OmegaMom

Specifically, Alaska politics.

Specifically, Lisa Murkowski’s announcement that she’s going to run for re-election to the U.S. Senate as a write-in candidate.

Whoa.

To give some history to non-U.S.A.ians:  The Alaska Senate primaries (in which the various parties decide upon who is going to run as the official candidate) produced a Democratic nominee, Scott McAdams, and a surprise upset on the Republican side.  Lisa Murkowski, a well-known and generally respected 8-year-senator, was beaten (narrowly, by 1% of the primary vote) by a Tea Party candidate, Joe Miller.

How did that happen?

Well, there was this proposition on the ballot, too, Proposition 2.  Proposition 2 was a measure to require parental notification whenever a girl under 18 attempted to get an abortion.  And, boy howdy, did the religious right come out in droves to vote against it.

At the same time, they voted for Joe Miller.

Now, my husband and I marched off to vote against Proposition 2.  We didn’t bother to vote in any of the senatorial primaries, though we could have (both being registered as independents, I believe), partly because we just assumed Lisa Murkowski would get the nod.  See, we didn’t even think about the relationship between Prop 2 and the senatorial primary. 

The day after the primary, Joe Miller was in the lead by 2,000 votes.

A few days later, with more ballots counted, his lead was narrowed, but he was still ahead.

A few days later, Lisa Murkowski conceded the Republican nomination to him.

Moderate Republicans and state Democrats were shocked.  It was a major upset.

Then there were a couple of weeks of dancing around, with questions as to whether Murkowski would run on the Libertarian ticket (they said no).  And then there were a week or two of dancing with the question as to whether Murkowski would run on a write-in candidacy, with all the associated pluses and minuses.  Could she do it legally?  (Yes.)  If she did, would she alienate some Republican voters by “not abiding by the Will Of The People”?  (Yes.)  If she did, would she be able to get some Democrats to vote for her, plus enough independents, to win?  (Goodness only knows.)  If she did, would that split the Republican vote and allow the Democrat (a very long shot by a previously fairly unknown mayor of Sitka)?  (Goodness only knows.

Well, she went ahead and did it.  It’s quite a surprise.  She came out swinging at Miller and the Tea Party (“extremist”, “outsider”, “the gloves are off”), with a mild sideswipe at McAdams (“inexperienced”).

The next 45 days are gonna be interesting here.

To reassure all my readers that my life is not totally Doom And Gloom And Misery these days, I haste to mention that it has been time for the State Fair, and all the wonders that it encompasses, for the past few weeks.  What with OmegaDad being laid up by his elbow and me being busy packing the wound with gauze (ew yuck) (it’s all healing nicely now and hasn’t needed the gauze packing for a week, thank heavens!) and neither of us feeling particularly like exposing The Elbow to the exigencies of fairdom, we put everything off until this weekend.

One reason we couldn’t put it off any longer is that the dotter’s gymnastics facility was Putting On A Show, and the dotter was in it.  Three times in one day.  Seven hours of hanging around the fair.  In the drizzle.  Waiting for a break in the weather.  They cancelled the first show, and didn’t make up their minds about doing the second show until five minutes before show time.  But!  Then it went on, and the third show as well.

Alas, being in the show meant that all the kids had various restrictions, the most important of which was “NO RIDES”.  It seems that in the past, gymnasts went gallivanting off to enjoy the carnival rides between the shows, and often showed up for second and third shows green in the face and about to vomit and had to sit the show out.

In between various attempts to get the show going, I managed to catch this quartet of musicians who had gotten Fair Hair and face paint:

So we had the dotter hanging around with us in the drizzly grayness and not being allowed to do anything fun, except hanging out with buddies under the umbrella we brought along:

And a quick break for hula-hooping:

I got some pics of the performance, and a video (I may try some screen grabs later), and then ran out of memory in my camera.  Bah!  But here is a pic of the dotter waiting between portions of the performance:

The remedy for the lack of fun was for us to go to the fair again today.

Today was beautiful.  Sunny.  Clear.  Blue skies.  Warm.  Crowded.

The only clouds around were a few fluffy white clumps in the sky, and the drifts of lifting fog around the mountains.

Our first stop was the dotter and I joining forces to steer the little race cars around the track:

In previous years, she has provided the foot on the gas; this year she provided the steering and I powered the vehicle.  We roared past all the other cars, weaving in and out (at very low speeds) and had a great time.

We ate, we wandered, we purchased stuff—at good prices, amazingly enough, because today was the last day of the fair.  We all went through the Dungeon of Doom and shrieked at all the sudden noises, bangs, and ghosties.  Then the dotter and I indulged ourselves in carnival rides, which OmegaDad doesn’t like—we slid down the SuperSlide, we rode the super swings, we got in the spacecraft with the virtual roller coaster ride inside, we did the centrifugal tilt-a-whirl ride where you’re all standing up and the force is holding you against the outer wall…?

A sad side note:  as we passed one of the pony rides, I asked the dotter if she wanted to do it, and she said, “No.  That’s for little kids.  I don’t do that anymore.”  Wah!  OmegaDad whispered to me that she still liked to ride horses, it was just that she doesn’t like the going-around-in-circles pony rides anymore.  Still, it’s evidence that she’s growing more and more.

Then, of course, it was time for Fair Hair.  This year, rather than the spray-in paint that gets sculpted into wondrous structures, she voted for colored hair extensions.

Getting the first one put in:

And this is the final result:

The extensions supposedly last two to three months.  Luckily, the hair place also hands out a note on how to remove the extensions—for people who decide that their extensions are really just not what they wanted after all.  Or who get tired of them…

The finale to our time at the fair was the annual face painting.  This time, she got something called “SuperBling Princess”.  Yes, that’s really the name of the look.

It was amazing.  Apparently the face painter was so pleased with it that she took a picture of it to put on her wall; she said it was the best she had done at the fair.  It made the dotter look like either a Hindu goddess, a Bollywood star, or a Chinese Opera star.

After leaving the fair, we went off to a nice restaurant for dinner, and had multitudes of people compliment her on her look, including a nice old grandfatherly type who asked if he could take her picture to show the folks back in Indiana what real Alaskans looked like!

So.  Not all doom and gloom here.  I have located a therapist who sounds like she’s my type of people, and am about to organize some serious therapy work to deal with the ongoing grief.

In The Book of the Dun Cow, there is a dog, Mundo Cani, who joins forces with the hero, Chaunticleer the rooster and helps him defeat The Evil.  At times, Mundo Cani erupts into a miserable, lonesome howling of “Marooooooooooned!”  I read the book years and years ago, once, but that image always stuck with me, a sort of archetypal outpouring of grief and mourning and lonesomeness.

I find myself, at times, tempted to just throw my head back and howl to the world, “Maroooooooooned!”

Most of the time this summer, however, I have been merely frozen.

Like a rolypoly bug, I have curled in upon myself, not bothering to write the blog until nagged to by BlogHer’s automatic “We Miss You!” email that explains, sadly, that the ads are being withdrawn until the blog is updated.  Not bothering to look at my email.  Not bothering to respond to emails, or calls.  Not reaching out to local acquaintances.  Just sort of surviving, with a feeling of “One must go through the motions.”  Reading a lot.  Dealing with family things, but mostly with half a mind, or a pane of glass or frozen ice between me and everything else.

Now and then, I pull myself together and do something related to mom’s death.  At which point the ice shatters, and a piece stabs into my belly and I find myself gritting my teeth, pulling my hair, pacing, finally crying.  Afterwards, I carefully retreat back behind the ice, back where it’s safe and it doesn’t hurt.

It was a cold and rainy summer here.  It was sunny and warm here while I was in Arizona, dealing with mom’s hospitalization and death.  But shortly after I returned home, the gray horizon-to-horizon clouds moved in and the temperature dropped and it stayed chilly and drizzly and shadowy.  We broke a weather record for most consecutive days with rain, and the lovely little current-temperatures-versus-average-temperatures graph on Big City’s NOAA weather page showed consistently below average temperatures.  The sun didn’t come out until the first day of OmegaDotter’s new school year…

OmegaDad had his surgery early in the summer, and recuperated slowly.  Then, a week and a half ago, he awoke with a bump on his elbow—which I assumed was some kind of bug or spider bite—which, by the end of the day, had morphed into a horrible angry red baseball-sized swelling.  To give you an idea of how ugly it seemed, I was the one who insisted we go to the emergency room for it, since we had missed closing time at the local urgent care doc-in-a-boxes.  (Normally, I’m the one who wants to wait; OmegaDad accuses me of generally wanting to wait until he’s passed out on the floor before I grudgingly admit that he needs to see a doc.)  Anyway, the thing turned out to be a staph infection (not MRSA, thank heavens for small favors!), and we spent the week traipsing off to the osteopathic surgeon’s office on an almost daily basis to have it drained and bandaged and tut-tutted over.  The prognosis on Friday was if things hadn’t settled down by this Monday, he would have to go to the hospital to have elbow surgery; but, in the meantime, the doc upped his antibiotics.  This, thankfully, turned the tide, and by Monday the doc was most pleased and allowed us to stop packing the wound with gauze and let it start closing naturally.

So this week I finally wrote up an invitation to family and friends to our scattering of mom’s ashes, which we’ll be doing in mid-October.  This, of course, cracked the ice and led to a torrent of tears.  Then I retreated back again.  Tonight, I pulled together email addresses and sent it out.  There are more names and email addresses I need to get, but this is the majority of them, I think.  The ice cracked again.  Since OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are asleep, my outlet is here, at the blog.

OmegaDad wants me to find a grief counselor.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how to start.  As I am not religious in the least, I don’t have—or want—a priest or pastor handy to turn to.  And, as I am not religious in the least, I do not want counseling based in belief of heaven or hell or the afterlife. 

I am at a loss.

In the meantime, the season is rapidly turning towards autumn; trees are yellowing, leaves are falling, blossoms are fading.  Winter is on the way.