OmegaMom

I’ve been busy, because two and a half weeks ago OmegaDad suddenly discovered he had a (very typical) middle-aged man’s problem that needed “routine” surgery.  My last blogpost was written while we were waiting for the “routine” surgery.  Need I say that the phrase “routine surgery” has become somewhat…um…tainted for me after the past year?  After all, my mom had “routine” pacemaker surgery, and my dog had “routine” abdominal surgery, and both died.

So it was amazing how the tension went out of my shoulders as soon as I got OmegaDad back home from the outpatient surgery and things went swimmingly well.

Okay, they went swimmingly well from my point of view, not his.  He is still not happy, because the healing is taking longer than a day or two, and thus he can’t do all his normal activities, nor can he sit for very long and veg out at the computer, wandering the twisty, turny passages of the Intartubes.

The nice thing about the whole affair for me is that it has kept me busy.  I’ve been cooking, schlepping out to the chicken coops, mowing the lawn, reminding about pain meds, washing dishes, in addition to handling the dotter’s affairs—all of which is normally split between the two of us (mostly on his end; OmegaDotter’s schedule keeps me plenty busy normally).  The busy-ness has made it so that mom’s death has been pushed into the background of my mind.  Oh, it’s still there, and easily ramps back up when anyone wants to talk about it, but it’s been pleasant not to be constantly feeling like there’s that black hole in the pit of my stomach.

In the meantime, there are two stories I want to mention here that have caught my attention in the past week.

First off, there’s the press-and-blogger viewing of “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy”, a documentary that follows an 8-year-old from China who is adopted by a family from the U.S.  The film will be premiering on PBS in August; this is the trailer:

When I first watched that trailer, many months ago, it broke my heart.  I imagined OmegaDotter—also 8 years old—in that situation, being taken from her family of four years in the U.S. (Faith was living with a foster family for 4 years) to be adopted by a family from China.  I thought about how she would feel, what it would be like for her, and watching Faith cry that she wants to go home to China just…well…words can’t say how much that hurt.

Two bloggers—Malinda and Peach—were invited to the preview.  While I think that the original plan of the documentary was to be a feel-good happy-happy adoption story, they got a different feel from it.  Read their reviews (linked on their names) and see what you think.

The second story is that of the hoo-rah at ScienceBlogs.  The gist:  ScienceBlogs is a collective blog about (surprise!) science, with a stable of about 70 bloggers from all walks of science, including science journalists, medicos, physiologists, professors, physicists, biologists, archeologists, mathematicians, etc.  It started in 2004 2006 and has gained quite a reputation as the go-to place for science on the web.  This week, however, a blog was introduced called “Food Frontiers”, which was an “outreach” of PepsiCo.  It was given the same prominence as all the other blogs (all invited to join), but was obviously a corporate thing bought and paid for, though not explicitly labeled as such.  And, interestingly enough, while previous semi-corporate-linked blogs had been introduced beforehand, this one hit the SB front page with no warning whatsoever.

Well.  The shit hit the fan.  The question of the firewall between editorial and advertising was debated far and wide.  A subset of the bloggers left the site in response, with pretty candid “farewell” posts explaining why.  A number of other bloggers said they were dubious, at best, and were considering leaving.  One blogger sniffed that it was all a bunch of hysteria over nothing in a very disparaging way.  The management (and, probably, PepsiCo) decided that this was a Bad Scene All Around, and removed the corporate blog in question.  All that’s left is the post mortems.

I watched this with great interest.  My immediate response upon reading the original “hi, there!” post on Food Frontiers was, WTF?!  This is an advertorial, damn it!  What’s it doing not being marked as such?!?!  Ewwwwwww!!!!

For those who don’t know, an "advertorial” is what publishing calls advertising posing as editorial.  In the journalism world, such things are (alas) often necessary to pay the bills, but definitely clearly marked as advertising, usually done in a totally different design than the remainder of the magazine.  Including an advertorial in the midst of the magazine, using the same design, giving it the same editorial weight as writing by the staff, and not marking it (clearly, plainly, obviously) as advertising is a big no-no.  I mean, it’s taboo.  Really, truly.  As someone who spent 10 years writing and editing in business journalism, I can tell you (and those bloggers and commenters who think the whole uproar is a tempest in a teapot) that no matter how you feel about journalists and the ethics of mainstream media, when I say “taboo”, I mean totally, utterly, absolutely, no doubt about it, this is a line in the sand, TABOO.  You do not do this.  And if you do this, and someone finds out, and you are called out about it, you lose serious credibility as a journalistic source.

Period.

It’s like, say, having sex with your sister, that’s how taboo it’s considered.

I was appalled, myself.  I guess I have that verboten written upon my subconscious in letters of fire or some such thing; it was such a visceral response.

(Interestingly enough, I think mom’s response would not have been that emotional.  She was very pragmatic and less likely to imbue the journalism biz with idealism.  However, she would definitely have thought it was a sincerely bad idea, and rolled her eyes at how stupid it was for the management at ScienceBlogs to take that approach.)

Anyway, here’s a round-up of all the ScienceBlogger’s takes on the subject, and various commenting from other sources, courtesy of BoraZ (one of the bloggers at SB).  Alas, it’s not in chronological order; every search I’ve done on various search sites hasn’t produced one, so…start at anything dated July 7 and work your way forward.

::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.

I’ve got a little list of music to buy the dotter for Christmas, to go with her Big Present from me.  We’ve got some Don Henley, Elton John, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Petty, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, Feist’s “1-2-3-4″, Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, Taylor Swift, Kidz Bop, a Beyonce, some Chris Rock, a Sean Kingston, some High School Musical and Shrek…and to fill in the Chinese pop section, we have some Wilber Pan, Angela Zhang, S.H.E., and Jolin Tsai.

But I need some suggestions for classic or older rock, more C-pop, and new American stuff.  So, parents of 8-9-10 year olds:  What are your kids listening to?

Peach said, in response to my Dear Diary post:

I have to admit that when I read your response to her questions (maybe not given to her, but the ones you expressed ~ about it being unlikely that she could find her first parents, or her poster could get her parents in trouble?), it bothered me.
As adoptees we grow up completely believing what our adoptive parents tell us about the circumstances around our adoption. But when we become adults and find out more information (more than our parents said was available) it brings with it emotions that “just is” ~ nothing our adoptive parents could say or do will take them away or keep us from having to walk through the grief, no matter how hard they try. And it even more invalidation when we sense our adoptive parents are trying so hard to do this for us ~ to take away our pain, through their answers, honest or not.

It’s a hard balance.  I admit that I am a glass-half-empty person a lot of the time–one way of looking at it, though I prefer to think of it as “pragmatic” or “realistic”.  I do think it unlikely that, given what information we have, we could find anything, due to the fact that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.

Or at least, the information we were given says that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.  Which is one of the problems:  that information could be made up of whole cloth.  And we don’t know.

How do you carefully get this across to an almost-eight-year-old?  We don’t know.  Anything.  For sure.  How do you tell a child who hasn’t experienced a really big city just how many people there are there?  How do you explain that what information we have is a grain of sand on a big beach?  How do you say, “Even what we know, we don’t know that it is true”?

I have been very careful, all along, to say, “We think” or “we were told” or “the orphanage says” about these things.  But what one person says, another person may not hear, or may hear through a filter.  I say, “We think it must have been very hard for your birthmother to leave you.”  OmegaDotter may hear, “Your birthmother was devastated.”  I say, “The orphanage says you were left at the gates of XYZ.”  She may hear, “That is where you were left.”  How do you tell a child that adults lie about things like this?  She’s still at a stage where hearing me say “Bullshit!” accidentally when we’re playing B.S. (a card game–quite fun, taught to us by Aunt L. and cousins K. and I.) makes her gasp and say, “Oh!  You said the b…sh… word!  That means cow poop, but you’re not supposed to say it!”

Yes, I want to protect her.  Yes, I know it doesn’t help, in the end.  But the things that are wrapped around these questions are…well, more mature issues, questions of honesty and decency in adults, questions of the general ethics of international adoptions, questions of the problems of involving large amounts of money in the transferrence of responsibility for a small human being, questions of “human trafficking”.  I want her to know about these things, but in an age-appropriate manner.  So I start small.  I use weasel words, semantics…”we think”, “we were told”, “the orphanage says”…all of which are true, and all of which mean “this is information but it’s not the biblical truth”.  I have, in talking about her birthmother, told the dotter about the one child laws, and how they have changed; I have also mentioned that it’s possible her mother was young and unable to raise a child.  As she gets older, the more nuanced versions come out more.

Youngsters are concrete thinkers.  But as the dotter is getting older, she is becoming more aware that black-white thinking doesn’t always fit the world around her.  International adoption–hell, private domestic adoption, even adoption through the state–all of these have shades of grey on all sides.  So as she becomes more able to shade her own thinking about the world, so can we start offering more shades to her own story.

There are people who have searched for Chinese birthparents, with some successes.  Brian Stuy, of Research-China, has interviewed some birthmothers, and in Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China, Kay Ann Johnson also found and interviewed a number of Chinese birthmothers.  So birth families can be found, and some people have located their own children’s birth families.  Then I have heard tales of birth parents who have anonymously contacted people trying to locate them, pleading with them to not continue, because they are afraid of the repercussions.

There have been tens of thousands of children adopted from China in the past 15 years, and the number of located birthparents is still very small.

So:  How to say, “we will help you look” without it turning–in a child’s magical way of thinking–into “we will find your birthmother NOW”?  How to instill a realistic view of the probabilities?  How to find that balance?

The subject of international birth parent searching has also recently been discussed on This Woman’s Work and today on American Family.  Let me know what y’all think, too…

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.

The real estate agent who helped us find our house (and is a dear, close, personal friend of our ex-governor’s) is a relentless saleswoman.  We get letters in the mail with helpful tips and tricks!  We get–at irregular intervals–a coupon to a local ice cream store or dollars off on purchases at a locally owned business.  And, this Thanksgiving, we were given a pie, apple or pumpkin.

So, we now have a store-bought pumpkin pie for free, sitting in our fridge.

We have a turkey thawing out, alternately in the sink and in the fridge.

We have lemons and rosemary and garlic to stuff the turkey with.

We have taters, parsley, and cheese for OmegaDad’s trademarked Green Smashed Potatoes.  (Om nom nom!)

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

All that’s left is for us to put together the feast.  I will provide chopping and dicing; OmegaDad is le chef and I will do only his bidding in the kitchen.

It is time to list the things in life that make us thankful.  Really, it would be a good idea to do this on a regular basis; maybe the world would be a better place for it.  So long as it’s quiet and private and not trumpeted to the world.  My tidbits of thankfulness wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the world; they’re all small and personal and, face it, pretty damned selfish.  What I am thankful for, someone else may find picayune, and vice versa.

Number one on my list is OmegaDad.  This guy is an endless font of incredible spoonerisms and malaprops that leave me laughing at the same time as I am left in gaping awe at his inventiveness.  I have asked how he does it, and he shrugs:  it just sort of “comes out–I don’t do it on purpose…”  We have been together for almost 16 years, and I still find things to talk with him about, still find him gentle and sweet and thoughtful and intelligent.  And, dayum, he cooks up a storm, dontcha know!  This year’s focus has been bread, and we have been the recipients of yummy flatbreads, lavosh, pizza dough, challah, plain white bread, breadsticks, French bread, tortillas, and homemade hamburger buns.  Wow.

Next is OmegaDotter.  She’s just amazing.  OmegaDad recently challenged her to finally pin down her back flip, offering a differing amount of money depending on how long it takes her to get it solid.  In the course of a week, she has managed to reach the point of always flipping over and 75% of the time ending up on her feet again.  (The practice is on our bed.)  She is reading by herself, and we alternate nights when I read to her with nights when she reads to me.  Every once in a while she will bestow a piece of artwork on us that makes my jaw drop.  And she’s beginning to bring out more and more unasked-for flashes of empathy and moral grounding.  Yee-haw!

Then there’s GrannyJ.  She’s 82 and still going strong, walking her small town, taking photographs, blogging and nourishing a local blogging community, and challenging me with new and interesting science fiction authors all the time.

We have our health.  We have our house.  We have friends and family.  We have a standard of living that would make 70% of the world gasp in awe.

We had Kai for eleven years–that’s good.  We’ve discovered that chickens, though they may be pretty damned dumb, still have a lot of personality.  Our garden overflowed with vegetables, even though we were moosed at times.  We have long, lovely hours of sunshine in the summer to balance out the cold dark months of winter.

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. friends and readers, and generally thankful warm fuzzies to my non-U.S. followers!

Some thirty years ago, I got sick.  And sicker.  And sicker.  So I finally hauled myself off to a doctor somewhere (I do not remember where, or how) and got diagnosed with mononucleosis.  And tonsillitis.  And strep throat.  All at once.  It hurt like hell.  So this doctor prescribed antibiotics for the items that were bacterial, lots of rest for the mono, and some kind of painkiller so that I could actually swallow the other items.

I was supposed to pop the painkillers every four hours.

By the time a day had passed, I was having psychotic delusions that there were giant white rats and cockroaches crawling up the walls of my apartment.

This was not, I am guessing, the intended result.  I ended up calling a friend in the middle of the night, sobbing, and asking that she help me walk the stuff off, or at least keep me company until it wore off.  We flushed the remainder of the pills down the toilet.

This was my first introduction to the idea of idiosyncratic reactions to drugs.

Last Thursday, I got a sudden backache in an unusual spot–mid-back, right below my ribs.  I’ve had an on-again, off-again urinary tract infection, so worried about kidneys.  When the backache didn’t go away, and I kept getting sharp pains in two points directly over where my kidneys should be, I decided to haul my butt off to the doc-in-a-box Monday morning.  (The DIAB offices were quite full and it took forever.)

No bacteria showed in my sample (?!), but the doc decided to treat it empirically:  if I felt like it was my kidneys, probably the best thing to do would be to do some antibiotics and some UTI drugs.

Oh, and while we’re at it, here’s some Tramadol for the pain (”non-narcotic pain relief” quoth the doc).

So I sashay off, get the prescription filled, come home, and pop some pills.

Fifteen minutes later, I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open.  I staggered into the bedroom with a book, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.  I sat at the dinner table in a daze, ate a bite or two of food, then wandered back to bed.  At 7:30 a.m., the phone rings, it’s my wake-up call for the day from OmegaDad…I spend an hour awake–in a daze–getting the dotter up and breakfasted and out the door and realize it might be a good idea to email work.  I open up the email program, start typing my boss’s name.  Except I can’t type; it’s gibberish.  I take a deep breath, reposition my hands, and start typing again.  This time it’s only half gibberish.  I take a deep breath, reposition my hands again, and start typing one.  Letter.  At.  A.  Time.

And then I went back to bed.

The end result:  One pill.  Twenty-one hours of deep sleep.  Four hours after that of space-y zoniness; awake, but totally unable to be, say, productive or coherent.

Oh, I woke up here and there.  Let’s see:  the pain-killing portion ran out about six hours in, I know, because I came to enough to think, “Hunh.  It hurts again.”  And I woke up around 11:30 p.m., rested my zoned out eyeballs on the clock, and thought, “I really need to get up to write a filler post for NaBloPoMo.”  Fifteen minutes later, I did the same thing.  Obviously, nothing got done.

So now I know:  no more Tramadol–or related items–for me.

Maybe next year I’ll actually complete NaBloPoMo.  So close!  Wah!

The antibiotics seem to be helping, though.

(And I am totally amused that no-one commented on my defiant liking of Lady Ga-Ga.  I must have stunned everyone into awed and appalled silence.)

One of the joys of Teh Intarwebz is that you can hover on the cusp of current culture, dip in and out like a hummingbird, and still live your own old boring everyday life.

For example:  I have taken to watching shows on Hulu.com.  Alas, I am also aware that Hulu.com is talking about becoming a subscription-only (that means $$) service come sometime in 2010; having found Hulu, I am about to lose Hulu.  Anyway, enough grief; I have found that I can watch Glee and Stargate: Universe on Hulu if I miss those shows the night before, and am happy.

In addition, when brouhahas such as Kanye West’s drunken outburst disrespecting Nice Girl Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Video awards occur, I can scour the web the day after to (a) see what actually happened, and (b) get down with all the nominated music videos.

Which leads me to my headline.  Actually, “led me to my headline”–I watched the nominated videos and found…

There’s a new Star (use your joisey accent on that:  “Stah!”) in the pop music firmament name of Lady Ga-Ga.  Lady Ga-Ga sings catchy pop songs that drip sexual innuendo in music videos that are pop art celebrations of out-and-out (::gasp!:: ::OMG!:: ::catch me while I blush and faint::) lewd sexuality.  She wears nude body suits.  She feels herself up.  She feels up guys.  They feel her up.  She wears outre makeup.  She wears outre clothes.  It is a wild Warholian act; it’s also a wild dionysian act.

And damn.  I love her.

I am aware that some of my readers absolutely positively thoroughly despise her.  (I’m talking to you, PAgent!)  I am aware that my cachet as an intellectual pseudo-counter-cultural ex-almost-hippie is tarnished beyond repair by saying it, but there it is.

I think she’s hilarious.  I love her over-the-top persona, her over-the-top hair, her over-the-top makeup, and her over-the-top music videos.  (I will admit, however, that these are music videos I do not want the dotter seeing.  When the dotter arrived home one day humming the tune to “Poker Face” and saying she had to show me a video, I practically plotzed.  Who the #@!& was showing this smutty stuff to my seven-year-old daughter?!?!  And then she started singing the words, and I realized that she was smitten by a parody video.  Whew.  Crisis averted!)

Then I discovered some interviews of her.  And I loved those–she’s snarky and snotty and playing the interviewers and leaps upon sexism.  And I discovered plenty of YouTubery where she’s doing her hit songs in live venues, small clubs or radio stations, one-on-one, just her and her piano.  I loved those, too–she sings like a torch singer, then switches off into a staccato singing silliness, then back to the torch singer.

Lady Ga-Ga is a mix of early Madonna, Elton John at his most flamboyant, and…and…oh, damn, give me a name of a torch singer from the forties, please.  She is a character and a half, and I go ga-ga over her.

Here’s the parody:

Here’s the original–no embedding, bah.

And here’s a live version:

I’m busy reading Predator, by Patricia Cornwall.  It’s creepy.  Really creepy.  And confusing.  Judging by the reviews on Amazon, lots of folks feel the same way.  But, still…

Mid-day yesterday, my back started hurting right beneath my bottom ribs.  I have no idea what I did to it, though given the location worry about kidneys and stuff like that.  It kept on hurting throughout the day.  When the dotter came home from school, I grumped about it…the next thing I know, she brings me an ice pack from the freezer and asks where to put it.

Later that night, in bed, I was still hurting.  Half asleep, half awake, middle of the night, I sort of mumble an “ow!” or two.  The dotter has been sleeping in our bed while OmegaDad is out of town, in a nest of sleeping bag, her favorite “Chix rule!” blankie, a down comforter, her roll-up pink fake-fur kitty cat pillow, and a stuffed duck.  So there I am, dazed and asleep and hurting, and suddenly a hand reaches out, pats me three times, strokes me gently, and she whispers, “There, there.  It’s okay.”  And I go back to sleep.

Aw, man.  She’s a Good Kid, dammit.

Instant negotiation mode:  Anyone who has been a parent can recognize that.  It’s when the child asks for something, and you give an answer that isn’t what that child wants, and the child immediately starts pushing the boundary back.  It’s how “maybe” or “I’ll think about it” gets magically re-arranged into “yes” in a child’s mind.  It’s how “next Saturday” becomes “tomorrow” when there’s talk of a friend coming over, or “one piece of candy after dinner” turns into “three!  now!”

So we have told the dotter that we will be visiting China when she’s 10 or 11.  This immediately gets turned into “why not when I’m 9?  Or 8?” whenever it comes up.

Why not?  Well, there are finances.  A trip to China is spendy:  there are the flights, the hotels, the meals, the tours, the museums, the tour guides, more.  This means saving up money.  (Sigh.  Really.  I actually looked just now at real, current prices for heritage tours, plus prices for air fare.  So, yeah, 10…that would give us enough time to save up the dough.)  In addition, there’s the question of maturity.  A trip when she’s 8 is likely to become a blur when she’s an adult, whereas a trip when she’s 10 is more likely to leave specifics in the memory.

A trip to China when she’s young is not an “if”, though it may have seemed like it to some readers.  A series of trips to China is an “if”.  In a perfect world, we would have enough money to traipse across the continents whenever the whim took us, but this is not a perfect world.  (Actually, in a perfect world, she would have been raised by her birthparents, and this would all be moot.)  We are able to say “Yes, we will take you to China” once; we cannot guarantee more than that.

My international adoptee readers may not like that, but that’s the way it goes:  We can schedule one trip, we may schedule two, and it would be really nice but very unlikely to do more than that before the dotter hits college age and starts wanting to make her own travel itineraries, probably including such parent-pleasing destinations as Ft. Lauderdale or Baja California during spring break.

(Excuse me while I start hyperventilating and practically faint at the very thought of my darlin’ innocent dotter in the midst of the heathen sun-loving, fun-loving, drinking & debauching freshmen and sophomores who crowd into the resorts during spring break.  Specifically male freshmen and sophomores who might be eyeing her with lustful intent.  ACK!  La-la-la, I’m not thinking about it!!!!)

Ahem.  Back now.

My non-adoption-related blog readers may think we shouldn’t do it at all.  That’s what’s interesting being the parent of an internationally adopted child in these days of Ye Olde Interwebz:  one can read all the mutterings, meanderings, thoughts and rants and dispassionately logical layouts of adult adoptees, and become assimilated into the Adoption Borg–but not quite enough, at which point the non-adoption people in one’s life think that you have become totally and absolutely obsessive about adoption and you’re going to turn the child into a neurotic wanker as a result. 

The upshot of all this:  none of your audience is completely satisfied.  Well, phooey on that:  We’re doing what we can, the best we think we can, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go suck lemons.  Or something like that.  Mainly, we’re tootling along in life doing what we think is best, and trying to keep adoption issues and Chinese culture an open item to integrate into the family dynamic without turning it into the be-all, end-all, and still doing the normal school- and summer-camp- and gymnastics- and holiday-gatherings- and family-visits-balance in life.

November keeps going, and I keep posting.  But by this point in time, it starts dragging.  I open up the blogging software and stare at a blank page, thinking, “There must be something interesting to blog about!”

Oh, there is.

I have my little list of questions to answer, from earlier in the month.  There’s still the “did you ever think of a sibling for OmegaDotter?” and the “There are people who deliberately cut off the culture of heritage?!?!” questions.

There’s also the comments on my “Dear Diary” post, which I do mean to respond to.

I also have a “great ladies of the family” series of posts in mind, talking about my great-aunties and how really nifty they were.

Plus a few more book reviews.

But right now, here’s the reality:

OmegaDad is out of town, at Chena Hot Springs (very cool place, by the way!), doing a work retreat/training/study combo.  I am left at home, holding down the fort.  This makes me realize just how very nice it is to have both of us here, together, functioning as a family, each of us (including the dotter) doing different things to keep the family rolling right along.  Not necessarily a lot, mind you, but each of us contributing enough to keep the rest from feeling like there’s just too much to do and not enough time to do it.

For instance, when OmegaDad is at home, I can take an hour earlier in the evening to putter about, think about things, and have something to start with when I face that blank page.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the parenting schtick, which takes time away from the blogging schtick.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the pet schtick.  Right now, that means checking on the chickens to be sure none of the other girls are coming down with The Chicken Plague.

With OmegaDad away, if I have a sick headache (like I did this afternoon), there are only two choices:  suck it up and deal with things while I’m feeling like puking and crying, or else (which I did) retreating to the bedroom, napping, and (a) letting the dotter play ToonTown and (b) letting the dotter watch TV until I wake up feeling better.  The dotter was a dream, making sure that she only did ToonTown for an hour (the Rule) and making sure that, when she turned on the TV, she turned it down and closed our bedroom door so it didn’t bother me.

It all boils down to one word:  Wah.  Or a command:  Pity me!  Har.  As if.  The world is full of single moms, and I salute them, because I don’t think I could do it all on my own, all the time.

I’m very tired.

I’ve spent the day putting small amounts of medicated water into the beak of a very very sick chicken, who wasn’t eating and wasn’t drinking.

And now I have to wrap up a dead chicken and figure out what to do with her.

Then I have to figure out how to let the dotter know that yet another of our pets has died.

Somewhere in there, I want to go to bed and sleep for days.

Chickens may be dumb clucks, but they have personalities and character.  Sarafina was a very sweet bird.

…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…

Long ago and far away, when I was a teen-seguing-into-young-adult, I worked downtown in Chicago.  A block away from my office was Carson Pirie Scott & Co. (…sigh…), there were glamorous stores galore on State Street, and half a block away was the wondrousness that was Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore.  The paperback books were downstairs, and the science fiction area was tucked away in the back righthand corner.  It was a glorious spot for me to hang out in on rainy or snowy days, either during lunch hour or after work.

For a few years, I noticed a book on the shelves called “The Forgotten Beasts of Eld “, by a lady named Patricia McKillip, but never purchased it.  It had a stylized tapestry cover, with a white-haired girl surrounded by huge Beasts, and I would pick it up, read the back cover blurb–all of a paragraph long–and put it back, never being really tempted enough to buy it.  At the time, my 60 cents was better spent on Andre Nortons or (Oh, please don’t despise me!) Barbara Cartland (I swear, I swear, I stopped buying those things, really, truly, before she started writing in paragraphs one sentence long.).  (God, I can’t believe I am actually admitting to having purchased that woman’s books!)

Anyway.  One day, I broke down and bought the book.

I have been hooked on Patricia McKillip’s writing ever since.

The writing is lyrical, poetic, spare, sometimes haunting.  It is as if someone had taken an old myth, sung and storied for hundreds of years, and written it down as a novel.

Sybel is a witch, living isolated and alone on the top of a mountain, the daughter and granddaughter of cold, emotionless wizards who lived apart from humanity and “called” to whatever they wanted–including female companionship.  She has inherited a collection of Beasts, magical, wondrous creatures from myth and legend, who were “called” by her father and grandfather to live upon the mountain.  There is the Cat Moriah, there is the Falcon Ter, the Lyon Gules, the dragon Gyld, and most wondrous of all, the white-tusked Boar Cyrin, who speaks in riddles and koans.  (”The giant Grol was struck once in the eye by a stone, so that it turned and looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there.”)

All Sybel wants is to live her life with her Beasts and to find the Lyralin, a huge white bird with trailing wings, and “call” it to her.  But one day, her life is upended by a man in armor pounding at her gate.  He is carrying a baby.  He insists she take and rear the child, because it is the only place in the world where the child will live.

She takes in the child, saying she has cared for Beasts before, and surely caring for an infant can’t be that much different?

The warrior returns over the years at uneven intervals.  And between these visits and the growth of the baby, Sybel becomes drawn into the loves, hates, dramas and wars that pervade the outside world.  All the while, she is searching for the Lyralin, and begins being stalked by a mysterious, dark, foreboding being called Blammor. 

Darkness and light, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, isolation and immersion, and the nature of being true to yourself are all balanced in this book, written in a murmuring, poetic manner.

It’s short, it has absolutely no Dark Lords or elves or we-must-stop-the-end-of-the-world quests, but it ended up winning the World Fantasy Award the year it was written.  It was out of print for many years, and apparently McKillip does not regard it fondly, but it has been re-released.  I love McKillip’s later books as well, and would recommend any of them, but her writing is more…um…mannered now.  Beasts is McKillip as a fresh young writer, finding her voice, and it knocked my socks off 30 years ago (almost forty?!).

Okay, not the dark.  But definitely the cold.

The local school district had H1N1 vaccinations for registered students.  Having read tales of people waiting in lines for three, four hours to get the shot, I determined we should get there early.  We got there, not the first, but close to it, and waited inside the outer doors, but were not allowed inside the inner doors until it was Time.

In the meantime, more people came with their kids.  And more.  The airlock filled up with people.  And then still more came.

And these idiots propped the door open.

It was 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gah.

But once the time came, we got in and out within ten minutes.  The dotter and I went off to lunch together, then off to her gymnastics class, and then home again.

Not a sign of pain in her arm, not a whiff of fever, not a single side effect.  She was happy as a clam all day long.

“I’m as mad as hell, and I can’t take it anymore!”

Ahem.

What prompts this, you may ask.

This morning, after doing my exercise routine and showering, I sat down at the keyboard and started my telecommute sign-in process.  First, sign onto the VPN (virtual private network).  Next, start up the Remote Desktop Connection.  Then comes Outlook and, finally, Microsoft Communicator–the corporate kin of Microsoft Messenger, which requires a log-in to the campus network.

At which point, Remote Desktop bings and tells me it couldn’t connect.

So I try it again, and start reading my e-mail.

Then Remote Desktop bings again, telling me it can’t connect.

So I try it again, and keep it up.  This time, I get through to my “your password expires in three days” message, click on “no” to changing it, and go back to my e-mail.

Then Microsoft Communicator bings at me.

Then Remote Desktop craps out again.

Then Outlook shows a little message that says it’s “trying to connect…”

I snarl.  I send a message to my co-worker, saying there’s a problem with the network.  I finish reading an e-mail.  Microsoft Communicator politely informs me that it was unable to deliver my message.  I snarl again, and disconnect the VPN, to see if the problem is with that…I pull up my browser, try connecting to my blog, and sit and wait.  It brings up the main article, but not the sidebars.  The little whirly circle keeps whirling.

I reboot.

I pull up the browser again.  Same thing.

At which point it became obvious that I had to pull myself together and attack The Unholy Mess of Wiring behind the TV upstairs.

The Unholy Mess of Wiring is hidden behind an end table that has the TV on it, sitting in the corner of the living room.  The dotter has long since appropriated this area for her…um…let’s call it a “creativity corner”.  Every once in a while the unsightly heap of scrids and scrads of paper, various small toys, pictures, beads, markers, and what not overflowing the table, the wiring, the carpet becomes too much for me, and I corral the dotter into cleaning it up.  It invariably turns into a Horrible Chore that takes forever.

This time, I was on my own.  This time, I went through the whole area from top to bottom.  I threw out a half a garbage bag of scrids and scrads (no toys), some loose beads, string, wrappers, the backing from old stickers–you name it, it was there.  Then I pulled the table out from the corner.  I swept.  I windexed.  I re-arranged.  I got some clear tape and a Sharpie marker, located twisty-ties in the Anything Drawer, pulled out a variety of power cords from various techno-boxes, and started de-tangling, identifying, organizing, and tidying up the strands of cords and wiring.

The whole affair, from start to end (with a break in the middle for some bagels and cream cheese), took four hours and twenty minutes.

The network works again.  I was unable to figure out what the problem was, but it works again.

I now know which cord goes to which box.  All the cords are labeled.  The extension cord is secured in a nice small bundle.  The various cords are no longer a knotty maze, but easy to follow from electrical outlet to box.

But what a bloody pain in the butt it was.  Grrr.

Anne wanted to know if I’ve read any SF or fantasy that I might be willing to recommend (or pan!) to my readers.

I gulp fantasies.  Oh, mostly they’re all cliched and formulaic, but, dayum, I likes me some Dark Lord-on-the-surge/homebodies-who-get-caught-up-in-the-grand-quest/doomed-ancient-hero-families combos.  Then again, there are some fantasies that I’ve read that either take on the Dark Lord with a twist or a new viewpoint, or else have a totally different focus.

You get those in later posts.  (Hah!)  Today’s post is for hard SF.

As is usual, at my last visit to GrannyJ, I loaded up with some of her SF.  I have no idea where she gets these things; every time I visit the book stores lately, what I see is row upon row of vampire/paranormal fantasy (eh) mixed in with a few fantasy authors who specialize in fifty kazillion books all based on the same world, or even the same series (sometimes like, sometimes don’t), plus a plethora of military SF (which I actually love).  But mom is always coming up with New! and Different! SF books and authors who I have never seen.  This may be because the bookstores I have been patronizing are all chain bookstores aimed at peddling the SF-flavor-of-the-month (or year), and the devil take the offbeat or different.

So.  This trip, GrannyJ passed on a trio of books by a guy name of Richard K. Morgan; Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, also known as the “Takeshi Kovacs novels”.  As usual, again, her comment was, “You might like these.”

Call them SF noir.  The setting is about four centuries into the future.  Mankind has expanded to the stars, due to finding a slew of old arcane machinery…and associated buried cities…left behind on the planet Mars by a mysterious and long-gone alien race.  Really alien race, as in, “if you try to understand these sapients–or their architecture, or even their technology–you may end up going utterly and absolutely bonkers.”

At the same time, humanity has developed the ability to “re-sleeve” dead humans.  Sort of like an organ transplant, except it’s your consciousness that gets transplanted (after being carefully recorded by a cortical stack).  Taking Larry Niven’s concept of “organleggers” one step further, Morgan’s future is one of a society that gets new bodies for “deserving” people (aka “rich” people or “connected” people) by borrowing them from convicts, whose consciousness gets decanted into a holding pattern.  If you’re lucky, in a well-kept-up virtual reality; otherwise, a poorly-kept-up VR, or even nothingness.  Oh, yeah, and the criminal rings will steal bodies for use in re-sleeving.

Oh, yeah, there are criminal rings galore in this future.  Corruption pervades society from the bottom to the top.  Take Takeshi Kovacs home world, Harlan’s World (a nod to Harlan Ellison?).  It was originally settled by Japanese, some Mafia families, and Eastern Europeans, each ethnicity bringing with it its own take on the underworld.

Takeshi Kovacs was a low-level thug on his home world, until he was recruited into the super-elite Envoy Corps, whose mission in the end is to help the governing elite of the various worlds to maintain the status quo.  This sometimes means starting a war in order to put down revolutionaries who might actually, say, help the downtrodden regain a bit of dignity.  The upside of being an Envoy is being regarded as heroes by the upper-class, and as unstoppable by almost all.  Oh, yes, and you get a never-ending supply of re-sleeves.  The downside is that the military, knowing they can resurrect you, can send you into horrible situations over and over and over and over again.

That was then.  This is now:  Kovacs has long since left the Envoys and is now a sort of free-lancer, a mercenary-cum-detective.  He’s cold, cynical, hard-bitten, vicious, callous–and underneath it all, very idealistic and learning empathy.

The books are vivid, harsh, violent, profane, full of (to me, damned well-written) sex scenes.  There is a growing crescendo of anti-governing classes sentiment that starts (relatively) low at the beginning but blossoms and explodes by the third book.  There’s also the question of the ethics of re-sleeving (on both ends–the “sleevee” and the “sleever”) and what it means to be “you”.  What makes you what you are?  How much of who you are is based on your physical body?  Is love a physical thing or a mental/spiritual thing?  Underlying it all is the mystery of who were the Martians, how did they live, why did they disappear, and can anyone truly understand them?

Lots of interesting questions.  I highly recommend these books, but only if you’re able to handle really graphic violence and sex, and lots of it.

My father was a veteran–he joined the Army at the end of WWII, and spent a year or two in Japan as part of the Occupation Army.  My uncle, too, was a veteran, who was also in Japan at the same time.  I never knew whether dad joined first, or Uncle C.; they were best of friends beforehand, and Uncle C. returned home to marry my father’s sister.

My brother joined the army as a way to pay for college.  For two years, he was stationed in Germany and wrote long, funny letters to anyone who would send a letter back, illustrated with little comic characters and drawings.  Since I was one of the ones who wrote back, I got a lot of letters from him.

Just a thank you to all the veterans out there.

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.

The dotter was “grounded” today from playing at other kids’ houses or having them over, due to yesterday’s misunderstanding.  But we did send her off to “Parents’ Night Out”, mainly because I wanted a quiet evening with OmegaDad.

We rented a movie.  He bought smoked salmon and an array of cheeses and crackers, we had grapes and home-grown carrots and sugar snap peas and dilly dip.

We watched the movie (”Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”–sweet and odd and funny).  We ate.  We joked with each other.  It was relaxing and peaceful.

I have two or three post ideas rolling about in my head:

• In extremis - I read Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer.  There was a scene in there that made me think of this last year’s Iditarod race, and how people who choose to go into an extreme situation, a possibly competitive situation, may view “moral situations” differently.
• A slew of interesting adoption posts have hit my blog reader recently.  There’s the question of “should you adopt internationally/interracially?”  There’s the question of “should international adoptive parents try to ‘open’ the adoption/perform birthparent searches?”  There’s the question of international adoptive parents who deliberately close the door on the culture-of-origin.
• Q&A - Ask me questions!  I need post ideas!

Later, gators.

Remember this?

It happened again, this evening.

So, instead of relaxing and watching some nice dark science fiction (aka Stargate Universe), OmegaDad and I have spent the past 40 minutes dealing with OmegaDotter’s social life–or, currently, lack thereof.

Once again, she started making plans with A.–as in, “We’ll pick you up at…”–without sitting down and asking us first.

It’s not a lot to ask, I think.  I’d like to have her request that a friend can spend the night, and actually talk about it with us, before she starts making plans with that friend.

Not to mention, she had already asked a different friend to come over tomorrow afternoon.  (A friend whose phone number we do not have, by the way, so we can’t call his folks and say “It’s off, sorry!”.)

Not to mention, she had already asked me if she could do “Parents’ Night Out” at her gymnastics facility.

The result:  No friends over at all tomorrow.  No overnight.  And “Parents’ Night Out” only if (a) they have space, and (b) she behaves supremely well tomorrow.

I wanted to talk about other things in my post today, but I’m grumpy and tired and about to head off to bed to wallow in being Mean Mommy.

Our neighborhood is filled with dogs.  Big dogs.  Little dogs.  Dogs that go on walks with their humans.

On the whole, I find myself thinking of Kai less and less, though when the dotter brought home “Our Daily News” (in which the kids write a snippet, it gets compiled into a sheet, and the teacher copies the sheet and sends it home with the kids) where she had not one, but two snippets, about how our dog died…well.  That one made it suddenly come back again.

Anyway, I see the happy people walking their dogs and am wracked with jealousy.  “How come he still has his dog, when our dog died?!”

Totally irrational.  But it reminds me of how I felt in the throes of infertility:  “How come she gets to get pregnant, but I can’t?!”

The dotter’s friend A.’s mom is a veterinarian at a no-kill shelter.  The other day, she called to say they had a schnauzer that needed a home, and did we want him?

Right away, it was a gut-level, “NO!”  Too soon.  Still. 

Maybe next year it won’t be too soon.  In the meantime, there I am, jealous of people with their dogs.

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!

When the dotter becomes a famous artist, I am going to go around being such a mom.  “Did you see that new painting she did?!  Isn’t it awesome?!”  “You need to buy that sculpture of hers.  Did you know she was making sculptures out of construction paper when she was a tiny girl?  It’s only $3,000!  C’mon!”

Really.  I am in awe of her talent.  My mom, GrannyJ, is very artsy; she was always doodling and drawing and making hooked rugs and making psychodelic creatures out of papier mache.  I, however, find drawing hard.  Hard, hard, hard.  At my ripe old age of *cough* *ahem*, I have the patience to be very careful and do an okay drawing of a horse if I really, really try.

But the dotter…give her paper and scissors and tape and pencils or markers, and she’s off in a dream world, concentrating so hard that she doesn’t hear you.  (Of course, that’s no great feat:  she doesn’t hear you most of the time, anyway, so you end up getting louder and louder until she finally gets all huffy and says, “I’m going!” or “I hear you!” or some variation thereof.)

A few weeks ago she purchased a SpongeBob SquarePants book at the fall book fair.  She’s been reading bits and pieces of it, under duress–she still hates to read on her own.  (Wah.)  (I keep saying to myself that someday it will kick in; my gorgeous niece also hated to read at this age, but now devours novels.)  But I discovered the other day that she has also been…well:

Mind you, these are copies of pictures in the book, so it’s not original work.  But, dayum.  I can’t do that!  Any kid looking at these pics would (a) know who the characters are, and (b) think that some grown-up had drawn them.  Heck, I thought some grown-up had drawn them…someone who snuck into our house, used our paper and pencils, drew them, then snuck out again after leaving the pictures behind.

Did I mention she’s only 7 years old?  And that this wasn’t tracing, but free-hand?

She is so artistic.  It is so amazing.  And it has been there from the beginning; she has always wanted to draw, color, paint, create things.  I’m leaving her to it, letting her figure her own way around–the school has no art classes (none), due to the reading, writing and arithmetic scheduling resulting from NCLB edicts.  They’re lucky they still have recess and their one rotating “special” class.  I’m hoping that middle school will include art classes, but if it doesn’t, by that time she will have full confidence in her abilities and we will have to find an artist mentor for her.

Because art is like breathing for her.

Saturday night, OmegaDad snuck into my office, opened up a plastic bag from the local grocery store, and showed me the bag of miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that was inside.  “These were on sale–half off!  Hide this!” he commanded.  So I slid it into the drawer to the left of my computer.

The plan was, of course, that he and I could share it, and it would be safe from the dotter.

In the picture above, you see the reality of things.  OmegaDad should be a pusher.  I can see him now, dressed in a trenchcoat, leaning against an alley wall…as I walk by, he hisses, “Pssst!  Hey, there.  Want some cho-co-late, little girl?!”

The only thing that makes me feel better about this is that a serving size for these little diet busters is five pieces.  So, in reality, this is only two servings.  Only 440 calories–the majority of which come from fat.

And there is still one left in the bag.

Really.

And it will still be there tomorrow.

Really.

What am I doing?  Oh, I’m just going to get my coat and car keys.  Why?  Oh, no real reason.  Oh, no, I’m not driving off to the grocery store for more Reese’s.  No, no, no!  Not at all!  Perish the thought!

So here it is, November 1.  OmegaDotter’s friend, A., has been spirited back to his house after spending the night here.  The dotter and A. garnered plenty o’ loot last night, since I ferried them off to the neighborhood behind OmegaDad’s office, which has lots of houses fairly close together.  Our neighborhood is filled with one-acre lots, so it’s a pretty lousy spot for trick-or-treating…we had all of three T-or-Ters this year, which tromps all over our previous two years here, when we got big fat goose eggs.  None.  Zero.  Zip.  Zilch.  Nada.  Not…a…one.

To think I used to complain about the slim pickings back in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods!

Oh, well.  As I was saying, it’s November 1.  We turned the clocks back last night, and now the sun is rising at 8:30 a.m., instead of 9:30, and setting at 4:58 p.m. instead of 5:58.  The midday light here looks just like the end of a fine, long summer’s day, the shadows of the trees and houses stretching out across the neighbors’ lots.

The Time of Darkness rapidly approaches.

And, since it’s November 1, that means it’s time for NaBlaPoMo–the blogging world’s response to NaNoWriMo, wherein the blogger commits to writing a post every day for the month of November.  (Those who sign up for NaNoWriMo, like PAgent, are committing to write a novel over the course of November.)  I have done it for the past few years, never quite succeeding.

I’ve been a pretty piss-poor blogger lately, posting very irregularly rather than my previous almost-daily routine.  What can I say?  Mainly, it’s been because I haven’t felt like writing much.

So enters the dithering.  Shall I try NaBloPoMo?  Or sit this one out?

I think I’m going to try it.

Good lord.  Has it really been almost 2 weeks since I last posted?!  I apologize profusely.  Dunno why, but this year I have been in a total blogging doldrum; I come up with ideas for posts and then, like fog melting in the morning sunlight, they drift away, never to return.  Part of the problem, I think, is that Twitter posting has taken the place of my one-off blog posts, the quick-and-dirties that point to a news story or a very cool picture or what-have-you.  The other part is that I think my ability to think Deep Thoughts is atrophying.  This is not good.

But in the meantime…!

I have a new toy wending its way across the country to our doorstep.  I lamented a few weeks ago about trying to do any wildlife photography with our current point-and-shoot digicam, and said I wanted a STUDLY optical zoom.  So I hopped online and started researching.

This is what I ended up ordering:

It’s a Canon SX200 IS, with a 12x optical zoom!!!  Woot!  It is what is called a “prosumer” digital camera, halfway between a point-and-shoot and a digital SLR.  Judging by the reviews on Canon’s website, I will either love it or absolutely hate it.  There doesn’t seem to be an in-between.  What is most consistent is that everyone kvetches about the flash popping up whenever you turn on the camera–this is something I believe I can live with.  What is most amusing is that the people who love it say the low-light performance is awesome, while the people who hate it say the low-light performance is dreadful.  Hmm.  Our current camera’s low-light performance is utterly appalling, so this has to be better!

The Digital Camera Review called it “a solid, better-than-average performer in most respects”, and then went on to say it was a little bit “boring”.  That 12x zoom is not “boring” to me! 

It has automatic mode, but it also has manual control over the aperture and shutter speed, and supposedly can do ISO 1600.  I will be exploring that, to be sure.

Originally, I was supposed to get free shipping, but one of the drawbacks of living in Alaska is that many things that are available to folks Outside (e.g., “the Lower 48″) just aren’t available here.  Ground UPS service from Camera Kings is on that list.  So my carefully garnered rebate form is going to pay for 2nd day air.  On the one hand:  Humph.  On the other hand:  Kewl!

It should arrive Monday, I will start playing with it, and I will report further.

Onto other items:

First, Revere at EffectMeasure says you should get both the H1N1 vaccine and the seasonal flu; the rationale being that the H1N1 may slow down/fizzle out, leaving the normal seasonal flu to start doing its stuff in January and February.  So I am changing my mind on recommending only the H1N1 vaccine.

Secondly, I am finding myself missing Kai more than I thought.  In particular, whenever the urge comes upon me to go hiking (which it hasn’t much in the past few weeks due to illness and recuperation), I realize that we have been hiking together for 11 years…

Thirdly, the “not-flu” is the gift that keeps on giving.  OmegaDad is dealing with a “mild” case of pneumonia and finally seems to be doing better.  After a week’s worth of coping with a wonky stomach, I am now off my favorite Frappucinos–every time I drank one, it made me feel nauseated.

The dotter suddenly wants the computer so she can go play ToonTown, so I am off…

The chores proceed apace, which is making me happy.  OmegaDad discovered the Internet Bonanza of American Girl doll accoutrements, and the dotter is agog.  And eager to buy, buy, buy!  Which, of course, means money, money, money!  Which leads to chores.

Ahhhh.  So the dotter is sweeping, and vacuuming, and cleaning the catbox, and sorting laundry, and carrying laundry back upstairs and putting it away (I know I mentioned every single one of these things before, but it’s so damn nice to have it done, even if I do have to follow around and give pointers and make sure she does more than a seven-year-old’s slapdash job).

OmegaDad has been making bread.  He recently made two loaves of challah, one for us, one for our next-door neighbor, who just got married.  The late afternoon sunshine just made the warmth and goodness pop out in the picture.  Aren’t they purty?

Also enjoying the afternoon warmth was one of our cats, Wooly.  Piggy, the scaredy cat, rarely (if ever) ventures upstairs, but Wooly is everywhere.  Including on our laptop.  Which means that, after I took this picture, I spent five minutes closing obscure Windows windows and making sure he hadn’t accidentally switched screen resolutions, or turned on Armenian language, or shut off all the keyboard shortcuts.  For reference, this was what he looked like a few years ago, when he was only five or six weeks old.

Our new chickens are laying eggs now–yay!  So we get a wide variety of egg sizes.  The big one is from one of our older girls; the little one is from one of the new layers.  Our Silkies lay eggs only a bit bigger than the little one, but the new girls’ eggs will end up as big as the one on the left in a few months.

Another shot of Cinderella, posing:

She starts second grade tomorrow.  She’s been wandering the house shouting excitedly about school starting; that excitement will disappear very soon.  Right now, she’s upset that her second-grade teacher is male:  “A dude?!  I don’t want a dude for a teacher!!”  There is an implied “WTF?!” in there that she hasn’t taken to using.  Yet.  (I, of course, am quite aware that she tends to get ferocious crushes on young men who are coaches or counselors or teachers, so fully expect her to be [occasionally] sighing about Mr. Snows.  When she’s not complaining about the homework.)

Oh, yes, and in the midst of all the early/mid August stuff, I totally spaced out that OmegaMom, the blog, is now four years old.  Whoa.

So, sitting in my comment approval queue for the past, oh, two weeks, has been this delightful little tidbit:

{Hey|Hi|Hello|How are you doing|What’s up|How’s it going|Nice to be here}, I {liked|{love|enjoyed}|read} the post. {Recently|Of Late|Lately} {I’ve|I have|I’ve become} been more {interested|engaged|curious} in chickens and {coops|henhouses|hencoops|chicken coops} myself. Been {looking|searching|looking for} around for a {coop|henhouse|chicken coop|hencoop}, or more {information|info} {so|therefore|and then|and so|thus|indeed|hence} anything that is {putting|setting|placing|positioning} me in the {right|good|correct|adequate|proper|faithful|true|accurate} direction is {very|really} helpful. There is a {lot|heap|great deal|tidy sum|bunch|plenty|mass|mountain} of {information|info|data} out there to {sort|screen} through.

Some dude or dudette has this script, see.  S/he’s supposed to troll the net looking for blogs about (subject), which, in this case, is chicken coops.  Then s/he’s supposed to select only one of each group of word choices.

But s/he was lazy, and this is what I got.  I found it amusing.  Now that I’ve shared it with y’all, I can safely delete it.