OmegaMom

Ah…

Ahhh…

AHchew!

In my early 20s, I would visit Grandma down in Sun City on a regular basis.  As planning would have it, there were a whole slew of elderly aunties and uncles that lived there, too–my grandfather having decided, as he was nearing the end of life, that he should move himself and Grandma to that area so that they’d have family around. 

Great Aunt Iola lived down the street from Grandma.  A tall, rangy, raw-boned woman with a deep voice, she was one of my most favorite of the elderly aunties.  Her austere exterior argued for a no-nonsense kind of woman, someone who was brusque and cold and distant.  In reality, though, Auntie Iola was a sentimental pushover, warm and loving and fun.  She introduced me to the wonder that is ginger-ale floats, a much better concoction than root beer floats, trust me.

Auntie Iola had a Siamese cat named Greta, cross-eyed and with a creaky voice, who loved to sun herself in the little courtyard attached to Auntie Iola’s Sun City duplex.  Greta would bask in the sunlight, and, when the mood struck her, would roll about on her back in the dust for minutes at a time.

Given that this was Arizona, and in the summertime, with low humidity (obviously pre-monsoon season), Greta’s fur would fill with static and she would return from one of these dust baths with her fur filled with torrents, masses of dust.

This is how I learned that I was allergic to dust.

KtChew! Ahhhh….ahhhhh…

Because Greta was a sucker for luvins.  So one day, when I was visiting, she returned to the house after her daily dust bath, leapt up onto the table in front of me, and did some serious nose-diving, begging for luvins.  I obliged, scritching around the base of her ears, scratching gently under her chin, pushing her over to massage her tummy.  And within minutes I erupted into the absolute worst allergy attack I have ever–before or since–encountered.

…chew!  Ktchew!

In this area of Alaska, the prevailing winds come looping up the coast, circle inland a bit, and barrel down the glaciers.  The satellite loops look like immense commas, great big swooping spirals of cloud that march in on a regular basis, dumping the moisture sucked up from the ocean.

Right now, though, they’re not dumping moisture.  What they’re doing is kicking up dust from the glaciers and riverbeds as they go.

Small Town Alaska, to the east of us, where OmegaDad works, has been shrouded in clouds of dust for days.  Suburban Alaska, where we live, hasn’t.  Until this weekend.  Suddenly, the laminate flooring upstairs has this fine layer of dust, blown in through the open windows.

We were outside in the back yard almost all weekend.  Early Sunday afternoon, my eyes started itching.  A few hours later and my nose was streaming, and sneezes were exploding from me like the snooze alarm on our clock.  A little series of sneezes–ktchew!  ktchew!  ktchew!–and then a momentary rest where I could snurfle up the runnies with a sound like the honking of a goose, and then another eruption of sneezes.

Antihistamines don’t seem to be doing very much good, either, though I suppose if I weren’t taking them, things would be worse.

So even though it’s gorgeous weather, the sun is out, the trees are green (yes!  green!  woot!), and we have actually had a series of red flag warnings due to (it is to laugh) "low" humidity and high winds, I am praying to the Kozmik All for a good drenching in the next few days, just to get the dust to settle.  And pollen, too, I suppose.  But mostly the dust.

Ahhhh….ahhhhh….

KtChew!

Here we are, it’s May 6, and the sun is rising at 5:30 a.m., setting at 10:20 p.m.

In most areas I’ve lived, "twilight" is pretty well-defined.  It lasts about 30 minutes, then *poof*, it’s nighttime.

Here in Alaska, though, I’ve learned some new terms:  "civil twilight", "nautical twilight", "astronomic twilight".  The one I’m used to is the "civil twilight"–the time when the sun is less than 6° below the horizon.  Then there’s "nautical twilight", the period when the sun is between 6° and 12° below the horizon.  "Astronomic twilight" is when it’s officially night, and you can do starwatching.

Last night, I was suffering from insomnia.  I kept waking up and still being able to see faint light around our windows, at the edges of the curtains.  Surely, I thought, I was mistaken.

So I fired up Teh Google and searched for a sunrise/sunset calculator.  I found one with civil twilight mentioned, and it didn’t seem to match my experience, so I tried another.  And there it was, in all its glory:

Civil twilight–4:35 a.m. to 5:30 a.m., 10:20 p.m. to 11:16 p.m.

Nautical twilight–2:25 a.m. to 4:35 a.m., 11:16 p.m. to 1:27 a.m.

Astronomic twilight:  "Light".

Eh?  Say what?!

Hey, by my calculations, we should have one hour of full dark right now!  Look right above–Nautical twilight begins at 2:25 a.m. in the morning, ends at 1:27 a.m. in the morning.  So there’s a full fifty-eight minutes being ignored by that calculator.

Harrumph.

Anyway, "nautical twilight" means that navigators can see bright stars and the horizon at the same time.  "General outlines of ground objects may be distinguishable, but detailed outdoor operations are not possible, and the horizon is indistinct" sayeth the write-up in Wikipedia.

What it means, in general, is that we have no Real Dark now.  Not to say that we have light all the time, but we are possessed of "glow".  And it’s enough to seep around the edges of our curtains, and enough light so that I can stumble through the house in the faint light and see humps where the chest at the foot of our bed is or the sofas are in the living room.

It’s quite disconcerting.  And we have a month and a half of increasing daylight to go!

In the meantime, we have been plagued by moose.  Meese?  More than one moose.  Lolling about in our backyard.  Nibbling on the nice, tender, tasty shoots coming out of our shrubbery, with their just-about-to-bust-open leaf buds.

Damn moose.

Small Mountain University Town is under a red flag warning.  The Big Ditch has a Big Fire going near the entrance town Tusayan.  A large fire on the outskirts of Los Angeles has come and gone on the national news scene.  The Valley of Death (Phoenix) had record low humidity readings the other day, of 2%.  It’s fire season in the southwest…which means it’s warm, dry, and windy.

Chez OmegaMom, it’s cool and moist.  I’m actually seeing some leaf buds on our trees, so expect a haze of green to be showing in a few days.  It’s about time.  We’re hoping that this weekend we’ll be able to put in the veggie garden beds.

When OmegaDad and I first met in Los Alamos, one of the things that charmed us about the highlands of northern New Mexico was the way that the moisture rising up from the Rio Grande would form into clouds that billowed up over the edge of the plateau we were on.  Here in Suburban Alaska, we have similar clouds forming over the Little Lady River, and over the Turnaround Arm of the ocean…and, of course, fog from the inlet.  We don’t often get the fog here, but as we drive down towards Suburban Downtown (hah), or towards Small Town Alaska, you can see the fog rolling up the inlet and rivers and coiling around the base of the snow-capped mountains.

So at least we don’t have to worry about fire season any more, not for ourselves.  But we have friends and family still in that area, and when the red flag warnings go up, so does our attention.

We have had days worth of sun and warm weather, up in the 60s even.  Woot!

But this morning it started to snow.  "Little to no accumulation" was what the Weather Service said then.

The snow kept coming down.

By the time I went to escort the child to gymnastics, we had four inches…plus.

And when we got home, there was still more.

And now the Weather Service is predicting 10 more inches, and up to 15 more inches in Big City.

Gah & bah.  Isn’t it almost May, fer cryin’ out loud?!

The dotter is better.  It seems to have been a 24-hour bug; she was sick long enough for me to cancel a visit to a buddy on Saturday, but by the end of the day was able to eat regular food and keep it down, yay!

Yesterday was sunny, but we pretty much did nothing all day–the dotter, still recuperating, laid about and napped a few times, and I wasn’t feeling up to par myself.

But today–today was sunny and warm again.  Up in the 50s.  Oh, joy!

We now have slightly more than an acre.  About a fourth, I would say, is wooded.  The remainder is lawn.  One spot in the yard gets sun more often than any other, and it was free and clear of snow.  So I began raking it at 11 a.m.

By 4 p.m., that part of the yard was looking awesome.

I, on the other hand, now have been informed by both OmegaDotter and OmegaDad, on separate occasions, that my butt is quite dirty.  ("Hey!" says OmegaDad, "So sue me!  I like looking at my wife’s ass!")  I have a raw spot from where I was raking without gardening gloves.  Luckily, I realized it in time and grabbed the gloves, so it’s my only raw spot.

But my arms!  My legs!  My back!  Ack!

And it ends up I’ve only done about one-sixth of the yard.  I look out my office window into the back yard–the endless expanse of back yard, where the snow is rapidly shrinking, and say to myself, "Myself:  Look at that yard.  Maybe we want to let the woodlands come back."  Myself shakes her head and says, "No, no, me.  We need lawn so kids can run around and get tired out, and besides, we can’t let the woodlands grow over the septic tank or we will be sunk.  We can do this!  We’ll just do bits and pieces over the next few weekends, and then it will be time for OmegaDad to start mowing…"

By the way–underneath all the leaves?  The grass was green.  Not everywhere, just in spots.  But it was such a lovely, lovely color to see!

I spent the late afternoon snuggled up in bed, suffering from a sinus headache.  Oh, joy. 

Once upon a time, I didn’t have sinuses.  Or, rather, I had them, but they didn’t bother me.  It’s similar to how the dotter never complains about things like headaches; she gets a rather cute, scrunched up "Hunh?" look on her face when you ask her if she’s got one.  This went on for many years.  And then, one day…

One day…I got the Mother Of All Sinus Infections.  It came on fast and sudden.  I don’t remember very much about it except for the fact that my eye swelled shut and I was hauled off to either the doctor or the ER, and forthwith tossed into the hospital for a few days while they Did Things.  One of those things involved a bubous transparent plastic doo-dad attached to a big transparent plastic tank.  The nurses would come by every few hours, jam the end of the bulbous doo-dad into my nose, and vacuum me out.

Ewwwww.

I just want you to think about that.

My response?  Ewwwwww.

I think I was around eleven years old at the time.

After that–having primed the pump, as it were–my sinuses were in full-time infectious mode.  If the weather turned, if there was a high pressure system, if there was a low-pressure system, so long as there was a fluctuation in the humidity, I’d get sinus headaches.  Never to the extent of that first big blow out, but I could feel the fluid building up, then the skin on the right side of my nose near my eyebrow would start to puff out a bit, and the pounding would begin.

Then I moved to the great American Southwest.

Woohoo!

Freedom from sinus headaches!

Yay!  There was dancing in the streets!  (Except for the fact that my other headache bete noir, migraines, decided to take up the slack…)

Then we moved to Alaska.  Land of soaring mountains!  The Final Frontier!  Land of the Midnight Sun!  Yadda, yadda, yadda…

Also, land of unending humidity.

Guess what?  They’re baaaaack.

Oh, joy.

Gasp!  We have some itty bitty flowers!  It’s been snowing on and off, and we still have flowers!  Woot!

Not much as yet; these are at the tippy top of some of the trees around the house.  But if we have some sunlight for a few days straight, we should end up with a pleasant little display.

No pics yet.  It’s gray and drizzly and chilly, and I’ve already been pulled by the dawg to the point of sliding onto my butt on the slush.  But, still, it’s a heartening thing to see.

Ahhh.

Flowers.

One of the things that Alaska is famous for is cabbage.  World-class cabbage.  HUGE cabbage.  At the State Fair, one of the biggest competitions is who gets to take home the award for the biggest cabbage of the year.

OmegaDad decided he, too, wanted to try his hand at Big Cabbages.

This required researching Big Cabbage seeds.  And buying same.  A number of different varieties.

Which, of course, required planting a number of each of a number of different varieties.

He set up his indoor "greenhouse"–a set of metal and wood shelves with grow-lights and heat and a plastic covering sealed with velcro–and set up some flats.  They were not all cabbages.  Thank heavens.

However.  We now have…oh…fifty? cabbage plants just about ready to be transplanted outdoors.  (It would help if we had (a) the vegetable beds set up and (b) no snow.  We’re getting there on both aspects.)

This evening at dinner, OmegaDad served a concoction of sauteed sliced cabbage, crisp bacon bits, and red onion.  It was better than his last cabbage concoction, and actually somewhat tasty.

He eyeballed me over dinner and said, portentously, "You know…we need to come up with cabbage recipes."

‘Tis true.  If all goes well, we are going to be swamped with cabbage.

Now.  I like cabbage, in moderation.  A nice small cabbage head, cut into quarters and boiled until just tender-crisp, and slathered with butter–yum.

Once in a while.

I much prefer our yearly bounty of beans and sugar-snap peas and snow peas.  And little bitty tender lettuce leaves, which make a splendid salad.

Cabbage, on the other hand…hmmm.

Anyone have any good cabbage recipes??  We’re really going to need them.

We have had lovely weather, up in the 50s.  (Not sunny, but, hey, that’s okay.)  The snow was almost all gone from the yard.

OmegaDad, inveterate veggie farmer that he is, has been planning a raised vegetable bed to be placed by the shed out back.  He ordered the lumber yesterday for it to be delivered today.

Guess what happened?

Snow.

Arrrggghhhh!

So far, not much.  But predicted?  Up to nine inches.

Sigh.

I, too, had made plans:  I wanted to rake the soggy old leaves.  I wanted to pick up the garbage that had slowly been revealed as the snow and ice retreated.  I didn’t want, but needed to, pick up all the (ewww, yucky) dawg poop that had also accreted under all that snow.

But now?

Nope.

Wah.

(As I wrote this, the flakes were getting fatter and coming down faster.  This time, I think, the weather predictors are spot-on.)

Anyway, I blame it all–all!–on OmegaDad.

So Scribbit nails it here, about how it feels right now in Alaska, in the season that is known elsewhere as "Spring".  Yes, you read it correctly when you hit the line "The sun isn’t going down until nearly nine o’clock now".

OmegaDad returns from a field trip this evening after two days away.  On the home front, the dotter and I have been cooking and hanging out.  She is now quite handy in the kitchen and I have even started allowing her to cut ingredients up with The Knife.  Let me tell you how hard it is to act nonchalant while your daughter is very carefully cutting up green peppers and Italian sausage with The Knife, which is Sharp.  Very.  I kept having visions of her slicing one of her fingers through, but she managed in spite of my parental and discreet hyperventilating behind her.

A side effect of the Food Network is that she is determined to be a chef someday, and has taken to actually eating weird combinations of foods.  "Weird", that is, in a six-year-old’s world view.  We had kung pao chicken on Tuesday night–full of "weird" ingredients.  She ate it all.  She liked it!  She called it "yummy"!  And she asked if I could make it again next week!

Whoa.

This was followed by the next night’s homemade spaghetti sauce (thus the green peppers and Italian sausage), which, unfortunately, was not as great a hit.  Even though she had specifically asked for it two nights running.

My mommy satisfaction quotient was quite high after these mother-dotter bonding experiences.  In fact, my head was swelled.  But then, at the dinner table last night, she informed me that "It’s just not as fun without daddy here."  *Pop* went my MSQ, deflating to nothing.

Then, when talking with OmegaDad on the phone afterwards, he reminded me that she had missed me terribly while I was down in Arizona, and went on to say that he was fun, but I was comfort.

Heh.  Which I proceeded to illustrate yesterday night by convincing the dotter that saying "I will have good dreams tonight" ten times in a row would make sure she didn’t have a nightmare, like she had had the night before.  (A real doozy, that involved crying.)

Anyway, since the man has been away, and I have been devoting time to the dotter, the blog has suffered. 

And it shows!  Sheesh, guys.  I don’t post for a day and my hits plummet.  Bah!  I say, BAH!  Nowadays I don’t like looking at my site meter some days, because it makes me feel antsy and like someone is going to tell me to clean up my room.

In the meantime, I am trying (very hard) to put up an itty bitty video of her cartwheeling.  Well, it’s up on my website, but how to get it to display is another thing.  Some research is in order.

A simple question:  Who is responsible for 2007 taxes on a property purchased in September, 2007?

Ahem.

More on this on Monday, when I can call the borough and the mortgage company!

Answer:  We are responsible.  For the last third.  The sellers were responsible for the first two thirds.  That money went into our escrow account upon signing the mortgage.  Further $$ were put into the escrow account each month.

But nothing has come out of our escrow account up to now.

Perhaps I am naive.  Our first mortgage experience was smooth as silk; we purchased at the same time of year, but never received a delinquent tax notice!  Because our first mortgage company, lo these many years ago, actually paid the $#@*ing taxes out of escrow without us having to do diddley.  So we fully expected the same thing to happen with this mortgage company.

But perhaps they’re up to their eyeballs in alligators, what with everyone and his sister trying to re-fi or get out of higher interest rates or walking away from mortgages that are for more than the property is worth any more or something…

I am left wondering what’s up with our house insurance policy, as well…

Grrrr.

Last night, while cleaning up bookcases to go into the family room, it occurred to me to wonder–when did the first person decide that smearing smushed up dried honeycombs on wood was a Good Idea?

I mean, really–what on earth prompted someone to do that in the first place?

It’s similar to something else I’ve wondered:  Who was the first person who decided that horseradish might be actually good to eat if it were ground up and mixed in with other foodstuffs?  What possessed this person?  One of my most memorable experiences was when my mom handed me a chunk of what we both thought was celeriac root–carefully cleaned and peeled–and I took a great big honkin’ bite.  It wasn’t celeriac.  It was horseradish.  Let me tell you:  horseradish, in its natural state, is not, repeat not, edible.  I chewed for about five seconds.  At which point, my brain told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was being poisoned.  It was ghastly.  Surely I’m not alone in that?  So what prompted some genius, in the long long ago, to decide that it might be okay if it were used sparingly?

Why is it that I suddenly have nothing I want to say?

I’ve been encountering some good discussions around the blogosphere.  They pique my interest.  I want to discuss them when I read them.  But then, a few hours later, I open up the ol’ bloggin’ software and am confronted with a blank page…at which point my brain goes blank, too.

Part of it is that we’re being very homey right now.  The house is slowly, slowly falling into place; more and more boxes are unpacked, curtains are up, bookcases are out and books soon to be placed in them.  It’s feeling like our home suddenly.  I still feel sad about leaving the old house, but am happy about having more space, and more closets (closets!!!  OMG!  I could just swoon with the joy!).  We have also–somehow–managed to stay on top of the creeping mess here, so things have their places and get put back/away, rather than accreting like a giant midden heap in various spots around the house.

We have light.  In fact, so much light that it is making me feel very odd and out-of-focus.  Twilight at nine p.m. should mean that the weather is almost hot and the flowers are blooming and the grass is green.  But right now, we still have snow in the backyard and ice in the driveway (and in the afternoons, a lovely thin layer of melting ice on top of the slick ice, which resulted in one of our cars slooooowy sliding backwards down the driveway…luckily I noticed this in time to move it back up to a non-icy spot!).  We have birds congregating around the bird feeder, but no greenery.  We have sunshine all day, but no buds on the trees.  My body keeps saying, "Sun!  Woot!  But…but…dude!  Where’s the ’spring’?!"

Then there are the various "just living" things.  Taking the dotter off to gymnastics class.  Doing teleconferences during the day.  Taking the dawg out to do his thing.  Planning a vegetable garden.  Putting up artwork.  Doing the laundry.

Anyway, right now, I open the blog, want to post something pithy and pungent, and find the P&P quotient in my brain has plummeted.

Give me some ideas!

As of today.  Woot!

So, is there any evidence of this "spring" here?

Well, there’s the sunlight.

Remember, back in November and December, how I was bemoaning the darkness?  The misery of daylight that lasted only 5 hours?  The "daylight" that seemed more like an endless late-afternoon?

Hah.

I spit in the direction of the darkness, that’s what.

Because we got our curtains up in the bedrooms just in time.  This would be a week and a half ago.  The weekend that the idiocy that is Daylight Savings Time showed up.  Because now…now the dotter goes to bed while it’s still light out.  Official sunset is at 8:18 tonight–but the light lingers on for another hour.  The sun rises at 8 a.m., but we’ve got light twilight before that.

In other spring evidence, we have hordes of various chickadees, sparrows, nut hatches, and red polls swarming around our bird feeder at dawn.  We also have a songbird of some type, but I haven’t been able to see it.  There’s moss growing at the feet of trees.  And we had a week and a half of lovely weather where it got up to 50F for a while!  Alas, that passed, and we’re back down to the 20s and 30s and have had more snow.

But, yes, somewhere out there, spring is coming.

Here in Alaska, as many people know, we have an overload of daylight hours in the summer.  We’re talking 19.14 hours of daylight at the peak where the Omega Family lives, and more up north.

That’s a lot of daylight.

Our kids don’t need to work on the crops quickly after school to get them in before the sun goes down.

So why do we have Daylight Savings Time here?

I mean, really…why bother?  In the summer, our "noon" ends up being at 2 p.m. or thereabouts, an artifact of when Alaska managed to get itself all in one time zone (except for the further reaches of the Aleutian Islands) so that the state managers in Juneau could talk to various state folk in Anchorage and other places without having to worry about time zones.  Previously, we were in four time zones. 

So why didn’t they just get rid of DST at the same time?  I don’t know, but apparently there’s a move afoot to get it on a ballot this year, though some folks grumble that Alaska will then be up to five hours off the eastern part of the U.S. during the summer.

This morning, upon waking, I stumbled through the house re-setting clocks.  OmegaDad and I are going to hang drapes today; it’s necessary because now the dotter will be going to bed while it’s still somewhat light outside.  Soon the same will be happening for OmegaDad and me–we’re gaining almost six minutes of light per day.  I can sleep in any environment, but OmegaDad can’t get to sleep if it’s light in the bedroom…

Mainly, DST is a big bother for us and the other 670,000 people who live here.

When I lived in the S.F. Bay area, I often thought that if the area had any sort of winter weather at all, it would never have gained the popularity and population that it has.  Mainly I was thinking of the effect ice would have on life there.

So here I am in Alaska, coming to the last third of my first winter here.  We’ve dealt with large amounts of snow that pile up and pack down on the roads.  We’ve dealt with darkness…deepest, darkest darkness.  We’ve dealt with weeks’ worth of below zero weather.

Now.  Now we have Nice Weather!  Sunshine!  Temperatures in the 30s and lower 40s, or more!  And the dangers that have lurked beneath that snowpack are swiftly being revealed.

To wit:  Ice.

Snow-packed roads and driveways are a pain (you have no idea where the road edge really is, and have to blindly follow the drivers before you, like a lemming, hoping that they’ve got a better idea than you).  But the snowpack is, really, eminently driveable.  Underneath the packed snow, however, is packed snow that has become ice.  And when the sun shines on that ice and warms it up, you get a nice slick layer of cold water on top of ice.  And when the temperature still drops beneath 32F at night, you get more ice.  Nice, smooth, slick, slippery ice.

Drivers on the main roads around town have worn down all the ice and the roads are clear.  On the side roads, not as much.  And driveways?  Ack.  The phrase "sheet of ice" applies.

Our driveway has a gentle incline, so while our wheels give a few spins here and there as we go up to the house, so far it’s been okay.

But some of our neighbors…their driveways are going up a hill.  It’s nothing compared to the hills of the Bay Area, but it’s still more of an incline than our driveway.  During my smoke breaks in the past few days, I’ve watched twice as visitors to my neighbors have striven (strived?) to drive up the driveways, only to reach a point where the car wheels completely stop gripping the road and their cars slowly and gently start sliding downwards in what ends up being a sideways motion.

My assumption was that people who have lived in Alaska a long while know how to drive on ice.  Right?  Wouldn’t you think that’s a fairly natural assumption to make?

Living in the mountains of the southwest, for us ice was a rare event.  Oh, we got lots of huge snows.  But generally the strength of the sunlight would melt through the snow before it ever really became ice.  So we’d get–maybe–two or three days when the roads up to the higher portions of Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods would become icy enough that we’d have to either do some fancy maneuvering up the icy spots or else try one of the less steep roads up. 

But honestly.  That was enough driving on ice to give us some basics.  Like, if you’re sliding downwards, sideways, on a driveway, perhaps the best thing to do would be to turn your car wheels so that you’re not going sideways?  After all, aiming your car in the direction the car is moving allows a certain amount more control.  And perhaps punching on the accelerator as you’re going downhill is a bad idea?  And perhaps you should tap on the brakes a few times as you’re going downhill so that you don’t do a fine out-of-control donut at the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the driveway and smash your car into the eight-foot-high bank of packed snow leftover by the snowplows.  All of which has happened.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.  We would never have considered the incline of the driveway when thinking of the house we were purchasing.  We thought about floodplains.  We thought about commute distance for OmegaDad.  We thought about being as far away as possible from the trains and the highways.  But ice?  Didn’t even think of it.

We have had beautiful, clear, sparkling sunny days for the past week.  The clouds have moved away, the sun is out, and it makes me happy.

It also makes it very, very cold.

Very.

Right now, at 9 a.m., it’s 22 below zero.  For the past few days, the high for the day has been either zero Fahrenheit or 1 degree.

But it’s sunny!  And we’re up to almost eight hours of daylight per day!  And we went out to dinner last night leaving at 6 p.m., and there was still a trace of red and maroon right at the horizon!  And we’re gaining almost eight minutes of light per day!

But, dayum, it’s cold.

I said to someone on a board or list that I’ve gotten to the point that when it’s zero out, my mind says, "Hunh!  It’s kind of warm today!"  She laughed and said that meant I was becoming a true Alaskan.  I really think it’s my 27 years of growing up in Chicago and dealing with Chicago winters.  For those who wonder, yes, you can become accustomed to lots of things, so long as you get a steady taste of it, and I actually think that it’s easier to get used to extremely cold weather than it is to get used to extremely hot weather–especially extremely hot, humid weather.  After all, you can always layer more clothes on, but once you’ve stripped down to a bikini, you’ve pretty much reached the limit of "adjustment" that can be made.

The dotter, a few nights ago, wanted to know how come it gets cold in the wintertime.  The problem with these questions she asks is that she’s asking them when she’s snuggled up in bed, "ready" to go to sleep, so it’s fairly obvious that these questions are a last gasp attempt to stay awake.  A question like this, though, requires demonstration and discussion, so I promised her I’d find something on the internet to explain it (after a lame attempt using my fists).

(I mean–look, it’s hard to jerk your brain out of the "keep the child quiet, keep the voice low, it’s snoozing time" mode to answer, say, "How do you make plywood?"  You give the child a quick explanation, but it’s not enough, she wants more, more, more!  So I am beginning to collect a fine set of links…)

The cold is frustrating, I admit.  Looking out the window, we have a beautiful sunny day.  We have lots of snow.  I wist after sledding or skiing or just going out and playing in the snow.  But that cold is a bit too cold for such frolicking.  So we look out, enjoy the growing sunlight, and wait for a day that is (a) sunny, (b) between 0 and 32F, and (c) on the weekend.

We’ll get some sooner or later!

One of the things I forgot to mention in the "How is Alaska?" post is the prevalence of young moms here.

Small Mountain University Town was, of course, a college town.  There were hordes of professorial types, with their professorial spouses, and the median age of the parental units in town were in their 30s or early 40s.  So, not only did I fit right in in terms of outlook (liberal) and interests (eclectic), but I also fit when it came to parenting.  Half the moms picking up kids at daycare were near my age, and I only got, "Oh, are you OmegaDotter’s grandma?" a time or two.  And the norm in terms of how many kids was…two?

Also, I got my info on good daycare/camps/schools/etc. from the moms I worked with–all of whom were in their 30s or early 40s as well.

Hereabouts…well, heck, it seems as if there’s something in the water.  Dudes, the landscape is littered with moms in their early to mid-20s with three kids in tow.  Or more.  So when I see older moms, I glom onto them, like a drowning man would clutch a life preserver.

And hereabouts, I get the "grandma" comment a lot more–because, well, I could be a grandma to most of the kids I see.

Ack!  That’s a fearsome thought to me.

Right now, we’re gathering RSVPs to the dotter’s birthday party, to be held next Sunday.  She has fully drunk the Kool-Aid by now:  the party is going to be mermaid-themed.  Am I a bad mom if I say that I really liked the horsie theme better?  But I am doing my momly duty, printed out mermaid-themed invites, am going to do the pink and purple and sea-blue stuff with (ack!) mermaids on it, and herd a horde of girls (and a boy or two) for a couple of hours at the local health club, which has a play area for rent.

Let me digress here:  Back at preschool, I knew what to do in terms of birthday party invites.  I just slipped them to Miss Emmy with a whispered, "Can you slip these into people’s cubbies?" and knew everything would be taken care of.  I didn’t know what to do this time; if I handed the invites to the dotter to parcel out, there would be Drama.  The dotter would make a production of it.  There would be Girls Not Invited pouting and sad.  There’s no way on God’s green earth I was going to invite 18 kids, plus the kids the dotter wanted from after-school-care.

So, eyeing the invites with a puzzled look, I stuffed them into the weekly envelope that shepherds homework and school announcements and notes and what-not from school on Fridays, and wrote a note to Miss Shoebox asking her to–essentially–slip them into the kids’ cubbies.

The dotter returned with a downcast face.  Miss Shoehorn hadn’t divvied out the invites, according to her.

The same the next day.

The same the next day.

I was panicking.  Had I Done Something Wrong?  Was it a faux pas to ask Miss Shoetree to do it?  Is it different in kindergarden??

But.  Slowly I am getting responses.  We now have three responses, so I know the party won’t be a bust (whew!).

What does this have to do with young moms, you ask?  That’s a good question!

I just got an RSVP from H’s mom.  H’s mom talks a lot.  H’s mom just moved here last summer, too, from Massachusetts.  H’s mom is 40.  H’s mom volunteered that omigawd-aren’t-the-moms-here-so-young?!  H’s mom had the delightful experience of meeting the parents of some of her new friends…in other words, H’s friends’ grandparents–who had just turned 50.

It was an instant bonding thing.

Some commenters have noted that I seem to be "settling in" and feeling better.  I think they’re right.  The question, of course, is "is this a long-term thing?"  See, the days are starting to get longer, and already we’re gaining almost 4 minutes of daylight per day.  Naturally, with more daylight, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (har!), and rather than diving into depression, I am rising, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of winter.

Very poetic.

Time for a round-up of differences between Small Suburb, Alaska, and Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods, Arizona:

• Fruits and vegetables go south very quickly here, much more quickly than in Arizona.  I don’t know if this is a function of how long it takes to get fruits and vegetables here in the first place, or a function of greater humidity.  Either way, it’s disconcerting to have parsley and cilantro start rotting on the vine within a day of purchase, or apricots and pears turning mushy in two days.  The only fruit we ever had a problem with in Arizona was strawberries.
• Speaking of fruits and vegetables, there is a sad lack of diversity in same here.  It’s not like we were surrounded with yuppie-like abundance of diversity in veggies in Small Mountain University Town, but there was certainly a better assortment to choose from.  Here we have basics, and more basics, and still more basics.  BOR-ing.
• My nighttime hot flashes have turned to night sweats.  This is definitely a function of higher humidity; in AZ, the sweat from the hot flashes would evaporate immediately, while here the sweat sits and pools and drips and is generally just gross.  TMI, I know, but there it is–something I would never have expected.
• Snow is different here.  We have yet to have a snow with the great big goobery flakes splatting against your windshield like we would have in mountainous Arizona.  Here, the snow comes in small flakes.  It also comes in small doses, unlike back in AZ.  Small Mountain University Town would have three or four Big Snows per year–typically 18 inches to 30 inches within the span of two or three days.  Here, we have lots of small snows that peak out around 4 inches.  The end result:  about the same amount of snow, total.
• One becomes accustomed to cold rather quickly.  Nowadays, when it’s above zero, it feels fairly warm.  Not short-sleeve warm, mind you, but "why bother zipping up your coat?" warm.
• I didn’t realize just how drafty our old house was.  How cold.  Our new house, though pretty much your basic box (no character, really), is nice and toasty warm.  No drafts.  None.  Crawl spaces under houses apparently are heat sinks; it’s nice to have warm floors!
• Wood laminate floors need to be cleaned.  A lot.  Dust bunnies don’t hide out, discreetly staying in corners, stuck there for eternity.  No, they go rampaging about whenever someone walks by; they leap out to grab you, shake you by your leg, and shout out, "Yoohoo!  Here I am!"  And then, when you reach down to grab it, the breeze caused by you reaching down has the dust bunnies scooting out of your reach, almost as if they’re sentient and daring you to grab them.
• Stairs = awesome calf muscles.  Even if no other part of my body is getting exercise, I have awesome calf muscles, because we’re up and down the stairs many times each day.
• We have to drive to find trails or places to cross-country ski; back in HDEW the forest was two blocks away, and we could just step off our front porch into our skis and ski over to the open woods.
• The woods are much thicker here.  I never realized just how open the piney woods were, though my life back in the midwest should have made it very obvious.  When you find national forest land, you can’t just go plunging straight into the trees and head out into unknown territory; you need an honest-to-god trail, because otherwise you’ll be bushwhacking and wear yourself out in no time at all.
• I didn’t realize just how convenient having a fenced yard was.  We need to fence part of our yard here, because otherwise our dawg, who is…um…not well-behaved, will go gallivanting off to pester other people.  So we have to walk him three times per day.  In addition, our yard is the crossroads for a wide variety of neighborhood dawgs.  Humph.
• Cloudy days.  We have lots of cloudy days here.  November and December are apparently not only the darkest days in terms of amount of sunlight, but also in terms of days of sunshine.  February through September are the sunny months (with the exception of August).

All in all, we are settling in and growing accustomed to it.

As promised, an early morning pic of our winter wonderland, birches towering over spruce trees.  Right now, at 2:30 p.m., that corner of the yard is actually a little bit sunlit, but the photo was taken shortly after sunrise.

Miss C. wants to know what the difference between hoarfrost and rime frost is; so far as I can tell, the difference is that hoarfrost is ice that deposits on surfaces directly from cold, moist air, whereas the rime frost is deposited when there’s cold fog that builds up crystals.  Hoarfrost, I believe, tends to form small beady shapes on surfaces; this frost is all feathery ice crystals fanning out from the surface of the trees.

Herewith a lousy pic to maybe show you what it looks like a little closer:

And here is the dotter’s decor–which, I assure you, no longer looks quite so pristine, but is now covered with horsies on the tops and various stuff shoved into the cubbies:

However, she actually grasps the concept of "sorting" and "storing" now; we have two of the drawers filled with legos, one filled with cars, one with dolls, one with airplanes and rockets, etc.  More later!

One thing we get here in Alaska that we never got in our mountain home in Arizona is frost due to fog on freezing nights.  It’s not actually "hoarfrost", it seems, but rime frost, but I thought it was hoarfrost and it made a splendid post title.

Last night, we were under a dense fog advisory, with visibility down to 1/4 mile.  This morning the dotter woke me up with a question:  "Mommy, why are the trees so white?"  Blurry with sleep, I replied it was because we have birch trees, and they have white trunks, unlike the pine trees in Flagstaff.

But then I woke up, and actually looked out the window when the sun came up.  It was a lacy, icy fairyland.  All the trees were covered with a soft feathering of ice crystals, looking like flocked Christmas trees.  You could see where the fog level had been; since we’re down in a hollow, the fog didn’t get all the way down to the ground, but about halfway down the trees.  Many of the spruce (? firs?) in our yard are much smaller than the birch trees, so we have an interesting effect of lacy white branches on trees with white trunks, towering over dark green spruce.  It’s really quite picturesque.

Of course, I’ve kept meaning to take pictures all day, and now, as I sit down prepared to write this post, the light has disappeared and I can’t get that picture.  Bah.  Tomorrow, I promise!

Household-wise, OmegaDad finally bit the bullet and hauled the dotter out with him to look at furniture for her bedroom, specifically storage furniture.  Why are we doing it so long after we moved?  Well, there was another plan originally, consisting of painting the rustic low-level bookcase-ish thing made of orange crates and boards, and then moving it into the dotter’s room…it kept being discussed, but never done.  Then finally OmegaDad wiffled and waffled and allowed as to how he really wanted that particular item to go into the storage shed, for his use.  Ahhhh!

So, anyway, the two of them went out yesterday and returned with two Cubeicals, a little storage bench, and a bunch of pink and faux-zebra and faux-leopard fabric drawers to fit.  OmegaDotter chose these herself.  It’s amazingly kewl.

So OmegaDad has spent the day hammering and swearing, while I try to keep OmegaDotter out of his hair.  I will, of course, provide pics of that, as well.

As you drive the highway between Small Alaska Suburb and Austin, AK, the sides of the highway are peppered with various signs. 

There’s the "Watch for moose" signs, and the accompanying tally of how many moose have been hit by cars on the highway since (date).  And, yes, that truly does happen; while we were stuck in the Shoebox and I was doing laundry at the laundromat, I managed to overhear a lady who was still recuperating from a broken back and leg from when she had hit a moose in March–and OmegaDad’s boss and wife hit a moose last year while driving to see their son (who lives in our neighborhood).

There are the requisite "don’t trash Alaska" signs.

Speed limit signs, of course.

Then there are the never-ending "No fireworks allowed in Hataniska-Satsuma Borough", followed by a list of borough regulatory paragraphs that cite this.

But as you enter Austin, AK, on the highway, you are greeted by HUGE signs.  Gorilla Fireworks.  Hippopotamus Fireworks.  Buy Your Fireworks Here CHEAP!  And more.  When you drive out the other side of Austin, once again the highway signs admonish you:  No fireworks allowed!

I figured that the Austin fireworks stands–which always look deserted when we drive by, but we haven’t driven by in a long time–were legal by Austin’s regulations (thus avoiding the problem with borough regulations), and were probably jumpin’ joints around Independence Day.

Um.  I need to be thinking of those daylight hours again.  Because around Independence Day, the sun doesn’t officially set until midnight.

But on New Years’ Eve…?

In the deepest, darkest depths of winter…?

The sun sets very, very early.

And the "not allowed" fireworks start at about 8 p.m.

And keep going.

And going.

And going.

Until about 1 a.m.

This is a major culture shift for us, folks.  We’re used to living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods…in the tinderbox-dry woods…where the municipal July 4 fireworks display has been canceled mere days before the date three out of the last four years.  Back there, anyone who was insane enough to fire off lots of private fireworks around July 4 were fined huge amounts, and shunned and scorned by anyone with any grain of sense.  New Years’ Eve?  Eh.  We’d have one or two neighbors who would fire off firecrackers directly at midnight, and that was that.

Last night, in our area, it was like a freakin’ war zone.  Fireworks.  Firecrackers.  Roman candles.  Streamers.  Bang!  Bang!  Bangity-bangity-pop-pop-pop-pop.  Quiet.  Bang!  Whiiiiiizzzz-Bang!  Quiet.  Pop!  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!  Bang!  Boom!  Quiet.

I have never, ever, in my life, lived in a place that did this.

Our dog was, luckily, not frantic, but definitely perturbed, and he kept following me or OmegaDad around the house and startling when a particularly loud (read:  direct neighbors) bang sounded.  Our cats were missing in action.  The dotter was both enchanted (when she could see the fireworks from the bedroom) and terrified (when all she got was the bang-bang-bang-BOOM! effect).

I was able to see fireworks from the porch next to the kitchen, looking northwest.  I was able to see them from our living room, looking southwest.  I was able to see them from our bedroom, looking northeast, and looking southeast.

We decided that the borough police department must make its yearly income from all those fireworks, that they’d be able to just cruise around almost anywhere and hand out tickets left and right.

"Hi!  I’m Rachael Ray!  Today, I’m not going to be teaching you about food–I’m going to teach you about farms!"

She flourishes a pink cowgirl hat…whispers, "You’re a teenager…"

"Now!  You’re a teenager!  And you have a job.  And you want to be a cowgirl.  And you want to be married.  And you want to be a teenager."

Mommy:  "Hi.  I want to be a cowgirl."

"Okay!  You want to be a cowgirl.  And you’re a teenager!  And that’s okay.  Now, after you get married, you can become a cowgirl!  And go to your job.  And come back and be a cowgirl!"

She pushes the cowgirl hat onto mommy’s head.

"You need a cowgirl hat to be a cowgirl!  Now you’re a cowgirl!  But you are still a teenager.  And you’re getting married!  Cowgirls can be married!"

She gestures to the "stable".

"You have horses!  This is Kayla and this is Spot.  Kayla’s kind of shy, so be gentle!  You need to feed them some oats.  And some hay.  This is how they eat!"

Kayla (formerly Frankie) nibbles from her hand.

Mommy suggests that maybe they need a feed bucket.

She grabs a box from Lands End.

"Now!  This is for their food!  What are the oats?  The purple socks are the oats!  And the white–orange–socks are the hay!  And now we’re going to feed the horses!" 

She grabs a bright orange plastic school bus and drags it in front of "Spot" (the wooden rocking horse).

"Now, Spot is a pony, a shepherd pony.  But that’s okay!"  (For the uninitiated, "shepherd" is a confused Shetland.)

"Now we’re going to give them some treats!"

And on and on from there…

Rachael Ray, I have to say, is everywhere.  A few weeks ago, I had no idea who Rachael Ray was, or that she was everywhere.  However, a few weeks ago, we lugged the second TV upstairs to the living room and plugged it in to the cable.  The first station that showed up?  The Food Network.  The dotter was mesmerized. 

We haven’t bothered to figure out how to change the station.

She laughs at and with Paula (just watching Paula puts pounds on your hips, trust me; I think Paula could deep-fry everything), but she adores Rachael Ray.  And now, when we go out shopping, she sees Rachael Ray on everything.  There are Rachael Ray Triscuits.  Rachael Ray on cereal boxes.  Rachael Ray on magazine covers.  Rachael Ray being interviewed on TVs in department stores.  Trust me, this woman is everywhere.  And, trust me, the dotter sees her where-ever she is.

The dotter also announced this morning that Hannah Montana was "the grrrreatest rock star ever!"  We quickly disabused her of this notion.  Or tried to.  OmegaDad claimed Elvis.  I said The Who or Eric Clapton or anyone else but HM.  The dotter promptly said:

"Okay!  Elvis is number two!  Hannah Montana is number one!"

Ahem.  No, that’s not what we said…

So right now, the dotter wants to be a cowgirl/rockstar/cook/girl who does hair when she grows up.

In other news.  The doc-in-a-box xrayed me, did the blood test thing, tsk-tsked over my cholesterol levels, said my blood sugar was just fine, told me about his lead sled dog whose name is Paxil, wrote me some painkilling prescriptions and sent me on my way.  (Can I just say how neat is it that the doc-in-a-box has a sled-dog team?)

He kept insisting it was arthritis pain, and when I’d say it was an electric shock would repeat back to me that it was a stabbing pain.  No, that’s not what I said, dammit!  I know a stabbing pain and I know an electric shock type of pain, and I know the difference.  And I sure as heck know the difference between arthritic pain and nerve pain.  But, hey, I’ll give the prescriptions a try and rest reassured that I’m not about to explode with hypo- or hyperglycemia.

And in the biggest news…

The best news…

Today?  Today on the weather page?  Where it says how much daylight there is hereabouts?

Today, rather than a "loss", it was a "gain".  Of 2 seconds.

WOOT!!!  Yes, folks, today marks the solstice.  From here on out, until June 21 or thereabouts, we’ll be gaining sunlight.

OmegaMom does the Snoopy Dance out the door.

Right now, it’s a balmy -10F.  It’s 30 degrees warmer "back home".

The dotter has lost a second tooth and I again successfully performed the Tooth Fairy Move.

I have a new computer, a Christmas gift to myself; spent many hours today configuring and re-configuring my network router and home network (entailing schlepping laptop and new computer up and downstairs a few times between office and dining area, where the router is located), finally figured out that the reason my new speakers weren’t working was because they weren’t plugged in (duh!), and am dealing with Vista.  And a clacky keyboard.  The office is full of boxes.

The tree is trimmed.  Pics to come (assuming my camera plays nicely with the new computer).

Damn, it’s cold!

More tomorrow…

While OmegaDad and OmegaDotter were waiting for the icing to set on the gingerbread house (a kit), I stepped outside to snap a picture of the neighborhood.

It was 12:03 p.m.

This is what it looked like:

See those long shadows?  That weak, slightly melancholy, golden light?

High noon, folks.  That’s as good as it gets these days.

Today is cold.  Right now, the temp is 14F.  The wind is averaging 24 mph, with gusts up to 36; supposedly, gusts up to 80 mph.  Wind chill is -8F.

The lights have been flickering all day with the wind.  The internet has gone out intermittently as well.

But we’ve been inside, listening to Christmas music and decorating gingerbread houses and washing clothes and reading or watching TV.  Snug and warm and cozy (so long as the flickering doesn’t turn into all-lights-off-for-more-than-a-minute-or-two).

Last night, we had A Visitor.  I was outside the kitchen again, having a smoke (yes, don’t shout please), and heard crunching and rustling.  Thinking it was neighbors, I peered over the railing and down.  There, in front of the neighbors’ garage (not pictured, it’s to the right and behind me from that pic) was a moose.

He thumped.  He rustled.  He crunched snow and ice.  He moved ponderously down the driveway, into the finger of woods between our house and theirs, then plunged down the hill into our yard and thudded his way through, then was gone in the night.  The howl of dawgs followed him through the neighborhood.

Gingerbread pics tomorrow.

(Isn’t that a great word?  Whinge.  Love it.  For those who don’t know, it’s the British version of whining.)

Leah has given me permission to whine.  So here goes with confession time.

I’m homesick.

There.  I said it.

I live in Alaska, land of wilderness and mountains and oceans, a place so many people dream about coming to, and I’m homesick.

I miss the sun, oh so much.  Right now, we’ve got 6 hours and 53 minutes of sunlight per day.  That’s if you call it “sunlight”.  First, we get “sunlight” maybe once every four days.  Second, the angle of the sun is so low that while the sky gets light, we don’t get the sun for about an hour after “sunrise” (it hides out behind the mountains), and similarly it hides before sunset.  Third, that low angle of sun means that the sunlight we do get is watery late afternoon sunlight all day.  But most of the days are gray with clouds.

I miss the stars, oh so much.  When we were moving here, I just assumed that, being in the northern wilderness, we’d have glorious stars.  Not so.  We’re near enough to the coast to have high humidity, which washes out the stars…when it’s not totally overcast (those gray days extend to gray nights, too).  I miss seeing the Milky Way almost every night, arching across the sky.  And so far we haven’t had any northern lights to take the place of my glorious, shimmering, take-your-breath-away stars.

I miss the smell of pine trees in the sunshine.

I miss the openness of the piney woods.

I miss our ratty old log home, smelly and poorly designed and cold and drafty as it was.  It had character.  Our new house is nice enough, but it’s a basic box and lacks character.

I miss my buddies back in Arizona.  I miss having the Society of Geeky Gals meeting up for dinner and a play on a regular basis.  I miss my Northern Arizona FCC buds.

I miss my mom and my grandma.  Oh, lordy, do I miss them.  I miss being able to say to myself on a lazy Sunday, “Hunh!  Wonder what Mom’s up to…I think I’ll drive down and hang out for a while!”

I miss our old neighbors.  We had some cool neighbors back there.

I feel so guilty to be feeling so homesick.  Here I am, on the adventure of a lifetime.  For cryin’ out loud, the feds paid for us to come here. 

I know that I need to give it all some time, that I will make new friends, that in about six weeks’ time the days will start getting longer, that we’ll find new places to hang out, that I’ll be able to visit my old hangouts every now and then to get a jolt of piney woods and stark desert and stars and vivid sunlight.

I know all that.

But right now, I’m homesick and I just want to cry.

A lot of the cool kids are doing bullet-style posts recently.  Since most of them are doing NaBloPoMo, they get a pass from me because the daily posting drains the creative well dry very quickly.

I, on the other hand, am doing a bullet-style post because I’m just plain lazy.  No NaBloPoMo excuse from me, as I’m not participating.

• It’s 4:00.  The sun is setting in a few minutes.  The sun rose today at 9:10 or thereabouts.  According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we’re supposed to have 7 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight today.  Well, yeah, I suppose we did.  There were no clouds, so we saw the sun today.  That was nice.  But the maximum altitude of the sun hereabouts was 10 degrees.  Ten.  Sort of like having sunset all day.
• I don’t care that Hilary Clinton had someone planted in her audience lob her a planted question meant to point out some of her stands on certain issues.
• I equally don’t care that FEMA had a plant in their audience at a press conference to ask questions guaranteeing that a few things got mentioned.
• I further don’t care that John McCain didn’t lambast one of his supporters when she asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” when talking about Hilary Clinton.  I thought “Can someone translate that for me?” was a perfectly good way of saying, “Yo!  That’s not nice!”
• I’m afraid to open our gas bill.  I don’t want to know what a month’s worth of heating costs, especially given that it will be much higher in the next few months.
• Context is important to me.  If a person writes an article in which she makes a comment to her adopted daughter that could indicate she has a savior complex and thinks China is a land of indentured orphans, I’d like to know what kind of relationship she has with her daughter.  If it’s one kind of relationship, it’s an in-joke about what some people say about adoption; if it’s a different kind of relationship, it’s snide and insensitive and denigrating.  Given the remainder of the article, I lean towards the former…but a helluva lot of folks in the blog world are leaning towards the latter and a kerfuffle has ensued.
• On the other hand, if angry comments on the article coming from adult adoptees were censored, that sucks.  In my read of the article yesterday, though, it looked like many of the originally censored comments were in.  ?  I don’t know.
• Thanksgiving is next week.  How the hell did that happen?!  It’s far too soon.
• And that means Christmas isn’t far behind.
• My carefully crafted code to dive into the “raw data” from a downloaded web report was foiled–foiled!–when the people who created the report went and changed the column names on the raw data tab of that report.  Grrr.  Now I have to do some figuring on how to check those column names beforehand, and have to stash them in a table so that the next time they decide to get fancy with column names, we’ll be able to catch it right away, instead of wondering for a few weeks why no new data was being imported.  Let me just say:  Duh, OmegaMom.  On the other hand, why the hell did the folks change those column names?  Raw data=stuff that gets used somewhere.  Not raw data=stuff that you can fiddle with all you want.  Or at least let people know with a popup the next time they cruise your web reports.
• Boots, snowpants, and snowgloves arrived yesterday from LandsEnd.  OmegaDotter is happy.  Winter parka is back-ordered.
• Will discuss way-kewl interfaces tomorrow.  And way-kewl prosthetic devices the day after.  Or maybe combine the two.

I grew up with Daylight Savings Time.  It was just another one of those things that marked the turning of the seasons.  I was just used to it, like all the rest of the folks around the U.S. who live with it.  I never questioned it, either, just going with the flow.  I thought everyone in the U.S. did it, so it was no big deal.

(A lemming.  I think that was what I was in a previous lifetime.  A lemming.)

Then a buddy of mine–one of those people whose lives are filled with drama, and it turns out that the drama is self-manufactured–moved to Indiana near the border with Michigan.  Indiana (or the area of Indiana she lived in) was Daylight-Savings-Time-free; her job, however, happened to be in Michigan, which was not DSTF, so she had the delight of dealing with two separate timezones for her life.  Of course, this provided additional fodder for her ongoing lifetime drama.  Anyway, this was all very new to me…a place without DST?

Let’s not discuss how I managed to grow up within 20-30 miles of Indiana and never knew that the state didn’t observe DST.  Life in a big city can be very parochial at times.

Skip forward a few years, to when the Omegas moved to Arizona.

Arizona is also a DST-free zone.  Most of it–the Navajo Indian Reservation uses DST, so you can drive through AZ on one time, drive through the reservation on another time, drive through northern AZ back on the first time, and then out into Utah or Nevada and back into DST.

We had to keep a mental note of whether we were ahead of our friends and family in different states, or at the same time, or behind.  OmegaDad’s cute little mnemonic trick was “In the summer, you go to the beach; in the winter, you go to the mountains”.  Thus, in the summer, we’d be the same time as California; in the winter, we’d be the same time as Colorado.

We grew quite accustomed to not having to fiddle with the clocks or resetting our internal body clocks.  OmegaDotter has never had to deal with it.

So now we’ve moved to Alaska, and back into the land of Daylight Savings Time.  Leaving aside the question of why AK bothers to use Daylight Savings Time, and the highly politicized answers and discussions attached to that, there we are, having changed the clocks last week.

This week has been horrid.  The dotter, tired enough in the middle of the week already, was practically falling asleep in her ballet class on Wednesday, and did fall asleep one minute after leaving.  Worse yet is the fact that the dotter is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.

Let me just repeat that:  she is waking up at 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.

My response, in one word:  Grrrr.

In other news:  Let’s talk about really sucky people, to wit, a pair of young women (19 and 20 years old) who held up a bunch of Halloween trick-or-treaters at gunpoint and demanded their candy, shooting into the air above their heads.  That sucks.  Not only does it suck, but it’s stupid–after all, there are plenty of folks (like the Omegas) who will gladly hand out Halloween candy to anyone who knocks at the door if they’re in costume.  Not only is it stupid and sucky in that manner, it’s really stupid in general–because the police, contacted by the alert 10-year-olds who memorized the license plate of their truck, searched their homes and found (a) a trick-or-treat bag with the name of one of the victims on it, and (b) $100,000 worth of other stolen goods, thus breaking up a local crime spree that they had been working on for months.

That must have been one terrible Jones for Halloween candy those young women had, is all I can say.

The weather forecast calls for cold and snow.

And cold and snow.

And cold and snow.

Not too cold yet, though.  Twenties and thirties.  We have had two snows so far, last night’s giving us about four inches at the house.

The dawg loves the snow.  He barrels about in the snow, shoveling it with his nose and flipping it into the air.  Then he bounces around, pees, poops, shovels some more snow, and bounces some more.

The sun is coming up at about 9:10 a.m. and setting at 6:15.  At Small Mountain University Town, the sun is rising at 6:42 a.m. and setting at 5:38…we’re now off by an hour of daylight, and rapidly decreasing.

We had our first parent-teacher conference today.  Mrs. Shoefetish and Mrs. Brian assured me that the dotter was doing quite amazingly well academically.  We actually got a “report card”.  Goodness.

In terms of the kindergarden curriculum question, the report card specifically looked at kids being able to name colors, shapes, count to five, know their first and last name.  They’ve gone through six letters of the alphabet.

The dotter was praised for her creativity; she likes to make “books” during free time, and apparently the other kids at her table are so taken with the books that they’re starting to make them too.

MIL called this evening; in an attempt to keep the dotter quiet while OmegaDad spoke on the phone, I pulled the dotter aside to do some drawing.

Somehow this morphed into us doing clapping games.

You remember clapping games?

I learned one new one; we raced through Pattycake; we did “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea”, though neither of us remembers the specific clapping pattern; and we ended up laughing uproariously at each other.

That was fun.

Lest you think that all is fun and games with the dotter, let me say both OmegaDad and I were amazed that the dotter got exemplary marks for “following directions” and “behaving appropriately”, and just nodded our heads and rolled our eyes at the “still learning” “score” on “respecting the rights and property of others” category.  I am now beginning to suspect that the dotter is Miss Sweetness and Light at school and saves up all her snarkiness for us at home.  Man, oh, man, can she whiiiiiiine!

But this evening was quite fun.

We are still waiting on the finishing touches of the relocation company buying our house.

Grrr.

As soon as that check hits our bank account, we are out buying OmegaDad a car of his own.  Or OmegaMom a car of her own.  Or whatever.  This one car dealio is driving both of us nuts.

Also as soon as that check hits, I am picking up the phone to call the local blind installation company so we can get some insulated cell blinds put in.  And drapes.

Pumpkins.  At this time of year, in Small Mountain University Town, every single grocery store is knee deep in pumpkins.  There are pumpkin corrals out front, with cheesy scarecrows at the corners, and pumpkins of every size possible, from teeny-tiny to ginormous, spilling out in carefully orchestrated abandon.  Pumpkins are sold by the pound, and tend to run about (if my memory is correct) 30 cents per pound or less.

Today, one of the items on our shopping list was a pumpkin.

Actually, two.  One small, for school.  One pumpkin-sized pumpkin for the carving and scooping and candles and all that Halloween stuff.

So the dotter and I went to Carrs.

No pumpkins out front.

No pumpkins right inside the door.

Helllooooooo?  Pumpkins?  Where arrreee you?!

I finally found the pumpkins, up front but in an out-of-the-way area.  An itty bitty teeny tiny display with maybe 15 pumpkins total.  The pumpkins were eighteen dollars for two pumpkins.

No.  I am not shitting you.

Eighteen dollars for two.

There was a slightly bigger display of pumpkins at Three Bears.  They also had some ginormous ones, and their pumpkins were being sold by the pound.  Forty-nine cents per pound.

I thought this was the land of big veggies…

Wah!  I wanna go home!

In another “wah!” item.  OmegaDad finished painting the bedroom.

We had hemmed and hawed at the hardware store when purchasing paint.  I wanted a sage-y color.  The one I pointed out, he said, dubiously, “Looks awfully dark…”  So we picked out a lighter shade of the same color.  (Or so we thought.)

The paint is wet.  The pink paint in the dotter’s bedroom was much darker when wet.  Maybe greenish paint doesn’t behave the same way?  Maybe when it dries out, it’ll be darker, instead?

Because right now, it’s a pale celery color.

Celery?!?!  WAH!

(The above was written earlier.  OmegaDad, seeing my downcast face and hearing my, “Is that what it looks like??” said we should go get more paint…after all, everything is already masked off, and we can paint over.  So it looks like we’ll be getting an honest-to-goodness “sage” color after all.  The paint, much dryer now, is still looking like pale celery.  Or pistachio ice cream.  Not what I wanted at all!)

Okay, so my rant about the “scene” setting on digital cameras in my previous post set me to wondering.  So I finally dug up the manual for my digicam and read up on the whole “scene”.

(Har!)

So the scene about the “scene” is that digicams apparently have a bunch of pre-set settings that are applicable to particular types of photos.  The “scene” setting, in conjunction with selecting the proper “scene” type, supposedly changes a variety of settings for your camera to make, for instance, the process for sunset photos different than the process for ski-slope photos different than the process for backlit photos, etc.

This is not the first time that I’ve tossed a rant based on total ignorance out onto the blog, then researched the subject, and had to recant.

I recant!

And I will not say, E pur si muove! like a certain famous scientist did.  (My recantation being purely voluntary, his not.)

The problem, it seems, is that the default “scene” on the scene setting on our digicams is one that produces generally dreadful pictures for run-of-the-mill snapshots.  I’m quite happy with the results from the “auto” setting, but guess that now that I am informed properly about what the “scene” setting does that it behooves me to play around with it a bit and report back.

Del asked:

Hey, aren’t moose really big animals with cranky dispositions and are best left alone? And you have these things wandering around in your backyard???

Yes, moose are really big.  Yes, moose have cranky dispositions.  Yes, they are best left alone.  And, yes, we do have these things wandering around our backyard–though we’ve been here more than a month (!!) and this is the first time they’ve appeared.

Moose are truly big and truly cantankerous.  The neighbor of a coworker of OmegaDad’s had a dog kicked to death by a moose recently.  One blow.  Blam!  And, as I wrote about early in our Alaska experience, the school district specifically requests that parents instruct their kids who walk or bike to school about What To Do In a Moose Encounter.

Having grown up on Rocky and Bullwinkle and Whassa Matta U, I must say that this has come as a paradigm shift for me.  Elk, which plagued us in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods, were pretty laissez faire.  You leave them alone, they leave you alone.  No warnings were posted about how to deal with elk.  Hitting an elk on a dark highway in the middle of the night was much more likely to total your car than, say, hitting a deer, but word has it that since moose are bigger (males average 1200 pounds, females 900 pounds; elk males average 750-950 pounds, females around 550 pounds) you’re more likely to just plain die if your car hits a moose.

All that said, moose seem to be the mascot of Alaska.

We will no doubt get more moose in the yard over the winter, and I will try to get better pics.