OmegaMom

Argh.

I am trying to get a copy of my grandmother’s death certificate so that I can close an account that has both my mother and my grandmother named as owners.

This is turning into a bureaucratic nightmare.

It seems that having a birth certificate listing my mother as…well, my mother, and a death certificate listing my mother’s mother as my grandmother does not suffice to establish that I am, indeed, my grandmother’s granddaughter.

But, nooooo.

I have to send them a copy of my mother’s birth certificate.

Which, of course, I don’t have.

I have plenty of copies of her death certificate…

My paralegal passed me on to her local “investigative services” company.  They listened to my tale of woe and said that, alas, it would be just as quick for me to order a copy of my mother’s birth certificate.

In order to get a copy of my mother’s birth certificate, I had to send a copy of my birth certificate.  And submit a “Sworn Statement and notarized Certificate of Acknowledgement”, which required a visit to the local bank to get it notarized.  And pay more money.  And wait more time.  Oh, yes, and I couldn’t upload the document…I had to fax it.

So, out of all this, some financial advice for all and sundry:

1. If you’re going to just pass your money on to your kids, put them as beneficiaries on all your financial instruments.  Alas, there was a mixup in communications with my mom, and she thought we had put me on all her accounts as “pay on death”, but it was only the accounts at one bank and none of the investment accounts.  It was so nice to have the real estate in beneficiary deeds—all we had to do was record mom’s death with the county, and her properties were automatically distributed as noted in the beneficiary deeds.
2. Another option is to do a living trust, into which you write all your financial instruments.  That way, you have dealt with all the paperwork, and your heirs will not need to do anything.
3. If you have an account that has a co-owner who has died, get that person’s name off the account pronto.  Oh, it is so easy to let these things slide—after all, don’t we all have plenty of time?
4. If you have stocks and bonds that you have purchased in small amounts, and have those certificates, you can always put them into an investment account and name people as beneficiaries, rather than having the certificates sitting in a safe deposit box.
5. Once again, if someone is named as a co-owner of your stocks or bonds and passes away, immediately remove their name(s).  Once again, this would be easier if you had them in an investment account; that’s what the investment people are paid to do.
6. If you’re going to be the executor of someone’s estate, and you’re going through various papers and see something, like, oh, say, a person’s birth certificate, or an original death certificate, grab it and put it in your ever-so-vital “estate folder”.  Do not say to yourself, “Oh, there’s mom’s birth certificate!  Wow!” and then put it right back where you found it.  Which place you will not be able to remember, and, furthermore, which place may be many many many miles away from you when you need that document again.

All stuff I have learned this past six months.  Sigh.  Now all I have to do is wait for mom’s birth certificate, at which point I can close that account, transfer it to the estate account, put the stocks and bonds into the estate account, and then divvy it all up.  It’s not like it’s a whole helluva lot of money, but the fact that it was in bits and pieces made it more difficult.

This year, OmegaDad made sure to have some little gingerbread houses for OmegaDotter to do all by herself, because she gets tired of having to follow daddy’s directions.  She wants to let her creativity reign; he wants to rein in her creativity (in this case only!), because he always has A Vision for his holiday gingerbread creation.  Anyway, he made four tiny little gingerbread cottages for the dotter to decorate, while he immersed himself in his pagoda-on-the-hills creation.

I helped the dotter, but only as directed.  What she said, went.  So here’s the overall view from above:

You have four gingerbread cottages with green and red tiling; a car on the road, two pine trees (one decorated), a little pond, and Santa and an elf making snow angels.  You can’t see them, but each of the cottages has a wreath made of chewing gum.  Chewed chewing gum.

This is a close-up from the side of the front scene, in which you can see the decorated tree much better, plus the candy-cane fencing:

Santa, being so eager to run out and make snow angels, had dropped his bag off at the entry to the village:

While all this was going on, OmegaDad was sculpting his Santa of fondant:

Santa was going to be skiing down one of the hills, so he had to be on skis.

The finished product has ski poles, and the hands are wrapped around the ski poles, which is why Santa is handless in these pics.

So here is the grand product, the pagoda on the hill.  Note there are no ninjas.  I do not know what happened to the planned-upon ninjas, they just sort of vanished.  Maybe they are so sneaky that they are invisible, but they’re really there?!  Note the lovely, smooth, glass-like lake.  See Santa skiing downhill?  He was originally up higher, but…he skied further down the hill, and OmegaDad decided that this was the spot Santa needed to be at.

The night scene:

In the back of the pagoda hill, there is another tree and another panda:

A close-up of the pagoda and its Christmas tree:

The pagoda, alas, started tilting early on.  At this point, it is the Leaning Pagoda of Alaska, and OmegaDad and I figure that sometime soon, when the dotter is bouncing around, it will fall and go boom.

You might think this is a very sparse, little decorated gingerbread scene, and thus not very much work.  I assure you, it was a lot of work.  Three huge batches of rice krispie treats.  Many, many, many batches of fondant and royal icing.  The pagoda itself is made of stacked circles of rice krispie treats with gingerbread roofs made by coating the outside of pot-pie tins with carefully draped gingerbread.  The trees are made of fondant, rolled out, cut into graduated circles, then carefully given points by pressing with the pointy part of a heart-shaped cookie cutter.  And on and on.  OmegaDad’s creations are always fun, and always a lot of work, and always (though it may not seem like it) a lot of work.  Please applaud his project!

(I note that, even after lo these many gingerbread projects being featured on the blog, I did not have a “Gingerbread” category.  That has been rectified.)

From our house to yours:

It has been a busy week here.

First up, we had the lunar eclipse.  OmegaDotter had her best bud A. over, and the two of them were running all over the place, but not interested in going out into the cold, cruel backyard, so we managed to steer them to the window on the entryway landing, where they could see it as it happened.  In the meantime, OmegaDad and I were in and out and peering and photographing and trying out my dad’s small telescope (which, lacking a spotting lens, was a bust).  I took many shaky, blurry pictures, but finally wised up and braced myself against the corner of the house to get this view of the almost-totally eclipsed moon and some stars (faint):

Cropped and blown up, it looks like this:

I was pretty pleased.  Not bad for a hand-held camera, though there were a number of truly lovely pictures floating around the web from people who had Real Live Telescopes to photograph through.  Sigh.

Then—then!—We had winter solstice.  Not that we did anything to celebrate, but boy howdy, let me tell you, looking at NOAA’s weather website for Big City, which always shows how much gain or loss of sunlight we have had, and seeing a positive number–all five seconds of it!—thrilled me no end.

“But, but…,” you’re saying.  “OmegaMom—what were the LOLs about?!”

Ahhh.

Well.

Over the past year, I have been propagandizing OmegaDotter about Locks of Love.  This propaganda was my attempt to make her think of others, think of doing things for others, with it being a serious donation, not just a “Oh, well, I don’t like that toy anymore; put it in the donate bag!” approach.  OmegaDotter has adored having long hair, and loved the various hairstyles we can do—French braids, joined ponytails, “French” ponytails, plain braids, buns, high-up ponytail, low-down ponytail or braids, etc. etc.

When I first started talking about Locks of Love, she shied away immediately from the whole idea.

I didn’t push it.  I just mentioned it now and then.

Then, a few weeks ago, a long-time blogging buddy who also adopted from China posted about her daughter having her hair cut for LOL.  I showed OmegaDotter the pictures.

And suddenly—suddenly it clicked.  Firstly, “ooh, a cute short haircut!” clicked.  And secondly, donating her hair clicked.

So we made a date, all three of us.  OmegaDotter would donate her hair and get a short haircut.  A. would get his hair cut shorter for basketball.  I would get mine trimmed so it wouldn’t look so shaggy while I’m growing it out.

So off we went.

Here she is, pre-cut:

Her hair was down to her waist.  The hairties are to separate her hair into ponytails for donation.  The hair stylist took the ponytails and braided the hair, then ::snip!:: off they came:

This is what she looked like post-shearing and pre-styling:

We had researched short hair styles and found her a style she liked—a bob with the hair cut shorter underneath, so it curls under.

This is the end result:

We got it done at Great Clips, and it was free (which I didn’t expect).  They even handled packing it up and sending it in.

OmegaDotter loves her flippy new do, and has even figured out how to pull the top layer back into a ponytail to keep it out of her face for gymnastics.

I’m very proud of her.

OmegaDotter is off spending the night at a friend’s house, so OmegaDad and I took the opportunity to Get Things Done. 

What this consisted of this evening is me wielding a hair dryer to warm up wax paper stuck to slabs of chocolate Rice Krispie treats, and OmegaDad carefully cutting and gluing them together with buttercream frosting.

Why?

It is time for OmegaDad’s Christmas gingerbread house.  This time, he is doing a pagoda on top of a Guilin-esque hill, beside a stream.  The great secret behind many a creation here is the structural use of Rice Krispie treats; in this case, the hill is made of layers of them.  He had made three cookie sheets full, then covered them with wax paper while they “cured”; the problem is that the wax paper had adhered completely.  The first slab, we picked the wax paper off veeeerrrry carefully.  Then OmegaDad had his flash of brilliance, scurried off to the bathroom, returned with my hair dryer, and voila, the deed was done quickly and handily.

Now, I realize that many adult adoptees will cringe at the decor ideas for this year’s gingerbread fantasy, but keep in mind that these particular ideas come straight from OmegaDotter:

There will be pandas made of fondant.  Here’s one of the pandas, already made:

Isn’t he squee-fully cute?!

Then, OmegaDotter insisted that there be ninjas.  She likes ninjas, so ninjas there will be.  She and OmegaDad spent a happy evening researching how to make fondant ninjas on Google images.

There will be a stream of vivid blue rock sugar.

There may be a Chinese-style bridge over the stream.  It is in the plans, but OmegaDad sounds kind of dubious about it.

The pagoda will be a round pagoda, somewhat like this hexagonal one.

OmegaDad told me this afternoon, while surrounded by heaps of dirty dishes and carrying the last slab off to the dining table, that The Food Network was letting everyone down, because their Cake Challenge show never showed the immense work that had to be done in the background to allow the stars to do their stylin’ cakes—the people who made the fondant, the royal icing, the buttercream, the layers of cake.  All you see is the finished pieces being carved and put together, but behind all that is the unsung work of many others.

And while we were doing that, the Senate was voting to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  It’s about time!  And both of Alaska’s senators voted for the repeal—yay!

So we put up the tree this past weekend.  Since we rearranged the living room a few months ago, we had to make a new place for the tree—rather than in front of the window, as in past years, now it is in a corner by the stairs up from the entryway.  It’s very pretty.

This is the tree:

Here are OmegaDotter’s ballet slippers (the ornament):

A nutcracker:

A snowman:

OmegaDotter’s horsie ornament, given to her by GrannyJ a few years ago:

The pickle:

Another snowman:

And many more eclectic ornaments, gathered over the years.  A pineapple, a strawberry, mushrooms, red-and-white striped balls, tapestry spindles, an artichoke, an onion, a garlic, a collection of glass petit fours, stacked glass presents with a bow on top, cowbells, wooden apples, horns…

This is the new cat:

He looks the very picture of innocuous innocence.  Sweet, kind, unassuming, loving, overweight.  He is the cat I brought home from Mom’s house in February, when I returned after moving Mom into the extended care facility.  She didn’t want the responsibility at that point—she didn’t even want more than a couple of her immense collection of plants, because it seemed like too much to take care of them.  So the cat returned to Alaska with me.

He likes to lick people.  He has the teeny-tiniest purr, barely audible.  So he purrs, and licks, and drools, and then starts nipping, all very gently, but quite persistently.

We think he has never experienced a Christmas tree before.

O, the delight!  O, such glittering goodness!  O, such tinkly bells!  O, such rustling needles when you bat at the ornaments!  Truly, a Christmas tree is a heaven-sent gift for felines!

Right?

Worst of all, this innocent cat has been leading Wooly, survivor of many Christmases at our house, astray.  Newman bats at the ornaments, they sway and jingle and glitter, and Wooly has to bound over to see what’s going on, slither around the base of the tree, and bat at an ornament or two himself.

I have spent every evening since we put up the tree hunting down ornaments, or sweeping up broken ornaments.  So far, thank heavens, the only ornaments that have been broken are the boring ones, the plain glass balls of various ho-hum colors.

At least we haven’t had any cats climbing the tree.

Yet.

I leave you with a shot out my office window, a “this is Alaska” moment.  Today, while I was working, I heard a crunch-thump very close by, and caught a glimpse of a large shadow; I turned and there was the moose, and then there was the mooselet.  They sauntered stilt-legged across the backyard, nosed in the snow-covered raised beds for a bit, then cruised past the (long dormant) ornamentals and flowers by the greenhouse wall.  So of course I had to catch a picture of mama and baby:

We were rumored to get northern lights last night…alas, I did not see any.  Maybe tonight.

(Note to regular readers:  This will bore you and/or perplex you.  Ignore this post!)

If you are a database programmer of any kind, and you are trying to run an update query but every time you get this error:

Failed to retrieve execution plan: Subquery returned more than 1 value. This is not permitted when the subquery follows =, !=, <, <= , >, >= or when the subquery is used as an expression."

and you got here by googling that particular error:

There is one cause of this error, and it is exactly what it means.  The problem is, some of the time (like in my instance today), you can’t track down where you’re getting this subquery that returns more than 1 value.

In my case, I was doing a simple update query that looked like this:

UPDATE Temp_Table as TT
SET TT.Action_Items = T.UpdateField
FROM  Temp as T INNER JOIN
Temp_Table ON T.Proj_ID = TT.Proj_ID

No matter what I did—rephrasing it, using a subquery instead of an INNER JOIN, trying to use a MERGE statement (which, alas, I couldn’t use, because we’re using SQL Server 2005)—I couldn’t find where on earth I was getting the multiple values returned.  Temp had exactly one record for every record in Temp_Table.  I was tearing my hair out.

After hours of googling, in the depths of one forum discussion on the subject, I found someone who mentioned “Hey, if you’ve got a trigger on your table, that’ll cause the error, too!”

So I promptly disabled the trigger on table TT, and voila, my query ran immediately.  The trigger was what was returning the “more than 1 value” being complained about.

I hope that someone found this by searching, and that it was useful and/or helpful.

…on December 8, we stepped off a plane in Nanning, got on a bus, drove to our hotel, and started filling out lots of paperwork.  Two hours later, we were handed a quiet, intense little girl dressed in a multitude of layers.

Sometimes I still wonder what on earth they were thinking.  They gave us a baby, fer cryin’ out loud!!!

Well, she’s definitely not a baby anymore.  Far from it.  At dinner tonight, OmegaDad was rerunning our old story of how our first dinner out went, with us eating noodles with chopsticks, and her eyes following every move of the chopsticks, her little mouth open, just waiting for us to drop a noodle in, like a bird.  OmegaDotter was clearly not amused; she was giving off an emanation of, “Oh, lordy, Daddy, not that story again!”

Hah!

The first moments:

Our first Christmas.  Somewhere, I have a picture of her happily chewing wrapping paper:

First year:

Second year:

Third year:

Fourth year:

Fifth year:

Sixth year:

Seventh year:

Eighth year:

And so it goes.  It’s been a splendid eight years.

Okay, so once again I failed at NaBloPoMo.  The month started with good intentions, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with, don’t we?  Right?

Anyway, the main reason I did it was to see if I could get my blogging mojo back.  And, even though in the end posting every day was not in the cards for me, it did, indeed, help jump start my blogging.

So, expect to see more of my posts in the future.  It won’t be every day, but it will definitely be more often than I had been posting recently.

In the meantime, a quick glance at our Thanksgiving break.

We built a snowman:

…and here’s a close-up of his merry face:

OmegaDotter did some sledding in our yard:

She and I dressed up for Thanksgiving dinner:

We went cross-country skiing on Saturday and Sunday, and I learned that you actually use your triceps when you cross-country ski.  You also use your inner thighs a lot, too, but I knew that one already.  Anyway, I ended up being almost comatose Sunday night and Monday as a result.

And we got a splendid speech from the dotter at Thanksgiving dinner.

Who?

This person on PostSecret:

I have never had such a instant gut-wrenching reaction of sheer rage.  This guy has no concept of ethics, morals, compassion, love.  I bet he gets a jolly ol’ private laugh every time she gets her period and collapses in tears at yet another cycle gone by without her dream of a second child—supposedly shared by her husband—fulfilled.

God damn.  You don’t lie to your spouse about something like that.

And then…then…to compound his lack of compassion and empathy for people other than himself, he sends the goddamn secret off to Post Secret.

Oh, yeah, big guy.  Way to go.  Now instead of fondling your precious secret to yourself every night as you “get it regularly”, you had to spew it on the internet, so that hundreds of women dealing with secondary infertility who can’t afford fertility tests have to wonder…

“…is that my husband…?!”

Is my husband the reason I’m having to cope with this hellish, horrendous, awful, miserable, cyclical misery?  Is the person who is supposed to love me and cherish me the one who deliberately put me into this pain?

Nasty, vile little man.  I hope one of those women wondering is your wife, and you stop “getting it regularly” when she finds out and kicks your sorry ass out the door as far as it can go.

It’s the end of Thanksgiving Day.  We’ve had our turkey and cranberry sauce and yams and beets and pumpkin pie.  We played in the snow and built a snowman.  OmegaDotter and I dressed up for dinner.

I’m thankful that this year is almost over.

I’m thankful that I have an amazing, thoughtful, creative, loving, smart, funny guy like OmegaDad.

I’m thankful that I have a talented, creative, smart, funny, silly, beautiful girl like OmegaDotter.

I’m thankful that I had GrannyJ for as long as I had her.  And Jean.  And my dad, and my oldest brother.

I’m thankful that I still have family members who I love and cherish.

I’m thankful that we’re warm and safe and reasonably happy.

Happy Thanksgiving to y’all.  I’ll show you OmegaDotter’s Thanksgiving speech—which she delivered before we started eating—tomorrow.

• OmegaDad had the tools to make the turkey because…he went out and bought them.  Well, not the Dremel, that has been his man-toy for quite a while now.  But the dried wheat stalks and the Indian corn and the turban squash and the (om nom nom!) dried apricots were all purchased Sunday afternoon to pursue the pumpkin turkey dream.
• School was out today, due to the ice.  School is going to be out tomorrow, because of the ice.  (Except at this point I think there may not be any “ice” left, because we’re basking in 39F temperatures at ten minutes to midnight in late November in Alaska, and it was pouring down rain half an hour ago.  All our cold weather has gone south, blasting down the West Coast and dumping snow and ice in Washington and Oregon.  I mean, really, folks:  Did you have to steal our –15F weather?
• 3cmum asked what I’m reading on the Kindle.  Right now, I’m reading Blackout, by Connie Willis.  Next up in my mental queue is Condoleeza Rice’s autobiography, because I read a review of it that sounded very interesting.  And if Jeanne Marie Laskas’ Fifty Acres and a Poodle is available on Kindle, I recommend it—it’s a heartwarming chick-lit autobiography type book from a lady who writes (wrote?) an ongoing column for a major newspaper.  She also happens to have adopted from China, too.  (After writing a few columns about infertility that made my infertility email list buds back in 1990 gasp, groan, and feel inspired to write letters to the editor.  Ah, me.  Those were the days!)
• Joe Miller has re-filed his lawsuit after being told—in no uncertain terms—by the federal judge that he had filed his lawsuit in the wrong court, that it needed to be heard on the state level as this was state law he was challenging, and that the federal court couldn’t do anything with it until it was settled (or not) in a state court.
• North Korea and South Korea.  WTF?!  Anyone have any ideas why it suddenly blew up like that?
• If you’re interested in a hilarious, touching, thought-provoking fantasy web-comic, go check out Digger.  It may take a few pages to get into, but it’s well worth it.  I am in the midst of re-reading the whole thing.

Today we had ice.  Early in the morning, OmegaDad headed out to work, made it up to the mailboxes, decided to turn back home, and says he had a grand old time spinning around and around at the top of the hill.  We got three calls from the school district—the first saying, “Use your discretion”, the second saying goodness-knows-what, since OmegaDotter got the phone that time, and the third saying “Core schools are closed”.  We didn’t care:  After OmegaDad returned home, we weren’t going to let the girl out onto the streets.

So while I was working (there are times when telecommuting is not good), OmegaDad and the dotter made cupcakes, and then we all finished up the pumpkin turkey.

…Whoa!  Say what?!

Oh!  Well, yes.  Yesterday, OmegaDad was about to sacrifice the un-carved Halloween pumpkin to make pumpkin pie filling.  The dotter was distraught that we were not going to have a jack-o-lantern at all at all.  OmegaDad, being the creative crafty genius that he is, come up with the idea of—rather than carving a jack-o-lantern—making a pumpkin turkey.

The creative crafty genius contemplating his blank canvas:

The first step—drilling a hole for the neck using the all-important Dremel tool:

The neck was an Indian corn cob.  OmegaDad and I were guffawing at each other (I’ll admit it:  we can be quite juvenile), and the dotter had no idea why.  I’m sure my readers do:

The first phase of the tail feathers was individual wheat stalks stuck into Dremel-drilled holes (there’s that damned turkey “neck” making me think juvenile thoughts again!):

Then we used the red husks from the Indian corn as a front layer for the tail feathers:

We did another layer of corn husk “feathers” behind the wheat stalks.  (While I was editing these pics, OmegaDad walked in upon this one and said, “What’s my daughter doing to that turkey to give it an erection?!?!”  Then he added, “You need to censor that picture so no-one gets any perverted thoughts!”  I considered a little rectangular censor icon across the front of the turkey, then figured…naaah.):

Somewhere in there, we added little wings to the side, but I got no picture of that.  Next: time to drill the hole for the head.  The head was a turban squash:

Turkey head installed:

The final product…googley (googly?) eyes, dried apricot comb, and all:

Here’s a close-up of the head:

I think it’s way cool.  I’m also very glad that we got that head on, and that it stayed on (we had to do some seriously glue-gun work to keep the stalk from…drooping…damn, I’m still feeling juvenile about the whole thing!).  It will become a centerpiece for the Thanksgiving dinner, sitting at one end of the table so that we can all see each other instead of having it LOOM in front of us.

School is already closed for tomorrow.  I’m hoping they close OmegaDad’s work…for two reasons:  Firstly, for his safety, and secondly…well…much better to have him around for the dotter to pester, instead of her wanting to pester me while I’m working.

Ah, such fun gymnastics is!  You have a meet in Big City at 9:30 a.m.  Which means you need to check in at 8:45.  Which means you have to leave Suburban Alaska at 7:45 (at least).  Which means you need to get up at oh-dark-thirty on Saturday morning.

Right?

Wrong.

You do it the way we did it, and drive to Big City the night before, rent a hotel room, and relax.  (And forget totally about a NaBloPoMo post.  Oops.)

Which we did.

The dotter, amazingly enough, got the second highest score in her group on the beam, did well on the vault, and not so well (but still good!) on the bar and the floor routine.

The girls from the four different gymnastics teams lined up to salute (ours are the second line from the right):

Waiting for their turn at the bar, while watching another team’s girls doing the floor routine (OmegaDotter on the right, with the French braid I have been practicing every day this week):

Since we had spent the night, we did not have to endure driving an hour through the heavy fog and the slick roads.  Yay!

The cold night air and the heavy fog produced a lovely batch of hoarfrost coating all the trees in Big City.  When we stopped afterwards at our favorite Japanese restaurant to eat lunch, I couldn’t resist the red berries with the frost spearing out like little porcupine quills.  There were some lovely dead leaves edged with the frosty spears as well, but, alas, the pictures are out of focus.  Bah.

I’m thinking one or the other might make nice Christmas cards…if I ever get around to doing Christmas cards.  Hah.

There it is, the huge blank expanse of my Windows Live Writer window.  It is begging for a substantive blog post, when all I can do is simply stare, dumbfounded, my mind as blank as the screen.

Boise.  Maybe I’ll think about Boise.

Maybe I’ll wander off to the living room to try and figure out how to re-start Netflix on our AppleTV.

Maybe I’ll cruise Amazon, looking for new and interesting books to read on my (precioussssss) Kindle.

Maybe I’ll ask my readers to ask me questions.  Help!  I am running out of things to talk about!

Weeks, months, years.

I am tired of it all, right now.

In addition to suddenly being bereft of all ties to the older generation, we are dealing with the younger generation in the person of our dotter.

It is, we guess, attachment issues.  And possible ADD.  The only good thing that is holding me up right this moment is the fact that the Bad Days are coming exactly 24 hours after a therapy appointment…which, when I realized it, lifted a bit of the misery and gloom and desire to just walk away, get on an airplane, and fly to Arizona where I have a house of my own, free and clear, because if there’s such a direct correlation in response, then maybe, just maybe, the therapy might be helping.

Maybe.

And, hell, what we’re dealing with here is minor, compared to serious attachment issues.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how people deal with major attachment disorders in their children; this is wearing enough.

But, to break the mood of this post, I will pass on Allie Brosh’s latest, over at Hyperbole and a Half.  I hope it makes you howl with laughter, the way it did for me.

Lisa Murkowski now has a 2,247-vote lead over Joe Miller, without the challenged ballots.  That is, Ms. Murkowski managed to get 92,715 hand-written, properly spelled, properly formatted, oval-filled-in ballots from Alaskans around the state.

I think that’s amazing.

There’s another 8,153 ballots that have been challenged by the Miller campaign that were counted by the state Board of Elections which are awaiting a judgment in a previously filed lawsuit.  From what has been written, those write-ins were mostly questioned on smudges, misplaced commas, dubious penmanship, and a certain number where the name was written in the same format used for the printed candidate names (e.g., “Murkowski, Lisa  Republican”).

But wait—!!!

Hold the presses!!!

Joe Miller has filed a lawsuit requesting a hand recount of his own votes.  Because he mistrusts the electronic voting machines.

Well, hey, I can understand that; I have a deep mistrust of the electronic voting machines myself, given my knowledge of computer programming and all the details that can (and do) go wrong.

I just think it’s amusing, that’s all.

(Alert readers will look at the headline of the story I linked and say, “Hey!  They say Murkowski has a 10,000 vote lead!  What’s the deal?!”  I merely say, re-read the details of my own post.)

My dad, looking intense.  Jean, pregnant with OmegaBro.  Eldest brother Dean, looking ready to erupt into a tantrum. 

All three of the people in this photo are dead now. 

I never thought Jean would go so quietly, so peacefully.  She was a feisty woman, strong, opinionated, rabidly, radically liberal, passionately involved with Native American culture, raspy voiced.  She was my dad’s first wife, and they were divorced not too long after OmegaBro was born.  During my childhood, the boys would come stay with us for one weekend a month, but they lived only two blocks from my grandparents, so I saw them all the time.  While there was a rather bitter anger between dad and Jean, it didn’t matter to us kids until we were older, by which time the anger was gone.

She would travel to pow-wows in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Montana, driving in her VW with the boys.  She wore her coarse, raven black hair in braids, always wrapped with Native-American leather wrappings; in the spring and fall she wore hand-made beaded moccasin boots everywhere.  Both were gifts from friends at the pow-wows.

I remember when OmegaBro got his Ph.D. at Small Mountain University.  My parents were living in Prescott then, and the brother’s commencement ceremony was at the end of winter semester.  They all were slated to drive up for the ceremony…but a blizzard swept in, so my mom and dad decided it was wisest to stay at home.  But Jean motored her way up to Small Mountain University Town from Phoenix, bulling her way through the blizzard in a tiny rental car, to see her son get his long-awaited doctorate.  Then she drove back down to stay with my folks, and they sat around and drank beer and talked late into the nights about all their friends from their younger, wilder days.

The lawn they’re standing on, in that picture?  It’s right in front of my grandparents’ house.  You’d walk straight down the street they’re standing next to for two blocks and end up in the small bungalow that she bought a few years after the divorce, the house that as of today belongs to the eldest son of the little boy in that picture.  The scene yanks me back to my childhood, to Halloweens at my grandparents’ house, the huge piles of dead leaves that swished and crunched under your feet, the tall graceful elms arching across the streets.  Memories of eating at Jean’s house with my brothers, playing with her half-wolf dogs and endless numbers of her Siamese cats named after sports cars.  Picnics at the beachfront park on Fourth of July, watching the fireworks.

The people are gone, the elms are gone, life has changed so much.

The moose have been tromping around our yard since twilight.  When OmegaDad went out to the garden to gather some thyme, he found that we had had a visitor who had very carefully removed all the fall flower garden detritus and stomped footprints into the moist soil.

(Yes, “moist”.  We have been frolicking in balmy weather; it has snowed, but the snow is wet and slushy, and the temperature has been regularly in the forties—FORTIES!!—here in mid-November.  The past month, temperatures here have been far above normal, as evidenced here:

The dark gray band is the “normal” range of temps; the red marks are what our temps have been for the past few weeks.  Let us not mention the dread words Gl0bal Warm1ng!  So, rather than slowly freezing solid, as should be happening now, our ground has become slurgy and saturated.)

Then OmegaDad heard thumps and bumps in the front of the house.  Peering out the living room windows, he saw Moose by the front porch.  So he went to investigate…

…and discovered that our flower boxes, normally perched upon the porch railings, had been knocked off, and that Moose had actually been upon the porch landing, and dragged a flower box down the stairs and over by my parked car.

That is one tenacious Moose!  No doubt, he found the remnants of our petunias to be particularly tasty.

The dotter now has two parts in the Christmas play, Becky Elf and Oliver Elf.  She didn’t get a singing role, which I actually think is a Good Thing, as she needs some experience on stage performing before anyone goes overboard (including herself).

Molly asked if I had ready Elizabeth Moon’s Ky Vatta series; indeed I have, and I liked it very much!  I also like the Heris Serrano series.  If you’re not into military SF, the first few books of the Heris Serrano series is actually much less military and much more…well…fun.  As in “funny”.  As in “SF romps”.  The later ones get darker and more military oriented, as the political scheming behind the romps in the first three books suddenly turns serious and deadly.  Or, at least, more deadly.

Spacemom and Georgene—Yes, the Kindle battery lasts longer with the wireless turned off.  Unfortunately, it’s still not lasting a long time for me, dunno why.  This means charging it up once every week or so, which isn’t a game-changer in the long term scheme of things, it just makes me envious of people who talk about not needing to recharge for six weeks or so.

Georgene—laid up with a broken leg (!! How’d you do that, lady?!)—says that her Kindle has become her “bed buddy”, and she is romping through old classics that are available free of charge.  I will have to check and see if Dickens is available; I have, in amongst our boxes in the garage, a complete set of Dickens that is about a hundred years old, and started working my way through it at one point in time…

Noreen says that she will never desert real live books, and I can certainly understand that.  There is something so…tangible about books, the smell, the way you can flip back and forth between spots in the book quickly (not do-able on the Kindle, unless you set a bookmark, and even then it’s unwieldy), the fact that you can actually read the ending of the book when you’re a third of the way in…Why, no, I’ve never done that, why on earth would you think so??? 

Kris wanted to know what version of Kindle I got.  This is the cheapest one, the $139 model with Wi-Fi but no 3G connection.  It is lightweight; you can, indeed, change the size of the fonts easily (though, alas, you cannot magnify any graphics, unless you’re doing their [excruciatingly useless] web browser or a PDF file, so anything like, say, maps or family lineages or fine line drawings are just pretty ornaments without any useful communication); you can collect books into collections, add bookmarks, add highlights, add notes; and it has a (small) QWERTY keyboard.  I looked at a few others, but the Kindle just felt best in my hands, and gave me the best reading experience in my quick in-person reviews.

Mrs. Jones says that her online acquaintanceship is filled with people who are having tough times now, with deaths and disasters and what-not.  I think that part of it may be that we are all of somewhat similar age, and so we are all facing similar problems.  (You should go check out the absolutely lovely afghan she made!)

More later!

I don’t know how J. is doing.  I called last night, forgetting quite how late it was in Chicago, and talked to her for a short while, enough for her to finally grasp who it was who was calling, for me to say, “I love you”, for her to say, “I love you, too”.  I could barely hear her over the sound of the mechanical devices helping her to breathe; at first, her voice sounded like it was coming from hundreds of miles away.

J. is my brother’s mom, my dad’s first wife.  Yet another of that generation, the one before mine, that is slipping away, more and more as the years go by, the losses accelerating.

My dad, seven years ago.  My aunt A., five years ago.  My grandmother, two years ago.  My mom, this year.

J.’s path seems to have been following my mom’s almost exactly.  She, too, had her lung collapse.  She, too, has been hooked up to a device to remove liquid from the lungs.  She, too, has been recuperating in a nursing home.  OmegaBro and SIL were trying to figure out how to take care of her from across the country; they were trying to convince her to move in with them, or to move into an assisted living facility, but she has been stubborn:  she wants to go home. 

I am an orphan.

My brother is soon to be one, maybe in just days.

We are moving on up in the ranks of family as graded by generational status.  Soon, we will be the “older generation”.  We’re not old enough.  It’s not time.  Surely we can have these people around for longer?  To guide us?  To be loved and love us?

This is making mom’s loss hit again; oh, not as hard as at first, but still…

Heh.  Every year, I try it, and every year something happens to keep me from posting one day.  Usually it’s much later in the month, but this year’s NaBloPoMo-interruptus came barely a third of the way into the month.

Nonetheless, I think I will try posting all the remaining days of the month.

What happened?  Well, there was an Epic Scene with the dotter.  OmegaDad threatened her with being taken off the gymnastics team.  There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  And shouting.  And OmegaDad—that gentle, kind, thoughtful man—lost it to the point where he stormed out of the house.

Um.

Usually, that part of the scenes is mine.  Or at least, I try for it, but am not allowed to by the dotter.  In this case, it was more important for her to be screaming at me and trying to wrench the phone out of my hands as I called the gymnastics facility…

Anyway, she and I ended up snuggled up in the big chair in the living room while I talked with Ling and MeiMei (her Chinese dolls) about what OmegaDotter had done and why Big Scenes are happening more and more frequently and blah de blah de blah.  The end result:  she fell asleep in my lap.  And then we woke up later, and I moved us into our bedroom, and we fell back asleep.  Somewhere in there, OmegaDad returned.  I slept until 8:30 a.m.  The scene was at 4 p.m.

This morning we had a Come To Jesus meeting with the dotter.

She spent the entire morning cleaning—not at our behest, mind you; this is one of her ways of dealing with stress and (silently) apologizing.  So we got rid of all the garbage in the living and dining rooms, and in the garage, and we swept and reorganized and she vacuumed the downstairs and the stairs and cleaned the catbox and and and…

Note to all who do not have children yet:  Raising children can be extremely hard.

And then this evening I had word that a loved one is in the ICU and probably going to die in the next few days.

Did I mention that this has been a shitty year?  Oh, yeah.

That would be me.

Tomorrow’s post will be a round-up.  Tonight’s is just…well, we’re having “control issues” here, and I think A Scene is coming up.  Bah.  The end result:  no desires for fun posts tonight.

In keeping with my mood, Joe Miller has started filing his lawsuits.

We kept the kiddo out of gymnastics tonight, so it was time to keep her entertained.  She went through the free sample lesson at Chinese For Smart Kids, copying down the pinyin, traditional characters, and the translations, then demanded we sit down with the first group of flash cards with the BYKI Chinese learning program together and did the same with those.  Then OmegaDad fed us homemade jaozi while we watched Wallace and Gromit in “A Matter of Loaf and Death” via Netflix.  Then it was time for an old National Geographic show on snow leopards, and then we decided to watch an episode of “Wild China”.

We’re finding Netflix very nice indeed, especially since it means no more Suite Life, Suite Life on Deck, Hannah Montana, or other such bad-behavior-provoking materials.  Yay!

And while she and I were curled up on the loveseat watching “Wild China”, she pulled out her box of markers and her notebook of paper, and produced these…

First, we saw—and she drew—the “Loin Dance”.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her it should be “lion”.

Then the show focused on some kung fu practitioners at the Shaolin Temple.  She produced the kung fu guy and handed him to me:

Next was some lovely footage of a rare type of Chinese ibis that almost went extinct, but is now protected and rebounding.  She handed me this bird:

The episode’s main focus was pandas, and the dotter finally handed me this panda:

I gleefully gathered them all up and, as soon as she was in bed and asleep, rushed down to the office to scan them for posterity.

While the past year has seen me slacking off on the blog, slowly posting less and less frequently—the blogging mojo having vanished into the mists, the past two months have seen a drastic drop-off in the amount of posting.

Ah!  But I have excuses, you see!

First, there are Facebook and Twitter.  All the little snippets that I used to toss into a blog post now go into Twitter, and a certain amount of more “private” stuff has sashayed off to Facebook.  So, since I no longer have a reason to use a snippet to turn into the inspiration for a full-fledged post, where I actually delve into the ins and outs of a particular subject (at least for a few paragraphs), many posts have died a-borning.

Then, there’s the fact that this past year, frankly, was a bitch.

Just a friggin’ bitch of a year, folks.

Miserable, awful, horrible, no good year.  Bad year!  Bad, bad year!  No treat for you!

A lot of my energy was diverted to things that were just vastly more important to me than the ol’ bloggeroo.

The past month and a half, however…well, there were two specific reasons for the dearth of postings.

The first is that the OmegaFamily traveled to Arizona to join family to scatter Mom’s ashes.  I may post about that later.

The second reason…?

Ah.

Well.

It’s this:

This is not a picture nicked from the Amazon website.  Oh, no.  It is my very own, personal time suck device, photographed on a piece of poster board that was splayed across the downstairs coffee table.

I succumbed, you see.

I may never go back to paper books again.

Well, okay, I take that back.  Any book that has pictures that are necessary to its essence—a pictorial encyclopedia, a “Where’s Waldo” type book, kids books with illustrations, technical manuals—things like that are absolutely useless on a Kindle.

The cons:  It takes a one-second eternity for the page to “turn” on the Kindle.  If you’re a voracious reader, the battery charge doesn’t last too long.  Also if you’re a voracious reader, the ability to buy a book online and have it immediately available is a dangerous, dangerous thing to your bank account.

The pros:  OMG.  It is so lightweight!  Great big books that required a certain amount of wrist strength to read in bed while curled up on one side no longer leave me with an aching forearm.  I can load up boatloads of books onto this thing.  It has word games available, even!  (Though they gobble up battery charge.)

Anyway, I have been buried in an orgy of military science fiction (my secret vice) (I re-read all the Honor Harrington books, one right after the other) and fantasy (oooh, all five books of the Kencyrath, no longer scattered through the boxes of books in the garage!), a new Charlie Stross “Laundry” book, the conclusion to the latest Peter Hamilton trilogy, a few novellas by John Scalzi and others, and more…All of which has eaten into my free time, and my brain.

There are lots of inexpensive e-books available.  Science fiction publishers have gotten onto the e-book bandwagon big time, which is one reason why almost all my books (with the exception of some Jack-and-Annie [The Magic Tree House] books) are science fiction.

Anyway, I highly recommend the contraption.  Just don’t wallow like I did and drop off the face of the earth…

(Psst.  If you’re interested in buying one—or some books—you can always use the Amazon search box on my blog, and I will receive mucho dinero [okay, a small amount] for each purchase.  ;-)  )

(The dotter’s thumb is All Better Now.  Well, not quite; it still hurts if she puts pressure on it, but thank the Kozmik All she hasn’t needed any ibuprofen at all today, so I expect it will fade into a distant memory within the week.)

The thumb swelled up.  The blood pooled under the fingernail.  Whenever the ibuprofen or acetaminophen wore off, the throbbing began and the tears woke her up.  At 3 a.m., she was half asleep, the pain hadn’t gotten too bad, and I was able to convince her to take medicine.  At 6 a.m., I was asleep, the pain woke her up all the way, and getting her to take the medicine was a pain in the butt.

Sigh.

I suppose by the time she’s a grown up, she’ll realize that it’s just plain easier to take the pain meds right away, rather than fritter away an hour throwing a hysterical fit about how much it hurts and how much she hates taking meds.

Yah, right.

Anyway, we hauled her in to the doc-in-a-box, who promptly wanted an x-ray, just in case.  There was talk about the growth plate being injured.

Now, I had heard about kids and bone growth plates, but never seen them or understood them, quite.  I always thought it was some sort of medico way of talking about growing outwards.  Well, duh—of course, it’s something that lets kids’ bones grow lengthwise.  And, amazingly enough, you can see them quite clearly on an x-ray.  So we asked for a CD of the x-rays just because they were so cool.  (And, luckily, they didn’t show anything broken.)

See those thing flat parts at the bottom of each bone, that look like bones themselves?  In an adult hand, they aren’t there.  What you’re looking at is a growth plate—“Growth plates are areas of developing cartilage tissue near the ends of long bones.”  The bones grow from the ends, where those growth plates are.  As the kid matures and the bone stops growing lengthwise, the growth plates fuse with the end of the bone.  You can already see how some of her palm bones (metacarpals) are beginning to fuse.

After the x-rays, we had the doc put a hole in the fingernail to drain the blood, which immediately released the pressure and made the dotter a happier camper.  She was fitted with a splint, which she thought was just about the coolest thing ever, and we headed home.

I, no longer being accustomed to the sleep deprivation of having a child wake up multiple times during the night, spent the next few hours remedying my sleep deficit.  I am amazed, looking back, that I was capable of coherency during those four years of the dotter’s ongoing sleep problems.  Thank heavens these days she sleeps like a log through the night, and if she doesn’t, she comes in, snuggles up at the foot of the bed, and lets us sleep in peace.  I do not miss those nights of constant interruption, believe me!

And then we spent the evening watching old movies and nature documentaries on Netflix.

We took the dotter to “Family Night” at school, and left there with her best buddy A. to go out to dinner.  While we were at dinner, she and A. kept darting out to the atrium to play on the various mechanical toys.  And somehow, while that was happening, she managed to get her thumb smashed in a door by A.

Oops.

So we are snuggled in, her thumb soaking in ice water (she wouldn’t do just a bag of ice, because it kept bumping the tender parts), and watching nature documentaries on Netflix.

Manana, folks.

Last week, the dotter brought home yet another of the endless reams of handouts you get from school.  Science Fair coming up in March!  Elocution contest!  Tryouts for hockey!  Early release day!  Election bake sale!

This one was for auditions for the school Christmas play.

OmegaDotter wanted to try out.

She was nailing it at home—speaking with expression, hitting the loud points, varying the voices.  And she sang her heart out for her dad and me.  She wanted to do the singing audition, too.

There was the obligatory lecture about how if you audition and get a part, then you have to be responsible for the part.  How she needed to know the lines pat days before the audition and then practice daily.  I also emphasized that the handout said that anyone who memorized the lines and did the audition would get a part.  (Hey, it’s elementary school!)

The audition was today, after school.  I cleared the snow off the car and drove (very carefully) the few blocks to school.  I located the dotter in her classroom and escorted her to the music room.  There were fewer kids auditioning than I had expected—for some reason, I thought there would be lots and lots, but there were only about ten kids trying out.  As each child came up, the dotter wiggled and mouthed the lines with them and (alas) gleefully whispered to me about where each one skipped lines.

She had decided during the week that she wasn’t going to audition for the singing part.  Now, when she tries, she can sing quite nicely, and I figured it would be a good part of an audition for her to do, so I kept encouraging her (quietly) to try the singing part.  The first few, she kept repeating that she wasn’t going to.  Then she decided maybe she would.  Then she decided she definitely would.

Then she got up to do the audition and decided she wouldn’t do the singing part.

When she sat back down next to me, she thought maybe she should have, after all.

I said she could always raise her hand and ask to do it now.  It was difficult trying to be balanced, to push gently for her to stretch her wings without PUSHING overboard, if y’know what I mean.

She dithered.  I reminded her that if she got a singing part, she would have to sing in front of people, and maybe it would be better to start practicing now.

Then she waited until everyone left, went up to the two teachers and asked if she could sing for the audition, too.

Which she did, and much, much better than all the other kids.  (Ahem.  I am not being partisan here; she really is a good singer when she tries.)

But Ms. Firmhand, the librarian, asked if there might be a problem with stage fright.  On the side of my body away from the dotter, I flipped my hand back and forth.  Once she gets going, she’ll do well, but it’s passing that point that is the hard part.

So:  Tomorrow, we find out what part she got (remember, the handout said anyone who memorized the lines was IN.)  In two weeks, I’ll be ferrying her back from school to gymnastics or home as she spends the 1/2 hour practicing until December 2, when the performance is.  Part of me hopes she gets a singing part.  Part of me hopes not.

Last night, I was reading election results on the web and just waiting, waiting, waiting for 8 p.m. to roll around so the Alaska polls would close and we could start getting our very own election results.

I thought long and hard about this senate race.  Lisa Murkowski—the incumbent—had been defeated in the Republican primary by Joe Miller, a Tea Party Candidate.  Miller had two things going for him in the primary:  a parental-notification proposition, which brought out the conservative pro-life voters, and the fact that Murkowski’s typical followers viewed the primary win as a sure thing.

Oops.  It wasn’t, and Joe won.

Lisa gave a concession speech, but then there were appalled moderate Republicans and independent voters across the state who begged her to find a way to run in the general election—run as a Libertarian! some cried.  Others said, run as a write-in candidate!  Save us from Joe Miller! most said.

Three and a half weeks later, Lisa announced that she was running as a write-in candidate.  Miller supporters sneered at her for being such a “sore loser”.  Democrats winced—they had hoped to garner votes for Scott McAdams from the vast Oh-No-Not-Joe! group of voters, but Lisa had name value, both as an incumbent and as the “heir” to Frank Murkowski, former senator of Alaska, who handed his senate seat off to her when he won the governorship of the state.

Anyway, it was a very interesting election season here.

As I said, I thought long and hard.  I knew I would never vote for Joe, but should I vote for McAdams—the one I wanted to vote for—or should I vote for Murkowski—the one I thought would win?

Decisions, decisions.

Lots of Alaskans faced that same choice.

In the meantime, Miller was doing lots of things that just made people very uncomfortable (such as having a reporter handcuffed and “citizen arrested” for “trespassing” at a Town Hall meeting), refusing to talk to reporters, arrogantly heading off to DC to check out apartments and look at decor options for his (presumed) senate office…

I ended up voting for McAdams, as did OmegaDad.

But yesterday enough people voted for someone so that Lisa Murkowski made history (or so we all assume):  “Write-ins” won 41% of the vote, Miller got 34%, and (alas) McAdams got 24%.

Of course Miller’s campaign has immediately lawyered-up, and the fight will be on.  Hopefully, it won’t be as long and drawn out and divisive as the Franken vote count was; in the Franken case, it was Republican against Democrat, and the RNC was backing its man with all the lawyers and challenges money could buy.  In this case, however, it’s Tea Party Republican against (relatively) moderate Republican, and the RNC wins either way.  There will, of course, be challenges and spats over “voter intent” left and right, but 16% of the write-ins need to be either not Murkowski or tossed out for Miller to win.

As I said on Facebook late last night, “I can live with Lisa. Would prefer McAdams, but Lisa Murkowski is better than Joe Miller.”

While I sit here alternately reading election returns and berating myself for reading election returns (“Why are you hitting your head against the wall?”  “Because it feels so good when it stops!”), I thought I would put together a post on our Halloween shenanigans.

Mostly, our annual Halloween haunted gingerbread house.  This was last year’s version.  This year, OmegaDad decided that we needed a haunted movie theater.  It would have a movie screen, and various ghouls and ghosties and witches and whatnot sitting in the audience, and you would only be able to see it through holes in the decorated walls…

First, he and OmegaDotter decided on a movie to be playing (Monsters Versus Aliens), and then the dotter produced a sketch of what should be showing on screen  (I like the “Dude!”):

While OmegaDad was putting together the walls, the dotter worked on translating her sketch to the royal icing movie screen:

With this as the end result:

Note that working with edible ink pens on royal icing is, frankly, a pain in the butt.  She’s great with pencil on paper, and good with markers on paper, but the edible ink pens/royal icing combo was killer for her.

Then she and OmegaDad spent a while creating theater seats and various monsters to inhabit the seats.  At the front, you will see three ghosts, a Frankenstein, and a witch off to the side; behind them are tombstones and the beginnings of two Candy Corn Creatures.  OmegaDad is working on the movie house framework and, I believe, beginning to populate the theater:

The inside was completed, and before they put the roof on and finished the outside, I took a photo:

I love the candy corn wall sconces!

And then they really got to working.  I present to you—The Boojou Theatre!

This is the front.  Note the movie poster for Monsters Versus Aliens, the skeletal booth attendant, and the Candy Corn Creature.  (OmegaDad downloaded a variety of monster movie posters, shrunk them, printed them out, and then plastered them onto slabs of royal icing.)  A close-up of the front:

The left side, with "The Creature From The Black Lagoon”, “The Giant Gila Monster”, ghosts, tombstones, Candy Corn Critter, and a view inside, and the back, with a monstrous spider, glowy-eyeball black cats, and another movie poster:

A view of the right side.  The movie poster is “Beach Girls and the Monster”.  You can see the movie “playing” inside:

So, it was grand and grand fun.  On the whole, however, both OmegaDad and I preferred last year’s creation.  He is already planning next year’s, which currently is slated to be a haunted disco, and titled “BOOgie Nights”.  Har!

OmegaDotter was a sorceress for Halloween, with a grand black-and-white wig which she very carefully styled into a sixties-style hairdo.  There was purple eye shadow and purple lips, and a splendid staff made of black painted PVC with a purple/pink painted wiffle ball and glowsticks inserted inside. 

She insisted that I dress up a bit, so we scampered around Sunday afternoon and pulled together a Mama Bunny look:

We both discovered that the face paint itched like crazy after a while.

So that was our Halloween!

Now…back to reading ::sob!:: election returns.