OmegaMom

Time to bite fingernails.

I hope the friend who says she will eat a Milk Bone at the dog park on Friday if Romney wins won’t have to!

On a more serious note:  The arguments I presented in my previous two posts about the election were the logical, rational arguments.  On the other hand, I have some major emotional reasons to vote the way I did.  Some of them include the fact that I have a uterus, and my daughter has a uterus.  Some of them include the fact that I have (and have had) some family members who are gay, and I want them to be able to have the same marital rights as I do.  One is that I have become fed up with the extremism of today’s Republicans; the very notion that Obama is a socialist just boggles my mind.  I cannot imagine a world where skin color is a reason to vote against Obama (check out the early tweets on #VoteWhite, sigh).  And more… 

I voted straight Democratic today (the first time I have ever done so), and I deliberately didn’t vote for Republicans who were running unopposed.

We shall see.

We have visitors.  One of the visitors has a camera.  She came along on my walk with the dawg to do some pics, and also took some while we all were at lunch in Town With Spanish Name That’s Pronounced The Same Way The One In Missouri Is Pronounced.

Me and the dawg, silhouetted:

The dotter, captured as she was laughing at about a photo she had snapped:

I really like it because she’s not “posing”.

What I look like currently:

And a happy, happy dawg, in mid-run:

I thought this might make a nice break from political stuff from all directions!

Three words:  President Paul Ryan.

Two words:  Financial de-regulation.

One word:  Choice.

On the first point:  Paul Ryan’s budget plan is a disaster for every aspect of the government except for the military.  Under his plan, non-defense discretionary spending (that would be spending on, say, the USDA, NOAA, USGS, NIH, CDC, NASA, etc.) would be cut by $1.17 billion dollars.  It would be roughly cut in half by 2021. 

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that there’s a helluva lot of Good Stuff™ coming out of agencies such as these.  (Conflict of interest note:  That would include my husband’s salary, benefits, and retirement, too.)  To use just a couple of examples, NOAA is the agency that correctly predicted that Hurricane Sandy would take a sharp turn to the west and head inland at New Jersey, and that it would combine with a strong nor’easter.  USGS is the agency that does volcano monitoring, which may not be a big deal in general, but in Alaska is a big deal.

Paul Ryan’s budget plan would also cut funding for federal disaster relief, Pell grants, and “revisit” the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform.

Which leads us to point number two, financial de-regulation, which Mitt Romney has said he is for.

Can I just say “ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR BLOODY EVER-LIVING MINDS?!?!”

Look.  You know what caused the greatest recession since the Great Depression?  Repealing the Glass-Steagall Act.  The Great Depression was caused by wild amounts of gambling on the stock market with borrowed money which was backed by…the expected gains from the gambling on the stock market.  Somewhere along the line, suddenly people realized that there was nothing backing up those loans, so they were essentially worth nothing.  The onset of the Great Recession was caused by the realization that the wild amounts of gambling on the housing market with borrowed money that was backed by…the expected gains from the gambling on the housing market was all a chimera, a game of smoke and mirrors.

I remember watching with open-mouthed amazement the prices of houses in our little Hippy Dippy Enclave In the Woods as they rose…and rose…and rose yet again.  At that point, I started following several “housing bust” blogs.  Some of them were written by wild-eyed end-of-the-world doomsayers, but some were written by economists or housing market analysts who were taking a clear look at the fun-house-mirror world of NINJA (no income, no job) loans, house flipping, mortgage derivatives, and derivatives of the mortgage derivatives.  When it all caved in, I wasn’t surprised.

For those of you who don’t really remember what it was like…there was a rumor that Henry Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, actually got down on his knees and begged Nancy Pelosi and other powerful congresscritters in a secret meeting in September 2008 to save Wall Street and the banking industry.

It was that bad.

While I don’t like George W. Bush and think his presidency was awful, I have to hand it to him and the congresscritters:  they hunkered down, put forth a bailout bill, and when it was shot down, put it out again and pulled in all their congressional IOUs to get it passed.  It was highly unpopular.  But I feel it was also highly necessary.  TARP was the first step in saving our country from the Grander Depression, in my opinion, with Obama’s economic stimulus the second step.

And all of this was started by financial deregulation.

Mitt Romney joked in one of the debates that he wasn’t talking about allowing people to start banks in their garages.

That’s not what I’m worried about.  I’m worried about another stupid round of high-rolling gambling suckering the U.S. into yet another round of wild “prosperity” that is founded upon…nothing.  And then staring into the financial abyss yet again, when my husband and I are retired and living on a fixed income.

My third point is choice.  I have a daughter.  I have a daughter adopted from China.  I have a daughter adopted from China because her parents had no choice.  Whether it was economic, whether it was seeking a boy-child, whatever—the entire cultural situation in China that produced the situations where there were “extra” girl babies being abandoned, backed by, in some cases, forced abortions…well…

I want my daughter to be able to have a choice when she becomes sexually active and (please no!) accidentally gets pregnant.  I want her to be able to decide what is best for her.  If she decides to have a baby and keep it, that’s cool.  If she decides to have a baby and relinquish it for adoption, that’s cool.  If she decides not to have a baby, and has an abortion, it is her choice.

I don’t want her choice to be dictated by old white men who think a few cells is equivalent to a living, breathing human being.

As recently as during the Republican primaries, Romney said he “absolutely supports” a Constitutional amendment banning abortion.  Paul Ryan, his running mate, is the author of the “personhood” bill.  Both have said they want to defund Planned Parenthood.  Both have supported laws that would allow companies to deny their employees coverage for birth control and abortion due to moral or religious beliefs. 

My personal belief is that my employer has no right to limit what female reproductive services my insurance dollars pay for.

Now, since the Republican primaries, Mr. Romney has backtracked on most of these positions.  He is attempting to re-position himself as a centrist to appeal to the independent and moderate voters. 

Which Romney should I believe?  The one who ran for governor of Massachusetts claiming he was pro-choice, then in 2005 vetoed a law expanding access to emergency contraception, then claimed he would support revoking Roe v. Wade in the Republican primaries, then claimed there was no legislation regarding abortion in his presidential agenda?  The Romney who was quite the hawk during the Republican primaries, or the one who pretty much nodded and said, “What he said!” to all of President Obama’s positions during the third presidential debate?  The one who favors financial de-regulation, or the one who said “Well, of course we need some regulation!” during the second debate?

The Des Moines Register seems to have fallen for Romney’s shift-to-the-middle stance, which they cited in their endorsement editorial.  But I can tell you from experience that hoping a right-wing candidate will actually be more centrist than he sounds is a Bad Idea.  I voted for George W. Bush in 2000.  Yes.  (Please don’t hit me!)  I voted for him thinking he couldn’t possibly be as right as he sounded, and that he was probably going to be a pragmatic centrist.  I thought Al Gore was too liberal.

Hah.  Look what I got.  You can believe I did not vote for George W. Bush in 2004.  I’m not going to fall for another “shift-to-the-center-now-that-I’ve-got-the-nomination” ploy again.  Besides which, as I stated in yesterday’s post, I am fully satisfied with Barack Obama as president.

Four years ago, during his campaign and during the presidential debates, Barack Obama promised a few things.

He promised to focus on Al Qaeda and responding to those who attacked the U.S. on 9/11.

He delivered.  Osama bin Laden is dead; the leadership of Al Qaeda is in tatters.

He promised to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

In December 2011, the last U.S. troops left Iraq.

He promised to put together a national health care plan.

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Health Care Act into law.  It isn’t the sun, moon, and stars we were all hoping for (I particularly wanted a public option), but it is a start.

He promised to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for U.S. military servicemen.

On September 30, 2011, that policy was ended.  Amazingly enough, our military forces are not in disarray as a result, and the world has not ended.

He did try to close Guantanamo; the prison is still open because…well, there are still prisoners, and Congress refused to pass a bill to cover the costs to transfer the prisoners to a facility in the U.S.

He did try to pass a cap-and-trade bill, but once again this was obstructed by Congress.

He has instructed the Justice Department to stop enforcing The Defense Of Marriage Act.

He signed the Lily Ledbetter Act into law shortly after he was inaugurated.

When President Obama was elected four years ago, the economy was in freefall.  The stock market hit its low in March, 2009, two months after Obama was inaugurated, but had done the majority of its fall the previous year.  The high of 14,164  for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was hit in October 2007; by late October 2008, it was already down to 8,451, and it wavered around that point for the remainder of the year.  Now?  The DJIA is back up around 13,000.  By the end of 2008, the U.S. GDP was plummeting by almost 9% for the last quarter of the year.  Starting with the third quarter of 2009, the GDP has been positive again.  By late 2008, the U.S. had lost 2.6 million jobs for the year.  Job losses continued, though slowing down, until March 2010, and have been on a continuous upward trend since October 2010.  Even though faced with a recalcitrant Congress, President Obama managed to get a jobs stimulus bill passed in 2009, and economists agree that without it, unemployment would currently be much higher and GDP much lower.

The world economy tanked in 2008.  There are countries out there—ironically enough, many European countries that Republicans consider “socialist”—that followed the austerity path, rather than the economic stimulus path.  Those countries are now still mired in deep recession and high levels of political unrest (Greece, for instance, is facing unemployment of 25%).

Climate change is on everyone’s mind right now (even though there was no mention of it during the presidential debates), what with Hurricane Sandy’s recent hit on the Northeastern U.S.  Barack Obama is aware of and his administration is quietly working on dealing with global climate change. The U.S.’s carbon emissions have dropped to a 20-year low, natural gas and renewable energy resources have become much more prevalent as energy sources for the U.S. during his administration, and U.S. auto MPG rates have been ramped up, with the most recent requirement going up to 54 mpg (average) by 2025.

I think Barack Obama did a hell of a job given the mess he walked into.  When he was elected, the Onion’s headline was “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”.  Why he still wants it is anyone’s guess (my personal opinion is that his poor performance during the first presidential debate this year was that he was wondering if he really wanted to deal with this shit for four more years).  But since he wants it, I’m going to vote that he gets it.

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

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

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

The dawg spent another happy day at doggie daycare.

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

More tomorrow.

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

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

Things are moving along!

Bella asked for an update on the move.

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

That is how the move is going.

::frenzied rictus in place of a grin::

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems that even though (a) I haven’t been writing much lately, and (b) I certainly haven’t been writing much about adoption, per se, when I do write a post, someone nominated me for the “Top 25 Adoption Blogs” at Circle of Moms.

I know nothing about the website, honestly.  So, for what it’s worth, I toss this out to my (few remaining) loyal readers:

One of the nice things is that I’m in good company.  Malinda of Adoption Talk; AmFam at American Family; Tonggu Mama at Our Little Tongginator; Heather, at Production, Not Reproduction; Shannon at Peter’s Cross Station;  and M3 at Do They Have Salsa In China are all also nominated, plus a smattering of adult adoptees and a whopping two birthmothers.

Go forth and vote for those who you think do best!  (I believe you can vote once each day, but am not quite sure.)  This is not, however, a vote-for-OmegaMom promo, as I think my dearth of blogging lately sort of makes an award like this moot.

In the meantime, I am serving on a grand jury for two days every two weeks and find it promotes a heavy dose of cynicism.  Criminals are stupid.  Teens do stupid things.  Fights get started over stupid things (chipped coffee cups, anyone?!  Dirty sheets?!).  Drunk drivers are stupid.  Lots of people stupidly drink or do drugs or sell drugs.  Women get into stupidly obvious bad relationships.  Most of the cases we see are depressingly banal.

I can see why police officers tend to be world weary and cynical, oh my how I do.  I’m only doing this for three months, very part time; they do it all the time.

Additionally, I am finding lots of things to be worried about vis-à-vis a tween who is much too eager to grow up.  (To her, that means “being a teen and having boobs”.)  Sex!  Drugs!  Creepy dudes!  The thrill of swiping someone’s credit card to buy (wheeeee!) towels!

(ETA:  Anyone have any idea why my badge—which I swiped directly from Malinda’s post, where it shows with a transparent background—does not have a transparent background on my blog?)

Meet Seward.  Seward is two months old.  He’s a mix of Husky and gawd-knows-what.  OmegaDotter’s gymnastics coach, upon seeing his huge paws, suggested he was part Saint Bernard.  Um, I don’t think so.  I also sincerely hope not.  My suspicion is part German Shepherd.

Anyway, he’s a puppy.  He does what puppies do:  He piddles on the floor (though he’s rapidly learning that going outside is for peeing, and we are rapidly learning his peeing cues), he chases the cats (only one of which has decided to emerge from hiding after two days), he chews things.  We are trying to teach him “Sit” and “No” and “Down” and “Leave it” right now, with more advanced stuff—such as “Heel” and oh-my-gawd-it’s-never-going-to-happen “Come”—for later.

(Chewing.  Sigh.  I just intercepted him and OmegaDotter’s hairbrush and her fancy-pants swimming goggles.)

Seward was a bribe.  Specifically, he was a bribe for the dotter.  This is because she had fulfilled the requirements for her previous bribe—no minuses for behavior in gymnastics—which resulted in horse riding lessons.  It also, alas, resulted in an immediate drop in her behavior.  OmegaDad, a firm believer in bribery, immediately put “puppy” into play as a bribe for doing well at the state meet in gymnastics.

Now.  I’m not a great believer in bribery, myself.  I feel like it sets the bribee up for exactly what’s happening:  once the bribe is earned, there’s no motivation for x behavior anymore, and y behavior sets in, instead.  However, OmegaDad had come down the heavy about the state meet, and was insisting she get first place and second place and I don’t know what all, and, naturally, it was Extreme Pressure for the girl.  So, while she was participating in the state meet, and doing fairly well though not as well as her best meet, I was giving OmegaDad the Hairy Eyeball about how he was being a hardass.  The dotter started out fairly good on the beam, but didn’t do so well on her second event, and worse on her third, and she was, at that point, stressed and unhappy.  (Besides, it being about a year and a half since Kai died, I was sort of wanting a puppy, too.)  The dotter produced a second place and two third places in her age group, plus a fourth place overall, and I declared that it was okay, and we would get a puppy.

I had forgotten just how time-consuming a baby animal can be.  Cleaning up the piddle and chasing after him every time I hear him sound like he’s chewing is very distracting.  But!  I have been taking him out for walks in the morning and the evening, and am now looking forward to going for hikes with him and the dotter when the snow and ice is completely gone.

In the meantime, I have a slew of blog posts brewing in my brain, so hopefully it won’t be as long before the next post as it was before this one.  We’ve been off to a Chinese New Year celebration, the dotter has been drawing cartoons, we have baby chicks we incubated and hatched, I finally saw the Northern Lights (but did not get any pictures, wah!), we all got sick for a week apiece, one after the other—it’s been busy.

(OMG.  The puppy found a large piece of foam rubber hidden away somewhere and totally tore it apart in about five minutes.  And I just diverted him from chewing some computer cords.  OMG.  Johnny was right, damn him:  On Facebook, when I announced the puppy’s arrival, he said, “Let the chewing begin!”)

Okay, so once again I failed at NaBloPoMo.  The month started with good intentions, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with, don’t we?  Right?

Anyway, the main reason I did it was to see if I could get my blogging mojo back.  And, even though in the end posting every day was not in the cards for me, it did, indeed, help jump start my blogging.

So, expect to see more of my posts in the future.  It won’t be every day, but it will definitely be more often than I had been posting recently.

In the meantime, a quick glance at our Thanksgiving break.

We built a snowman:

…and here’s a close-up of his merry face:

OmegaDotter did some sledding in our yard:

She and I dressed up for Thanksgiving dinner:

We went cross-country skiing on Saturday and Sunday, and I learned that you actually use your triceps when you cross-country ski.  You also use your inner thighs a lot, too, but I knew that one already.  Anyway, I ended up being almost comatose Sunday night and Monday as a result.

And we got a splendid speech from the dotter at Thanksgiving dinner.

Who?

This person on PostSecret:

I have never had such a instant gut-wrenching reaction of sheer rage.  This guy has no concept of ethics, morals, compassion, love.  I bet he gets a jolly ol’ private laugh every time she gets her period and collapses in tears at yet another cycle gone by without her dream of a second child—supposedly shared by her husband—fulfilled.

God damn.  You don’t lie to your spouse about something like that.

And then…then…to compound his lack of compassion and empathy for people other than himself, he sends the goddamn secret off to Post Secret.

Oh, yeah, big guy.  Way to go.  Now instead of fondling your precious secret to yourself every night as you “get it regularly”, you had to spew it on the internet, so that hundreds of women dealing with secondary infertility who can’t afford fertility tests have to wonder…

“…is that my husband…?!”

Is my husband the reason I’m having to cope with this hellish, horrendous, awful, miserable, cyclical misery?  Is the person who is supposed to love me and cherish me the one who deliberately put me into this pain?

Nasty, vile little man.  I hope one of those women wondering is your wife, and you stop “getting it regularly” when she finds out and kicks your sorry ass out the door as far as it can go.

It’s the end of Thanksgiving Day.  We’ve had our turkey and cranberry sauce and yams and beets and pumpkin pie.  We played in the snow and built a snowman.  OmegaDotter and I dressed up for dinner.

I’m thankful that this year is almost over.

I’m thankful that I have an amazing, thoughtful, creative, loving, smart, funny guy like OmegaDad.

I’m thankful that I have a talented, creative, smart, funny, silly, beautiful girl like OmegaDotter.

I’m thankful that I had GrannyJ for as long as I had her.  And Jean.  And my dad, and my oldest brother.

I’m thankful that I still have family members who I love and cherish.

I’m thankful that we’re warm and safe and reasonably happy.

Happy Thanksgiving to y’all.  I’ll show you OmegaDotter’s Thanksgiving speech—which she delivered before we started eating—tomorrow.

• OmegaDad had the tools to make the turkey because…he went out and bought them.  Well, not the Dremel, that has been his man-toy for quite a while now.  But the dried wheat stalks and the Indian corn and the turban squash and the (om nom nom!) dried apricots were all purchased Sunday afternoon to pursue the pumpkin turkey dream.
• School was out today, due to the ice.  School is going to be out tomorrow, because of the ice.  (Except at this point I think there may not be any “ice” left, because we’re basking in 39F temperatures at ten minutes to midnight in late November in Alaska, and it was pouring down rain half an hour ago.  All our cold weather has gone south, blasting down the West Coast and dumping snow and ice in Washington and Oregon.  I mean, really, folks:  Did you have to steal our –15F weather?
• 3cmum asked what I’m reading on the Kindle.  Right now, I’m reading Blackout, by Connie Willis.  Next up in my mental queue is Condoleeza Rice’s autobiography, because I read a review of it that sounded very interesting.  And if Jeanne Marie Laskas’ Fifty Acres and a Poodle is available on Kindle, I recommend it—it’s a heartwarming chick-lit autobiography type book from a lady who writes (wrote?) an ongoing column for a major newspaper.  She also happens to have adopted from China, too.  (After writing a few columns about infertility that made my infertility email list buds back in 1990 gasp, groan, and feel inspired to write letters to the editor.  Ah, me.  Those were the days!)
• Joe Miller has re-filed his lawsuit after being told—in no uncertain terms—by the federal judge that he had filed his lawsuit in the wrong court, that it needed to be heard on the state level as this was state law he was challenging, and that the federal court couldn’t do anything with it until it was settled (or not) in a state court.
• North Korea and South Korea.  WTF?!  Anyone have any ideas why it suddenly blew up like that?
• If you’re interested in a hilarious, touching, thought-provoking fantasy web-comic, go check out Digger.  It may take a few pages to get into, but it’s well worth it.  I am in the midst of re-reading the whole thing.

Today we had ice.  Early in the morning, OmegaDad headed out to work, made it up to the mailboxes, decided to turn back home, and says he had a grand old time spinning around and around at the top of the hill.  We got three calls from the school district—the first saying, “Use your discretion”, the second saying goodness-knows-what, since OmegaDotter got the phone that time, and the third saying “Core schools are closed”.  We didn’t care:  After OmegaDad returned home, we weren’t going to let the girl out onto the streets.

So while I was working (there are times when telecommuting is not good), OmegaDad and the dotter made cupcakes, and then we all finished up the pumpkin turkey.

…Whoa!  Say what?!

Oh!  Well, yes.  Yesterday, OmegaDad was about to sacrifice the un-carved Halloween pumpkin to make pumpkin pie filling.  The dotter was distraught that we were not going to have a jack-o-lantern at all at all.  OmegaDad, being the creative crafty genius that he is, come up with the idea of—rather than carving a jack-o-lantern—making a pumpkin turkey.

The creative crafty genius contemplating his blank canvas:

The first step—drilling a hole for the neck using the all-important Dremel tool:

The neck was an Indian corn cob.  OmegaDad and I were guffawing at each other (I’ll admit it:  we can be quite juvenile), and the dotter had no idea why.  I’m sure my readers do:

The first phase of the tail feathers was individual wheat stalks stuck into Dremel-drilled holes (there’s that damned turkey “neck” making me think juvenile thoughts again!):

Then we used the red husks from the Indian corn as a front layer for the tail feathers:

We did another layer of corn husk “feathers” behind the wheat stalks.  (While I was editing these pics, OmegaDad walked in upon this one and said, “What’s my daughter doing to that turkey to give it an erection?!?!”  Then he added, “You need to censor that picture so no-one gets any perverted thoughts!”  I considered a little rectangular censor icon across the front of the turkey, then figured…naaah.):

Somewhere in there, we added little wings to the side, but I got no picture of that.  Next: time to drill the hole for the head.  The head was a turban squash:

Turkey head installed:

The final product…googley (googly?) eyes, dried apricot comb, and all:

Here’s a close-up of the head:

I think it’s way cool.  I’m also very glad that we got that head on, and that it stayed on (we had to do some seriously glue-gun work to keep the stalk from…drooping…damn, I’m still feeling juvenile about the whole thing!).  It will become a centerpiece for the Thanksgiving dinner, sitting at one end of the table so that we can all see each other instead of having it LOOM in front of us.

School is already closed for tomorrow.  I’m hoping they close OmegaDad’s work…for two reasons:  Firstly, for his safety, and secondly…well…much better to have him around for the dotter to pester, instead of her wanting to pester me while I’m working.

Ah, such fun gymnastics is!  You have a meet in Big City at 9:30 a.m.  Which means you need to check in at 8:45.  Which means you have to leave Suburban Alaska at 7:45 (at least).  Which means you need to get up at oh-dark-thirty on Saturday morning.

Right?

Wrong.

You do it the way we did it, and drive to Big City the night before, rent a hotel room, and relax.  (And forget totally about a NaBloPoMo post.  Oops.)

Which we did.

The dotter, amazingly enough, got the second highest score in her group on the beam, did well on the vault, and not so well (but still good!) on the bar and the floor routine.

The girls from the four different gymnastics teams lined up to salute (ours are the second line from the right):

Waiting for their turn at the bar, while watching another team’s girls doing the floor routine (OmegaDotter on the right, with the French braid I have been practicing every day this week):

Since we had spent the night, we did not have to endure driving an hour through the heavy fog and the slick roads.  Yay!

The cold night air and the heavy fog produced a lovely batch of hoarfrost coating all the trees in Big City.  When we stopped afterwards at our favorite Japanese restaurant to eat lunch, I couldn’t resist the red berries with the frost spearing out like little porcupine quills.  There were some lovely dead leaves edged with the frosty spears as well, but, alas, the pictures are out of focus.  Bah.

I’m thinking one or the other might make nice Christmas cards…if I ever get around to doing Christmas cards.  Hah.

There it is, the huge blank expanse of my Windows Live Writer window.  It is begging for a substantive blog post, when all I can do is simply stare, dumbfounded, my mind as blank as the screen.

Boise.  Maybe I’ll think about Boise.

Maybe I’ll wander off to the living room to try and figure out how to re-start Netflix on our AppleTV.

Maybe I’ll cruise Amazon, looking for new and interesting books to read on my (precioussssss) Kindle.

Maybe I’ll ask my readers to ask me questions.  Help!  I am running out of things to talk about!

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.

Lisa Murkowski now has a 2,247-vote lead over Joe Miller, without the challenged ballots.  That is, Ms. Murkowski managed to get 92,715 hand-written, properly spelled, properly formatted, oval-filled-in ballots from Alaskans around the state.

I think that’s amazing.

There’s another 8,153 ballots that have been challenged by the Miller campaign that were counted by the state Board of Elections which are awaiting a judgment in a previously filed lawsuit.  From what has been written, those write-ins were mostly questioned on smudges, misplaced commas, dubious penmanship, and a certain number where the name was written in the same format used for the printed candidate names (e.g., “Murkowski, Lisa  Republican”).

But wait—!!!

Hold the presses!!!

Joe Miller has filed a lawsuit requesting a hand recount of his own votes.  Because he mistrusts the electronic voting machines.

Well, hey, I can understand that; I have a deep mistrust of the electronic voting machines myself, given my knowledge of computer programming and all the details that can (and do) go wrong.

I just think it’s amusing, that’s all.

(Alert readers will look at the headline of the story I linked and say, “Hey!  They say Murkowski has a 10,000 vote lead!  What’s the deal?!”  I merely say, re-read the details of my own post.)

My dad, looking intense.  Jean, pregnant with OmegaBro.  Eldest brother Dean, looking ready to erupt into a tantrum. 

All three of the people in this photo are dead now. 

I never thought Jean would go so quietly, so peacefully.  She was a feisty woman, strong, opinionated, rabidly, radically liberal, passionately involved with Native American culture, raspy voiced.  She was my dad’s first wife, and they were divorced not too long after OmegaBro was born.  During my childhood, the boys would come stay with us for one weekend a month, but they lived only two blocks from my grandparents, so I saw them all the time.  While there was a rather bitter anger between dad and Jean, it didn’t matter to us kids until we were older, by which time the anger was gone.

She would travel to pow-wows in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Montana, driving in her VW with the boys.  She wore her coarse, raven black hair in braids, always wrapped with Native-American leather wrappings; in the spring and fall she wore hand-made beaded moccasin boots everywhere.  Both were gifts from friends at the pow-wows.

I remember when OmegaBro got his Ph.D. at Small Mountain University.  My parents were living in Prescott then, and the brother’s commencement ceremony was at the end of winter semester.  They all were slated to drive up for the ceremony…but a blizzard swept in, so my mom and dad decided it was wisest to stay at home.  But Jean motored her way up to Small Mountain University Town from Phoenix, bulling her way through the blizzard in a tiny rental car, to see her son get his long-awaited doctorate.  Then she drove back down to stay with my folks, and they sat around and drank beer and talked late into the nights about all their friends from their younger, wilder days.

The lawn they’re standing on, in that picture?  It’s right in front of my grandparents’ house.  You’d walk straight down the street they’re standing next to for two blocks and end up in the small bungalow that she bought a few years after the divorce, the house that as of today belongs to the eldest son of the little boy in that picture.  The scene yanks me back to my childhood, to Halloweens at my grandparents’ house, the huge piles of dead leaves that swished and crunched under your feet, the tall graceful elms arching across the streets.  Memories of eating at Jean’s house with my brothers, playing with her half-wolf dogs and endless numbers of her Siamese cats named after sports cars.  Picnics at the beachfront park on Fourth of July, watching the fireworks.

The people are gone, the elms are gone, life has changed so much.

The moose have been tromping around our yard since twilight.  When OmegaDad went out to the garden to gather some thyme, he found that we had had a visitor who had very carefully removed all the fall flower garden detritus and stomped footprints into the moist soil.

(Yes, “moist”.  We have been frolicking in balmy weather; it has snowed, but the snow is wet and slushy, and the temperature has been regularly in the forties—FORTIES!!—here in mid-November.  The past month, temperatures here have been far above normal, as evidenced here:

The dark gray band is the “normal” range of temps; the red marks are what our temps have been for the past few weeks.  Let us not mention the dread words Gl0bal Warm1ng!  So, rather than slowly freezing solid, as should be happening now, our ground has become slurgy and saturated.)

Then OmegaDad heard thumps and bumps in the front of the house.  Peering out the living room windows, he saw Moose by the front porch.  So he went to investigate…

…and discovered that our flower boxes, normally perched upon the porch railings, had been knocked off, and that Moose had actually been upon the porch landing, and dragged a flower box down the stairs and over by my parked car.

That is one tenacious Moose!  No doubt, he found the remnants of our petunias to be particularly tasty.

The dotter now has two parts in the Christmas play, Becky Elf and Oliver Elf.  She didn’t get a singing role, which I actually think is a Good Thing, as she needs some experience on stage performing before anyone goes overboard (including herself).

Molly asked if I had ready Elizabeth Moon’s Ky Vatta series; indeed I have, and I liked it very much!  I also like the Heris Serrano series.  If you’re not into military SF, the first few books of the Heris Serrano series is actually much less military and much more…well…fun.  As in “funny”.  As in “SF romps”.  The later ones get darker and more military oriented, as the political scheming behind the romps in the first three books suddenly turns serious and deadly.  Or, at least, more deadly.

Spacemom and Georgene—Yes, the Kindle battery lasts longer with the wireless turned off.  Unfortunately, it’s still not lasting a long time for me, dunno why.  This means charging it up once every week or so, which isn’t a game-changer in the long term scheme of things, it just makes me envious of people who talk about not needing to recharge for six weeks or so.

Georgene—laid up with a broken leg (!! How’d you do that, lady?!)—says that her Kindle has become her “bed buddy”, and she is romping through old classics that are available free of charge.  I will have to check and see if Dickens is available; I have, in amongst our boxes in the garage, a complete set of Dickens that is about a hundred years old, and started working my way through it at one point in time…

Noreen says that she will never desert real live books, and I can certainly understand that.  There is something so…tangible about books, the smell, the way you can flip back and forth between spots in the book quickly (not do-able on the Kindle, unless you set a bookmark, and even then it’s unwieldy), the fact that you can actually read the ending of the book when you’re a third of the way in…Why, no, I’ve never done that, why on earth would you think so??? 

Kris wanted to know what version of Kindle I got.  This is the cheapest one, the $139 model with Wi-Fi but no 3G connection.  It is lightweight; you can, indeed, change the size of the fonts easily (though, alas, you cannot magnify any graphics, unless you’re doing their [excruciatingly useless] web browser or a PDF file, so anything like, say, maps or family lineages or fine line drawings are just pretty ornaments without any useful communication); you can collect books into collections, add bookmarks, add highlights, add notes; and it has a (small) QWERTY keyboard.  I looked at a few others, but the Kindle just felt best in my hands, and gave me the best reading experience in my quick in-person reviews.

Mrs. Jones says that her online acquaintanceship is filled with people who are having tough times now, with deaths and disasters and what-not.  I think that part of it may be that we are all of somewhat similar age, and so we are all facing similar problems.  (You should go check out the absolutely lovely afghan she made!)

More later!

I don’t know how J. is doing.  I called last night, forgetting quite how late it was in Chicago, and talked to her for a short while, enough for her to finally grasp who it was who was calling, for me to say, “I love you”, for her to say, “I love you, too”.  I could barely hear her over the sound of the mechanical devices helping her to breathe; at first, her voice sounded like it was coming from hundreds of miles away.

J. is my brother’s mom, my dad’s first wife.  Yet another of that generation, the one before mine, that is slipping away, more and more as the years go by, the losses accelerating.

My dad, seven years ago.  My aunt A., five years ago.  My grandmother, two years ago.  My mom, this year.

J.’s path seems to have been following my mom’s almost exactly.  She, too, had her lung collapse.  She, too, has been hooked up to a device to remove liquid from the lungs.  She, too, has been recuperating in a nursing home.  OmegaBro and SIL were trying to figure out how to take care of her from across the country; they were trying to convince her to move in with them, or to move into an assisted living facility, but she has been stubborn:  she wants to go home. 

I am an orphan.

My brother is soon to be one, maybe in just days.

We are moving on up in the ranks of family as graded by generational status.  Soon, we will be the “older generation”.  We’re not old enough.  It’s not time.  Surely we can have these people around for longer?  To guide us?  To be loved and love us?

This is making mom’s loss hit again; oh, not as hard as at first, but still…

Heh.  Every year, I try it, and every year something happens to keep me from posting one day.  Usually it’s much later in the month, but this year’s NaBloPoMo-interruptus came barely a third of the way into the month.

Nonetheless, I think I will try posting all the remaining days of the month.

What happened?  Well, there was an Epic Scene with the dotter.  OmegaDad threatened her with being taken off the gymnastics team.  There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  And shouting.  And OmegaDad—that gentle, kind, thoughtful man—lost it to the point where he stormed out of the house.

Um.

Usually, that part of the scenes is mine.  Or at least, I try for it, but am not allowed to by the dotter.  In this case, it was more important for her to be screaming at me and trying to wrench the phone out of my hands as I called the gymnastics facility…

Anyway, she and I ended up snuggled up in the big chair in the living room while I talked with Ling and MeiMei (her Chinese dolls) about what OmegaDotter had done and why Big Scenes are happening more and more frequently and blah de blah de blah.  The end result:  she fell asleep in my lap.  And then we woke up later, and I moved us into our bedroom, and we fell back asleep.  Somewhere in there, OmegaDad returned.  I slept until 8:30 a.m.  The scene was at 4 p.m.

This morning we had a Come To Jesus meeting with the dotter.

She spent the entire morning cleaning—not at our behest, mind you; this is one of her ways of dealing with stress and (silently) apologizing.  So we got rid of all the garbage in the living and dining rooms, and in the garage, and we swept and reorganized and she vacuumed the downstairs and the stairs and cleaned the catbox and and and…

Note to all who do not have children yet:  Raising children can be extremely hard.

And then this evening I had word that a loved one is in the ICU and probably going to die in the next few days.

Did I mention that this has been a shitty year?  Oh, yeah.

That would be me.

Tomorrow’s post will be a round-up.  Tonight’s is just…well, we’re having “control issues” here, and I think A Scene is coming up.  Bah.  The end result:  no desires for fun posts tonight.

In keeping with my mood, Joe Miller has started filing his lawsuits.

We kept the kiddo out of gymnastics tonight, so it was time to keep her entertained.  She went through the free sample lesson at Chinese For Smart Kids, copying down the pinyin, traditional characters, and the translations, then demanded we sit down with the first group of flash cards with the BYKI Chinese learning program together and did the same with those.  Then OmegaDad fed us homemade jaozi while we watched Wallace and Gromit in “A Matter of Loaf and Death” via Netflix.  Then it was time for an old National Geographic show on snow leopards, and then we decided to watch an episode of “Wild China”.

We’re finding Netflix very nice indeed, especially since it means no more Suite Life, Suite Life on Deck, Hannah Montana, or other such bad-behavior-provoking materials.  Yay!

And while she and I were curled up on the loveseat watching “Wild China”, she pulled out her box of markers and her notebook of paper, and produced these…

First, we saw—and she drew—the “Loin Dance”.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her it should be “lion”.

Then the show focused on some kung fu practitioners at the Shaolin Temple.  She produced the kung fu guy and handed him to me:

Next was some lovely footage of a rare type of Chinese ibis that almost went extinct, but is now protected and rebounding.  She handed me this bird:

The episode’s main focus was pandas, and the dotter finally handed me this panda:

I gleefully gathered them all up and, as soon as she was in bed and asleep, rushed down to the office to scan them for posterity.

While the past year has seen me slacking off on the blog, slowly posting less and less frequently—the blogging mojo having vanished into the mists, the past two months have seen a drastic drop-off in the amount of posting.

Ah!  But I have excuses, you see!

First, there are Facebook and Twitter.  All the little snippets that I used to toss into a blog post now go into Twitter, and a certain amount of more “private” stuff has sashayed off to Facebook.  So, since I no longer have a reason to use a snippet to turn into the inspiration for a full-fledged post, where I actually delve into the ins and outs of a particular subject (at least for a few paragraphs), many posts have died a-borning.

Then, there’s the fact that this past year, frankly, was a bitch.

Just a friggin’ bitch of a year, folks.

Miserable, awful, horrible, no good year.  Bad year!  Bad, bad year!  No treat for you!

A lot of my energy was diverted to things that were just vastly more important to me than the ol’ bloggeroo.

The past month and a half, however…well, there were two specific reasons for the dearth of postings.

The first is that the OmegaFamily traveled to Arizona to join family to scatter Mom’s ashes.  I may post about that later.

The second reason…?

Ah.

Well.

It’s this:

This is not a picture nicked from the Amazon website.  Oh, no.  It is my very own, personal time suck device, photographed on a piece of poster board that was splayed across the downstairs coffee table.

I succumbed, you see.

I may never go back to paper books again.

Well, okay, I take that back.  Any book that has pictures that are necessary to its essence—a pictorial encyclopedia, a “Where’s Waldo” type book, kids books with illustrations, technical manuals—things like that are absolutely useless on a Kindle.

The cons:  It takes a one-second eternity for the page to “turn” on the Kindle.  If you’re a voracious reader, the battery charge doesn’t last too long.  Also if you’re a voracious reader, the ability to buy a book online and have it immediately available is a dangerous, dangerous thing to your bank account.

The pros:  OMG.  It is so lightweight!  Great big books that required a certain amount of wrist strength to read in bed while curled up on one side no longer leave me with an aching forearm.  I can load up boatloads of books onto this thing.  It has word games available, even!  (Though they gobble up battery charge.)

Anyway, I have been buried in an orgy of military science fiction (my secret vice) (I re-read all the Honor Harrington books, one right after the other) and fantasy (oooh, all five books of the Kencyrath, no longer scattered through the boxes of books in the garage!), a new Charlie Stross “Laundry” book, the conclusion to the latest Peter Hamilton trilogy, a few novellas by John Scalzi and others, and more…All of which has eaten into my free time, and my brain.

There are lots of inexpensive e-books available.  Science fiction publishers have gotten onto the e-book bandwagon big time, which is one reason why almost all my books (with the exception of some Jack-and-Annie [The Magic Tree House] books) are science fiction.

Anyway, I highly recommend the contraption.  Just don’t wallow like I did and drop off the face of the earth…

(Psst.  If you’re interested in buying one—or some books—you can always use the Amazon search box on my blog, and I will receive mucho dinero [okay, a small amount] for each purchase.  ;-)  )

(The dotter’s thumb is All Better Now.  Well, not quite; it still hurts if she puts pressure on it, but thank the Kozmik All she hasn’t needed any ibuprofen at all today, so I expect it will fade into a distant memory within the week.)

The thumb swelled up.  The blood pooled under the fingernail.  Whenever the ibuprofen or acetaminophen wore off, the throbbing began and the tears woke her up.  At 3 a.m., she was half asleep, the pain hadn’t gotten too bad, and I was able to convince her to take medicine.  At 6 a.m., I was asleep, the pain woke her up all the way, and getting her to take the medicine was a pain in the butt.

Sigh.

I suppose by the time she’s a grown up, she’ll realize that it’s just plain easier to take the pain meds right away, rather than fritter away an hour throwing a hysterical fit about how much it hurts and how much she hates taking meds.

Yah, right.

Anyway, we hauled her in to the doc-in-a-box, who promptly wanted an x-ray, just in case.  There was talk about the growth plate being injured.

Now, I had heard about kids and bone growth plates, but never seen them or understood them, quite.  I always thought it was some sort of medico way of talking about growing outwards.  Well, duh—of course, it’s something that lets kids’ bones grow lengthwise.  And, amazingly enough, you can see them quite clearly on an x-ray.  So we asked for a CD of the x-rays just because they were so cool.  (And, luckily, they didn’t show anything broken.)

See those thing flat parts at the bottom of each bone, that look like bones themselves?  In an adult hand, they aren’t there.  What you’re looking at is a growth plate—“Growth plates are areas of developing cartilage tissue near the ends of long bones.”  The bones grow from the ends, where those growth plates are.  As the kid matures and the bone stops growing lengthwise, the growth plates fuse with the end of the bone.  You can already see how some of her palm bones (metacarpals) are beginning to fuse.

After the x-rays, we had the doc put a hole in the fingernail to drain the blood, which immediately released the pressure and made the dotter a happier camper.  She was fitted with a splint, which she thought was just about the coolest thing ever, and we headed home.

I, no longer being accustomed to the sleep deprivation of having a child wake up multiple times during the night, spent the next few hours remedying my sleep deficit.  I am amazed, looking back, that I was capable of coherency during those four years of the dotter’s ongoing sleep problems.  Thank heavens these days she sleeps like a log through the night, and if she doesn’t, she comes in, snuggles up at the foot of the bed, and lets us sleep in peace.  I do not miss those nights of constant interruption, believe me!

And then we spent the evening watching old movies and nature documentaries on Netflix.

We took the dotter to “Family Night” at school, and left there with her best buddy A. to go out to dinner.  While we were at dinner, she and A. kept darting out to the atrium to play on the various mechanical toys.  And somehow, while that was happening, she managed to get her thumb smashed in a door by A.

Oops.

So we are snuggled in, her thumb soaking in ice water (she wouldn’t do just a bag of ice, because it kept bumping the tender parts), and watching nature documentaries on Netflix.

Manana, folks.

Last week, the dotter brought home yet another of the endless reams of handouts you get from school.  Science Fair coming up in March!  Elocution contest!  Tryouts for hockey!  Early release day!  Election bake sale!

This one was for auditions for the school Christmas play.

OmegaDotter wanted to try out.

She was nailing it at home—speaking with expression, hitting the loud points, varying the voices.  And she sang her heart out for her dad and me.  She wanted to do the singing audition, too.

There was the obligatory lecture about how if you audition and get a part, then you have to be responsible for the part.  How she needed to know the lines pat days before the audition and then practice daily.  I also emphasized that the handout said that anyone who memorized the lines and did the audition would get a part.  (Hey, it’s elementary school!)

The audition was today, after school.  I cleared the snow off the car and drove (very carefully) the few blocks to school.  I located the dotter in her classroom and escorted her to the music room.  There were fewer kids auditioning than I had expected—for some reason, I thought there would be lots and lots, but there were only about ten kids trying out.  As each child came up, the dotter wiggled and mouthed the lines with them and (alas) gleefully whispered to me about where each one skipped lines.

She had decided during the week that she wasn’t going to audition for the singing part.  Now, when she tries, she can sing quite nicely, and I figured it would be a good part of an audition for her to do, so I kept encouraging her (quietly) to try the singing part.  The first few, she kept repeating that she wasn’t going to.  Then she decided maybe she would.  Then she decided she definitely would.

Then she got up to do the audition and decided she wouldn’t do the singing part.

When she sat back down next to me, she thought maybe she should have, after all.

I said she could always raise her hand and ask to do it now.  It was difficult trying to be balanced, to push gently for her to stretch her wings without PUSHING overboard, if y’know what I mean.

She dithered.  I reminded her that if she got a singing part, she would have to sing in front of people, and maybe it would be better to start practicing now.

Then she waited until everyone left, went up to the two teachers and asked if she could sing for the audition, too.

Which she did, and much, much better than all the other kids.  (Ahem.  I am not being partisan here; she really is a good singer when she tries.)

But Ms. Firmhand, the librarian, asked if there might be a problem with stage fright.  On the side of my body away from the dotter, I flipped my hand back and forth.  Once she gets going, she’ll do well, but it’s passing that point that is the hard part.

So:  Tomorrow, we find out what part she got (remember, the handout said anyone who memorized the lines was IN.)  In two weeks, I’ll be ferrying her back from school to gymnastics or home as she spends the 1/2 hour practicing until December 2, when the performance is.  Part of me hopes she gets a singing part.  Part of me hopes not.

Last night, I was reading election results on the web and just waiting, waiting, waiting for 8 p.m. to roll around so the Alaska polls would close and we could start getting our very own election results.

I thought long and hard about this senate race.  Lisa Murkowski—the incumbent—had been defeated in the Republican primary by Joe Miller, a Tea Party Candidate.  Miller had two things going for him in the primary:  a parental-notification proposition, which brought out the conservative pro-life voters, and the fact that Murkowski’s typical followers viewed the primary win as a sure thing.

Oops.  It wasn’t, and Joe won.

Lisa gave a concession speech, but then there were appalled moderate Republicans and independent voters across the state who begged her to find a way to run in the general election—run as a Libertarian! some cried.  Others said, run as a write-in candidate!  Save us from Joe Miller! most said.

Three and a half weeks later, Lisa announced that she was running as a write-in candidate.  Miller supporters sneered at her for being such a “sore loser”.  Democrats winced—they had hoped to garner votes for Scott McAdams from the vast Oh-No-Not-Joe! group of voters, but Lisa had name value, both as an incumbent and as the “heir” to Frank Murkowski, former senator of Alaska, who handed his senate seat off to her when he won the governorship of the state.

Anyway, it was a very interesting election season here.

As I said, I thought long and hard.  I knew I would never vote for Joe, but should I vote for McAdams—the one I wanted to vote for—or should I vote for Murkowski—the one I thought would win?

Decisions, decisions.

Lots of Alaskans faced that same choice.

In the meantime, Miller was doing lots of things that just made people very uncomfortable (such as having a reporter handcuffed and “citizen arrested” for “trespassing” at a Town Hall meeting), refusing to talk to reporters, arrogantly heading off to DC to check out apartments and look at decor options for his (presumed) senate office…

I ended up voting for McAdams, as did OmegaDad.

But yesterday enough people voted for someone so that Lisa Murkowski made history (or so we all assume):  “Write-ins” won 41% of the vote, Miller got 34%, and (alas) McAdams got 24%.

Of course Miller’s campaign has immediately lawyered-up, and the fight will be on.  Hopefully, it won’t be as long and drawn out and divisive as the Franken vote count was; in the Franken case, it was Republican against Democrat, and the RNC was backing its man with all the lawyers and challenges money could buy.  In this case, however, it’s Tea Party Republican against (relatively) moderate Republican, and the RNC wins either way.  There will, of course, be challenges and spats over “voter intent” left and right, but 16% of the write-ins need to be either not Murkowski or tossed out for Miller to win.

As I said on Facebook late last night, “I can live with Lisa. Would prefer McAdams, but Lisa Murkowski is better than Joe Miller.”