OmegaMom

Okay, so I suck at updating. And, for the nth year in a row, I have hopelessly flubbed NaBloPoMo.

Sigh.

Maybe next year, eh?

So. We are now ensconced at a lovely little B&B in Ranchos de Big City (not to be confused with River Rancho, a suburb of Big City filled with McMansions crammed together cheek by jowl). As a result of this stay, we have become enamored of Ranchos de Big City, an area on the banks of Big River that is filled with huge old cottonwood trees, old ranchos of sprawling adobe structures sitting next to outrageously large new construction.

The streets are tiny. The properties are put together in huge blocks, so you might have a series of one-acre properties lining the street, with a series of one-acre properties behind them, reached by a common lane/driveway leading off the main street.

Interspersed here and there are irrigation ditches, which the local residents have used as hiking paths for years and years, to the point that the village of Ranchos de Big City finally gave way and made the ditches into official village hiking easements.

Following the irrigation ditch right next to the B&B, one finds: behind the house, horses in a corral; next, a pair of friendly llamas; then a newer adobe barn with yet more horses. On the far side of the ditch, you have: behind a lovely stick-and-wire privacy fence, a huge pond with a waterfall gurgling into it, filled with migrating geese; a field with more horses which is a destination for the migrating sandhill cranes; then some outbuildings which are home to some happy dogs with hoarse barks…

And on and on…

We love it. We would love to live here. Unfortunately, it’s outrageously expensive. But we would never have known of this area without the B&B, which caught OmegaDad’s attention by it’s name, which is quintessentially New Mexican.

Aside from that…

OmegaDad has started his new job. He has a corner office with big windows. He was greeted by seven neat stacks of files that his assistant said were items that needed his immediate attention. He also has an administrative assistant, which he finds somewhat befuddling; he is so used to doing everything for himself that she has to remind him that she’s there to help him, and she can actually do things for him…so he can wrangle those stacks of files into shape while letting her handle the day-to-day stuff.

The dotter and I have been exploring. We drop OmegaDad off at work, return to the B&B for (scrumptious) breakfast, head out for a hike somewhere we can let the dawg off his leash for a while, then drive around to scope out various properties OmegaDad and I have decided we might be interested in. Then we take a swim at the B&B’s indoor pool, schmooze with the utterly charming elderly proprietor for a while, then go pick up OmegaDad from work. (It will be nice when one of our cars arrives here, so the to-and-from-work schlepping ends.)

We now have a handle on a temporary, month-to-month furnished rental, so we can take some time looking at properties.

When we left Big City, Alaska, it was snowing. It took half an hour for the airplane to be de-iced before we took off. Our old Alaska town has has -5 temperatures already.

Here in Big City, New Mexico, it has been sunny and–at worst–down in the upper 30s at night. Everyone here complained the first few days we were here about how cold it was…we just sort of gave them old-fashioned looks and reminded them just where we had just come from. (And for the record, the huge storm that was all over the news? The OMG-it’s-the-end-of-the-world storm? Was on the north and west coast of Alaska, about 600 miles from Big City, Alaska. So, not only did we miss the storm by flying out of Alaska two days before it hit, we would have been just fine anyway, because it was like living in the Panhandle of Texas when a hurricane hits the Texas-Louisiana border. )

I am writing this using my brand-new iPhone, curled up on an inflatable mattress.  The house is empty, except for the heap of stuff we are either shipping to NM via UPS or schlepping onto the plane with us.  (That includes one dawg, three cats, and three turtles.)

OmegaDad is setting up turtle carriers.  OmegaDotter is snoring on another inflatable mattress beside me.

The cats were quite traumatized today.  Piggy, our 17-year-old half-Siamese, half-calico dainty scaredy cat, spent most of the past four days carefully hidden in the box spring of our bed.  When the movers finally came to take our bed away, we cornered her, then I deposited her in our empty closet.  Newman, our Siamese mutt cat I inherited from my mom, spent the day hidden on a high shelf in the dotter’s bedroom.  Wooly, our laid-back cat, I confined to the upstairs bathroom.  By the time the movers left, Piggy and Newman had gone AWOL.  Luckily, a few hours later, they both timidly emerged again.

The dawg spent another happy day at doggie daycare.

Tomorrow I clean.  And I drive my car to the port to get it shipped.  Then a day of finalization of various stuff, a night at a hotel, and we fly out Sunday.

More tomorrow.

Above is the container truck being backed into our driveway.  Yes, it is really happening.  Yes, the movers have packed some stuff into the container.  Yes, we have sent OmegaDad’s car off to the shippers (my car goes on Friday). 

We spent two hours this evening sorting everything that we’re either taking with us on the plane or shipping via UPS so we’ll have it right away when we get to Big City.

Things are moving along!

Bella asked for an update on the move.

Yes, I know that Bella requested it more than a week ago.

That is how the move is going.

::frenzied rictus in place of a grin::

The movers are here.  The house is like a hurricane has hit us.  Almost everything is packed, and we have four nights left.  No standard foods—though the refrigerator is full of scrids and scrads.  No plates.  No cutlery.

The beds are still here, but it sounds like they’re departing tomorrow.  Ah, well, we have inflatable mattresses.

I’ve been hauling the poor dawg off to doggie day care every day, so the movers (and I) don’t get literally “hounded” by the constant territorial barking.

I’ve been shutting the poor cats into the master bedroom, where there are heaps and piles of Things We Want To Ship Directly Or Take With Us scattered about.

The furniture in the living room has been carefully covered with wraps.  The moving guys assured me we could still sit on them.  Oh, goodie.

I’m frantically pulling together documents for our mortgage application for whatever house we decide on in Big City, NM.  (Actually, outside Big City, NM.  Preferably in more mountainous, tree-ish areas.)

OmegaDad and I are sniping at each other.  We are both sniping at OmegaDotter.  She is sniping back.  It is great fun.  Not.  I have taken to reminding myself “just a few more days, and we will be done with the omigod we are taking an airplane with three cats a dog three turtles a man a woman an almost-10-year-old and associated luggage I can’t breathe help me God whole affair.”

(The chickens and bunny rabbit have gone off to A Good Home.  Story to come.)

Then, of course, we get to settle in to a few days at a casita in a bed and breakfast in Big City, then find a local month-to-month rental, while we’re looking for a house to buy.

BUT.  Here?  It is gray.  The wind is howling off the glaciers.  The sun is rising at about 9:30 and going down at about 5:45.  It is currently in the 20s and there is snow on the ground that is being whipped into crusty small drifts by the 60 mph gusts.  In Big City, NM?  Sunny (or just clear at night).  In the 50s and 60s during the day.  It will be windy later in the week, but…the sun is rising at 7:30 and setting at 6:15.

I will be so glad when this is all over with!

(Oh, yeah, and I’m attempting [bahahaha!] NaBloPoMo, yet again.)

New Mexico, here we come!

OmegaDad accepted a position in Big City, NM, yesterday.  The job starts in about 8 weeks.  We took OmegaDotter out to dinner after her team gymnastics for the day and told her…

She cried.

Sigh.  I remember what it was like for her when we moved here to Suburban Alaska, those first few weeks when she didn’t know anyone at all, and I spent time cuddling her every day after school for a week while she processed being away from her One And Only True Love and her friends from Arizona.

Now she has to go through that again.

Oh, I know quite well that within a year, she’ll have new buddies galore, and thanks to the Miracles Of Modern Technology she will be able to keep in touch with her old buddies.  But for a few months, it will be very difficult for her.

In the meantime, I have been struck—quite unexpectedly!—by sadness at leaving Alaska.  While I will never, EVER miss the long, cold, dark dark dark winters, which leave me dull and depressed and miserable, I will miss the mountains, the long summer days, the fun of having daylight change so rapidly from short to long to short again.  I will miss the chance to see the northern lights.  (Alas, last night, when the latest wowza geomagnetic storm hit, it was overcast here and the almost-full-moon was shining behind the overcast.  So we got a lovely pearlescent sky, but none of it was the northern lights, wah!).  I will miss having actual seasons.  I will miss the thick, sweet, peaty smell of the wet boreal woods, which is so different from the light, dusty, vanilla scent of dry ponderosa forests.

I will also miss that odd plus to living in Alaska, the yearly PFD check.  While we should have banked it, we used it for such things as flying down to…the Southwest!…right around Christmas, or, last year, out to the Southeast.  Those trips were something that kept me sane during the darkest days near winter solstice.

I don’t have many friends here, myself; we managed to deposit ourselves squarely into the Bible Belt of Alaska, filled with conservatives.  I remember during the last presidential campaign arriving at the dotter’s gymnastics facility to be greeted with a bleacher full of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” pins.  On the other hand, our next door neighbor is a lovely liberal lady with her equally liberal female partner (who has had to deal with some really ugly experiences as a result); I will miss her and her family dearly.  Also, the family of OmegaDotter’s dearest friend are liberal and laidback; I’ll miss them too.

But it’s a new adventure!  Onwards!

As of today, we have been in Alaska for four years.

OmegaDotter has grown from a little girl going off to kindergarten in a strange place, with tears after school for the first week, to being a 9.5 year old mini-diva who is deep into discussions of (ACK!) periods, breasts, and boys with her buddies.  Luckily, these are things I have talked with her about long since, so she comes back to me and talks about her buddy discussions with me.

I’ve discovered that pop music is an excellent “in” to some more tricky topics about sex and drinking and “being pretty” versus “being yourself”.  (“Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack”, for instance, was a good conversation starter…)  There are times when my eyes bug when I’m listening to the songs, and I swear things are Just Too Racy!, but then I think back to the songs my friends and I listened to, in the Dark Ages, and I realize a lot of it was the same stuff, with more drugs in the songs back then and more alcohol in the songs now.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll.  The perils of being the mother to an almost-tween.

She is now almost up to my chin in height.  When we moved here, she was still below my breasts.

Speaking of breasts…things are beginning to move in that direction for her, too.  Oy.

Part of me wants her to just stay my little girl for a lot longer.  Another part of me is finding these discussions interesting, and finding her becoming a bit (just a wee tad) more mature and interested in some more almost-adult topics that don’t revolve around sex and puberty.  Alas, she still hasn’t become enchanted by reading, so I am considering a strict bribery-for-reading regime this school year.  A dollar a chapter?  Something like that, to push her past her “Ewww, reading is boring!” stage.  At least, I hope it’s a stage.

She and I went to Arizona for five days in mid-July and had a wonderful time hanging out with my brother and 18-year-old niece.  Niece and dotter adore each other, and almost all the pics I have of the dotter from that trip include pics of K. as well…but here is one where I cropped out K. so you can get a grasp of how leggy my girl has become:

In other news, our puppy is now 50+ pounds and six months old.  Everywhere we go, we get comments like, “Oh! What a pretty dog!”  What they don’t know is that our dog is like one of the brontosaurs of old, the kind that needed an extra almost-brain in the end of their tail.  I call him our lummox, because he is so cute and friendly and goofy and just plain…well…dumb.  I actually think he will turn out not so intellectually challenged as he grows older, but right now he’s got the “I’m a goofy dawg and need to chew things and get tangled up in my leash and whap things with my tail (as HARD as I CAN!) and Bounce Like A Tigger!” stage down pat.  It is trying.  Especially when the shoes get chewed up.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on right now.  More later.

It was up in the 50s today.  Yay!  Woot!

The rhubarb are beginning to show little red pen1ses, just the very starts of the explosion of greenery to come.  I posted pictures last year from about two weeks later, and you can see how they end up looking like weird red brains before they open up fully.

The snow is almost all melted from the back yard, the sunny side of the front yard, and the driveway.

OmegaDotter has taken to wearing her flip-flops.

The twilight has now extended to about 11 p.m., which means that any opportunities for watching Northern Lights is now vanishing into the mists.  Oh, if there’s a whopper of a solar flare, I might stay up until 1 a.m.  But then again, I probably won’t.  At least this year I finally saw some aurorae, and was totally, absolutely jazzed; all the result of the sun—at last!—gearing up from the solar minimum and producing some flares and plenty of sunspots.

There are pussy willows popping out; I have been watching their spread from the lower regions—which are warmer—up, bit by bit.  The pussy willow line has almost reached the altitude of our house.  (This is not to say that our house is high up; we are at about 700 feet above sea level.)

Many thanks for the virtual “there-there”s about the dotter’s foray into tween-hood and the relationships between the sexes.  I have told her she can be T.’s “girlfriend”, which consists of maybe holding hands and taking walks, but dating waits until she’s 14 or 15.  There are other issues, but they are related to living in a redneck-y, Bible-belt-y area of Alaska, and I may or may not discuss them in another post.

Right now, though, I’m just enjoying the real beginning of spring.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.)

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.

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.”

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. 

I spent Thursday driving down to Phoenix and flying from there to Big City, Alaska.  A lot of it, I spent just feeling miserable; for some reason, the knowledge that this was the last time I’d be flying to Arizona to see Mom and the last time I’d be flying home from such a visit was just…hard.  Oh, we’ll be going back, lots, I know.  But it was just so…final.

Then I arrived home and—of course—after weeks of beautiful warm, clear weather in Suburban Alaska, it turned cold, grey, and drizzly.  And our furnace was out.  And the house was getting cold.  And—after days of doing, doing, doing, suddenly I had little to do, and the grey drizzlies outside matched the grey drizzlies inside, and it was A Very Bad Day.

But today dawned bright and sunny, and OmegaDad was working in the yard.  I ventured out there pre-shower and pottered around the yard with him, and then noticed a pair of butterflies that were…um…making little baby butterflies together in the bushes near the veggie beds.  I didn’t have the camera, and didn’t think it was possible that the S E X would continue, but every time I peered over there, there they were, cavorting shamelessly in the sun.

The dotter called out the window for something:  “Mom!  MOM!”

I called back, “Yo, OD!  Wanna see some butterflies having sex?!”

(Really, I did!)

She was intrigued, but then wanted me to come inside to see something (cat vomit—oh, my life is so glamorous!), and while I was there, I grabbed the camera and OmegaDotter’s arm, hauling both out to the backyard to see the spectacle.

The dotter had, in the meanwhile, located her brand-new good butterfly net, and determined to capture the butterflies, which neither OmegaDad nor I thought very kosher.  Y’know, there they were, very involved and all that, it just didn’t seem sporting…

She managed to (gently) get the netting over the butterflies, then scooped them up.  And, whaddayaknow, they were still at it.  And I had my camera.  So I managed to get some smutty butterfly pictures, as seen above and below.

Then we demanded the dotter release the butterflies.  This caused some consternation; she wasn’t quite sure how to do it.  So I reached into the net, and the next thing I knew, I had a pair of copulating butterflies crawling on my arm.  The dotter reached out, and they climbed onto her hand.

Right after that, they flew away.

All the time, I was doing the “Oh, wow, Mom just has to see this!” and the associated “Damn.  She can’t.  And I can’t tell her.”

So it goes.

So, yeah, I’m back home.  We’re going to scatter her ashes in early October, a good time weather-wise; Arizona has suddenly entered the very hot season, and our visit out to the place where we scattered Dad’s ashes was already hot enough that we figured all Mom’s more elderly friends would have severe difficulties if we tried during the summer.  I will be contacting friends and family about where and when the event will be…

Spring has finally arrived Chez OmegaMom.  The snow has completely melted from the yard.  Robins are serenading us in the morning and deep into the “night”.  The gloaming is creeping up; it is 11 p.m. as I write this, and it’s still late twilight outside—sunrise was at 5:51 a.m., sunset at 10:05 p.m.  The trees and shrubbery are filled with leaf buds, which I swear seem to grow as you watch.  You can definitely see the changes from day to day.

Within a few weeks, all the houses on all the streets in our area will be hidden from view again by the riotous abundance of greenery surrounding them.

And, as happens each spring, the rhubarbs get a hard-on.  Thick, red, hard penile stubs emerge from the ground in clumps and look infinitely pornographic for a few days.

Then the hard-ons explode into wildly wrinkled, alien looking baby leaves.  A week or so later, suddenly the plants look like ordinary rhubarbs:  the aliens have vanished.

It’s an amazing transformation.

Alas, the pics we had of the hard-on stage were out of focus, but here we have some aliens emerging from the penile cocoon:

Here’s a more pornographic looking item; imagine it without its crinkled taffeta skirt:

Brains for the vegetarian zombies:

The rhubarb plants give my hubby and me something to giggle about in delayed adolescence.  Then, later in the year, they give my hubby rhubarb to make pies.

I, unfortunately, am not fond of rhubarb pie.  Hopefully we’ll be able to ship one off to OmegaGranny.

Aside from that, I have been walking in the mornings, enjoying the sunshine, the explosion of growth, the rich smells of moist dirt and growing things.  And getting mosquito bites—of course.  And raking—endlessly—the yard, in bits and pieces.

This past fall and winter, we had two hens die, so now that it is springtime, the husband’s thoughts lightly turned to—of course—new baby chicks.  So, this fine Easter weekend morning, OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trekked off to the local hatchery and brought back a Belgian Bearded d’Uccle Bantam (mille fleurs variety) and a Frizzle, both about two weeks old.  We now have Miss Frizzle:

And Millie:

They are happily ensconced in a heated plastic tub in the garage, and I am, of course, falling in love with them because they are so cute.

Yes, spring is rapidly springing here.  The snow has melted off the north side of our front yard.  Now, you’d expect it to melt off the south side first, but the south side of our yard is shaded by trees, so the north side gets freed up first.  In the back yard, the back two vegetable beds are now snow-free, and we have purchased black plastic to wrap the beds to heat them up and thaw the soil in preparation for planting.

In our rock garden at the foot of the kitchen stairs, one happy Leopard’s Bane is leafing out luxuriantly.  In the garden behind the house, the lilacs are budding their leaves. 

A mama moose and her calf have been wandering the neighborhood eating everything they can find that has sap running through it, so I am planning to cut up strips of Bounce to tie onto the lilac bushes (this is rumored to keep moose away).

The trees have pussy willows bursting out at the tops.

Today it unofficially hit 50F here in Suburban Alaska.

Spring!

So yesterday was the first time I was able to see the dotter at one of her gymnastics meets.  Her first real meet was two days after I headed off to Arizona to help take care of mom, and she had a second one while I was still there.  Being a doting mom, I just have to show off her beam routine:

Her handstand was a thing of beauty.  Everyone around us commented on how long she held it and how straight it was.  Alas, her landing wasn’t that good, which ended up moving her from a 9.0+ to an 8.9, and a red ribbon on the beam as opposed to a blue.  Wah!  And, yes, her split jump isn’t very good, but everything else she does on the beam is generally great.

Of course, since she had filled my camera card up with videos of Newman the cat encountering Wooly the cat, when I went to record other routines, the video card was filled up.  After gnashing my teeth at the small capacity of my memory card, I investigated, and promptly deleted two videos of yowling cats rolling around on my office floor, and was able to record her bar routine, too:

So she may be going up to Level 4 this summer, which is honest-for-goodness’-sake team level.  IF she stays focused and works hard, and doesn’t goof off with her buddy K. all the time, which she tends to do.  Doesn’t matter to me, but she and K. have been bitching and moaning about not moving up to Level 4 and how they want to and, gee, they can do their back handsprings and a Level 4 dismount, and blah, blah, blah.

In the meantime, the planet is blasting onward towards the spring equinox.  Tonight, the sun will set at 8:00.  This throws our entire dinner-time zeitgeist off—OmegaDad spends the winter with dinner being cooked after the sun sets (most often long after the sun sets), and the rapid shifting of the seasonal light takes a while to mesh with his cooking brain. 

All the light does not mean warm weather, alas.  In fact, we had well above average temps for two months—mostly while I was in Arizona—and as we move towards official Spring, the temperature has plunged below normal for the past two weeks.  This leaves me generally grumpy.  I managed to rant and rave and cry at OmegaDad this week about how I HATE Alaska and I just WANT TO GO HOOOOOME!  Um.  What can I say?  Seeing all the pictures around the intertubes of people’s swiftly growing snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and what-not, and reading about bike rides and lovely weather…well, it just makes me mighty damned jealous.

I could so easily become a true pagan here in Alaska.  I woke up this morning and knew it was the day of the winter solstice…and I felt like dancing.  I felt like carefully nursing a flame awake from a coal saved the day before, in symbolic token of the flame in the sky that will grow again.  I felt like turning somersaults, or zipping from room to room yelling “YIPPEE!!!”, or just jumping up and down in incoherent glee.

I posted it on Facebook.  I posted it on Twitter.  And here I am, posting it on the ol’ bloggeroo.

I have so much sympathy and understanding for all those northern European folk who were really into winter solstice celebrations.  Yes, this is the official “start” of winter.  Hereabouts, though, winter has been here since early November (much later than usual).  Yes, winter will hang around for four more months.  But at least the darkness will disappear!

Just for general information, here’s what the sun was doing today:

At its height—around 1 p.m.—the sun got a whopping 5-1/2 degrees above the horizon (as noted in the graphic).  Flip the graph over and that’s what it’ll be on the summer solstice (or thereabouts).

I’m happy, happy, happy.  Yeah, it’ll still be dark for a long time tomorrow.  And the day after.  And after that.  But y’know what?  By mid-January, the day will be getting longer by leaps and bounds—five or six minutes per day.

To celebrate, go check out Starts With A Bang; he’s got some really cool pictures—time-lapse photos of the sun at winter solstice, plus a nifty year-long time-lapse showing the analemma that the sun moves through over the year.

We have had a series of foggy, foggy nights here in the Valley, and with the fog comes a beautiful after-effect:  hoar frost.  The fog hangs in the air, the icy nights precipitate the fog onto any nearby surface, and the droplets of water freeze and build upon each other into an airy, fairy coating on trees, branches, signs, fences.  Then the sunlight comes out, and in all directions you see a sea of frosty white.  This time, instead of just one night, we had many nights in a row with the fog, and instead of breezes blowing the delicate frost formations off the surfaces during the day (which usually happens), they have stayed and the next night’s precipitation can build upon the last night’s.

The fog, of course, is not homogenous; you have areas where the fog is thick and areas where it drifts and blows and thins out…all of which shows up in the amount of frost that deposits on the surfaces.

This phone pole, for instance, didn’t get much frost:

It looks just like kids’ experiments with crystallizing sugar or salt.

This batch of trees on a ridgeline caught the sunlight; on our side of the ridge, it was dark:

A little later in the day, I wandered by Suburban Alaska Lake, and was able to photograph this lovely set of little trees, all covered with the frost:

A closer look reveals the leaf-like structure of the frost sticking to the branches (dig that vibrant blue sky!  We don’t see that very often around here!):

And then I went all macro:

It really is both beautiful and fascinating.

This was the view across the lake.  See how all the trees along the right side of the picture are covered, while the trees on the left side are only covered halfway down?  The frost never got that low on the left side:

When I got home, this was the view in the backyard:

The frost doesn’t cling to the evergreens the way it does to the deciduous trees; I’m not sure why.

I had to drive off to our neighborhood crossing of the Little Lady river, to see what it looked like in this fairy frosting:

You can see how the sunlight only hits part of the view; that’s because the sun doesn’t get high enough in the sky to light up the whole area, since it’s in a little dip.

So:  This was the post that was supposed to get done yesterday.  Hah.  The broken nose makes me realize just how mobile my face is; I am constantly lifting an eyebrow or twitching my nose, and each time I do that, it hurts.  It doesn’t look like much, really—I am not sporting the advertised raccoon eyes, which surprises me.  All I have is a few scrapes and the swollenness, but even that isn’t much compared to what it could be.  The part that hurts the most, actually, is my neck and shoulders—I plowed in face first, so jammed my head.  Call it “face plant whiplash”!

Many thanks for all the readerly sympathy! 

OmegaDotter and I are slated to go visit GrannyJ between Christmas and New Year’s.  OmegaBro will be there with his family, so we’ll have plenty of fun—lots of visiting, good eats, hanging out, playing with cousins, day trips.

Last year, my visit to Arizona was before Christmas.  The year before, it was before Christmas.  This year, it is after.

And, oh, lordy, what a difference it makes.

I have hit the wall.  I am drowning in the darkness.  I held out as long as I could, and was in fairly good spirits.  Somewhere in the past week, however, my body recognized that It Is Dark, and shut down.  I wake up and am totally, absolutely exhausted.  I could sleep all day long.  When I’m awake, I feel like I’m just going through the motions.  And today the tide of darkness swept over me, and all I felt was miserable.  Totally, absolutely, miserable.  Lead ball in the stomach miserable.  Bitchy, snappy, petty, angry, and underneath it all, on the verge of tears miserable.

Yes, the Magic Light helps.  Yes, the little blue pills help.  But they’re not enough.

Yes, the solstice is coming, and soon the light will be growing and the darkness will be shrinking.  But right now, that doesn’t help.

This is the time when I need to be going somewhere with more than six hours of daylight, with the sun more than 6 degrees over the horizon.  Rumor has it that the Nords and the Swedes are grim and gloomy during the winter—I can totally relate.

Just four weeks.  I can handle four weeks.  Two weeks to the solstice, three weeks until I’m in Arizona for a week, then back here and the days will start getting longer.

OmegaDotter had a silver crown put on one of her molars more than two years ago.  In the meantime, she has lost baby teeth and gained adult teeth, and her teeth are pushing on each other in various ways.  As a result, her silver crown started bothering her, and the night before last she told me as we were putting her to bed that it was poking into her cheek and hurting.

So I called up and made an appointment, which happened to be this morning at 9 a.m.

We drove in through the early twilight.  The mountains were just visible against the pink and lavender and purple clouds and the deep blue sky.

It took a little over an hour to remove the crown and put in a new filling (the dotter is very happy that it doesn’t hurt anymore, but sad that her shiny crown is gone).  I dropped her off at school.  Then I just had to get the camera and try to capture the skies.  I drove off to the Valley Resort, on the shores of Lake Suburban Alaska, noticing as I made the turns and peered through the trees towards the mountains that, OMG, the sun was actually rising, and if I didn’t get there soon, I wouldn’t be able to take that picture.

I got there just in time–10:25 a.m.  Five minutes later, the curve of the sun was over that saddle, and I would have had to fiddle with ISO settings to keep the sunlight from drowning everything else out.

(Sunrise was officially at 9:55 a.m., but those mountains were in the way.)

Our snow on top of melting snow and ice produced a phalanx of icicles hanging down from the roof beside the kitchen.  I liked the repeating vertical lines behind and in front of the fluffy snow-draped firs.

For your viewing pleasure:  The Big Picture once again does a Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar for December; go enjoy the purty pictures and remember to check back each day!

For more viewing pleasure:  absolutely incredible renderings of a 3-D Mandelbrot set.  Think of a 3-D fractal…Mathematics made beautiful!  I particularly like this one, which the creator has described as “shell life“.

I am enjoying the new C-Pop singers–thank you very much for your suggestions!  Since the dotter is mostly into bouncy dance-type music, I will wander through them picking and choosing (no Deserts Chang, alas!  But I think she’s groovy!).  Fantasia is also a great idea.

To finish things up, here is the world’s very best Poker Face parody, called “NeutraFace”, starring bearded designer geeks having fun.  Enjoy.  (I now want to have bearded nerds emerge from my bathtub):

The sun rose at 9:49 in the morning, and will set at 3:51 p.m., just a few more minutes.  We had a visit from the Pineapple Express yesterday; it is Alaska’s answer to the Polar Express.  Where the Polar Express is a blast of frigid Arctic air that swirls down into the Midwest following a huge dip in the jet stream, the Pineapple Express is a blast of warm air direct from Hawaii that barrels into South Central Alaska, melting the snow and ice and producing precipitation of one form or another.

First we got the melt.  You’d think this would be great, wouldn’t you?  But, alas, what it does is denude the forests of the one thing that keeps it bright in the wintertime, and leaves the skies gray.

Then we got the storm.  Where the Omegas live, it came as a day of rain–we were up to 40F.  But to the west, only about 30 miles away, the temperature was low enough that it came as snow, a huge snowstorm on the Lady River that dumped 30+ inches of snow in the hinterlands and in Small Alaskan Tourist Town That Prompted Northern Exposure.  A substitute school secretary in SATTTPNE said they had enough snow that the littlies, kindergartners and first-graders, were disappearing into the snowdrifts.

And then the weather turned cooler here, and our rain turned to snow.  So:  we had wet streets, car, trees, that iced up, then got snowed on.  Then the skies turned clear.

When I drove the dotter in to school, the full moon was hovering over the trees in the west side of the school parking lot.  The sun was just barely beginning to light up the skies to the east.  I dropped her off, ran to the convenience store, and drove home…but that lovely picture of the moon looming over the trees called to me.  At home, I ran into the office, grabbed the camera and drove back to the school, determined to get that picture.

Alas, it didn’t quite work out the way I wanted–I wanted that moon in the trees to be as crisp and clear as it was to my vision.  Since I haven’t worked out the ins and outs of the camera workings, I couldn’t figure out how to make everything in focus and not too bright.  So what you see above is what you get:  Moonlit trees slightly lighted by the first, faint blush of daylight.

It was beautiful.

That is what I live for, up here in Alaska during the winter.  Moments like that.  Because there is so much darkness at this time of year, and my annual bitchfest about the ever-encroaching darkness is revving up.  I talk to people on the phone…they say, “How d’you like the cold winters in Alaska?” with a bit of laughter in their voices.  And I talk to them about The Darkness.

It’s just a month or two that it’s bad, mind you.  I know that the winter solstice is fast approaching, and that three weeks after that, we will settle into the long cold bright time of year, where the days get longer but the chill of winter settles in deeper.  The cold is okay, really.  Because the sun comes out more and more each day, and sparkles off the snow and the mountains and the ice covering the inlet and the rivers and the waterfalls, so it is beautiful.  And behind it all is the knowledge that The Dark is Dying, the sun is coming back, spring will be here soon, and we will be into the Season of The Gloaming.

But that month and a half to two months where it just gets darker and darker?  It gets to me.  The sun was 6.8 degrees above the horizon today at its height.  That’s low.  That’s like “late afternoon just before sunset” low.

(The solstice is coming.  It’ll get here.  The dark will go away.)