried yesterday morning, we called the vet, we took the dawg back to the vet’s, we got a call from the vet mid-day, we drove back to the vet’s office under a low, black cloud of gloom, anticipating that we were going to be told that he needed to be put down…Only to find out, once we were there, that the vets had made a mistake during the first surgery, and they wanted to do a third surgery to correct it.  The good news was that the dawg was not needing to be put down.  The further good news was that they were going to do the surgery for free.  The bad news was…well, three surgeries in a week is an awful lot, and the vet wasn’t sure that this would do the trick for our poor puppy.

But, anyway, the dawg is recuperating from his third surgery, and I suggested we go visit the dawg, which we did.  And then OmegaDad was hungry for lunch, so we grabbed a burger for him from DQ.  And while we were there, he said, “Let’s take a drive!”

“Turn right here.  Turn left here.  Drive straight here.  Turn here.  Slow down.  Slow down.  Just beyond those trees–can you see them?”

See them?!  Holy moly, there were some of the prettiest birds I’ve seen in a long time, and they were right by the road.  We could practically have reached out and touched them.  They had red crests on top of their heads, perched on long, graceful necks.  Their bodies were mottled brown and cream from one angle, an iridescent blue-ish from another angle.  They were just…beautiful.

And I didn’t have my camera.

After taking the husband back to work, I drove home (12 miles), grabbed the camera, and drove back (another 12 miles) just so I could get pictures of these beauties.

Of course, by the time I got there, they had moved much farther back into the field, away from the edge of the road.  This meant I had to zoom in with my point-and-shoot’s all-of-3x-optical-zoom.  Which meant that all I was getting was lousy pictures.  I got out of the car, moved into the greenery by the side of the road–

–and the birds very quietly and gracefully moved an equal distance further away from the road.  It wasn’t like they were scared, or really noticing at all; it was almost as if it were a force of nature, like gravity or magnetism, except repelling rather than attracting.  I move forward, they drift backward.

Bah.  The pic at the top of the post is the very best I could manage.  I ache to have better pictures of those birds.

Obviously, I need a new camera, one with more oompf.  None of this twiddly, pixellated digital zoom, thankyewverramuch.  I want some STUDLY OPTICAL ZOOM, dammit!  So this is my new quest:  cruising CraigsList for a nice used 10x digicam.  The dawg has eaten up a lot of our PFD check, but I think I can swing a 2nd-hand good digicam…Just so that next year I can get better pictures of these guys.

So, after two surgeries and many days recuperating, the dawg is back home again.  We had all been missing him something fierce–even the dotter, who the dawg doesn’t get along with, and who, therefore, doesn’t get along with the dawg.  So he’s back, he’s ensconced downstairs (no stair climbing for a while!), he smells extremely doggy (no doggy baths for a while!), and we have managed to get him to eat and keep down a tablespoon or two of freshly baked chicken and some rice.  Given that he’s hardly eaten in a week, this is monumental.

In the meantime, as soon as the autumnal equinox passed, our area of Alaska plunged directly from late fall into almost-winter.  Typically, the early winter snows creep downward on the mountainsides, first dusting the tops (”termination dust”), then moving on down bit by bit. 

Last week was vintage autumn:  clear, vibrant blue skies, the kind that you can lose yourself in forever, with the sun glittering in etched yellow along the edges of leaves.  We had some winds, and they loosened the fall leaves, which would shower down to the ground like a handful of golden coins tossed into the air.

Then came gray days and rain.

Then came the cold snap, along with more rain.  We had no snow hereabouts, but you could tell the mountains were getting it.  This morning, when the dotter went off to check her chickens, the back stairs were icy.  This afternoon, when we motored off to the vet’s to get the dawg, the sun was out and sparkling from every damp spot on the trees and the houses and the underbrush.

And surrounding the valley, the mountains were covered with snow, two-thirds of the way down.  Yesterday evening, I had caught a peek or two that showed that the snow came almost down to our level, but the sunshine today must have warmed things up enough to melt that snow back.

The mountains seem suddenly more immediate, more immense, more looming, when they are covered with snow; I don’t know why.

Right now, it’s a beautiful sight.  I actually can’t wait until our first snowfall down here.  Remind me of that in January and February, when I am bitching endlessly about the never-ending wintertime, eh?

We got to see the dawg at the vet’s office today; he was totally stoned on pain meds, but even so looked much better than he had yesterday morning.  So we loved on him and snuggled with him, and then left, with promises of being able to check him out tomorrow morning, and maybe take him home.

Mom is out of the hospital, yay!

And I?  Am worn out.  Just plain tuckered.

It has been a bad few days.

A few days ago, I noticed the dawg wasn’t eating much, or drinking much.  Then yesterday a.m., early, the dawg started barfing.  And barfing.  And barfing.  And soon, there was nothing to barf up…but he was thirsty.  And he couldn’t keep that down, either.  At which point, dawg-worrying became intense enough to have us call the vet.

The dawg doesn’t like vets, so we needed both OmegaDad and myself to be there to calm the pup down for an exam.  Then x-rays.  Then blood work.  Then shots (an anti-emetic and an acid suppressor).  Then instructions to wait until evening, then try him on water, then white rice & boiled chicken this a.m.

We walked out having spent $380.  Ack!

The dawg stopped barfing for a bit.  Then we tried him on water later that night, which he slurped right down.

And then promptly threw right up again.

All through the night, the same thing:  drink water, throw it up.

So we called the vet again this a.m., and the vet said it was time for the barium x-rays:  fill the dawg with a barium-spiked fluid and trace the movement to see where the blockage was.  So I schlepped the pup off to the vet again, and dropped him off, with an estimate of another $300.  Ack!

Two hours later, the vet calls, saying that the barium didn’t move more than an inch beyond the end of his tummy, and the only thing to do was exploratory surgery, and here’s the estimate:  $1000 to $2000.  ACK!  ACK, ACK, double ACK!

At which point, the qualms start.  Ooookay, we’re talking serious bucks here.  Ooookay; if it were the dotter, we wouldn’t be balking at the cost, but scrambling to find ways to cover it.  Ooookay; there are people in the U.S. who need that money to get health care.  Ooookay; a dawg is worth it/a dawg is not worth it.  Oookay; there are people who would think we were nuts to even think of paying for it.  Ooookay, there are people who would think we were cruel and horrible for even thinking of not paying for it.  Ooookay; we don’t have the extra bucks right now, but we will have them when our PFD check comes through in two weeks–and yeah, we wanted to buy some toys with the money, but isn’t Kai worth it?

Et cetera.

It was a very odd feeling.

The end result:  A “Care Credit” card, a credit card offered for paying for vet bills.  You can apply over the phone.  Oh, goody.  Just what we need…

So we signed and the dawg went in for surgery, OmegaDad and I went out to lunch, and then I went home.

To be confronted with a message on our phone from a friend of my mother’s saying “She’s ALL RIGHT, but your mother is in the hospital, just released from the ICU, and here’s the phone number…”

Oh, shit.

Two days of ongoing worry were suddenly replaced with frantic panic.

Talking to my mom, and then talking to her doctor, reassured me (currently).  Seems she went in for day-surgery for a blockage in her leg; all went well.  She stayed with her friend for the night, and in the night, her leg and foot started hurting.  She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t go out for her regular weekly breakfast with her buds, so she finally called the doc and asked is this was normal.  He immediately told her to hie herself off to the emergency room.  When she got there, the ER folk all panicked about her heart flutter and kept talking about how she needed a pacemaker right now.  Her doc finally got them straightened out on that (she has had the flutter for quite a while, and has a “strong heart” according to two cardiologists aside from the flutter), but she was admitted to ICU for observation and testing.  While she was there, some bloodwork came back indicating she might have internal bleeding, but everything else was okay; they moved her out of ICU into PCU (?!) and decided to keep her for another day or two.

The end result:  I have been on the phone now to fifty kazillion people for hours.  (I tried calling my Unka Bill in Australia, but when I got through, he couldn’t hear me, so I had to email him [Unka Bill, check your email!].)  Our finances are in a holding pattern.  I’m tired.  I want my mommy.  My mommy wants her camera and a laptop because she’s bored out of her gourd…

Oh, yeah, and mom’s friend says that she’s due to go back for roto-rootering of her other leg in 10 days…

Oh, yeah, and I finally talked to the vet’s nurse, who said that the surgery took longer than expected (that means more $$), they had to take out a piece of the dawg’s intestine, and there was a blockage which looked to be the knotted end of a rope chew toy.  At which point, I was amazed:  we haven’t given the dawg a rope chew toy for more than a year, when this incident happened.  The nurse scoffed.  She said it wasn’t possible.  Well, I can tell you that we removed the dawg’s chew toys that very afternoon, May 17, 2008, and haven’t given him one since, and he’s not allowed out unless we’re with him…sooo…where’d the chew toy come from if it hasn’t been sitting in his stomach since then???

Wah.

So.  I have taken the dotter hiking Saturday.  And Sunday.  And today.

Ahem.

Well, look.  We live in an area where when it starts to rain, it rains and rains and rains and rains.  Not hard, mind you, just a continuous dingy gray drizzle that makes everything soggy and the moss grow and mushrooms thrive and my mood sink.  So when we get Nice Weather™, I feel duty bound to actually get out and do something.

Yesterday’s hike was on a trail alongside the Mamahuska River, starting out in Small Town Alaska.  Looked easy, looked interesting, so I printed out the file from the borough recreation site.  Then things started going wrong.  Firstly, I confused north with east on the map (no comments from the peanut gallery, please), so thought that taking Large Raptor Street to the end of the road was what I was supposed to do.  We did that, parked, got out, started walking towards the river beside the high school, only to discover that the path we were on just died out at the top of a very steep bluff.

Um.

Okay, so we head back to the car.  I get out the map.  I read the directions.  It says “the intersection of Large Raptor Street with The Big One Street”.  I drive back towards the highway on Large Raptor Street.  We find The Big One Street intersection.  There is no path leading off; there is, instead, a large 2.5 acre vacant lot that is for sale.  Riiiiight.  We continue on a block, and behold, a path leading off north.  We park.  We head off that path.  It leads up and into a beautiful meadow filled with tall grass covered with sun-ripened seedheads and fireweed fluff.  But the river–our destination–is far off to our right.  Surely this is not correct?  So I march us to our right…And we find ourselves at the top of a steep hill overlooking the aforementioned 2.5-acre lot, through which a faint track wended its way.  So we slid and tiptoed and bounded down the hill to the faint track and started following it.

It led us right back up the bluff to the other side of the track which we had just been on.

Luckily, as I was standing there wondering what we were going to do, and why the #@!$*% the borough recreation department hadn’t marked the damned trail, our dawg and another dog started getting close & personal, and I was able to ask the owner of the other dog where the heck the trail was.  Once we got our trails sorted out, he pointed us in the right direction, which turned out to be on the other side of the wide meadow down where we had been.

I loved the trail.  The dotter didn’t.  We thought it would be down by the river banks and sunny; instead, it was up on the bluff and deep in the shady trees.  It was mysterious and dark and smelled damp and rich and filled with greenery and vegetation that was mouldering away, and there were oodles of mushrooms and fungus.  We could see glimpses of the river between the trees, with the sun sparkling and dancing off the lacy braids of water zigzagging across the riverbed.  The excitement of the trail was when some horseback riders came along–I pulled the dotter and the dog off to the side of the trail, to avoid the dog getting over-excited by the horses, and this turned out to be a mistake:  the horses, thinking the dawg was a bear, went into a panic.  Luckily, all we had to do was step out into the trail so the horses could see that we were not carnivorous monsters.

The end result:  dotter wanted to be down there, not up here.  Sigh.  And, since she really, really wanted to be able to play in the water–any water!–I drove us down to the Kmik River for a bit of wading around in ice-cold water.

The view from the darkness:

Some bright white berries that caught my eye:

Some beautiful bright white mushrooms popping in the darkness (they were huge!):

A clump of mushrooms displaying their undersides and looking voluptuous:

The dotter playing in the water:

Today’s hike was to Eklutna Lake.  The lake is utterly gorgeous, and this hike was bright and sunny, and easy, and fun.  There were certainly a lot more people on this hike than our other two, because it’s so near Big City.  But I think I’ve overloaded the girl with hiking.  Maybe I’ve overloaded myself with hiking?!  Anyway, I think it’s time to do other things for a while!

The lake:

Some sunny autumn color:

And some more sunny autumn color:

Playing at the water’s edge at the lake:

Many thanks for all the compliments on my weight loss pics.  I must admit, I chose the least flattering pic of me from our summer trip, so that may have helped make the difference more noticeable.  And, as Blog Antagonist asked, I am petite–5′2.5″–so a small weight loss looks bigger on me.  (The converse is also true:  a small weight gain looks bigger, as well.)  I will keep plugging away at it, but will only update once in a while on the ol’ bloggeroo.  The goal is another ten pounds, I think.

When I visited GrannyJ in Arizona back in June/early July, and hung out with my bro and his family, I realized–with a sort of bemused horror–just how much weight I had put on.  My mom took many, many pictures, and there I was in them, looking zaftig.  Or maybe more than zaftig. 

I found it wearing to climb the steps of her house, so I was out of shape, too.

The pictures, and the lack of energy, made me take stock.  Then, too, there was the fact that all of my summer clothes were just too tight–my shorts, my T-shirts, my sleeveless shirts, everything.  I felt awful.  Fat, fifty, out of shape–I felt like an archetypical Amurrikan.

So after we returned home, and after OmegaDad’s brother’s visit ended, I decided to Put An End To That.  I started “dieting”, which mainly consisted of no longer eating entire bags of Fritos at one sitting, no longer snarfing down three to four Frappuccinos each day, eating more fruits and veggies, eating more slowly at each meal, and cutting back on the multiple helpings of carbs at dinner time.

I also started exercising, using some DVDs I had lying around, always meaning to get around to doing them; I’d do cardio one day and toning exercises the next, with a day off on the weekend.

It’s been slow, but kind of steady.  OmegaDad claims he has noticed.  My “fat jeans” are now loose (one pair I can no longer wear, two pairs are baggy in the butt and loose on the legs, and one pair I can pull down over my hips while it’s still buttoned and zipped).  I was able, today, to squeeze into my old size 10 jeans in preparation for a hike with the dotter.  (Yes!  We went on another hike!  I will report on it tomorrow.)

While we were on the hike, OmegaDotter took the following picture of me:

(It really should be a picture of me in those same shorts, but while it’s been nice and warm for Alaska, it hasn’t been “shorts weather” to me.)

It’s not a lot; about ten pounds over the past two months.  But I intend to keep going.  I feel a lot better, I can run up and down the stairs without feeling like I’m about to expire on the steps halfway up, and it definitely looks like I’ve lost weight.  I especially like being able to clamber up and down steep hillsides with the dotter, and run around the back yard with her kicking a soccer ball around.  In addition, some ongoing aches and pains in my neck, arms, and hips seem to have disappeared, which is all for the good!

Here it is, the fifth of September, and we are well into autumn weather and colors here in Alaska.  This is Labor Day Weekend, three days off, and the Kozmik All has graced us with beautiful sunshine, sparkly clear skies, and (relative) warmth.  The dotter wanted to spend her time today watching TV.  I said, “No way, Jose!”, and dragged her out into the backyard to kick the soccer ball around a few times.

And then I dragged her on a hike.

Lately, she has been quite down on the idea of hikes.  All summer long, at summer camp, she avoided most of the hikes because her gymnastics class was scheduled in the middle of the day, ending after the kids were bussed off to wherever that week’s hike was.  When she did go, she pooh-poohed the experience.  My heart sank each time she did that–I love to go hiking, and she seemed to be deciding that Nature, and walking, and looking at the beautiful world around her was just BOR-ing!

Well, bah humbug, says I.  That’s no way to grow up!

So there we were, and it was a glorious day, and I pretty much told her to suck it up, we were going on a hike.

We grabbed the dawg, motored on up to Margaret Pass, where the Little Lady River runs, parked by one of the trailheads, and headed up the lower reaches of Gummint Peak.  The trail was wide and open, alongside a creek that joins the Little Lady River, with many little offshoots of the trail leading to the creek.  The dotter paused to look for rocks to throw:

The trail crossed a neat wooden bridge; I’m not sure why it was built that way, with the two parts:

Then the trail suddenly became small and narrow and steep, heading up a ridgeline very quickly.  I warned the dotter that we would have to come down the trail on our butts because it was so steep, but that only made it more attractive to her.  I tried to take pictures of how steep it was, but none of them showed it properly.  Here the dotter is clowning around on a rock on the trail ahead (and above) me:

There were oodles of fireweed in full fluff, and with scarlet leaves:

The fireweed are splendid wildflowers.  They bloom bright pink flowers all along their stalk, above green leaves; then, when they’re all done blooming, the stems to the flowers turn dark pink, the leaves turn scarlet, and the seeds covered with fluff burst open.  When the wind picks up, the fluff from the fireweed dances off into the skies.

When we got up to a bench on the ridge, we stopped, rested, rehydrated, and took pictures.  First, a vista:

I took the landscape pictures, then the dotter demanded the camera.  First she caught the dawg resting, looking Noble:

Then she did a self-portrait.  Note the faint orange mustache from her Gatorade:

She took a picture of me, but I’m not putting it in here, ’cause it shows my impending wattle, yuck.

Then we turned around and slid back down the trail.  The dotter wanted to go back up and slide back down, but I nixed that idea; the butt of her blue jeans was getting pretty damned grubby by that time, and I was afraid that any more grinding action would engrain the dirt to the point where it was impossible to ever get out again.

On the way up and back down, I was constantly clicking the camera, grabbing shots of autumn colors.  Some more fireweed:

Some berries (not edible, I think):

Purty fall colors:

Once we were back at the trailhead, we crossed the road to the Little Lady River, and played on the rocks and in the water.  The dotter collected a large number of speckled rocks, which she proudly proclaimed were river dinosaur eggs, and that the eggs needed to be right at the edge of the water to hatch, so that the baby river dinosaurs could just swim away when they hatched.

Then we went home.  On the drive home, the dotter informed me that she just loved hiking, and could we do it every weekend?  Har.  My nefarious scheme is working!

The scene:  OmegaDotter picks up the phone, dials a number.

“Hello?  This is OmegaDotter, who is this?…Can I please speak with A.?”

“Hi, A.?  It’s OmegaDotter.  I blew it.”

“I made a poor choice.”

“You can’t come to the fair with us tomorrow.  I’m sorry I said you probably could.”

The backstory:

A.–OmegaDotter’s current best buddy–is coming over for a sleepover tomorrow night, as a result of some parental badgering on the dotter’s part.  The Big Fair is running from yesterday through September 8.  We were planning to go tomorrow.  The dotter asked us prior to dinner–while on the phone with A.–if he could come to the fair with us.  We said we’d make our minds up later, but it was dinnertime and time to get off the phone.

During dinner, she asked again.  And again.  OmegaDad said that he had been wanting a “just family” day.  I personally was leaning towards saying, sure, why not, let’s bring A. along, it’ll be fun, but said we needed to decide later.

Dinner was over, the dotter cleared the table, I stepped out for a smoke, OmegaDad stepped out with the dawg to do the dawgly duty.

When we got back inside, the dotter was on the phone with A., telling him that yes, he could almost certainly come to the fair with us.

Oops.  Big mistake, kiddo.  Don’t go making plans with someone else based on no decision from your parents.  We told her to say goodbye to A., that she’d call him back later, and to get her cute little butt back to the dinner table so we could Talk To Her.  At which point, we laid out the fact that (a) we had not made the decision yet, (b) she called A. and told him we had, (c) as a result, our decision was that he was not coming with us, even though I had been leaning towards taking him along, and (d) she had to call A. back, tell him she was wrong, and apologize.

Oh, lordy.  Y’know, sometimes being a parent is just a plain old pain in the ass.  Damn.  Chores need to be supervised, so it’s more work than just doing it myself.  We need to remind her to do the chickens.  We have to explain that not everything is going to go her way.  We have to explain courtesy, and patience, and junk like that.  (We also have to explain that talking in class is a Bad Idea, that while it’s polite to listen to someone who is talking (!!!  Yes!  She claimed she was listening and talking to A. in class because he was talking to her and it was the polite thing to do!), the teacher talking takes precedence, and quiet time in class takes precedence, and, and, and…)

Bah.

On the good side, though, we applauded her phone call (she was saying it all very quietly, in another room, so it wasn’t for show), we all played five-card draw, and B.S., and Crazy Eights, and I read another chapter of her Karito Kids book to her before bedtime.  I guess it all balances out.

So what is the family doing with our spare time now that the dotter is back in school, in the second grade?  Are we doing Quality Time Things with her?  Teaching her great moral truths?  Helping her understand the principles behind basic mathematics?  Discussing the political situations of the day?

No.

We are teaching her to play poker.

At, I might add, her request.  I have no idea where she came up with the idea, but while OmegaDad was out of town on the East Coast, I gave it a (lousy) whirl.  When I concluded that I couldn’t remember it very well, and certainly couldn’t remember the ranking of the various hands, I copped out:  I told her to wait until Daddy came home, and ask him to teach her to play.

Which she did.  And he did.  And we’ve been having a grand old time playing five-card poker, not Stud, for pennies from the zippy full of one hundred pennies that the dotter took to school last year for the 100th Day festivities.  At the end of the game session, we check to see who has the most pennies to declare the winner, and then the pennies go back into the zippy.

Our first night, the dotter won just about everything, and wiped out OmegaDad’s funds.  Beginner’s luck!

The second night, OmegaDad won.  This will probably be the default, because he has been playing poker for many years.  (”Weyall…the boys and I was playin’ poker in Nebraska City one night…”, said in one’s best Western drawl, is one of our favorite family lines, because he was playing poker with the boys in Nebraska City one night, whilst on a business trip…)

Hopefully, one of these days the dotter will learn what a “poker face” is.

I have had a cold.  It laid me low Thursday and Friday, and kept me from re-starting my (new) exercise regimen on Saturday and Sunday.  Worst of all, I had this goopy cough, wheezy breath, and found myself getting tired just going up the stairs.

Ew, yuck.  Time to hie myself off to the doctor, I said.  So I hied to the doc-in-a-box.

And at the doctor’s office, I waited.  And waited.  And waited.

While I waited, I saw parent after parent leading a child in–or out–for a shot.

Today, by the way, is the first day of school.

The first day when the new varicella vaccination rules are in place.

The “new” varicella vaccine rules which were communicated to me (a parent) multiple times waaaay back in March.  And April.  And May.  With handouts.  With notes from the school nurse.  In the newsletter.  There was even a special mailing, also from the school nurse.

All of which said:  No varicella vaccine, no school for your kid.  Period.  End of statement.

The nurse who was taking my vitals had to quickly leave the exam room to go help administer a shot to an eight-year-old who was screaming his head off in another exam room.

The doctor told me–when he finally got to me, two hours after I got there–that he was cross-eyed from seeing the kids and getting them their shots.  He estimated he had already seen twenty kids.

Helloooooooo!!!!

Folks!  Get a grip!  You’ve had plenty of notice!  Months of notice!  You’ve had a whole summer in which to get this thing done!  WHY ARE YOU WAITING UNTIL THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL TO TAKE CARE OF IT?!?!?!

Gah.  Twits.

OmegaMom wanders off, muttering darkly to herself and shaking her fist in the air.

The chores proceed apace, which is making me happy.  OmegaDad discovered the Internet Bonanza of American Girl doll accoutrements, and the dotter is agog.  And eager to buy, buy, buy!  Which, of course, means money, money, money!  Which leads to chores.

Ahhhh.  So the dotter is sweeping, and vacuuming, and cleaning the catbox, and sorting laundry, and carrying laundry back upstairs and putting it away (I know I mentioned every single one of these things before, but it’s so damn nice to have it done, even if I do have to follow around and give pointers and make sure she does more than a seven-year-old’s slapdash job).

OmegaDad has been making bread.  He recently made two loaves of challah, one for us, one for our next-door neighbor, who just got married.  The late afternoon sunshine just made the warmth and goodness pop out in the picture.  Aren’t they purty?

Also enjoying the afternoon warmth was one of our cats, Wooly.  Piggy, the scaredy cat, rarely (if ever) ventures upstairs, but Wooly is everywhere.  Including on our laptop.  Which means that, after I took this picture, I spent five minutes closing obscure Windows windows and making sure he hadn’t accidentally switched screen resolutions, or turned on Armenian language, or shut off all the keyboard shortcuts.  For reference, this was what he looked like a few years ago, when he was only five or six weeks old.

Our new chickens are laying eggs now–yay!  So we get a wide variety of egg sizes.  The big one is from one of our older girls; the little one is from one of the new layers.  Our Silkies lay eggs only a bit bigger than the little one, but the new girls’ eggs will end up as big as the one on the left in a few months.

Another shot of Cinderella, posing:

She starts second grade tomorrow.  She’s been wandering the house shouting excitedly about school starting; that excitement will disappear very soon.  Right now, she’s upset that her second-grade teacher is male:  “A dude?!  I don’t want a dude for a teacher!!”  There is an implied “WTF?!” in there that she hasn’t taken to using.  Yet.  (I, of course, am quite aware that she tends to get ferocious crushes on young men who are coaches or counselors or teachers, so fully expect her to be [occasionally] sighing about Mr. Snows.  When she’s not complaining about the homework.)

Oh, yes, and in the midst of all the early/mid August stuff, I totally spaced out that OmegaMom, the blog, is now four years old.  Whoa.

OmegaDad hauled the dotter and me out to pick various berries in the yard–he plans to make rose-hip and rhubarb jelly, and maybe tart it up with cranberries.

While we were out there, I came upon some pretty mushrooms and fungus:

The dotter and OmegaDad in the midst of foliage:

The takings - cranberries:

And rose hips:

Rose hips are chock-a-block full of pectin, but they’re not very tasty.  Fairly bland, as a matter of fact.  So hopefully the rhubarb and cranberries will make the end result more interesting.

As the majority noted, it was, indeed, Pippi in the dotter’s picture.  (Lauri–No, I wasn’t trying to get very deep!  ;-)  Just wanted to see if people who didn’t know beforehand could recognize the subject of the picture.)  I am torn at this point between the idea of sending the dotter off to take some “art lessons” so she can learn about perspective and shading and various techniques, and the fear that the same thing could kill her creativity.  If someone were to squish that outpouring of creativity, I think I’d get…violent.