OmegaMom

Weeks, months, years.

I am tired of it all, right now.

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

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

Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Really, I did!)

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

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

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

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

Right after that, they flew away.

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

So it goes.

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

Ages ago, while living in Small Mountain University Town, I noticed a little massage school next to the pet store we liked to frequent.  I poked my head in, and discovered that they had students doing massages every weekend, and that you could get an hour massage for very small amounts of money.

Later on, Small Mountain University’s classified employee council made an arrangement with that massage school to get an additional percentage off the price for university employees.

I was in heaven.  Maybe once a month, once every six weeks, I’d traipse off to SMUT Massage College and get myself an hour-long massage, emerging limp and noodly and relaxed.

Since moving to Alaska, however, I have been unable to indulge.  Oh, we have massage schools off in Big City, but, hey, it’s an hour-long drive there, and the benefits of the massage would be outweighed by the drive back, in my experience.

When I landed in Arizona again to take care of my mom—which included watching her like a hawk while we were snowbound, preparing small meals and trying not to cry as she barely ate anything, then getting her off to the hospital and being ready to fight anyone who claimed it wasn’t “medically necessary” for her to be admitted to the hospital, then keeping an eye on the staff at the nursing home until it became obvious that they were caring, gentle people who really wanted to help, then spending hours making appointments and visiting and touring assisted living facilities in the area—

Well.  It was, to put it mildly, making me uptight.  Really uptight.  I was finding myself unable to sleep because my shoulders were in knots, and my brain was in overdrive, producing item after item after item to worry about or to remember to take care of the next day.  Something had to be done. 

So I called one of the local massage colleges, to see if they had any student clinics going on.  Lo and behold, though they didn’t have beginning students, they had an “advanced” clinic running for the month.  I signed up.

O what a blessing is a good massage.  What a release of tension.  What a lovely hour or so of mindless bliss, melting into the massage table, feeling the horde of knots loosen—even those that I hadn’t realized were there.  It helped so much that I threw monetary caution to the winds and signed up for one a week while I was there.  I loved every minute of those three hours.

Some specifics:  This was through ASIS, in downtown Prescott.  The masseuse was named Jill H., and she was awesome.  She was gentle, asked questions, sent me a note via mail after the first massage (!!), remembered what I had told her and where all the knots had been on the second and third visits, and was, all around, a boon to me during a tough time.  I highly recommend their services, and especially highly recommend Jill.  (She is also working with a local chiropractor…I have, unfortunately, lost the card she gave me, otherwise I would say which chiropractor.)

::OmegaMom walks into the blog space, blows some dust off the furnishings, looks around…::

Hey there.  It’s been long enough for a post from me that BlogHer advertising sent me a “tsk, tsk” email and turned off the ads.  Hah!

Oh, well; I’ve been busy and tired and uptight enough that blogging (and Twitter) has taken second (third?  Last?) place in the scheme of things.

The good news is that my mom is so, so, so much better.  We moved her into assisted living yesterday; she has all the furniture she needs and today’s chores include moving some plants and paintings and photos so that her space is even more her space.

Every day in the past two weeks has been jam-packed with things related to getting her better, getting the move coordinated, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, vacuuming, cleaning.  Twenty-five years at one location does tend to make one accumulate stuff…and much of it, as mom says, “Nothing precious”.  My main learning point–aside from the need for retirement funds, and how expensive assisted living is–is that the investment in a weekly cleaning person is a Must for those who do not have the cleaning gene.  All the dust and the stress has combined to give me a lovely cold with a dollop of super-duper sinus infection on top.  Hah!

Arizona has been irritatingly sunny and beautiful, all the while I have been unable to rest and enjoy it.  Grrr.

My brother arrives today–yay!  Someone else to take the burden!  And I head home on Sunday, to a dotter who finally last night broke down during our nightly phone conversation to say, “I want you to COME HOME!!!”, with her voice cracking into tears on the last two words.  Oh, yes, OmegaDad wants me home, too, but he hasn’t cried–it’s been me bursting into spontaneous tearfests on his long-distance shoulder every few days.  He’s a good dude, y’know?  I’ve done something right to have the Kozmik All let me find him all those years ago.

My main focus with mom’s move–aside from, well, the move–has been to create a colorful and welcoming space for her in her new place.  One of the things I did was taken directly from a blog that my commenter and long-time virtual friend Kaz pointed me to named Attic24.  The lady who writes Attic24 is a lover of all things bright and colorful, and her January 21 post made me re-assess my inward sneer at tulips.

I have always thought that tulips are just too, too niffy-naffy and snooty for words.  Stiff, formal, upright–ptooey.  But in the midst of her posts filled with bright mixes of color, A24 showed a vase jam-packed with multi-colored tulips.  It was bright, springy, the furthest thing from “formal” you could imagine.  So I started searching the local florist shops for tulips.

Of course, none of the local florist shops had gotten the word:  tulips in arrangements meant all one color, all stiff, semi- to very formal, and very little variety in color.  Red was big.  So was white.  And pink.  Never in the same store, though!  Bah.  But Monday I was at the local grocery store, struck by the “manager’s specials” of leftover Valentine’s Day bouquets and tchatchkes, and was lured into their flower cooler.  There, in the corner, was a bucket of tulips, gathered into groups of five stems, each group one color.  But they had orange.  They had red.  They had purple.  Pink.  White.  Yellow.  A riot of colors.  So I cornered the young lady who was putting “for sale!” signs on the manager’s specials, and described what I wanted.

She came through!  One of the nicest things about the move was walking mom into her new place and having her delighted with the (beginnings of) big splashes of color…one of which was a small vase jam-packed with tulips of all different colors, sitting on her dining table.

It’s the small things that make me happy sometimes.  That vase of colorful tulips was a symbol to me, a symbol that mom’s life is not going to shrivel up into a blank nursing home stare, that she’s going to have spring and life and color for time to come.

Well.

When I wrote that last post, it was going to be followed up by the “And she’s all better now, whew!” post.  But I had things to do that weekend, and places to go, so didn’t write.

But I did notice that mom hadn’t blogged for a few days, and she hadn’t sent me any email.  So I picked up the phone to call her (I previously had been calling her every day, but then thought she was better, so stopped).

At which point, she asked me to come out to Arizona again, saying that things were worse.

So here I am in Arizona, with mom.  I managed to sneak in during a break between the storms that have hit Arizona (and California before that).  The airplane was delayed two hours on the tarmac in Big City due to a malfunction that turned out to be a Ghost In The Machine, and missed my connecting flight in Salt Lake City…but Delta showed how absolutely wonderful it is by automagically rebooking all the people who had missed their flights onto the next available flight.  This was very cool–all we had to do was take our existing boarding pass, run it beneath a scanner, and a brand spanking new boarding pass for the rebooked flight was printed out.

But when I got to Phoenix and got to the car rental place, a snag occurred.  It seems that we didn’t have enough money in our account to cover any car rental (if I had had a credit card, that would have worked, but they automatically block out more money for debit cards, no matter how little an amount of time you want to rent)…paychecks being deposited on Saturday didn’t help.  I was tired.  I just wanted to get up to mom.  So I parked myself on one of the chairs in the middle of the huge car rental complex and proceeded to sob my heart out.

Then I called OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love OmegaDad?  Well, okay, just thought I’d mention it again.

Anyway, he arranged for the inter-city shuttle to pick me up and get me up to Prescott.  Yay, OmegaDad!

Driving up was an adventure–but the good kind.  See, since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have to worry about all the water crossing the road, or the high winds, and was perched up nice and high so I could peer out the windows and see over concrete barriers on bridges and wash crossings.  All of which were flooded with rushing water.  Waves.  Crests on the waves.  Waterfalls coming down the rocky roadcuts that we were traveling between.  Snow mixing with the heavy rain when we got to Prescott.

(Up in Small Mountain University Town, they have had something like four feet of snow.  Roofs are collapsing on businesses–the ice rink, the big, comfy used bookstore, the fabric store, more–and the city mayor has declared that all businesses must clear their roofs or face a fine.  The powers that be also closed the main highways around SMUT for 24 hours.)

Anyway, I am here with GrannyJ.  We are working on getting her into a nursing home for a few weeks, to see if they can do anything.  We’re talking about her maybe moving to live with my brother.  Lots of things to talk about.  She is not doing well, but she is–as ever–my sharp-witted, fun, sweet mom.

In the meantime, consider me a poster child for the Sandwich Generation:  OmegaDotter’s birthday is tomorrow, and she is in her first “real” gymnastics meet tomorrow, too, with judges and not every participant getting a trophy.  We had a little birthday dinner Wednesday, and gave her the family presents, but I wasn’t able to arrange her party in time…that’s up to OmegaDad.

I know a lot of bloggers who are having issues with their moms these days.  Kat Kaz (damn, should proofread when I’m posting at midnight!), Laurie, Lorrie, V…I’ve kept so quiet with them about their problems because…well, it’s kind of a “La, la, la, I’m ignoring things!” approach.  But we’re past the ignoring problems part here, and I want to apologize and shout out to all of you to say, “Hang in there, kiddos.”

I will keep all & sundry posted; I wasn’t planning to post tonight, but saw Anon in AV’s comment, and thought I should update.

When you’re a new parent, with a small life depending on you, you find yourself doing strange things sometimes.  One commonality that I’m sure my readers have experienced is how new moms and dads can find themselves stopping by their child’s bed in the night and watching—urgently, because you can’t hear the breathing and you’re afraid that something’s wrong.  You wait, suspended in the moment, your anxiety ramping up, until you see the slow, gentle, up and down movement of your child’s torso in tune with her breathing, and you move on, reassured.

I found myself doing that with my mother while I was visiting over Christmas.

I’d be padding into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and find myself popping in to hover at the side of her bed over her, watching, suspended in the moment, my anxiety ramping up, until I saw that slow, gentle, up and down movement of her torso in time with her breathing.  The anxiety was always there.  I’d find myself sneaking in while she was taking a nap, just to be sure.  The sound of her oxygen machine—which she’s used for years now—receded into the background, becoming part of the everyday noises of the house, but it was still loud enough so that when I’d check her, I’d have to get very close to see the small movements of breathing, to hear anything.  I hovered, just checking.

When we first got there, my brother and family were ensconced in the living room, so we made a nest for OmegaDotter by the side of mom’s bed, and I slept in the bed with her.  It wasn’t reassuring.  She was not her normal self; she was lethargic, quiet, enervated.  We were all worried.  Bro and SIL had taken her on an overnight trip down to Tucson, and from the pictures, it looked like mom hadn’t gotten out of the car much.

So there I would be, in the middle of the night, waking up with one of my infamous hot flashes, and I’d hear mom gasping for breath, with a soft moaning sound that turned into a whimper.  I would sit up and watch her, my brows furrowed, my heart aching.  If it kept on, I would nudge her slightly awake, so that she would close her mouth and breathe from her nose instead, the nose which had the cannula of the oxygen tube.  Then she could breathe, and I would be able to fall asleep again.

Her cardiologist had put her on a huge dose of Lipitor in mid-December.  My brother—at least twice her weight, and with cholesterol levels much, much higher than hers, was on 10 mg per day; she was on 80.  The theory, as we understood it, was that it was a jolt-dose, a purposeful systemic shock—but even so, it was unnerving.  Especially since the medical listings of Lipitor on the web included “enervation”, “exhaustion”, and “weakness” as possible side effects.  We made her promise to go to the doctor after we left to find out exactly why she was put on such a high dose, and see if he wouldn’t lower it.  In the meantime, I suggested that she simply halve the pills and take half the dose.

The day before we were supposed to leave—after my brother and family had left themselves—we went out on a drive to the lake, to see the (vile, mean, odious, scary) geese who had chased me and grabbed my pants legs and pecked the back of my knees in a vain search for bread while I was videotaping them.  It was chilly, but bright.  The dotter and I wandered around, she fed the ducks and geese, I took photographs…and mom stayed in the car.  Yes, it was chilly, but this was not like her.  She said later that day that every day she felt just a little bit worse.  Not a lot.  But enough.  And she was hardly eating at all.

That night, in the kicthen, as I was giving her a hug, I leaned my head on hers and whispered in her ear, “Would you like me to stay a bit longer?”  She reached up her hand to cover mine on her shoulder and said softly, “I think…yes, I would.” 

Hi, all…I’m still in Arizona, and will be for a few more days.  Mom (GrannyJ) isn’t feeling all that hot, and I decided to stay on longer than planned, so I can ferry her to doctors to have her looked at and her meds examined and all of that kind of stuff.

For those who have had to change/cancel flights, a word of warning:  Travelocity customer support told me that the cheapest replacement fare (if we were to change our flights) was going to be $1500 (give or take a few dollars) per person.  At the same time, I was looking at the Travelocity search, and for the same day, I saw many flights in the range of $500 to $700.  Something was just Not Right.  So I went ahead and cancelled the tickets, and we now have a credit to be applied to the rebooking, so even with the rescheduling fee it will be much cheaper.

Later, gators.

ETA:  Oh, my!  I totally forgot:

Happy New Year!  May 2010 be a wonderful year for you all!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have returned.  We had a lovely time visiting with GrannyJ and OmegaBro and family.  We swam, we walked, we visited, I worked (multiple days, bah, but it was mostly my own stupid fault), we hung out, we got lots and lots of sun, and OmegaDotter now is no longer scared of bugs but is busy collecting them (courtesy of OmegaBro and Niece and Nephew).  I got lots of dark nights (yay!) and some stars (yay!) and lots of clear electric blue skies, ponderosa pines, and monsoon storms.

But I will discuss those things in more detail later.  Maybe.

The most important thing, though, was that I managed to locate and contact One And Only True Love’s family in secret and managed to get the dotter up to Small Mountain University Town for a visit with him without her knowing what was going on.

I lied my head off to do this.  I told her I had looked them up in the phone book and couldn’t find them.  I told her the surprise I was working on didn’t work out.  When I said we were going up to SMUT, with a stop at Slide Rock State Park, and she asked if we could please, please, puh-leeze find a way to meet up with OAOTL, I shook my head with a sad smile and reminded her that I couldn’t get their information and didn’t remember where they lived.

Hah-hah!

So we did Slide Rock, then motored on up the hill to SMUT, and she fell asleep–worn out from playing, and I had to drive out one of my favorite roads hoping I could time her rise from her nap to coincide with us getting back into the right neighborhood at the right time.

Which I did.  (Picture OmegaMom with a smirky, triumphant grin right now.)

At which point–she was awake and excited to be back in SMUT–I said, “Hmmm.  Now I think I can remember where he lived–wasn’t their house down this way?” and turned off the road onto another, and then another, and she started recognizing things and got excited.  I pulled the car to a stop across the street from their house–which had been painted so I couldn’t recognize it when I went scouting–and she said, with great excitement, “That’s it!  That’s his house!” 

I said, doubtfully, “Hmm.  I’m not sure, love, it doesn’t look the same to me.  But maybe we could knock on the door and see if they know where he lives now.”  We went across the street, up the deck stairs, to the door, and before I could even ring the doorbell OmegaDotter was trying to open the screen door, and OAOTL’s mom was there, and OAOTL was barging out saying, “OMEGADOTTER!“

At which point, OmegaDotter became quite suddenly still and stiff and shy, which she has been doing lately.

Um.

Now this I had not expected.  I had expected her to swarm all over him like a crazed monkey.  I had expected her to stand with her hands clasped at her waist with a particularly goofy grin that she has when she’s over-the-moon happy.  I did not expect awkward silence.

At this point, I was terrified that everything was Going To Go Wrong.  But she pulled my head down and whispered into my ear to ask if this was my surprise, and said, quietly shocked, “You lied!  Oh, you bad mommy!”

So she and OAOTL sat, awkwardly, on different spots on the sofa while OAOTL’s mom and I made small talk.

OAOTL produced the most lovely, sweet drawing with “I LOVE YOU OMEGADOTTER!” written on it, and huge hearts, and two pictures of two kids holding hands, one in a boat.  OMG.  It was simply not the sort of thing you’d expect from a seven-year-old boy.  (OAOTL’s mom tells me that all of his “girlfriends” have looked just like her, and his latest had said something like “OmegaDotter, OmegaDotter, OmegaDotter!  I am so tired of you talking about OmegaDotter!” shortly before she stopped being his friend…)

The kids, however, were still not smiling or touching or anything at this point.  It was…just plain awkward.

Luckily, we had made arrangements to take them off swimming at the swanky new aquatic center.  By the time we got there, the awkwardness had evaporated: the dotter and OAOTL were chattering their heads off, and once we were in the pool area, she and OAOTL sprinted off to the waiting line to go down the immense water slide.  We hung out there for an hour, and then headed off for pizza at the cheap Chuck E. Cheez clone, and then back to OAOTL’s house for trampoline jumping and playing, and then it was time to go…

Both kids swarmed into OAOTL’s bedroom, scampered up onto his bunk bed, and started bouncing onto and off of each other and shouting “NO!” and “Can’t I spend the night?!” and “When can she come back?!”

OmegaDotter later told me I was the very best mom ever, and it was the greatest surprise ever.

Here are the kids towards the beginning of the visit, just beginning to warm up again:

And here they are when trying to avoid her going back to GrannyJ’s:

I now have address, phone number, and email address safely sent–via email–to all three of my email addresses, so there is no way we can lose them now.

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.

I am sitting in GrannyJ’s office, watching it snow.  Nothing is sticking here, but up the hill in Small Mountain University Town they have actually closed Small Mountain University due to “severe weather”.  Everyone–from the desk personnel at Budget Rent-a- place to the family friend we had dinner with last night–has made jokes about how “cold” it is here.  I just goggle at them, thinking, “You keep saying that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

(By the way, GrannyJ says that I needed to precede the previous post with the all-important words “After I got off the plane in Phoenix”, so that folks know where I am.  I am here [at GrannyJ's], and OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are back home.)

Even with the “winter”, though, and its associated cloudy skies, I am getting twice as much light here as at home.  Here, the sun rose today at 7:2 a.m. and will set at 5:22 p.m.; back home, the it came up at 10:13 a.m. and will go down at 3:34.  In essence, I get double the daylight.  Woot!  It makes an amazing difference.

In all, it’s just quiet and pleasant and relaxing, which is what I have been needing.

Back home, the first disaster was the Gingerbread Toast.  We had a lovely gingerbread house.  It was still being decorated, bit by bit.  It was awaiting the final touches at the hands of my husband and dotter, snugly stashed away in the oven.

You can see where this is going, right?

OmegaDad decided to make “hot dogs on a stick” for the dotter Sunday night.  This requires the broiler.  Alas, he had forgotten that the gingerbread house was in the oven.  The end result:  toasted gingerbread house, with charred decorations.  He has promised me that he took photographic evidence, so when I return home, I will post before and after pictures.

Tomorrow, I write about homework again…

I had promised GrannyJ that I would stop at Trader Joe’s on my way up to buy her some lemon-dill sauce and some tuna steaks.  I had a plan:  I would go to the TJ’s I know, at 99th and Thunderbird, then head on up the hill.  No problemo; the route was engrained in my head.  So I pulled out of the rental car complex and let my autopilot take over:  turn this way, turn that, get on I-17, drive, drive, drive, turn off on Thunderbird, drive, drive, drive.

I arrived at 99th and Thunderbird, and there was the familiar shape of the TJ’s mall.  But it looked different. Where were all the cars?  I turned across the intersection and pulled in, realizing, with a sinking feeling, that TJ’s was gone. Yes, I had the right spot:  there was the familiar shape of the TJ’s store front.  But where the “Trader Joe’s” sign had been there was only a fading memory burned into the creamy adobe by the sunlight, a dim shadow of where the letters had been.

Oops.

So I pulled into the Wells Fargo parking lot, pulled out the phone, called mom.  Sorry, I said.  I’ll be there in about an hour and a half.

I decided it would be fun to drive up 99th (the Lake Pleasant Road) up to the Carefree Highway, though I knew it would be painful.  The last time I had done the drive, the encroaching ticky-tacky boxes had been pushed further north, but surely there would still be some desert out there that I could drive through in the setting sun.

I drove up 99th, just getting into the swing of things, and was abruptly stopped at a T-intersection where 99th ended.  Before me was a mall, a swanky earth-colored eminence with neon lights advertising eateries and clothing stores.  The cross street was called “Lake Pleasant Parkway”.

Say what?!

I had to make a snap decision, and was not in the left-hand lanes…goodness only knows how things had changed further, and perhaps the better thing to do would be to just turn right, head back to I-17.

As I was driving the broad new parkway, expecting to head towards the highway, it started curving.  I noticed a cross street:  Beardsley.  Say what?!  That’s not right, I thought–doesn’t Beardsley intersect with the highway?  I kept on, but started looking ahead for cross-street signs.  And I realized that the setting sun was no longer behind me, but off to my right.

There ahead of me was Union Hills.  ACK!  Yes, I was right:  ”Lake Pleasant Parkway” had morphed from a possible intersection with the highway into something heading directly south–back the way I had come.  I turned on Union Hills, and saw that LPP had, at some point, turned into 83rd Avenue.

But despite this unexpected detour–which had taken an extra 30 minutes–I soon made it to the highway, and was motoring north through the edges of Phoenix…and passing yet another “Photo speed enforcement zone”.  They were littering the area on all the highways, and they were new.

I passed Deer Valley and hit construction:  a long, long passage of arrows pointing left, then pointing right, the highway lanes swinging this way and that, the Arizona Department of Transportation widening the highway and rerouting it.

I passed an intersection labeled “Jomax Road”.  Once, only 10 years ago, Jomax Road was a small dirt road that fed into 99th Avenue in the middle of the desert, a lonely sign on a 2-lane road, that led into an area of old 2-acre spreads with dowdy ranch houses.  Now, it was big enough to warrant an entrance to the interstate.

I passed the construction on the new, expanded interchange with Carefree Highway.  It was dark now.

The newness passed away; now I was on familiar ground.  Coming up on my bete noire, a development called Anthem.  Once upon a time, the road there was called Desert Foothills; now it was called Anthem Way.  Once upon a time, there had been a (for the desert) lush forest of palo verde trees, one of my most favorite spots to drive through in springtime, as the wildflowers carpeted the ground and the pale chartreuse leaves popped out on the trees.  When Del Webb came through and raped the desert to install its huge development out by New River, they made very sure to keep all the saguaro cacti–it was required by law.  But all the palo verde trees?  The thing that made that spot unique?  Poof.  Gone.  See, they weren’t required to do anything with them.  So they brought in their bulldozers and ripped them out of the ground to make way for hundreds of square adobe-colored McMansions.  McMansions purchased by people who wanted inexpensive housing near to Phoenix, out in the desert where the nights were an endless expanse of darkness filled with hundreds of stars.

Of course, now that those McMansions are there, with their associated street lights and porch lights and their carefully saved saguaros, the velvety nights with the tiara of brilliant stars are no more.

I’m sure the people who had lived in New River for years beforehand were pleased to have their night skies removed like that…

Most of the drive between Anthem and Prescott was the same, thank heavens.  Long sweeps of emptiness with a blob of lights around Black Canyon City, and scattered spots of light marking old houses out in the chapparal.  A small spot of newness at the entrance to Prescott, where ADOT is remodeling the old highway interchange, but not too much difference.

The past ten years have changed so much about this land I love.  The relentless expansion of Phoenix has chewed up an amazing amount of the desert, and it saddens me.  It especially saddens me to realize that–according to reports I have heard–many of those new houses, built to cash in on the real estate run-up of 1997-2006, are empty or on the verge of foreclosure.

Ah, well.  I am at mom’s house.  Her street is the same as it has been in the past ten years; the changes came here before that.  We spent yesterday visiting the local Gingerbread House Village, hanging out, and going out for dinner.  It’s quiet and relaxing, and I find I miss my dotter very, very much.

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.

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 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.

The seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on a carousel of time.
We can’t return
We can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Painted pony number one:  Five years ago Saturday, we met our dotter for the first time.  It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been so long already.  We’ve gone from a tiny little baby coming home for the first time:

To an almost six-year-old full of creativity and vitality:

Her first tooth to come out is just about out–it’s at that stage where it can lie almost flat.  We almost thought it was out tonight, but it looks like at least one more day, after all.

Our trip to Arizona has blindsided us with some Issues.  The dotter decided–unbeknownst to us–that it meant we were moving again.  Um.  Oops.  Then, since OmegaDad’s job is still fairly new, we had decided early on that he would stay only a few days, while the dotter and I would stay longer.  So I spent this evening in the bathroom with her in full-blown brokenhearted weeping mode–Daddy was gone, she missed him, I would be gone on Wednesday (a trip to the office) and would leave her all alone, and she first refused to believe we were actually going home on Sunday, and then declared in tears that she wanted to go home now, and then told me that Sunday would never come.

Some kid point-of-view things just blindside you, y’know?

Painted pony number two:  A person who I have posted with for years on various debate boards died of colon cancer this week.  She was in her early 40s.

Painted pony number three:  Marguerite, coming up on her 104th birthday, had a bad infection that required her to be on antibiotics.  The infection and antibiotic combo, along with heparin, had her hallucinating and sleepless for three days and nights, unsteadily wandering the halls of her assisted living center and falling often.  No broken bones, but they finally hospitalized her, got the infection under control, figured out the right antibiotic, and got her to sleep.

But the assisted living center said they couldn’t handle her anymore, and she needed a nursing home.

Sigh.

So Great Grandma (my own grandmother) is now in a nursing home, and sad and confused.  Nothing tastes good.  She can’t hear well.  Her eyesight is going, with black spots in her vision that make her think there are black bugs wandering all over her food and her clothes.  And she, like OmegaDotter, wants to go home.  Imagine going to sleep in one place and waking up in another–with the intervening days and nights just vanished from your memory–and being told, "This is your new home."

I’m so glad that we had planned a party for Great Grandma, so that there were lots of folks in town to help my mom out during this extremely stressful time.  But it’s so sad for us all–we have been spoiled…Marguerite was still bowling up until 1999, she was still out playing bridge at the assisted living center two years ago, she has always been sharp as a tack and filled with tart commentary and memories.  Having her in this state is…heartbreaking.

This evening, at bedtime, the dotter quizzed me:  "Why is Great Grandma like that?"  And I had to explain to her that Great Grandma is 104 years old, that most people don’t live that long, that she’s wanting to go home and is having a hard time realizing that she has a new home, and that she’s just tired tired tired.  So in the midst of all the upheaval, all the worries about moving again, the dotter is learning some other things that are very difficult to process.

Parenting is hard sometimes.

Life is hard sometimes.

But I’m so glad we have the dotter with us.  I’m so glad my family can pull together like this.  I’m so glad we all have each other.  Because it makes the hard stuff more bearable.

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(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.

OmegaDad was out in the field for a few days, and the dotter and I were able to leave the house later than normal (due to not having to drive him to work).  So, this morning, when we left the house at 7:10 a.m., and it was dark, I was surprised.

It darkened my whole day, actually.

It was chilly and gray and windy, and it started out dark.

I’m afraid that my 11 years in Arizona, plus my years in sunny San Francisco (really!) (well, okay, the sunny East Bay), plus my 3 years in Arizona prior to that, have caused my body to think that sunlight is the natural state of things, and grey, cloudy, chilly, and windy is not.

So I spent the day in a major funk.

Hells bells, what is it going to be like for me in the middle of winter if I feel this way now?!

In addition, my underbrain keeps telling me that it’s too early in the year for heavy-duty jackets, that the sun will shine and things will warm up.  This is okay for me–I’ve got a Polartec fuzzy that I wear which covers quite a range of temperatures, and I know enough to put my hands in my pockets when they get cold.

But for the dotter, hmmm.  We’re used to wearing mainly fuzzies and light jackets, with the heavy stuff broken out only on severe days, and immediately consigned back to the coat hooks to wait for another batch of severe days.  In other words, we don’t have any suitable jacketry for the dotter.  Who, by the way, does not know enough to put her hands in her pockets when they get cold.  So we need to order the child a decent jacket/coat combo that will keep her warm down to, say, -15F.  And boots.  And snow pants.  So we have to measure her.  But we haven’t found my sewing stuff, which is where our soft measuring tape is.  (Don’t worry:  I’m going to use string instead, and things will get ordered this weekend.)  (Yes, we can buy stuff here, it’s just that I’m tired of asking the dotter if she likes this one or that one, and having her go “Eh”.  I’m ordering some stuff from Lands End, and if she doesn’t like it, tough.)

I go outside in the morning, and my underbrain says, “Hey!  What’s with this chilly stuff, dammit?!  It’s not supposed to be chilly yet!  Where’s the sun?!”

In Arizona right now, the sun is rising at 6:15 a.m.  The sun sets at 6:30 p.m., whereas here it’s setting around 7:30.  But I’ve got the feeling that it’s not the total amount of daylight that counts, but the timing of that daylight–same amount of daytime in Arizona as here right now, it’s just shifted.  And, after 11 to 15 years of my body seeing late morning sunrise as the equivalent of deep winter, my underbrain is flummoxed by a late morning sunrise meaning the end of September.

As a result of all this, my body has kicked into winter mode.  The main evidence of this is that my body desires sleep all the time.

Wah.  Wah, wah, wah.  I’m down and grumpy.  Call the wahmbulance.

When we first moved to Arizona, we lived in the area of Former State Capital.  OmegaDad would drive up to Small Mountain University Town on Monday mornings, and return on Friday evenings or when his field trip was over (at first, this was ten days out in the field, six days off).  I would drive down to the Valley of Death on Monday mornings, stay with Great-Grandma in Sun City, and then drive back on Friday evenings.

Then OmegaDad’s job switched from term-temp (a two-year stint) to permanent.  This is a Big Thing in fed work, and a Good Thing.

We knew that we could now depend on being in SMUT for quite a while, so it was time to look for a home.

The bankers we contacted pre-approved us for what was, to us, an ungodly amount of money.  We shook our heads at each other and decided we’d look for something more in our range–which was, alas, quite cheap for SMUT.  (Even then, housing prices in SMUT were outrageous.)

One place our realtor suggested we look when we gave her our price range was Mountainaire.  We wanted Kachina Village.  Or Munds Park.  Anyplace away from the train noise.  (I can live with train noise; I grew up in Chicago and almost always lived near the El.  OmegaDad, however, thought that train noise would always intrude–he didn’t realize that the noise fades into the background when you live with it.)

Mountainaire was a small enclave in the forest, with about five hundred houses, half of which were used only in the summertime weekends by vacationing families.  Once upon a time, it had been a logging camp.  Then it became a vacation home area.  At the time we were looking, it was becoming a place for first-time homebuyers, young couples just starting out.

As we drove through there, our immediate reaction was:  “We can’t live here.  It’s way too hippy-dippy for us.  We could have lived here ten years ago, when we were young, but not now.”

The roads were dirt roads.  The houses were mostly teeny tiny.  There was a plethora of trailers-in-blankets–small trailers and mobile homes that had been covered over and expanded upon. 

There were oodles of cute little A-frames that were (maybe) one bedroom. 

There were a slew of houses that had simply accreted over the years, as owners had added on and added on as they got more money. 

And scattered throughout, there were newer homes, especially at the back, up on the hill. 

Rumor had it that one house, somewhere in Mountainaire, had a septic tank that was made of an old Volkswagen bus that had been set into a hole in the ground…

But we simply couldn’t live there.  No way.  We wanted Kachina Village, a slightly more upscale enclave across the highway.  They had paved roads!  And natural gas!  Woot!  Up-town style, dudes!

But I found this house on the internet.  It was a log home (we had always wanted to live in a log home–we had spent a few evenings rhapsodizing about log homes when we first met).  It was cute.  It was up on the hill, so it wasn’t as dusty (the houses at the bottom of the hill, where the one road entering the enclave came in, were subjected to large amounts of traffic and dust).  So I sent OmegaDad off to look at it.

He says he walked in the front doors, and said, “This is it.”

So we ended up living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods after all, for nine years.  And we loved it.  We loved our neighbors.  We loved the little store at the foot of the hill, owned by J and S and S’s parents.  We loved the feeling of community.  We loved that we could walk a few minutes and be out in the middle of the forest.  We loved that, on snowy days, we could pop on our cross-country skis and ski down the street into the forest.  We loved the pizzas and steaks from the Mountainaire Tavern.  We loved that we knew the guy who walked his ancient old dawg every day, making sure he went slowly enough so that his arthritic companion could keep up.  We loved that, by the time we left, we knew almost everyone who lived there, and most of the vacationers who returned year after year.  Scruffy and down-at-the-heels as it looks, it has character and community.

OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump moved to Arizona in 1981.  I was 22.  Everyone in the family was amazed.

OmegaGranny had lived in Arizona, on and off, as a child, and remembered the Arizona mountains fondly.  Her mother lived in Sun City, near Phoenix.  She had aunts and uncles who lived there, also.  So as she and Uncle Grump were nearing “retirement age”, she kept propagandizing Arizona as a place to move.  She and Uncle Grump subscribed to a real estate catalog for Arizona, and began daydreaming.

One day, out of the blue, the family got the word:  Uncle Grump, who had hardly ever left Chicago since he returned from Japan after World War II, had not only gotten on an airplane to fly to Arizona–spur of the moment!–but had signed for a piece of property in the central Arizona mountains in a nowhere spot on the map called “Wilhoit”.  OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump were moving!

After they moved, I spent all my vacations out there with them.  I’d fly out, drive up to the spot on the highway called Wilhoit (miles away from anything resembling a real town), and we would spend a week or two driving the backroads of central Arizona, exploring canyons and forests and Indian ruins.  They were in the (lower) mountains, and the view from their house went on forever–rolling foothills, dark canyon slashes across the hills, mountains in the distance.  As the days progressed, the light from the sun would shift angles, and every moment, the old view would morph into something new and beautiful.

Now, if you speak to people about “Arizona”, the immediate stereotypical image they get is of saguaro cacti, deserts, coyotes, and the Grand Canyon.  (In the typical tourist’s mind, the Grand Canyon is somehow smack in the middle of the desert.)  And Phoenix and Scottsdale.  So the generic view is that Arizona is all desert, all flat, all dry, and always 110+F in the summer.  It was my view, too, as all I had to really define the state was my visits to grandma in Sun City–which is definitely not the way to experience Arizona.

This wasn’t the Arizona my parents introduced me to.  The one my parents showed me was, in my mind, heart-rendingly beautiful.

So after a few years of visiting them on my vacations, and realizing that I was crying on the way back to Chicago, missing the mountains and the wide open spaces and (of course) my mom and dad, prompted by my dad having back surgery, I decided to move out there.

It was great.  There was only one problem:  money.  Where mom and dad lived (they had moved into the city that was 18 miles away from their spot on the road, because they were spending all their time there anyway) was a cute town, and very pretty and piney, but there was a distinct lack of good jobs.

So I moved out to the Bay Area, got a good job, paid off a whole slew of debt, decided to go back to college and finish off that damned degree, met Mr. OmegaMom-to-Be, and moved to (ugh) Lubbock to be with him (trust me, this is a sign of True Love).

As Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be finished off his Master’s degree in soil science, he started looking for jobs.

At the same time, he was currying favor with the in-laws by sucking up to OmegaGranny.  To do this, he regularly shared gardening tips, cool info he could come up with related to his degree subject, and anything more.  He knew that there was a government agency that had–free for anyone who wanted the information–surveys of various areas.  He called up the state soil scientist of Arizona so that he could get the survey for OmegaGranny’s area.

They started talking.

It turned out that there was going to be a survey of the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead starting that summer.

It just so happened that Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be was due to graduate with his master’s degree that summer.

State soil scientist told Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be to keep in touch.  MOMTB did.  And that summer, as mentioned, the surveys were opening up and being staffed.  MOMTB applied, was accepted, and there we were…

…moving to Arizona.

But not the Arizona of the stereotypes–the Arizona of my experience.

Once, when OmegaGranny and I took the shuttle down from Former State Capital to the Valley of Death to visit elderly relatives, we were stuck with a young man from the East Coast.  Philadelphia?  Baltimore?  Boston?  I can’t remember.  But what I do remember is that he spent the entire trip complaining about how BROWN and DRY and UGLY and HORRIBLE Arizona was, and how he couldn’t wait to get somewhere where it was green again.

OmegaGranny and I just raised our eyebrows at each other…because, to us, Arizona is beautiful.  We see the high chaparral, with its junipers and pinyon pines dotting the scrubby grasslands, as glorious.  We love the stark beauty of the geology that is revealed by highway roadcuts.  We love the way the dun and brown grasslands turn vivid emerald green when the rainy season starts.  Walking in the piney woods when the sun has been baking the bark of the trees so that the vanilla scent makes your head spin…or smelling the sharp, metallic aroma of rain hitting the rocks somewhere within a 30-mile radius…clambering through the riparian tangles that line creekbeds as we look for a particularly good area of petroglyphs…The shshhhh of snow falling in the wintertime (yes.  You can hear the snow fall.) or the shshhhh of snow melting in the sunlight…the constant yammer of the ravens and the jays…the vivid flash of mountain bluebirds flying by…the splash of color from pink penstemon or vivid red Indian paintbrush or the crumped-kleenex look of prickly poppy flowers…

There’s no way to describe just how much I love the real Arizona, the one that so many people will never encounter.  I will miss it.  I hope to return “home” someday.