OmegaMom

To reassure all my readers that my life is not totally Doom And Gloom And Misery these days, I haste to mention that it has been time for the State Fair, and all the wonders that it encompasses, for the past few weeks.  What with OmegaDad being laid up by his elbow and me being busy packing the wound with gauze (ew yuck) (it’s all healing nicely now and hasn’t needed the gauze packing for a week, thank heavens!) and neither of us feeling particularly like exposing The Elbow to the exigencies of fairdom, we put everything off until this weekend.

One reason we couldn’t put it off any longer is that the dotter’s gymnastics facility was Putting On A Show, and the dotter was in it.  Three times in one day.  Seven hours of hanging around the fair.  In the drizzle.  Waiting for a break in the weather.  They cancelled the first show, and didn’t make up their minds about doing the second show until five minutes before show time.  But!  Then it went on, and the third show as well.

Alas, being in the show meant that all the kids had various restrictions, the most important of which was “NO RIDES”.  It seems that in the past, gymnasts went gallivanting off to enjoy the carnival rides between the shows, and often showed up for second and third shows green in the face and about to vomit and had to sit the show out.

In between various attempts to get the show going, I managed to catch this quartet of musicians who had gotten Fair Hair and face paint:

So we had the dotter hanging around with us in the drizzly grayness and not being allowed to do anything fun, except hanging out with buddies under the umbrella we brought along:

And a quick break for hula-hooping:

I got some pics of the performance, and a video (I may try some screen grabs later), and then ran out of memory in my camera.  Bah!  But here is a pic of the dotter waiting between portions of the performance:

The remedy for the lack of fun was for us to go to the fair again today.

Today was beautiful.  Sunny.  Clear.  Blue skies.  Warm.  Crowded.

The only clouds around were a few fluffy white clumps in the sky, and the drifts of lifting fog around the mountains.

Our first stop was the dotter and I joining forces to steer the little race cars around the track:

In previous years, she has provided the foot on the gas; this year she provided the steering and I powered the vehicle.  We roared past all the other cars, weaving in and out (at very low speeds) and had a great time.

We ate, we wandered, we purchased stuff—at good prices, amazingly enough, because today was the last day of the fair.  We all went through the Dungeon of Doom and shrieked at all the sudden noises, bangs, and ghosties.  Then the dotter and I indulged ourselves in carnival rides, which OmegaDad doesn’t like—we slid down the SuperSlide, we rode the super swings, we got in the spacecraft with the virtual roller coaster ride inside, we did the centrifugal tilt-a-whirl ride where you’re all standing up and the force is holding you against the outer wall…?

A sad side note:  as we passed one of the pony rides, I asked the dotter if she wanted to do it, and she said, “No.  That’s for little kids.  I don’t do that anymore.”  Wah!  OmegaDad whispered to me that she still liked to ride horses, it was just that she doesn’t like the going-around-in-circles pony rides anymore.  Still, it’s evidence that she’s growing more and more.

Then, of course, it was time for Fair Hair.  This year, rather than the spray-in paint that gets sculpted into wondrous structures, she voted for colored hair extensions.

Getting the first one put in:

And this is the final result:

The extensions supposedly last two to three months.  Luckily, the hair place also hands out a note on how to remove the extensions—for people who decide that their extensions are really just not what they wanted after all.  Or who get tired of them…

The finale to our time at the fair was the annual face painting.  This time, she got something called “SuperBling Princess”.  Yes, that’s really the name of the look.

It was amazing.  Apparently the face painter was so pleased with it that she took a picture of it to put on her wall; she said it was the best she had done at the fair.  It made the dotter look like either a Hindu goddess, a Bollywood star, or a Chinese Opera star.

After leaving the fair, we went off to a nice restaurant for dinner, and had multitudes of people compliment her on her look, including a nice old grandfatherly type who asked if he could take her picture to show the folks back in Indiana what real Alaskans looked like!

So.  Not all doom and gloom here.  I have located a therapist who sounds like she’s my type of people, and am about to organize some serious therapy work to deal with the ongoing grief.

In The Book of the Dun Cow, there is a dog, Mundo Cani, who joins forces with the hero, Chaunticleer the rooster and helps him defeat The Evil.  At times, Mundo Cani erupts into a miserable, lonesome howling of “Marooooooooooned!”  I read the book years and years ago, once, but that image always stuck with me, a sort of archetypal outpouring of grief and mourning and lonesomeness.

I find myself, at times, tempted to just throw my head back and howl to the world, “Maroooooooooned!”

Most of the time this summer, however, I have been merely frozen.

Like a rolypoly bug, I have curled in upon myself, not bothering to write the blog until nagged to by BlogHer’s automatic “We Miss You!” email that explains, sadly, that the ads are being withdrawn until the blog is updated.  Not bothering to look at my email.  Not bothering to respond to emails, or calls.  Not reaching out to local acquaintances.  Just sort of surviving, with a feeling of “One must go through the motions.”  Reading a lot.  Dealing with family things, but mostly with half a mind, or a pane of glass or frozen ice between me and everything else.

Now and then, I pull myself together and do something related to mom’s death.  At which point the ice shatters, and a piece stabs into my belly and I find myself gritting my teeth, pulling my hair, pacing, finally crying.  Afterwards, I carefully retreat back behind the ice, back where it’s safe and it doesn’t hurt.

It was a cold and rainy summer here.  It was sunny and warm here while I was in Arizona, dealing with mom’s hospitalization and death.  But shortly after I returned home, the gray horizon-to-horizon clouds moved in and the temperature dropped and it stayed chilly and drizzly and shadowy.  We broke a weather record for most consecutive days with rain, and the lovely little current-temperatures-versus-average-temperatures graph on Big City’s NOAA weather page showed consistently below average temperatures.  The sun didn’t come out until the first day of OmegaDotter’s new school year…

OmegaDad had his surgery early in the summer, and recuperated slowly.  Then, a week and a half ago, he awoke with a bump on his elbow—which I assumed was some kind of bug or spider bite—which, by the end of the day, had morphed into a horrible angry red baseball-sized swelling.  To give you an idea of how ugly it seemed, I was the one who insisted we go to the emergency room for it, since we had missed closing time at the local urgent care doc-in-a-boxes.  (Normally, I’m the one who wants to wait; OmegaDad accuses me of generally wanting to wait until he’s passed out on the floor before I grudgingly admit that he needs to see a doc.)  Anyway, the thing turned out to be a staph infection (not MRSA, thank heavens for small favors!), and we spent the week traipsing off to the osteopathic surgeon’s office on an almost daily basis to have it drained and bandaged and tut-tutted over.  The prognosis on Friday was if things hadn’t settled down by this Monday, he would have to go to the hospital to have elbow surgery; but, in the meantime, the doc upped his antibiotics.  This, thankfully, turned the tide, and by Monday the doc was most pleased and allowed us to stop packing the wound with gauze and let it start closing naturally.

So this week I finally wrote up an invitation to family and friends to our scattering of mom’s ashes, which we’ll be doing in mid-October.  This, of course, cracked the ice and led to a torrent of tears.  Then I retreated back again.  Tonight, I pulled together email addresses and sent it out.  There are more names and email addresses I need to get, but this is the majority of them, I think.  The ice cracked again.  Since OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are asleep, my outlet is here, at the blog.

OmegaDad wants me to find a grief counselor.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how to start.  As I am not religious in the least, I don’t have—or want—a priest or pastor handy to turn to.  And, as I am not religious in the least, I do not want counseling based in belief of heaven or hell or the afterlife. 

I am at a loss.

In the meantime, the season is rapidly turning towards autumn; trees are yellowing, leaves are falling, blossoms are fading.  Winter is on the way. 

Carrots.  Really!

We planted many carrots this year.  Many many many carrots.  And all our carrots grew.  We have spent the summer happily pulling a few carrots here and there and snarfing them down.

But now it is mid-October, and more than past time to be clearing out the veggie garden before the soil freezes and it becomes impossible to remove the veggies.  So OmegaDad spent the afternoon today pulling carrots.

Many many many carrots.

The picture above is one hod of carrots.  We had more than that.  (The moose did not get the carrots; the veggie beds are protected by PVC pipe-and-netting contraptions, covered with translucent plastic since things have started getting chilly.  The moose ignored the veggie beds entirely.  Alas, our brussels sprouts were not in the veggie beds.)

We also had a sink full of carrots:

We spent the afternoon trading off the task of cleaning carrots.  This is the end result:

You will note, above the sprawl of carrots, a bowl.  In the bowl is a loaf of bread.  This may give you some context as to how many carrots there are in the picture.  I might also add that the heap is about four inches deep, up to six inches deep at the center.

It’s a lot of carrots.

They’re very tasty–the frosts we have had in the past few weeks have sweetened them up amazingly.  They are almost candy sweet.

But, still.  It’s a lot of carrots.

(The song, of course, refers to bananas.  Mashed bananas.  “There were thirty…thousand…pounds…of mashed bananas…of bananas…of bananas…!”)

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

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

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

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

…and then goes to rescue OmegaDad.

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

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

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

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

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

And I didn’t have my camera.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came gray days and rain.

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

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

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

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

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

Ahem.

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

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

Um.

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

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

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

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

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

The view from the darkness:

Some bright white berries that caught my eye:

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

A clump of mushrooms displaying their undersides and looking voluptuous:

The dotter playing in the water:

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

The lake:

Some sunny autumn color:

And some more sunny autumn color:

Playing at the water’s edge at the lake:

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

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

And then I dragged her on a hike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some berries (not edible, I think):

Purty fall colors:

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

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