OmegaMom

It snowed last night, a heavy, wet snow, unlike our normal dry powder.  This was the kind of snow that lingered on branches and made the area look very Currier and Ives-like.

We had small branches draped with the stuff:

We had the pea cables and posts topped off with white confection:

(The pea cables are a particularly proud piece of work from the hands of OmegaDad.  They don’t quite work the way we had planned, but they do provide a scaffolding for the pea plants to climb up–so long as we remember to get out there and start lacing pea runners properly early and often.  Otherwise our peas end up turning into viny clumps.)

This little lovely–a snow-covered rosehip–was in a very awkward spot.  I tried shooting it without the flash, but the light was dim enough that it needed to have a slow shutter, and the awkward spot made it so that every time I tried without the flash, my hands shook just enough so it was completely out of focus.  But the flash shot makes it pop, and it was so pretty, I thought I’d include it anyway:

The rosebushes here in Alaska have great big fat rosehips, the size of the last joint of my thumb.  We tried making jams from rosehips this summer; alas, the rosehips themselves have a pretty blah taste.  One would expect them to be zappy and zingy in flavor, but, no, they’re just very bland.

Our back yard:

The pictures were shot at about 3:30 p.m.  It was cloudy and still snowing, and the sun is setting at 3:58, so everything is rather dim.  Rumor has it we got six inches of snow; this is enough of a snowfall to warrant its own listing of snowfall totals from around the area on the National Weather Service forecast page.  We are still about 11 inches short on normal snowfall–we got plenty of precipitation in the form of rain earlier in the fall/winter, when the weather was still unseasonally warm.

It’s very pretty.  The kids (the dotter has her best friend A. over to spend the night) got cold and soaked from an hour of playing in it.

…Goes one of our chickens.  She’s been coughing and pretty languid for a couple of days; when we checked the chickens this evening, she had a bloody nose.

Dr. Google didn’t help.  But after some digging, the only things I could find that produce a bloody nostril discharge in chickens were avian influenza (ack!) and a piece by the USDA that said “serious avian disease”.

I was meaning to respond to some comments made by new readers to my post Dear Diary, but that will have to wait.  (Thanks to TonguMom for the link!)  Time to go out into the 17 below zero Fahrenheit weather and haul a sick chicken back into the garage…

In 2008, our first real snow was October 7.

In 2007, our first real snow was sometime in early October.

This year has been warm.  The lakes froze over only a week or two ago.  What precipitation we’ve had has been rain.  But mostly, it’s been grey and chill, but neither cold nor snowy.

Tonight, after putting the dotter to bed, I peered out a window, and noticed…was it?  Could it be?

Yes!  It’s snowing!

In a comment to yesterday’s post, Meri asked:

Since you are originally from the SW, how hard was it to adjust to the dark winters? and driving in snow!

The dark winters have been a real problem for me.  The past two years, I have made sure to visit my mom, GrannyJ, in mid-December so that I can get a dose of sunshine right around the winter solstice, when the days are shortest.  Our first winter here, I was utterly miserable.  GrannyJ sent me a variety of sculpted suns to cheer me up.  Bless her!  I had allowed my prescription for little blue happy pills (Zoloft) to expire, which made everything worse.

So, in January 2008 I trekked off to the local Doc-in-a-Box and got a new prescription.  That, plus the rapidly lengthening days, helped pull me back into a more sanguine state of mind.

Last year, OmegaDad bought me a Magic Light for Christmas, and it seemed to help some, too.  But I may be simply adjusting to the (horrible, awful, miserable) darkness, where the noonday sun is about as high as a late spring afternoon back in the Lower 48.

As for driving in the snow.  Girl.  I may have been in the southwest, but it was the mountains of the southwest.  We regularly got more snow in Small Mountain University Town each winter than we have gotten here.  The main difference is that in Small Mountain University Town, the snow came down in Great Huge Heaps, all at once, then melt.  We would end up with 24 to 36 inches per storm.  Here, a ten-incher is a big snow–however, once it starts snowing, the snow doesn’t melt until, oh, April.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that I grew up in Chicago.  Even though I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was about 23 or 24, I had plenty of experience driving in snow after that before I moved west.

In sum, the snow and driving in the snow is no problem, but the lack of light is a killer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boatman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had been kicked off my computer by the dotter, who wanted to play ToonTown with her best bud, A.  For hours.  This does not please me, mainly because it consists of the dotter getting on the phone and talking with A. and playing ToonTown and hogging my computer.  The other computer, upstairs, is too slow.

Anyway, I was reading upstairs, when I heard an uproar.  Slowly it was decoded as “Mommy!  Mommy!  Come quick!  Come and see!”

So I ambled down the stairs to see OmegaDad at the office window and OmegaDotter standing on the office chair and the moose above, right outside the office window.

He was eating our yarrow.  Great big honkin’ mouthfuls.

And our black-eyed Susans.  And our Shasta daisies.  And…and…and.

So I dashed upstairs to get the (old) digicam and the dotter and I quick shot some pics while OmegaDad barrelled upstairs to grab a cherry bomb and a lighter.

I was so outraged at the moose-alicious munching going on that I opened the window to yell.  The moose moved off a few yards:

The OmegaDad got to the bottom of the stairs and started chasing the moose off.  It ambled, gathered some steam, and then stopped at the edge of the grassy area, turned around, and laid its ears back.  At which point OmegaDad decided that just shouting and chasing wasn’t going to do the job, that the moose was about to charge, so he lit the cherry bomb and tossed it.  The moose ran off.

The toll: 

• My forsythia!  Chowed down to a foot from the ground!  Argh!
• The aforementioned yarrow, black-eyed Susans, and Shasta daisies.
• All the new leaves on our lilac bushes–though none of the stems, thank heavens.
• Our sunflowers by the greenhouse.
• All our almost-ready-to-harvest brussels sprouts, also by the greenhouse.  Wah!

Harrumph.

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

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

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

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

…and then goes to rescue OmegaDad.

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

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

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

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

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

And I didn’t have my camera.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came gray days and rain.

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

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

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

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

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

Ahem.

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

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

Um.

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

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

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

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

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

The view from the darkness:

Some bright white berries that caught my eye:

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

A clump of mushrooms displaying their undersides and looking voluptuous:

The dotter playing in the water:

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

The lake:

Some sunny autumn color:

And some more sunny autumn color:

Playing at the water’s edge at the lake:

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

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

And then I dragged her on a hike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some berries (not edible, I think):

Purty fall colors:

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

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

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

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

The dotter and OmegaDad in the midst of foliage:

The takings - cranberries:

And rose hips:

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

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

After dinner, I was heading out to the kitchen porch for a smoke whilst the dotter cleared the table and chatted with OmegaDad.  While I was lighting my ciggie, I heard a crunch-crash-crunch noise; I poked my head out to peer in the direction the noises were coming from.  Lo and behold, we had a Mama Moose and Baby Moose chowing down on the cow parsnips in our front yard.

Of course, I had to alert the dotter and OmegaDad, and we spent much time “ooh”ing and “ahh”ing, and OmegaDad managed to dash down to the office, grab the battery charger, run upstairs with it, reload the batteries in the camera, and snap off a few pictures.

The colors are off because it is cloudy and dim right now; the second shot, I believe OmegaDad managed to get some flash into the ambient environment.

So we were delighted and amused (baby doesn’t look too very old to me).

But then…

…then…

THEN OmegaDad decided to check the veggie garden:

The moose had knocked off our veggie garden covering on one of the veggie beds (you can see the pipes and [just barely] some of the netting behind the bed), and they had mown our chard and beet greens down like machines.  Sigh.

They were very luxurious, leafy plants only a few hours ago!  The beets themselves are still okay; the moose and baby didn’t eat those.  But boy howdy, they really liked the greens!  And the big lettuce that we were letting go in the next-over veggie bed.  They didn’t touch the celery and carrot greens, though–the devastation stopped where the chard stopped.

I guess it’s time to get out the firecrackers again…

…OmegaDotter and I were boarding an airplane with two cats and three turtles (very carefully packaged turtles), on our way up to Alaska.

Then we spent a month in The Shoebox.  We bought the first house we possibly could, just to get out of The Shoebox (okay, it was also very cute, bigger than our old house, didn’t need work, had an acre of land…).  I managed to think I was dying of a heart attack, and spent a few days in the hospital.  The dotter started kindergarten.  We moved into the new house.

I missed Arizona.  But we settled in, and life went on.

Here we are, two years later.  OmegaDotter is now 7-1/2 years old, a very different young lady than the little girl she was when we moved.  OmegaDad has totally revamped the back yard and I have been informed by our next-door neighbor (she-who-works-80-hours-a-week-at-three-jobs) that our back yard is the envy of the neighborhood.  I’ve survived two winters of darkness, and OmegaDad has survived two summers of The Gloaming.

It’s astonishing how quickly the time has passed.

Today, I picked the dotter up early from her summer camp, right after her gymnastics class, and we motored up to Small Alaska Town to go to the farmers’ market-cum-festival that SAT holds on Fridays in summertime.  There were fresh, ripe strawberries, and freshly-shelled peas, both of which found their way into a bag in our car.  Then we went daytripping up the Kmik River.  The river is wall-to-wall water, rushing and pouring and dancing down to the inlet, higher than we have ever seen it before.

We went up to a bridge that crosses Glacial Creek, which pours out from Small Glacier and tumbles down the mountainside to join the Kmik.  The creek, too, was higher than we’ve ever seen it before, a torrent of glacial “flour” rampaging underneath the bridge from pylon to pylon.  We clambered down to the edge and walked down the creek, seeing evidence that it had been even higher just a few days ago.  The sun–which had been hiding away for a few hours–popped out while we were there, and everything was bright and sunny and beautiful.

On our way back home, we passed a roadside stand selling fresh raspberries.  They had two kinds–ordinary red raspberries, and the most wonderful, sweet, juicy golden raspberries.  A pint of each also found their way into the car.

It’s still July.  But we saw oodles of alders whose leaves were already turning yellow, and The Gloaming is almost over–we actually need the lights on at midnight, now that we have “nautical twilight” back again.  Notices of registration periods are arriving in our mailbox…school, dance, gymnastics.  Autumn is whirling down on us, too soon for me, and within a few months we will have snow.

Our fair state’s governor, Sarah Palin, announced her coming resignation while the dotter and I were frolicking in Arizona.  I actually heard about it moments after it was announced, because I was sitting in the office with my boss and my replacement trying to fix things (which I bollixed up), and my boss was cruisin’ the news sites.

And what a surprise it was!  Whoa!  Our very own Joan of Arc, our crusader for Truth, Justice, and the Amurrikan Way, quitting?!  I thought she wasn’t a quitter?!

There was a flurry of speculation as to why.  She was tired of people taking potshots at her kid, Trig, via photoshopping–though the people were actually taking potshots at her. She was tired of “frivolous ethics complaints”–even though the one that was most serious and cost the most was initiated by Palin herself.  She was tired of being a media punching bag–even conservative media and Republican pundits were on the bandwagon.  There was rumor of a possible indictment, but that one got cleared up right away, with the FBI taking the unusual step of actually commenting on the possibility, or lack thereof.  She wanted to position herself for a presidential run in 2012.  (Given something she said in her final speech today, I think this one is on the money.)  And on and on.

She says she wanted to write a book and make money, and be the focal point of a New Conservative Coalition.  (Sound the trumpets!)

Well, today is the big day.  After a farewell tour of Alaska–I think she saw more of Alaska in the past two weeks than she had in the prior year and a half–and a trio of farewell barbecues, one in Anchorage, one in her hometown of Wasilla, and one in Fairbanks, she is officially no longer the governor, and Sean Parnell is in.

Sean who?!

I’m sure he won’t be as entertaining, though he supposedly espouses the same viewpoints as Sarah herself.

Sarah will still be on Twitter under a different account starting tomorrow; rumor has it that the new account is AKSarahPalin.  Currently, the account is protected.

We now have a wild duckling in the garage.  It’s name is Rhubarb, Ruby for short.

I arrived home late from the morning trip to Big City, having dumped the girls at China Camp, dealt with Miss Emily telling me about coping with OmegaDotter and others who were…shall we say, enthusiastic, with the kung-fu instructor, to the point of being annoying.  “Enthusiastic” means climbing all over him, swooning on him, teasing him, following him–you name it; Miss Emily did not have to tell me in any detail, because I immediately knew what it was like.  OmegaDotter still has a lousy sense of other people’s personal space, and when she likes her instructors, she hangs on them.  Literally.

Anyway.  OmegaDad had planned to take the day off to attack painting the interior of the greenhouse, so that we can put up the poly-plastic sheets that will let the sun shine in.  I fully expected to get home & find him off in the back yard, doing his thang.

Instead, when I drove up, there he was in front of the garage, with heaps and piles around him, and making strange faces at me through the window of the car, gesturing for me to get out ASAP.

I thought he had decided to remove the last of the detritus from behind one side of the villa complex.  I was vexed, because I thought the plan had been for him to wait to do this until Sunday.  I was all prepared to grump at him as I emerged from the vehicle.

At which point, he informed me he needed help, and did I notice that all the various boxes, pieces of wood, etc. were making a makeshift corral around the rhubarb plant?  (Um, no.  But now that he mentioned it…)

“Oh, by the way, there’s a baby duck in the rhubarb plant.”

…

I knew, immediately, what this meant.  This meant that we were now the proud owners of a duckling.

As soon as we could get it out of the rhubarb plant.

For those who think this is an easy matter, let me remind you of the effects of 20 hours of sunlight and 4 hours of twilight upon vegetation.  This is not your ordinary rhubarb plant; there is no such thing in the state of Alaska.  This is a monster plant, a jungle unto itself, with leaves the size of an HDTV, rearing up taller than the dotter and almost as tall as me.

ONE rhubarb plant.

Anyway, I stood guard outside the OK Corral while OmegaDad rummaged in the rhubarb jungle for the duckling.

The tale was that he had heard the dawg going nuts while he was in the shower.  He emerged to hear all the neighbor dogs going nuts out front.  He peered out the living room window to see what the ruckus was (usually a moose).  He saw Bad Dawg, from next door, pestering something on the ground while an adult duck fluttered and squawked and attacked it.  He went bounding out the front door, snapping out a loud and firm, “LEAVE IT!”  Bad Dawg retreated, and lo and behold, a duckling rocketed up our driveway and into the rhubarb forest by the corner of the house.  So he quickly began making the OK Corral out of whatever he could lay his hands on from the garage, and waited for me to come home.

So we could capture the duckling.  Which was supposed to be about so big (hold your hands two handwidths apart).  Which turned out, when OmegaDad captured it, to be practically newborn with its egg tooth still on, and about the size of the palm of my hand.

Newborn wild ducklings, let me tell you, are quite jumpy.  As in, at a day old, they can escape from Chicken Prison in the garage, and we find ourselves searching through the garage for small, dark hiding places.  Chicken Prison has now been turned from a minimum strength leisure spa into Mad Max maximum security as a result. 

Here’s a lousy picture–she won’t hold still for pictures at all.

OmegaDad was painting the trim on the villa/chicken coop/shed/greenhouse.  I was watching him up on the ladder whittling away at an old nail that was sticking out of the trim beneath the roof.  Something on one of the beams caught my eye, so I switched my attention…it was a dragonfly, happily sunning itself right at eye level.

I, of course, didn’t have my camera.

So, sending a quiet prayer up to the Kozmik All, I dashed across the yard, up the stairs to the kitchen, grabbed the camera, and came back.

The dragonfly was still there:

And then, as I was fiddling with my macro settings, worried that my original picture was fuzzy, he flew off, straight into my face.  Which, of course, resulted in a high-pitched squeak from me, which resulted in an alarmed “WHAT WAS THAT?!” from my husband, which required a certain amount of conversation to reassure him that all was well.

Big City has a proposed ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.  Today is the city council review, with a public comment period.  Big City’s Big Preacher has bussed in bunches of folks from Suburban Alaska to oppose the proposed ordinance.  There are hundreds of people there; the streaming media of the session is overwhelmed; and there is commentary on the Big City Newspaper’s article on the affair.

Amongst the comments are a bunch akin to “Hey, I don’t care what you do in private!  Just don’t flaunt your sexuality at me!”

No doubt, they’re really against overt PDAs, but I also think they count “normal” behavior as “flaunting” when it’s applied to homosexuals.

If I were to walk down the street hand-in-hand with OmegaDad, no-one would think I was “flaunting” anything.  If Joe and Jim, in a gay relationship of equal length to ours, were to do the same thing, they’d be getting the hairy eyeball about “forcing your sexuality on others!”

If I drop my husband off at work, peck him on the cheek, and say, “Bye, Babe!”, no-one in the parking lot there would bat an eye.  If Lois and Louise, in a lesbian relationship of equal length to ours, were to do the same thing, they’d be considered to be “flaunting their sexuality”.

If I put a picture of me and my husband at our wedding on my desk at work, it would be an opening for (a) people to say “Oh, what a lovely daughter you have!” (this actually happened to me once, grrr), (b) people to ask where we got married, (c) people to ooh and ahh at how cute we were, (d) requests for advice on weddings.  Bill or Bert, having married in New Hampshire or Iowa, are often afraid to do the same thing for fear of being fired.

If I call OmegaDad’s office and someone else picks up the phone, I can leave a message for him to call home, or have him say “I love you” to me in closing without any repercussions.  A gay or lesbian couple can’t do the same thing, for fear of responses from homophobic coworkers.

The folks who rant about homosexuality being a sin and a perversion, anti-discrimination ordinances being “special rights”, gays holding hands to be “flaunting” it, and homosexual marriage “devaluing” normal marriage just don’t get it. 

First off, I’ve said before, and will say again, that I think people who are afraid of promiscuity and the instability of modern households should be all for homosexual marriage–they’re settling down, they’re promising to love each other and cleave unto each other.  Wouldn’t that promote stability?  Doesn’t the desire for marriage for homosexuals imply that marriage is something special to them that they would cherish?  Aren’t two-income families better for the economy?  Don’t they have more disposable income?

As for “special rights”.  Sheesh.  All they want is to be able to do normal, everyday things–things that every heterosexual takes for granted so much that it isn’t even noticed, without being fired, or banned, or shunned.

And the “flaunting” question?  My god.  Homosexuals are faced every day with evidence of heterosexuals’ sexual relationships–in-your-face evidence. Few heterosexuals consider it “flaunting” unless it’s homosexuals doing the same thing.

I think that the people who were bussed in to protest it should be allowed to speak, but their opinions shouldn’t count in council members’ considerations of the ordinance.  They’ve got every right to their opinion, but they don’t live where the ordinance applies.  Their actions are akin to the out-of-staters who financed the “No on Prop 8″ group in California.  Let the people who are affected by such ordinances be the people to speak out and make the decisions.

It was gorgeous.  Sunny, warm, light breeze.  A little hazy, but, eh, I can live with that.  We had a grand time.  More later.

I grew up in Chicago.  It’s in the Midwest, for those of you who don’t know (har!).  The Midwest is blessed (or cursed, depending upon whom you ask) with magnificent thunderstorms.  Huge anvil-shaped cumulonimbus monsters build up, with accompanied by a build-up of oppressive humidity, until the air falls still and heavy and weighted and you feel almost like you’re swimming through it.  Typically, there’s a period of fitful breezes gusting one way and the other, before they die down, and you know IT is going to come through at any moment.  And then IT hits:  A wild burst of sustained wind coming from one direction, bending all the trees’ branches before it, tossing and turning the (ever-present) trash on the city streets.  With the wind comes an abrupt change in temperature–it can drop 20 or 30 degrees in a few minutes–and then the lightning starts, and the cracks of thunder, and the torrents of rain, and the wind always dashing it this way and that.  That’s the time to sit in your house near a window, so you can hear and see all the drama, and watch the water crashing against the windowpanes, and be happy that you’re safe and warm.

Rather than, say, walking to the El station without an umbrella, as it dumps water at the rate of an inch an hour.  Or driving, when you realize your windshield wipers aren’t up to the job, even at the top speed.

You also got tornado weather.  You knew it was tornado weather because the bottoms of the clouds, and the light filtering through, all turned an eerie greenish-gray color.  This was when you’d turn on the radio to be sure you heard of any tornado warnings–though it was extremely rare that you’d get one in the Big City; cities, it seems, tend to produce heat islands that cause updrafts that disrupt the beginnings of tornado formation.

Then I lived in the mountains of Arizona, which was blessed with monsoon season, a time when the storms would build up over the mountaintops and valleys over rivers, spreading outward, producing small thunderheads with powerful punch.  The storms wouldn’t sprawl over the countryside the way they do in the Midwest, but would produce–just like the weathermen say–”widely scattered thunderstorms”.  You can drive between them, and see the thunder, lightning, and rain being produced by one off in the distance, while being dry where you are.  But even though they’re small, compared to the storms in the Midwest, they’re intense, and filled with drama.

Then I moved to the Bay Area.  This is a place that has never seen a thunderstorm, so far as I know.  My need for weather drama went totally unquenched for years.

Then I moved to Lubbock, Texas, a benighted place where people think a row of tulips planted arrow-straight in front of their yellow-brick boxes is a “garden”, and where there’s no topography to speak of for hundreds of miles in any one direction.  BUT!  But Lubbock had three things going for it:  the spring and fall goose migration, wherein you would see, and hear, thousands of geese flying overhead, going north in the spring and south in the fall; incredible sunsets because of the dust and the aforementioned lack of topography–you could see the sunsets for an hour, a vivid array of golds and pinks and magentas and reds; and Wrath of God thunderstorms.  These were storms to conjure with, preceded by a wall of dust that would sweep through the neighborhood, covering everything with reddish loam, and then, when the storm hit, turned to instant mud spots.  Lubbock is in Tornado Alley, so not only did I get the drama of the storms, but lots of tornado weather.

Another stint in the mountains of Arizona lasted for ten years.

But here in Alaska, where we live, the rains are mostly long, slow, and dreary–no thunderstorms to speak of, normally.

This May, however…ah, it’s been glorious:  warm (almost hot), dry, clear, sunny.  And today?  Today, we are going to get rain.  Because the sky over the mountains to the north of us has been brewing monsoon clouds, like we got in Arizona, and now it is dark, threatening, lowering silver-gray and the thunder has been rumbling for an hour, getting closer and louder as the clouds build down to the valley where we live.  An hour ago, the clouds were still to the north, and I was sitting in the yard in the beating sunlight, listening to the sturm und drang behind me…now, the clouds have grown overhead and to the south.

Last year, we didn’t have any thunderstorms at all.  The first summer we were here, we had two or three; they are very rare.  In fact, the various write-ups of weather for these areas specifically mention that “even though you may have heard there are no thunderstorms in Alaska, it does happen…”

I was so excited, I called OmegaDad at work to breathlessly exclaim, “We have thunder!  And a huge anvil cloud!  And it’s coming our way!”  He laughed at me, and said, “I was just talking with M about thunderstorms, and telling him you would be so happy that we’re having one!”  Apparently, in one of those cosmic coincidences that make life interesting, I called him just after he announced that…Then, of course, he went on to claim that I was only happy when disaster was brewing, which made me pout, which made him laugh…

Anyway, I’m happy.  Thunderstorms do this Midwestern girl’s heart good.

Yesterday was spent ferrying the dotter off to a “Fun Meet” at her gymnastics place (what the heck do you call it?  “Gymnasium” doesn’t quite work.) for the entire morning.  Everyone who participated got a trophy (at least the ribbons were awarded based on points).  Oy!  None of my photos turned out well.  Oy!  The dotter had fun–hey!  And even though she needed prompting as to what came next, her floor routine was the best of her group.

Gratuitous video:

Today…today, OmegaDad and I spent scaring ourselves by removing the old wall to the outer part of the “stable” and framing in the new wall.  Why bother?  Well, just as a quick graphic showing the reason, we have the “foundations” of the two pieces on either side of the “door”:

It’s a miracle that thing has actually stayed upright (note, I do not say it has actually been plumb, or level.)  Not to mention that the cross-bracing on the back of these pieces of wall were cribbed* to within an inch of their lives by the previous horsie tenants.

Anyway, tomorrow’s post is going to be a pictorial history which will no doubt bore my readers to tears, but it’s history, dammit, and we have a very bad habit of taking dumpy stuff and turning it into nice looking stuff, and having no “before” or “during” pictures to point to.

While we were doing this (by “we”, I mean that OmegaDad did all the manly-man work, while I climbed ladders, held boards, helped measure, and fetched and carried pens, hammers, crowbars, drills, nails, and screws), we came across a surprise inside the upper portion of the wall–to wit, an ancient, dried-up hornet nest:

It was so pretty that I had to take close-ups:

Inside this splendid creation were dead old yellowjackets, mummified eggs, and the honeycomb-shaped cells:

I thought it was fascinating.  Believe me when I say I do not find a live hornet or wasp fascinating; they terrify me.  Yellowjackets I can cope with, and a long-abandoned nest filled with wasp-y cadavers actually makes me feel very good:  they are dead!  DEAD!  AND GONE!  Bwahahaha!

The dotter was very patient and hardly whined at us at all (it’s that maturity thang coming into play), so I rewarded her by hauling her off to the local lake for an hour.  Unfortunately, while it was toasty warm at our house, sheltered from the breeze as it is, the lake area was breezy and a bit cool, and the lake itself was still icy cold.  Given that three weeks ago, there was still ice there, this is no surprise.

*Non-horse folk:  “Cribbing” is when a bored horse chews whatever it can reach with its mouth. 

I have come to a momentous conclusion:

When telling people when to visit Alaska, I should say, “Come in May.”

Rain?  What’s that?  Sunshine?  Oooh, lots.  Greenery?  Yup.  A few flowers–not as many as later on, but at least there’s no drizzly, chilly, rainy days.  It has just been glorious, and I highly recommend it to non-Alaskans as a good way to get to know Alaska.

The dotter tried to do her homework in the hammock this afternoon.  First there was the flat-on-her-back approach:

Then there was the sitting-up approach:

It ended up not working.  Too many distractions, too much sunshine, the breeze kept blowing her papers around, and then there was the problem that her pencil’s eraser was worn down.  Which, of course, meant she couldn’t do her work.  Oh, well; it was a fun afternoon anyway.

I might note that this is my hammock, now dangling from my new Pawley Island hammock frame, a Mother’s Day gift from the hubby and the dotter.  The hammock was my gift many years ago, and was hung between two trees in the back yard of our house in Small Mountain University Town.  Here, however, I was adamant that I needed a frame, rather than putting the hammock between trees; I wanted to be able to grab the sunshine, and anywhere we had two trees properly spaced, we didn’t have sunshine, or else it was right next to the next-door neighbor’s driveway. 

The lilac buds are proceeding apace.  The one bush is loaded with buds on every branch:

The other two bushes are just beginning to get their leaf buds, but I fully expect them to do just as nicely.

The pasque flower that was a bud last week is now fully open:

My other Mother’s Day gifts were a cake, decorated by the dotter:

And, of course, the obligatory hand-made Mother’s Day card:

Note the nascent cursive writing.  She’s not supposed to be doing cursive at school, but is busily producing her own version.  This will probably cause problems next year, or whenever they introduce cursive (if they do at all?)…

I would do Deep Thoughts about Mother’s Day, but will just give you the gist:  Mom’s day is one of the hardest holidays an infertile woman can cope with.  To all my readers who are still struggling with infertility, all I can say is that I hope you, too, will one day be getting the hand-made cards and the gifties made at school.  Another Mom’s day thought is that I found myself thinking of OmegaDotter’s birthmother a lot; the girl is so damned amazing and fun (and irritating and whiny) and smart (and capable of doing incredibly silly stuff), and I wonder what her mother is like, and feel sorrowful that she’s missing out on such a cool kid. 

Follow-up:  Not only did the New York Times quote OmegaMom, but Inside Edition emailed me, wanting to know about flu parties.  Since I don’t know diddly about flu parties, I passed the query on to one of my Tweets, who was interested in doing one.

The blog has suffered intensely because we’ve had spectacular, wonderful, gorgeous weather.  Yesterday our local Mesonet station hit 82F; today it hit 78F; on Friday, it was in the low 70s.  These have been record-breaking temperatures.  The sun has been shining, the birds have been singing, and I have been raking.

And raking, and raking, and raking.

I am, as a result, achingly sore in my shoulder, arm, and hip muscles.  I also have a fantastic sunburn.  Wah, wah, wah.  Pity me:  We’ve had weather to die for, and I’ve been outside for three days straight, playing in the yard, and discovering that, yes, Virginia, Alaska sunlight can give you sunburns.

A week ago, the snow was all the way down the mountainsides; now, it’s melted up two-thirds of the way.  A week ago, the trees were brown and bare; now, leaves are exploding everywhere you look and our neighbors’ houses are fading away behind the greenery (as is our kitty-corner, catty-wompus sliver of a view of the smaller mountains to the north of the valley).

This time of year is called “break-up”, because the ice encasing the rivers finally breaks into chunks and is swept downhill, down to lakes and the ocean.  There are bets and lotteries based on when various rivers will break clear.  There is also the problem of ice dams–where the chunks of ice manage to get snagged on something, then snag more chunks of ice, which capture still more, until you have a jumble of ice damming up the river.  Wayfarer Scientista has a lovely description of break-up in her area; Bill Hess was up in Wainwright, helping some native Alaskan whalers prepare an ice ramp for their whaling ship; AKMuckraker, over at Mudflats, took a walk along a creek today, along with some great pics; and Hig, at Ground Truth Trekking, has been using the (lovely, wonderful, long-awaited!) sunlight to play around with Fresnel lenses.

Our lilac bushes are putting out leaf buds and what looks, to me, like the beginnings of lilac blossoms (?):

Some fresh new trees leaves catching the sunlight:

And our pasque flower survived the winter, too, and is about to bloom:

So, essentially, everyone in Alaska is making up for six months of winter weather by soaking up as much sunlight as possible.  It’s amazing just how much being able to be outside and just bask can change one’s disposition–I am practically manic with delight at the joy of springtime.  Anyway, something has to give when one is obsessively enjoying the weather and the yard and the leaves and flowers and and and…and in my case, what gave is the blog.

Ah, spring!  When the pussywillows start popping, when the temperature hits 60 degrees, when yours truly spends days upon days upon days raking the yard to remove last fall’s dump of dead leaves and a winter’s worth of dawg poop.  What?  Surprised about us not picking up the poop during the winter?  Hey!  YOU try spending the extra few minutes to pick up dawg poop when it’s 20 below zero, there’s snow on the ground, and the dawg poop sinks into the snow because it’s so warm in comparison and it suddenly becomes a major excavation project to pick up the poop.

Just sayin’.

Anyway, I have been raking and soaking in the sunlight and warmth (we almost broke into the top ten highest temps for April today!), and loving it.  Oooh, yeah, gimme that Vitamin D, bay-bee!

OmegaDad, on the other hand, has rediscovered the one bad side to spring/summer in Alaska.

The Gloaming.

Last night, the dotter needed to snuggle with me in bed because she had watched something ER-esque on the TV at the neighbor’s house.  Apparently, there was lots of surgery, requiring lots of blood, lots of shouting, and generally unnerving stuff for her.  So I settled into bed with her and a book, and then fell asleep.

This left poor OmegaDad seeking another place to sleep.  (The dotter is too big now for all three of us to sleep well if she sneaks or is invited into bed with us.)

So he trotted out to the living room, blankie and pillow in hand, and snuggled up on the sofa.

Only to get all of about four hours’ of sleep last night, because of The Gloaming.

Yes, we have entered the time of year when we have lost all deep darkness at night; the time when the sunrise/sunset calculators that display twilight times now show “light” for astronomical twilight.  In two weeks, the calendar suddenly displays “light” instead of twilight times for nautical twilight.  Then, in the first weeks of June, civil twilight suddenly disappears and the calendars display “light” for that interval.

So The Gloaming is just beginning.  (Ooooh, a cute little itty-bitty baby Gloaming!)  It doesn’t bother me one bit; I can sleep through just about anything.  But any hints of light around OmegaDad make him sleep poorly; it’s just the way he’s built.  Our bedroom curtains block a certain amount of light, so it won’t bother him there for another month, but in the living room/kitchen area, we have three windows that have no coverings at all, and The Gloaming creeps in on crepuscular feet.

(Isn’t that a great word?  “Crepuscular”.  It, and “gloaming”, are actual real live words that are actually applied to this exact situation.  One thing I have loved about living in Alaska is that I get to use these words to refer to Real Live Environmental Conditions!  Woot!)

Git yer minds outta the gutter, dudes!

I’m not talking about sex here, dammit!  I’m talking about…

Spring!

Frost heave!

A yard that due to 3 days of more-than-50-degree weather (yes!) has been freed from a layer of snow, only to reveal…

Hummocks.

Lumps.

Hollows.

Mud.

Seriously–I think we didn’t notice last year, because we weren’t out in the yard this early.  This year, we have chickens in the coop in the backyard, so we need to be trudging across at least twice per day.  And so, this year, we have noticed that the yard on either side of the septic tank is at least a foot-and-a-half higher than the area right over the septic tank.  OmegaDad is in dire fear that this means we have a Problem with the septic tank; I am convinced that after a week or so more of 50-degree-plus weather it will subside.

When you step on certain spots on the lawn–spots that look nice and dry and solid, unlike the spots that are pools of mud–they crunch beneath you, plunging your foot four inches downward in a single instant.  WHAM!  So you’ve got these unnatural spots where you innocently stepped…and you’ve got the natural spots where the ground just sank because the ice has already melted from that one six-inch-square area, unlike the surrounds.

It is very interesting.  It has the Omega Grownups thinking seriously of purchasing a roller drum for the tractor, so that we can smooth things out once the ground has thawed more evenly.

Today we had monsoon style clouds up over the mountains, and, once again, I cursed the fate that had me out and about without my camera.  (”The fate”, aka foolish forgetful OmegaMom.)  OmegaDad and I were driving to Home Debit, enjoying quality time together because the dotter is off having a Hannah Montana-filled overnight with best bud K.  As we swept up into the parking lot, one of the clouds over one of the mountains simply…dropped.  People who live in the southwest are familiar with this activity in the summer time thunderstorms; the precipitation beneath this one, however, was bright white rather than dark grey.  It was a thundersnow dropping onto the side of the mountain, highlit by the sun, and it would have been a stunning, awesome picture.  But I didn’t have my camera with me.

Damn.

Anyway, expect to hear more about SPRING! from me as the days go on.  I am practically dancing with excitement!

We are busy doing such things as ditching Comet the chicken (picked up today by a gal in town who is busy setting up a new flock), purchasing new chicks (a Buff Orpington and an Australorp, both less than two weeks old and the cutest little balls of fluff), dying Easter eggs, filling Easter baskets, socializing with school buds and what-not.  I hope to produce a post of some more substance tomorrow, but I had to pass these tidbits on.

First off, we have Ground Truth Trekking, a young couple who hiked across the northwest to their new home, a yurt in Alaska with a grand view of the volcano, and promptly had a new baby.  They have some lovely time-lapse photography of the volcano, plus some composite pics of the lightning during the nighttime volcano eruptions; go take a look.

Then we have a very nice slice-of-life blog featuring Sarah Palin’s own hometown, Wasilla!  It’s called “Wasilla Alaska, by 300…and then some“, published by a guy named Bill Hess.  I found him while looking at pics of volcanic ashfall from the Big City newspaper.  Those who like OmegaGranny’s blog, Walking Prescott, might like his.

Many moons ago, when I was a young lass in Chicago, I dipped my toes into the outskirts of science fiction fandom.  Alas, I was at the time too shy and uptight to let myself be sucked in further (it would have been easy, but I think I was wildly in tragic love at the time, which distracted me).  Anyhoo, I encountered Phil Foglio at a party or two, and got to know folks who knew him and said he was Going Places.  But…he did comic strips.  Ugh!  I thought, and promptly made sure to avoid all of his stuff since then.  But a few weeks ago, I decided to do a websearch.  Allow me to introduce two excellent web comic timewasters that are courtesy of Phil Foglio:  Girl Genius (set aside about five hours) and Buck Godot, Zap Gun For Hire (you will need fewer hours for this one, as it started in 2007, whereas Girl Genius started in 2002).  The latest volume of Girl Genius in print was nominated for a Hugo this year…

And, for your time machine needs, this handy-dandy posterized list of general scientific principles which will allow you to RULE THE WORLD!!!! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Dudes.  What is with our culture?!  Seriously.  Isn’t it good enough to be invited to participate in the state science fair?  Does every damned thing kids participate in require that every tender ego be protected from negative vibes?

All the kids at the State Science Fair got “participant” ribbons and a certificate.

Ah, well, it’s all for the chiiiiillllldrrrruuuuunnnn.  We must spare them any and all psychic harm, dontchaknow?

Bah.

That said…OmegaDotter came home with an official second-place ribbon, and we’re as pleased as punch with that.

The venue was a brand-new middle school in Big City.  A really pretty brand-new school.  With two art studios!  And a dance studio!  And an atrium filled with dangling glass mosaics in rainbow colors!  Holy cow, it looked like the set from High School Musical–there were balconies and swathes of glass and the principal’s office was a two-story high-ceilinged affair!  Man, we felt like we were in Swank City while we were there.

Friday evening was filled with standing in lines.  There was the line to check in to get a project number.  There was the “media release” line.  There was the line for the free T-shirt.  There was the line to pay for registration.  There was the line for the judging information and time selection for judging (for elementary students–older students had to be there for a full four hours).  There was the line for the FAQs (really–why on earth didn’t they just hand it out with the project number?!).  There was the line for the Safety Check, which in essence said that if you brought anything that could possibly, in any way, harm someone by giving them a boo-boo, it was out.  THEN, when all those lines were visited (older students also had the line-to-submit-abstracts and the line-for-human-research-protocol-checks), then you could visit the line where they told you where to put the project.

But even with all the lines, it only took us an hour.  Then we went off to dinner at a local Korean restaurant, overate, and went home, to return again this a.m.

These are the hanging mosaics at Very Bright Shiny New Middle School:

This was part of the scene in the gymnasium where the exhibits were displayed:

OmegaDotter talking with the judge.  We had walked her through various questions and answers beforehand, but were not allowed to be anywhere near her during the judging.  The gymnasium had an upper-level track around the periphery, so we went up there and spied from above.  Yes, it’s a bad picture; I zoomed too far and things pixilated.

Madame Scientista posing in front of her project:

One of the middle schoolers on the other side of the gymnasium also had a dissolving-egg-shells project; theirs was much more complex and involved measuring the thickness of the egg shells using calipers after four days of immersion, and they used Sprite instead of Dr Pepper and Pepsi.  The dotter was very interested in seeing their project, and they had to ask her if she bounced the nekkid eggs–which, of course, we had done.

Then we had five hours to kill before we could pick up the projects, so we drove down the coast of the inlet to Ski Resort Town, which we had never visited before.  I was astonished at how much snow they got there; OmegaDad kept telling me that this was the Rain Shadow Effect In Action.  Thank you very much, Herr Professor My Love!

We were intrigued by the effect of tides on ice in the inlet; there were many small iceberg-lets stranded on the mudflats at high tide, and the ice was not a solid sheet, but carved into canyons and mesas by the action of the tides (we assume).  Nothing like the ice on Lake Michigan in winter, which I remember very distinctly as a solid mass, with excellent frozen wave action on the edges (no waves in the inlet, so none of that here).

As we drove back, there was this large grey cloud to our left.  OmegaDad and I kept eyeing it, and we finally decided it must be an ash cloud from the volcano.  Note the brownish tinge to the bottom of the cloud layer at the top of the image below:

When we arrived home and checked the Alaska Volcano Observatory, sure enough, there had been yet another eruption (another day, another eruption; this is becoming almost routine by now), with an ash fall advisory in Big City.  Another eruption occurred after we got home, and this time the ash fall advisory is right here in Suburban Alaska.  So OmegaDad is outside taping up the cracks around the chicken coop.  Ah, life in Alaska…

As an aside:  last year, there were pictures of way kewl lightning around the eruption of Chaiten volcano in Chile.  Tonight, I am able to provide links to similar pictures of our very own volcano!

Oh, and greetings to any Mudflatters who are visiting.  Look around, kick the tires, see if you want to stay a while!

I’ve been anonymously blogging for about three and a half years now.  I was anonymous on boards and listservs before that.  Oh, not anonymous anonymous–anyone who really wants to figure out who I am and where I live can probably do it.  Part of it has been a general sense of “there are some Real Whackos out there, so it’s a good idea to keep the whackdom at arm’s length”, and since I started blogging the main reason for the anonymity is so that the dotter won’t find her name spread far and wide on the ‘net when she starts googling it.  (Also so her friends and enemies in high school won’t find same and start the taunting circuitry a-jangling.)

There are plenty of good reasons for people to be anonymous on the internet.  I have encountered at least three situations that made it plain why:

1. Case A - blogger who was adopting from China realizes she has a problem with drinking, announces her joining AA and doing outpatient therapy on her blog, someone forwards that info to her agency (this was prior to China having a stated policy against same), and her agency dumps her and her husband like a hot potato.
2. Case B - blogger who was adopting from China riles up a reader by posting pictures of equipment used in the adolescent sex education classes she taught years prior; said reader tracks down her info, contacts her agency saying she’s “unfit to be an adoptive mother”, and, as a result, the blogger’s adoption is put on hold while she undergoes extensive additional interviews by a hostile social worker.
3. Case C - This is an amalgam of at least four cases I know of where someone with an ax to grind called CPS on someone who was posting on boards, and it took forever for those situations to be sorted out.

There’s always Dooce as another reason; to be “dooced” is to be fired from your job due to something you’ve written on your blog.

Then there are angry or crazy ex-spouses, or ex-in-laws, or former lovers, or just plain sick stalker types who, when finding clues about their former spouse/in-law/lover/victim, are quite avid to return to their prior ways.

On the whole, my approach when reading a blog is to first check the quality of writing, then to check the quality of the thinking behind the writing, and then to see how well that first impression is maintained as time goes on.  In other words, I judge a blogger by his or her output, not by whether the blogger posts using a pseudonym or a “real” name.  I gained great respect for CalculatedRisk long before his name was revealed, and the same for his (alas, now deceased) co-blogger Tanta, because of their excellent writing and news summaries on the real estate bubble, its inevitable bust, and the inner workings of the mortgage industry.  The Rumor Queen got my respect with similar clarity and detail about what was going on as the wait in Chinese adoptions grew longer and longer.  I never knew who Miss Snark was, but I learned a helluva lot about the business of being a book agent from her blog while it was extant (do yourself a favor–go read her blog in its entirety…I was devastated when she closed up shop).  I have no idea what Johnny’s real name is, but I always find him an interesting read and know that he says what he means and means what he says when he posts.

I discovered AKMuckraker’s blog, The Mudflats, back when Sarah Palin was first announced as John McCain’s running mate.  I wanted to know what reactions were to the nomination in my own state–Sarah Palin’s state.  I figured I knew, but I’d check anyway.  And lo and behold, there was a well-written, well-thought-out series of posts by this anonymous blogger.  I subscribed, and kept reading, and nothing ever tarnished my impression of that blogger as interesting, funny, pretty even-handed.  AKM helped spearhead a coordinated relief effort for the villagers of western Alaska when nothing was being done by Alaska’s elected officials.  I respected AKM, and respected his/her decision to remain anonymous.  Not only respected it, but understood it completely.

All of this is in preface to the sad news that Democratic State Representative Mike Doogan of Alaska has taken it upon himself to first discover, and then publish in his legislative newsletter, the identity of the person behind The Mudflats. 

In correspondence with a constituent, Rep. Doogan further compared AKMuckraker to a member of the KKK because of her anonymity.  Rep. Doogan’s rationale for the outing was: “My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name.”  

Um.

Okay.

I’m sure the people who decided to make the ballot secret can see the wisdom in that…

I’m sure that Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, an anonymous tract against the political rulers of the day, was in agreement…

I’m sure that Publius, anonymous author of the Federalist Papers (revealed afterwards to be Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay), thought the same…

I’m sure that the medical researchers being harassed and targeted at universities across the country are in total sympathy with the outing and publicizing of their names to PETA forums and other such places, the same sort of thing that Rep. Doogan has done here…

Politics is an emotional topic.  Things can get very heated when it comes to Palinistas versus Obamanauts.  When you’re a member of a minority political group in a sea of the others (a Democrat in a sea of Republicans, in this area of Alaska), it’s very easy to be a target, and intimidated.  Perhaps Rep. Doogan, safe as he is in more-progressive Juneau, doesn’t realize what kind of atmosphere it is when one is the lone Democratic voter in, say, a set of gymnastics bleachers, surrounded by hordes of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” buttons.  Having stood out in the rain and cold waving an Obama placard on a very busy road in Suburban Alaska, I’m quite aware of some of the frothing anger against Democrats from a small subset of people.  I’m hoping that that frothing anger doesn’t get turned against AKMuckraker as a result of Rep. Doogan’s actions.

I’m not a Fan of Sarah.

Yes, Alaska, strike me dead now:  I repeat, I am not a Fan of Sarah.

The latest real issue I have with our dearly beloved Momma Grizzly is that (according to rumor) she and the state legislators had worked out exactly what the state was going to accept and not going to accept in terms of the federal stimulus package, everyone was in agreement, and then, 24 hours later, she came out with a grand fanfare saying she was going to reject a heckuva lot more–as in 30% of the package offered to Alaska.  “In essence we say no to operating funds for more positions in government,” quoth Sarah.

The rumor mill claims that she did this last-minute change of heart at the behest of SarahPAC, the group that is positioning her to run for President in 2012–rejecting gobs of the stimulus money would look good for GOP voters in the upcoming election, as would playing up “rejecting” big government.

Then there’s the fact that it took six weeks of effort from bloggers, local legislators, and eventually some spots on CNN, to move our Momma Grizzly to actually take some notice of the problems that western Alaska villages were facing due to high fuel costs, low fuel supplies, and an intense and long cold snap.

Not to mention the stonewalling on state scientists’ positions on how warming is affecting the polar bear population…

And Troopergate, which really does provide some interesting insights into how the Alaska First Family likes to operate…

And charging the state to provide transportation dollars for her kiddos to trek along with her as she swung around the U.S. “promoting Alaska” and (oh, by the way) promoting her VP candidacy.

So:  No love lost here.

But, really, this latest “ethics complaint” just leaves me rolling my eyes. 

So, here’s the story: Momma Grizzly’s hunka hunka burnin’ love, First Dude Todd, gets sponsored by Arctic Cat for his IronDog snowmachine competition to the tune of $5,000.  And Momma Grizzly shows up at the opening of the race to drop the flag clad in a “Team Arctic” jacket, with the Arctic Cat logo emblazoned on it.

That’s it.

In a nutshell.

WTFOMGBBQ!!!!  Strike her down now!  Evil, evil woman, accepting money and advertising while acting as governor!

Um.

Excuse me if I’m not prostrate in horror at this egregious lapse of ethics.

I mean, c’mon, folks.

We have better things to rant about.

I’m pretty sure the majority of Alaskans–Sarah Fans or no–can quite easily separate the “excited wife of many-time IronDog winner” from “high-level government official”.  In other words, cut Sarah some slack; she wasn’t advertising Arctic Cat–she was advertising First Dude Todd.  She wasn’t endorsing Arctic Cat as The Official Snowmachine Of The State of Alaska.

This is a waste of money.  On both sides.  And a waste of judicial time and energy.  On both sides.

In other news, the volcano has simmered down, and the weather has warmed up.  It was above 40F today Chez Omega, and the snow is melting swiftly.  I’z a happy camper, dudes.

The dotter staged this picture of my big red lips beanbag “reading” a book; I barely cropped it at all.

So there I was, relaxing and reading a few blogs’n'boards’n'things late this evening, and I decided to do my recent hobby:  checking in at Alaska Volcano Observatory’s Redoubt website to see how things were a-cookin’.  Things were definitely a-cookin’, to the point that I kept checking in at the seismic webicorders as it became obvious that the volcano was really thinking of doing something this time.

And then, between one moment and the next, suddenly the color code of the volcano watch changed from ORANGE-”watch” level to RED-”warning” level, and the descriptor over to the side changed to “RED: Eruption is imminent with significant emission of volcanic ash into the atmosphere likely OR eruption is underway or suspected with significant emission of volcanic ash into the atmosphere [ash-plume height specified, if possible]. WARNING: Hazardous eruption is imminent, underway, or suspected.”

So I switched to Twitter to send out a notice to whoever might possibly be listening to my intermittent blatherings, and as I was typing, @alaska_avo sent out a tweet that Redoubt was erupting.

Now, before anyone gets worried, concerned, scared, etc., please be aware that this volcano is a hundred miles away, and it looks like a short eruption (seismic stuff has already cooled down after going off the charts).

But still…so cool to be able to monitor this stuff in real-time.

Here’s what the seismometer was doing at one of the seismic stations; the red square at the bottom left corner is an indicator that the seismicity was off the chart, unable to be measured by that seismograph, during those minutes.

Spring.

Rumor has it that spring is arriving in various parts of the U.S.

While we still have snow and cold, there are hints of spring peeping up here and there in our area.  Specifically, snow is melting.  The sun is rising at 8 a.m., and setting at 8:20 p.m. (yes!), and we now have twilight until a little after 9.

And!  And!

I drove off Friday to Big City, to provide some supporting documentation for our first PFD (Permanent Fund Dividend) (which this year could be anything from a little over a grand per person to a whopping $68 per person, due to the economic mess).  It was sunny, it was warm, there were people outside with no coats on!  And shorts!  Woot!

But the thing that really gave me a foretaste of spring, that made me optimistic that endless winter is on its way out…

Certain stands of trees were showing the very faintest, tiniest, almost not noticeable, tinge of greenishness, mostly on the trunks.

And other trees, here and there, as I drove through Small Alaskan Suburb, had fluffy white flowers at the very topmost branches.

So, in honor of Friday’s equinox, I pronounce it SPRING!  Woohoo!

I have been in a truly bitchy mood all day, and one of the reasons is that it’s snowing yet again.  Another nine inches.  Sigh.

The other day, we passed a bank sign that excitedly proclaimed, “The pussywillows are here!”  I don’t believe them.  Oh, I guess it’s true; moose have been congregating by the roadsides, nibbling on the branchlets with the rising sap, and I swear I saw some leaf buds on the trees lining our streets.

But now they’re covered with snow.

OmegaDad claims that in a month, it will all be gone.  Please mark your calendars:  April 5.  No snow.

Right?

Springtime is coming.

Right?

After all, this weekend is Daylight Savings Time weekend.

And in a few weeks, we hit the Spring Equinox.

So even here in the frozen north, spring must be coming.

Right?

Please tell me it is so…