OmegaMom

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 email that explains, sadly, that the ads are being withdrawn until the blog is updated.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. 

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.

OmegaDotter bounced in the garage door, letting it slam shut behind her, kicked off her shoes, pulled off her jacket, tossed her book bag on the futon and was talking a mile a minute.

“Mom!  Mom, Joey’s family next door is moving out, and they want to sell the goat, can we buy the goat, please, please, I promise I’ll take care of it and it needs a home, puh-leeeeeze!”

Last fall, Joey’s family moved into the house next door.  We were delighted; the people who had lived there before had Mean Dogs that would chase me and the dotter as we walked back from the bus stop, that had invaded our other next door neighbor’s yard and chewed up one of their dogs, and would regularly raid our garbage can.  They also didn’t clean their yard at all, so it was totally overgrown and weedy—they didn’t even pick up the deck fencing that had fallen down onto the former lawn.  We were so glad to see that family go!  But Joey was a classmate of the dotter’s, he had brothers, they were a quiet(ish) family, and they cleaned up the property right away so it looked…decent…again.

And they bought a goat, Dottie.  The idea, I suppose, was that in time, as she grew, they could milk her.  The dotter was charmed.

At odd times during the winter, I’d be sitting in the dotter’s bedroom reading after we had done our bedtime routine, and hear her going “Maa-aah-aaah!  Maa-aah-aaaah!”  It would startle me until I remembered:  There’s a goat next door.  I’d worry vaguely about how she was doing in the cold, but other than that she didn’t impinge upon my life.

Until yesterday.

“No.  No goat!” I said.

“Moooom!  Puh-leeze!”

“NO GOAT.”  I said.

“Why not?!”

“Because I said so.”  Oh, what a great comeback!

She kept tossing various reasons why we should buy the goat, then reverted to calling me a meanyhead, and then her flighty attention got caught by something else and the subject was dropped.

We bought the first chickens after a bout of OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trying to wheedle me into a goat.  This came after years of OmegaDad trying to wheedle me into a llama.  No llamas, I said for years.  No goats! I reiterated when that particular flight of fancy caught their mutual attention.  But when they finally scaled back to something more reasonable—to wit, chickens—I finally said yes.

A goat, I know, would end up being Yet Another Responsibility.  Yet Another Animal to care for during those long, dark, icy cold winter days and nights.  Yet Another Reason to emerge from the warm house and go trudging across the snowpacked back yard.  Yet Another Expense in terms of food and shelter.  And, oh Kozmik All above use, Yet Another Reason for Vet Bills!

Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter did not mention the goat to her father.  But I knew it would come soon, so at bedtime, when I had crawled into bed and snuggled up against OmegaDad in the dark, I muttered, “Are you awake?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Joey’s family is moving out and they want to sell their goat.  NO.”  I said.

There was a silence for a moment, then he turned to face me in the darkness.  “Wait a minute.  I’m confused.  If it’s ‘NO’, then why are you telling me about it?!”

“Because I know that the dotter will try the classic end run where she asks you because she knows you’ll say ‘Yes’.  And I’m saying ‘No’.”

“I thought you were telling me because you wanted the goat.”

“NO!  I don’t want the goat!”  O panic.  No, no, NO, that’s not what I meant!

“Oh.  Okay.”  He turned back over and snuggled up against me again.

Then, in the dark, he sharply turned his head back towards me, in a silent version of a comic, “Are you sure?!”

I snickered.

He did it again, as if to say, “Now, y’know, a goat would be cool!”  I snickered again and poked him in the back.  He did it one final time, and I whapped him gently on the head.  “Enough!  No goat!”

We fell asleep.

Goatless.  Thank heavens.

Hail thee, festival day!
Bless’d day that art hallowed forever–
Day whereon Christ arose,
Breaking the kingdom of death!

I am not religious, in any manner whatsoever.  But I have lovely memories of Easter Sundays as a child, going with my grandparents to Easter service at a high Episcopalian church with The.  Most.  Awesome.  Pipe organ.  And singing that particular hymn, which is indelibly engraved on my memory.  The pipe organ would play the deepest notes possible, making the flagstone pavement vibrate, and then…then, when the Joyous!  Triumphant!  part of the hymns was hit, the trumpets making a blaring fanfare to celebrate.  (Much to my dismay, a long, detailed article about that organ is no longer available.)

So today was Easter.  Of course, we had an Easter basket for the dotter…but we had no dotter for the Easter basket!  She spent the night at her friend A.’s house, and blew eggs and dyed them and hunted them there.  So our Easter basket sat on the table, alone and forlorn:

(Note the mini basket up front, for her doll Ling.  Credit for this entire creation goes to OmegaDad.)

While we hung around (in blissful quietude!), OmegaDad was making pita bread, tortillas, and lavosh.  Yum!  The pita bread/lavosh dough produced a lot of gas, so much so that it looked like the rising bowl was going to…well, rise itself!

Eventually the dotter decided she wanted to come home, at which point she dove into the basket:

Inside the basket was a bounty of crinkle-cut paper confetti in many spring colors, in place of the green plastic grass that ends up being eaten by pets the world around on Easter day.  OmegaDad and the dotter decided to pile it on top of my head, topped off with a whirling yellow pinwheel:

Then she and I had to dye eggs, which is always fun.  We had a polka-dotted affair:

We had a starburst:

And we had one that really, truly looked like a planet.  It wasn’t just me who thought so; I was staring at it pensively thinking how much like Jupiter it looked, when OmegaDotter saw it and gasped, “OMG!  It looks just like a planet, Mom!  Let’s make it Saturn!  Let’s paint a ring around it!”  So I did; in fact, I painted two rings:

From this angle, alas, it looks either like the X chromosome or like an elongated infinity sign (the dotter’s notion, again) or an analemma.  (Windows LiveWriter, by the way, does not recognize the word “analemma”, harrumph.)

Our array of eggs:

I hope your day was as fun and filled with confetti as ours!

This past fall and winter, we had two hens die, so now that it is springtime, the husband’s thoughts lightly turned to—of course—new baby chicks.  So, this fine Easter weekend morning, OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trekked off to the local hatchery and brought back a Belgian Bearded d’Uccle Bantam (mille fleurs variety) and a Frizzle, both about two weeks old.  We now have Miss Frizzle:

And Millie:

They are happily ensconced in a heated plastic tub in the garage, and I am, of course, falling in love with them because they are so cute.

Yes, spring is rapidly springing here.  The snow has melted off the north side of our front yard.  Now, you’d expect it to melt off the south side first, but the south side of our yard is shaded by trees, so the north side gets freed up first.  In the back yard, the back two vegetable beds are now snow-free, and we have purchased black plastic to wrap the beds to heat them up and thaw the soil in preparation for planting.

In our rock garden at the foot of the kitchen stairs, one happy Leopard’s Bane is leafing out luxuriantly.  In the garden behind the house, the lilacs are budding their leaves. 

A mama moose and her calf have been wandering the neighborhood eating everything they can find that has sap running through it, so I am planning to cut up strips of Bounce to tie onto the lilac bushes (this is rumored to keep moose away).

The trees have pussy willows bursting out at the tops.

Today it unofficially hit 50F here in Suburban Alaska.

Spring!

Science fairs will be in late March, so OmegaDad decided to get started with some experiments with the dotter.  Unfortunately, the experiments are daddy’s ideas, but, hey, get the kid used to doing it, right?

Firstly, she was very possessive about “MY lab!”  In other words, I had to explain to her that real scientists these days were very open about their research (see PLOS) and, if they’re excited about their experiments, they’re very happy to have people in, show them around, tell them what the experiment is about, etc.

Anyway.  Since OmegaDad has been Doing Bread this past year (and very nicely, too!), and trying out sourdough starters with wild yeast, he thought it might be fun to see if you could get a sourdough starter from varying fruits.  He selected grapes and blueberries because both fruits have a blush on them; apples, because they don’t have a blush; and then we had a control of just plain ol’ flour and water.  Herewith the ingredients:

Then there’s the scientist herself:

Note that she is wearing “goggles”.  She was very concerned that everyone in her lab wear goggles, because, as she explained, “You never know when you’re going to get an explosion!”  Then she demonstrated how things would blow up:

Please note the “lab coat”.  Folks!  Let me tell you about this amazing new costume for your kids!  It’s a chef’s coat!  It’s a lab coat!  It’s two—two!—two coats in one!  OmegaDotter received a chef outfit for herself plus a matching chef outfit for her Karito Kids Ling doll, and has since taken to wearing the pink striped black pants as pajama pants or loungewear ever since, and when time came to do the experiment set-up, she decided it would make a fine lab coat.

What followed:  Placing one cup of blueberries into a Mason jar:

Mushing grapes before putting them into a Mason jar (an action shot!):

Explaining what comes next, and how you need to be careful (note the goggles again!):

Adding flour (we got a lot of flour all over everything, including the floor.  There were also a grape or blueberry or two on the floor, sigh.  Not that I really want you to look at our floor; please edit those shots mentally.):

Adding water:

Stirring (please note that we used different spoons for each jar, so that we had no intermixing):

She has the Evil Scientist pose down perfectly—“I have created LIFE!!!  Bwahahaha!”

And then, the finale, a “Ta-da!” pose:

And then she signed off with, “Thanks for watching Weird Science!”

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!

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.

OmegaDad has become quite proficient with building edifices out of gingerbread over the years.  And his dexterity with piping royal icing has become quite deft.  And, frankly, anyone who can figure out how to color icing dead black and bright orange deserves an A+ for ingenuity.

(Actually, it turns out that the way to do it is to buy the expensive food coloring at the local gourmet kitchen store.  Alas for my shattered illusions!)

He found out how to make ghosts out of fondant on the internet.  He came up with a way to make tombstones out of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies and white chocolate chips.  He is a dab hand at outlining windows and creating spiderwebs out of icing.

The piece de resistance was the roof, a square slab of homemade sugar candy, colored orange.

Behold!

We have ghosts.  We have tombstones.  We have little pumpkins on the steps.  We have spiderwebs.  We have gables.  Also, notice the way the side looks like a face…

I am most satisfied.  This one came out way cool.

A close-up of the path (made of rock candy) and front door (made of chocolate wafers):

Tombstones and a ghost:

The “ground” is Cocoa Crispies.

The “tree” is some twigs blown down by the incredible winds we have been having yesterday and today, anchored in a squished up caramel.  (We’re supposed to have gusts up to 75 mph tonight; when I took the dotter off to school this afternoon for “Trick or Treat Town” the mountains across the inlet, over by Big City, were obscured by what could have been fog, except that it was coming down through the passes, rather than up from the inlet.  The pseudo-fog was, in fact, dust being scoured from the various glaciers by the winds.  Big City was under an air quality advisory as a result.)

Some fun Halloween links:  The very best Mrs. Incredible costume…jelly jar candle jack-o-lanterns…a real-life Transformer costume (watch the video!)…an incredibly punny Halloween tale from Miss Cellania.

Enjoy your spooky day!

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…!”)

…because the dotter is sick with something flu-like.  The test came back negative for strep, negative for flu, but then the ped chatted up some other ped friends to discuss the sensitivity of the flu test, and given the dotter’s tendency to segue into she-should-go-to-the-hospital type pneumonia, the ped decided to treat it as if it were the flu.

Normally, I wouldn’t go hauling her off to the doctor right away after she got sick.  But given that there was a 10-year-old boy who died of H1N1 within a day after developing the fever up the road in Second Biggest City a few weeks ago, coupled with that aforementioned tendency to pneumonia, I figured it was time to be cautious.

The upshot is the doc prescribed Tamiflu.

(Don’t read the side effects for kids.  Just don’t.)  (I’m hoping we’re not any of the folks who get those side effects.)  (I mean, really, “may be at an increased risk of self injury and confusion shortly after taking TAMIFLU and should be closely monitored for signs of unusual behavior” just sort of raises the hair on my neck.  How creepy can you get?!?!)

The dotter has never done pills (really!), just liquid medicines and shots.   So when the doc asked, I said we should make it liquid…at which point it turns out there is no liquid form readily available, and there is just one local pharmacy that prepares the liquid form.

That pharmacy is, according to OmegaDad, The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  This is the result of him showing up at the pharmacy hours after we saw the doctor only to have them take half an hour to figure out that they didn’t have the faxed prescription, and more time thereafter to call up the doctor’s office.  OmegaDad was fuming when he got home, and said, in dire tones, that any further interactions were up to me, because he didn’t think he could keep from blowing his stack.

I call the doc’s office.  I offer to use pills, to introduce the dotter to the concept, so we can avoid dealing with this pharmacy.

The doc’s office calls back:  All the pharmacies in town don’t have the pills in the right strength, so we’re back to The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  But TWLCP can’t get the preparation done before they close. 

Oy!

It’s quite the distraction from the oh-OmegaDad-isn’t-going-to-step-on-Kai-on-his-way-to-bed feeling (Kai liked to sleep next to OD’s side of the bed).  The we-don’t-need-to-close-the-downstairs-bathroom-door feeling (Kai would eat the cat food otherwise).  The ongoing reminders.  Sigh.  Thank you all for your sympathetic comments; it has been quite helpful, actually.

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 what is the family doing with our spare time now that the dotter is back in school, in the second grade?  Are we doing Quality Time Things with her?  Teaching her great moral truths?  Helping her understand the principles behind basic mathematics?  Discussing the political situations of the day?

No.

We are teaching her to play poker.

At, I might add, her request.  I have no idea where she came up with the idea, but while OmegaDad was out of town on the East Coast, I gave it a (lousy) whirl.  When I concluded that I couldn’t remember it very well, and certainly couldn’t remember the ranking of the various hands, I copped out:  I told her to wait until Daddy came home, and ask him to teach her to play.

Which she did.  And he did.  And we’ve been having a grand old time playing five-card poker, not Stud, for pennies from the zippy full of one hundred pennies that the dotter took to school last year for the 100th Day festivities.  At the end of the game session, we check to see who has the most pennies to declare the winner, and then the pennies go back into the zippy.

Our first night, the dotter won just about everything, and wiped out OmegaDad’s funds.  Beginner’s luck!

The second night, OmegaDad won.  This will probably be the default, because he has been playing poker for many years.  (”Weyall…the boys and I was playin’ poker in Nebraska City one night…”, said in one’s best Western drawl, is one of our favorite family lines, because he was playing poker with the boys in Nebraska City one night, whilst on a business trip…)

Hopefully, one of these days the dotter will learn what a “poker face” is.

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

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

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

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

But then…

…then…

THEN OmegaDad decided to check the veggie garden:

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

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

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

This is Ling, from Karito Kids.  Ling is very expensive, like the American Girls dolls.

OmegaDad spotted her first, at the local fancy toy store (very Waldorf-y place…lots of wooden toys, silky dress-up, fabric dolls, that kind of thing).  So he showed her to the dotter, who swooned with delight:  “She could be my little sister!”  Then came the catch:  No, we wouldn’t buy it for her.  She had to buy it, with her very own money.

Then we hammered out the list of possible ways to make money:  Sweep and Swiffer the living room and kitchen twice a week.  Unload the laundry chute and sort clothes.  Put clothes away after Mommy was done washing and folding them.  Brush the dawg.  Vacuum the downstairs.  Clean the cat box every night.

Then she came up with her very own idea.

OmegaDad, you see, has this…problem…with using his turn signal.  In other words, he often forgets.  The dotter has noticed this, and is a regular little back-seat driver about it.  (She also gives me approval, because I don’t forget the turn signal.  Ah, little victories!)

So one or the other of them proposed a deal:  If she caught him not using his turn signal while driving, he would give her…

…A DOLLAR!!!…PER WHACK!!!

Um.  Now, if I had been consulted before this little dealio went down, I would have put my foot down, and proposed a quarter per offense.  However, the first I heard of it was after the deal was pinkie sealed.

The girl is destined to be a wheeler-dealer scam artist, fer shur.  Because she made sure that daddy would pick her up from summer camp almost every day–and this was a source of $2, $3, or more per drive!  (I told you he had a problem with turn signals!)

Every night, she and OmegaDad would count up the dollars in her Mason jar.  Finally, on Friday night, she came bouncing down to the office, where I was watching a YouTube of the Chinese Brittney Spears, Jolin Tsai, shouting out, “How can I make three dollars and fifty cents before tomorrow?!”  See, that brass ring was in sight.  She wanted Ling so much she ached.  She had already created a bed for Ling in her bedroom.  She had set up her pseudo-computer (gift from Grandma Jeannie) so that Ling could sit in front of it.  She had pulled out her biggest horse, ready for Ling to ride.  And all she needed now was $3.50.

So she spent Friday evening in a frenzy–she swept, she Swiffered, she vacuumed, she cleaned the cat box.  She got her extra money.

Saturday morning, she grabbed her Mason jar of money:

…and we drove off to the swanky toy store, where she got this huge bag:

And mommy spent half-an-hour releasing Ling from durance vile (aka the packaging).  Lemme tell you, this doll is pretty cool.  Her head tilts and bends.  Her arms and legs have ball-and-socket type joints, so you can move them in more natural style than other big dolls.  And, like the American Girls dolls, she comes with a book:

At which point, poor OmegaDotter had to schlep off to her previously arranged sleep-over with A., her best bud from school.  OmegaDad and I were instructed to make sure Ling got to bed–in OmegaDotter’s bed, since she wouldn’t be there–and get her up and put her in front of her computer.

I, in the meanwhile, am hoping that we can get more chore-work out of the dotter without major whining–it’s been nice to have her so motivated!  There are plenty of accessories for Ling, so we’ll probably be able to get the dotter into the habit of doing chores for weekly allowance.

Today we thinned out the beets.  We had two sizes–itty bitty embryonic beets, and almost-beet-sized beets.  We ate the mess of embryonic beets, cooked with their greens, and it was yummy.  Tomorrow or the next day, we will eat the almost-beet-sized beets.

Sunday, OmegaDad made homemade peach ice cream, brownies, and bread.  Saturday, he brought home two pints of the best blueberries I’ve had in ages.  It’s been a few days of eatin’ around here!

ETA:  Oh!  I forgot!  Today was the anniversary of the first moon landing.  I don’t remember it very well, but do remember watching it at my grandmother’s house down in Jacksonville.  We were telling the dotter about it, and she kept asking, “He was the first man ever to walk on the moon?!  EVER?!”  Then she asked who was the first woman to walk on the moon.  We said no woman has ever walked on the moon.  Now she wants to be the first.  Anyway, in honor of this occasion (warning:  language, but quite appropriately inappropriate!):

Life has been busy here, Chez OmegaFamily.  I have tales of the China Camp finale, the sad tale of how Ruby the duckling died, the rockin’ and rollin’ earthquake (5.4 magnitude) we had this morning that actually caused me to duck down beneath my desk, the bunny that OmegaDotter and her neighborhood girlfriends found, and further progress on the villa/greenhouse complex.

But right now, I just want to protest.

Remember how I gushed about Mr. L., the elementary school music teacher who is leaving for greener pastures, and how worried I am about who will replace him?  Well, we have now encountered a music teacher who is diametrically opposed to him in personality. 

I have been taking OmegaDotter in to summer camp around 9 a.m.  The first day of the second week of camp, as I chivvied the dotter in to the facility, we were greeted by all the kiddos lined up, hands on their hearts, and a middle-aged battle-axe of a lady playing the national anthem on the piano.  Now, I have little against the national anthem aside from the fact that it’s horrible to sing, and it actually makes me sad to hear it played so…so…mechanically is not quite the word I am looking for, but it comes close.  Every note played perfectly, but no rhythm, no swing, no soul.  Give me a musician who botches notes left and right, but does it with verve and joy any day!

I stood there with the dotter, feeling somewhat awkward, while the kids and counselors sang.  Then this lady moved right into a lecture about how it’s our duty to remember all the sacrifices Our Men In The Service have made, and that they have fought for the Right To Sing This Song.  And then she led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I am not what you would call a highly patriotic person in the normal sense of the word.  I really love my country.  I love the fact that we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness (in general*), and regard countries such as Italy (which had something like 40 governments within the space of six years at one point) with pop-eyed sympathy and a genteel shudder about the instability of it all.  I don’t like totalitarian governments, and cheered with everyone else when the Berlin Wall fell.

But bombastic “My country, right or wrong!”, “America!  Love it or leave it!” patriotism just isn’t my schtick.

So Miss Liza has two strikes against her in my book from the get-go:  she radiates rigid self-righteous belief in country, and she massacres music.  She sets my teeth on edge.

In other words, I took an immediate and violent dislike to the woman.

The problem is, it turns out that she is the “music teacher” for half an hour every morning at camp.

I am hoping and praying that she doesn’t kill all the joy in music for these children while she has them in her oh-so-patriotic clutches.

Today was the dotter’s first day back at her regular summer camp.  There was a handout next to the sign-in book.  I grabbed one and glanced at it.  It was a letter from Miss Liza.  It ensured that I think not only is she an uptight bitch who slaughters music, she’s pompous to boot and can’t write well (though she probably thinks she can).

The subject of this letter was first off how “we are gaining an understanding of rhythm and melody, by taking notice of the various applications and integrations, of those two fundamentals”, and how important music is in our lives.  So she asks that children bring in a CD each week to share with the class (just part of one song).  BUT…Miss Liza will judge the appropriateness of the music, and expects parents to help out by making sure their children avoid music with “inappropriate language, or subject content”.  This includes such things as (of course) drugs and alcohol, and also “mutilation” or “death”.  THEN she adds that they are “exploring musically the area of service and the effect it has had in shaping our country”, so the kids are asked to bring in pictures of family members who have been in service in some way.

Well.

I’m sorry, folks.  A lot of these are things that I think are just fine and dandy–that I agree with if presented thoughtfully and allowing questions–but this woman has set my back up and the entire tone of this letter set the hackles on my neck rising.  So of course, I had to show it to OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love this guy?

Y’know why?  The very first thing he did after reading it was to tell me we needed a good selection of protest songs to send in with the dotter.  Then he googled “protest music for kids”.  Then we spent an hour batting around songs that we thought we might be able to get in past the “inappropriate language” taboo (alas, they probably wouldn’t make it past the “mutilation or death” filter).  We thought of some classic folk songs from the 30s, war protest songs from the 60s and 70s, I tossed in U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and Midnight Oil.

OmegaDad really wants to do this.  I just feel like withdrawing the dotter from camp…

(*Yes, there’s a certain amount of irony in that “we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness” statement coupled with a protest video portraying the Chicago riots in 1968.  But–hey.  Look.  The riots died down, people voted, Nixon won, and America went on.  And when Nixon was brought down by Watergate, the country didn’t dissolve into chaos–Jerry Ford moved into the White House, Chevy Chase made a fortune with his “bumbling Jerry” routine on SNL, and America went on.  Part of what made it go on–perhaps–were these very protests.)

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

Gratuitous video:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OmegaDad joked that, between us, we have “a glass”.  That’s because he sees the glass as half full, I see it as half empty.

As an example:  This evening I have been doing the annual round o’ gifties for various teachers and what-not at OmegaDotter’s school.  Tomorrow is her last day of first grade (OMG!).  But this year’s gift round is bittersweet, because we are losing two people at her school who I think are Just Awesome:  the principal, and the music teacher.

Before the dotter got into school, I mainly thought of a principal as just an administrator–someone who made the decisions and got things done, but who wasn’t really important in the grand scheme of things.  But Mr. Big, the current principal, has made me aware of just how much influence the principal has in creating and maintaining an environment, an atmosphere, in a school.  OmegaDotter’s school, under Mr. Big, has been warm, caring, nurturing.  It’s a good school (even if I find myself irked that the front-desk workers have [gag] Thomas Kincaide screensavers with Bible quotes on their computers).  There are ongoing “fun” things being done, that make the kids feel part of a large family, like the sock hop and the family movie nights and the welcome and farewell barbecues.  There is good communication with parents.  (Mr. Big endeared himself to me forever with his response to the “Chinese girls are mean!” incident last year; he knew just how much that would hurt the dotter and her family.)

So he’s going.  A new school has been built, and he gets to start it up next fall.  We’re getting a new principal, who seems like a boring Marine type.  We’ve met him, but had no real interaction; in my typical “glass half-empty” way, I’m sure he won’t be as good as Mr. Big.

The music teacher, Mr. L., came to us last fall fresh from his music education graduate degree.  He’s young, cute, enthusiastic, and he has a true gift for teaching children about the joys of music.  He instituted school-wide concerts, one in the winter and one in the spring.  He taught beginning band to fourth- and fifth-graders.  He started a special chorus for those who wanted to join and do the work.  The dotter came home after her music days humming and telling us about digeridoos and drums and trumpets.  In the concerts–well, it was amazing how well he did with the fourth- and fifth-graders playing recorders.  The younger kids all sang in tune and together.  The older kids demonstrated that they could sing multiple parts and fortissimo and pianissimo.  And the tunes he selected were just plain fun.

Then there was the time he challenged the school kids to bring in their coins for a special charity by saying that he was going to shave off his long locks and the kids who brought in the most money would be able to do the shaving.  Four of the dotter’s classmates were amongst the kids who got to do the shaving, and it was great fun for everyone.  (I did miss the long hair, though; sigh…)

He’s going too, to follow Mr. Big to the new school.  It’s a fabulous opportunity for him, to be able to set the tone for the school music program and make it his own.  And I, being “glass half-empty”, am feeling like there’s no way on earth to find a music teacher as good as he was.  OmegaDad, of course, regales us with tales of the new music teacher in his elementary school, and how the new teacher was So Much Better than the old one.  The difference here being that, in his case, a new young teacher was replacing an old, worn-out teacher who was retiring…

So it’s bittersweet.  Tomorrow the dotter goes off to her last day of first grade, then we swing into summertime activities, and the fall lurks ahead like a great unknown…

I am seriously going to miss Mr. Big and Mr. L.  They were part of what makes the dotter’s school so good.

OmegaDad, after watching a co-worker deal with the frustration of purchasing new software, sent this on to me.

1. Ask ITS for new software. ITS will ask you to fill out “The Form”.
2. Spend hours filling out The Form. You may need help answering some questions on The Form, but there is no form to get help with The Form, and no human knows the answers. (Certain questions were put on The Form as a cruel joke. There are no answers to these questions. YOU MUST ANSWER ALL THESE QUESTIONS.)
3. Route The Form for signatures. Everyone must sign The Form. There are 1.8 million people employed by the US Government. Most of these people will notice that you have made some error on The Form, thus they will return The Form to you. Correct the errors and resubmit the form.
   1. Only 7 of the 1.8 million US government employees understand how to work the postage machine.
   2. 6 of these people are at Team Building Training and cannot be contacted.
   3. The 7th person is currently recovering from injuries received while trying to repair the postage machine.
4. Once The Form has be routed for signatures, it will be returned to your ITS Representative. Your ITS Representative will notify you that The Form is now out of date. Please complete the New Form and repeat steps 2 through 4.
5. Prior to approval, the New Form will be placed in a clearly marked 8.5 x 11 file folder. The File will be stored in a secure location. Remember that scene from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ where they stored the Ark of the Covenant in that huge warehouse? That it where The New Form will be stored.
6. A Transient Form Specialist at ITS will be notified that your Form has been filed. The Transient Form Specialist will be instructed to email you regarding the disposal of your New Form. Transient Form Specialists are temporary employees hired through the Americorps Program. As such, Transient Form Specialists do not have access to government computing networks. This is a Department of Homeland Security requirement. Please be patient while the Transient Form Specialist finds a local public library with Internet access.
7. Contact HR for instructions on how to transfer oversight of The New Form to the person who will replace you at retirement. If you wish to acquire new software in order to do your job more efficiently, this is the most important step. DO NOT FAIL TO CONTACT HUMAN RESOURCES FOR TRANSITIONAL FORM RETIREMENT COUNSELING.

P.S.  If you decide to pass this on, and you know our Real Names, please don’t use his, eh?

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

Just sayin’.

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

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

The Gloaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was going to use some weird pun on “tendon”, but I couldn’t think of one.  So I figured I’d just indulge in some early ’80s music to say:

All is well with OmegaDad.  The doc says he was very, very lucky in that he missed everything that could have caused problems–no damaged tendon, no damaged nerves, no nicked vein or artery, just straight through.

Whew.  Of course, it will take weeks to heal, but, hey–it gave me the chance to make tonight’s dinner tortillas.  Now I know that you need to roll them tissue-thin, instead of paper-thin.

(For the purists out there:  Yes, I am quite aware that this is not Falco’s original version…)

A PSA:

If you are interested in sharing the wonders and intricacies of the kitchen with your seven-year-old dotter, and you want to demonstrate to her that mango pits are hard and woody and stringy and stuff like that…?

Don’t use a dull-ish kitchen knife to jab at the mango pit.

Especially if that dull-ish kitchen knife has a nice sharp point.

Especially if your index finger is somewhere behind the mango pit.

Because what will happen is you will exclaim (loudly) (in front of the seven-year-old), “OH, SHIT!!!” when the knife rebounds off the mango pit and slices through your finger.

And then you will have to send your seven-year-old haring off for your wife, who is blissfully, quietly, peacefully sitting on the front porch soaking in the sun.

There will be a frantic interlude in the bathroom, with blood spurting everywhere and your dotter offering her hand-made first-aid kit as help.

And then the whole fam-damily will spend the next two hours getting you off to an (open) urgent care center, where the doctor and nurse will put you into a surgical room, clean and examine the wound, and let you know (by the way) that you actually went all the way through the finger and you might have severed your flexor tendon.  And here’s the number of the orthopedic surgeon you need to call tomorrow morning.  And here’s the splint for your finger, which you may need to wear for up to six weeks.  And if you don’t wear the splint and bend your finger wrong, and you have harmed the flexor tendon, it will snap and retreat up the inside of your arm and the surgeon will need to stick a wire up your arm and fish around looking for the tendon, and, and, and…

At which point, your wife will flinch and hunker down and cover her ears because, dayum, she so does not want to hear this graphic detail, thankyewverramuch.

And then the whole family will wander off to the nearest pharmacy that is still open to get pain killers and antibiotics ASAP.

And then the whole family will go off to IHOP for dinner and have the worst dinner possible.  (I had something that purported to be chicken crepes florentine.  There were, somewhere inside these things, small pieces of spinach.  There was, on the outside, a drenching of some coagulated yellow gravy stuff.  There were many pieces of chicken and onion.  Isn’t spinach much cheaper than chicken?!)

Anyway, this is your PSA for the day:  Mangoes are dangerous.

It didn’t start that way.

In fact, it started really nicely.  It started yesterday afternoon, when I went to meet OmegaDotter at the bus stop and stopped at the mail box congregation on the way only to find a Big Box from Ms. Lizard (an oft-time commenter here).  I deftly made the dotter think it was for me, and she only realized that it might be for her when I had it open on the kitchen table and started pulling out clothing from the Hanna Andersson Mothership.  Oooh.  Oooh, yeah.  A red velour dress, a purple and lavender striped day-dress/play-dress, and a poofy multi-colored skirt thing.  The dotter was in girly heaven; she wore the red velour dress all evening long, and this morning she couldn’t wait to pull on the purple striped dress (”It feels like pajamas!”).  (Note to Ms. Lizard:  VERY greatly appreciated!  VERY!)

And last night OmegaDad went on a late-night run to the grocery store and surprised me upon his return with a clump of cut daffodil buds.

That’s the nice start.

Then there was the earthquake around noon.

That’s our earthquake showing up on the Redoubt volcano monitors.  I was sitting in the office, shortly after ending my (short) work day, when I heard a bang (?) and definitely a rumble and the dog started to bark.  I thought it was the garbage truck picking up our roll-off box.  But then everything started to roll and sway.  Just when I was beginning to think “Now is the time to duck under my desk!”, it stopped.  Shortly thereafter it showed up on the volcano seismometers and OmegaDad called to ask if I felt it.  It was initially labeled a 4.7, now a 4.6.  They’re calling it a “light” earthquake.

OmegaDotter was frustrated that she missed the earthquake; the kids were coming in from recess right then, so no-one noticed.

Then there was the homework fuss.  Things have been very quiet on the homework front for months now, since I last vented about it, but today was a Bad Day.

But what made it a no-good, very bad, terrible, horrible day…

OmegaDotter and I went out for a walk with the dawg before dinner.  We went walking down the street that has her favorite horses.  We were having a grand time.  The dawg was well-behaved.  The horses were great.  The dotter was skipping and laughing and bright and cheerful.  But then came decision time:  Turn around and do the long block back, or go around a longer block in a circle?  She wanted to turn around and walk back past the horses.  I wanted to go around the longer block. 

We’ve been talking about her maybe being able to walk to friends’ houses this summer, by herself.

She said (or I said, I can’t remember at this point) that she could walk back down the street, I could do the long block, and we’d meet back at the end of the street.

She thought we should make a race of it.

I asked if she was sure.  She was.

I was a little dubious, but we’d been talking and talking about her walking the neighborhood by herself.  I know that many of my readers are probably gasping in horror at this point, but dammit, we live here, we are familiar with the people, there are fifty kazillion kids who run wild in the area when it’s nice out, the kids are allowed to walk to school in April/May and September/October, and I’ve been influenced by FreeRangeKids…

We head our separate ways.  I walk as fast as I can, knowing that my route is longer.

I get there, and there’s no OmegaDotter in sight.

I think she’s lingered too long at the horses.  I walk down the street (remember:  rural/suburban area; 1- and 2-acre lots; dirt roads; no traffic to speak of and all the traffic that is there takes wide detours around kids and dogs).

No OmegaDotter.

Not at the horses, either.

I am hyperventilating at this point.

I walk very fast back to the corner where we’re supposed to meet, hoping that she was “hiding” to try to surprise me.

No OmegaDotter.

I start shouting her name.  Loudly.

Oh God.  What if she was too bouncy around the horses and got trampled?  What if she ran into an aggressive moose?  What if she was climbing one of the little hills in the woods to hide from me, and fell down, and hurt herself?  What if some freakazoid just happened to come across her, kidnapped her, raped her, killed her, and we would never know?!

But maybe she decided to walk all the way home.  KILL HER MYSELF if she did!

I start walking the rest of the way home, calling her name, very loudly, getting more and more panicky.

And just as I turn the very last corner before our street, there’s the car with OmegaDad and OmegaDotter in it.

I am about ready to KILL HER; she must have walked home by herself, she must have forgotten to wait for me, OMGWTFBBQ I am going to KILL HER for scaring me so badly…

I climb into the car and start the “OMG I AM SO GOING TO…” when OmegaDad, in a fury, informs me that she had gotten scared, started crying, some nice lady stopped to help her and let her use her cell phone to call home and he went to pick her up…

…and on and on.  I felt (and feel) lower than the lint in a worm’s navel.  I also still feel scared.  I also felt (and still feel) angry at OmegaDad for even thinking that I had just abandoned her to walk all the way home by herself.  This had the salutory effect of making him angrier because I was making him the Bad Guy.

Oh, yes, and after collapsing in hysterical tears just after I got home, I went upstairs to grab my little coffee and smokes with some vague idea of running off somewhere so I could recuperate, and hit a box that hit the kitchen island that made the shelves in one of the sets of cupboards in the island come tumbling down, complete with many containers of coins.  (We think the shelves were loosened by the earthquake.)

So.  It was very bad.  I don’t think I’ll be repeating that little experiment for quite a while.  I spent quite a while snuggling the dotter, realizing that it could have been much, much worse.  Gah.

ETA:  Just in case it’s not apparent:  I am horribly guilt-stricken.  I have apologized numerous times to the dotter for scaring her like that.  I have been wandering around wondering what the fuck I was thinking, and realizing that the only thing I can say is that she seems such a big girl these days that it just went *poof* out of my head that she’s seven, she’s still a little girl, she still has serious problems with being alone and being abandoned, and I can kick my own ass quite enough.

A snippet of correspondence:

This a.m. I was starting to heat water for OmegaDotter’s macaroni & cheese, in the blue enamel pan, when I noticed that water was pretty much pouring out the bottom on one side.

Upon inspection (holding said pan up to the light), there were three holes finally eaten through the pan bottom along the edge.

Let us take a moment to remove our hats and remember the glorious lifetime service of the blue enamelware pan…

I have interred it in the garbage can.

exohme

The response:

NO!!!

Don’t throw it away….

That was the first piece of cookware I ever purchased… 27 years ago. I still remember the time/place where I bought it. (Hardware store, Blair Oklahoma, Late Summer Afternoon, May 30, 1982.)

Can I keep it… Please?

Xxxoooxxxoooxxxoooxxxooo, OmegaDad

Further:

You, my dear, are the world’s most sentimental dude, bar none.

I will retrieve it from the garbage. You will put it somewhere, like in the garage, where you can gaze upon it now & then and think back to Blair, OK.

I love you, but I am rolling my eyes.

exohme

OmegaDad and I have an ongoing…discussion…about whether we are going to keep the baby bottle we bought in China to feed a wee OmegaDotter for the first time.  If the dotter ends up being a packrat, I will know who to blame.  (Mostly.)  (My sentimental stuff tends to be letters, Christmas cards, photos.  His tends to be things.  Letters, Christmas cards, and photos take up a helluvalot less space.)

The reason we were unable to see the moon-and-Venus show last night is that we had cloud cover moving in.  I thought my post was too late, but apparently I was able to get at least two people out to view the conjunction, so My Work Here On Earth Is Done.  Or something.

Anyway, the cloud cover moving in proceeded to dump snow.  And dump snow.  And dump snow.  And it is still snowing.

OmegaDad (who posted a fine rant last night) decided that now that it is almost March, and springtime is a glimmer of light in the dark tunnel of winter, he should create an ice rink in our back yard.

Ahem.

Well, okay, a mini ice rink.  A teeny tiny ice rink.  While I am dubious, at best, I admit that when it freezes up I will partake of the 12×12 icy goodness for a few turns around the ice.  So here is the mini rink filling up:

Here is OmegaDad doing more work on the mini rink:

The dotter actually helped shovel snow off the area  to be the base of the rink.  Then she played.  First, she stands straight, falls flat on her back, emerges from the snow, and looks adorable.  Note how the pinkness reflects off her PINK snow gear onto the snow…:

And then she marched on the play structure/thing we have, that was covered with snow, and did her favorite activity, creating an avalanche.  First, before:

Then in avalanche-y action:

All grand fun.

OmegaDad is a great believer in Darcy’s Law; he can find applications of Darcy’s Law everywhere.

What is Darcy’s Law?  Hm.  Well, think of lots of snow melting on a mountain.  What makes it sink into the ground and disseminate to other places?  Darcy’s Law.  In simplest terms, the movement of water through various materials is a function of pressure gradients.  (I’m sure I’m getting this wrong, and OmegaDad–or some other True Believer–will correct me.)

While doing a follow-up on yesterday’s eggsperiment, I found another site that described some things you can do with the resulting nekkid eggs.  The one experiment that caught my attention was to have two nekkid eggs; dump one in a container of water, the other in a container of corn syrup.  Seal them up and wait a few days.  The nekkid egg in the water will look pretty much the same; the one in the corn syrup will have shriveled up.  (Yes, this has something to do with the previous two paragraphs.)

So.  Last night I snuggled up with OmegaDad, and first drove him out of bed in a fit of worry that we had left our clothes shopping behind in Big City by merely asking him where the shopping bag was.  Once that was done, and we were nicely spooned once again, I started whispering sweet nothings in his ear; to wit:  A summary of the additional egg experiment.  Now, I had read the explanation of the final result, and was curious as to OmegaDad’s response.  So I waited a beat.

“Of course!” quoth OmegaDad.  “Darcy’s Law!”

Wanting to be just that extra touch sure, I coyly asked him, “How so?”

“The water inside the egg will migrate outward into the corn syrup; in the water container, there will be water migrating inwards.”

Kewl:  it was just as the explanation on the ‘net had said.  My very own snuggling science explainer.

Then he went on:  “And of course it would, because that’s how cell walls work anyway.”

“So, what–are eggs just one great big cell?!” I asked.

He turned over, and I could see him giving me an old-fashioned look in the dark, even if I couldn’t see him.

“Think.  Eggs.  Sperm.  Cells.  Think.”

“Oh.  Duh.”  Yes, indeedy-oh:  a chicken egg is one great big cell.  Duh.

There ya have it:  Mushy romantic goings-on in the Omega Parental Bed.  Sweet nothings.  Deep emotional conversations.  Darcy’s Law, cell membranes, and science experiments, all in one fell swoop.

While getting ideas for science projects, I chanced upon a mention somewhere on the Intertubes of using [some item] to dissolve an eggshell while leaving the remainder of the egg intact.  I mentioned this in passing to OmegaDad, with [some item] replaced by “baking soda”.  He scoffed at the baking soda, but thought vinegar might do.  He thought it was a really nifty idea.

He and the dotter set up two mason jars on the kitchen counter, one filled with vinegar, the other with Dr Pepper (there is no period after the “r”), thinking that soda pop might be just as acidic, and dumped two uncooked eggs, shells intact, into the jars.

This evening, I was called into the kitchen by a very excited dotter.  “Omigosh, you have to see it!  Come see the egg, mommy!  It’s all squishy!”  So I wandered into the kitchen and found OmegaDad rinsing the remainder of the shell off the egg that had sat in the vinegar…and then we played with it.  It was very pearlescent, not as fragile as I thought it might be, and very cool.

Here’s OmegaDad squeezing the egg:

Then we grabbed my itty bitty book light (not the type of trademark fame, but even itty-bittier), turned it on, placed it next to the egg membrane, and turned off the kitchen light:

Does that, or does that not, seem like something that belongs in a fantasy novel?!  “G’kark held the glowing orb in his hands with breathless awe, waiting for the Gzrk to respond to his silent call…”

OmegaDad and OmegaDotter took turns bouncing it:

Then we poked a hole in it, which was like poking a hole in a water balloon.  I have it up on YouTube, but YouTube keeps telling me it’s still being processed.  Harrumph.  I will try again in a few hours, and edit this post then.

The whole family is entranced; it is so very interesting. The dotter is going to check out water (our control), vinegar, Dr Pepper, Pepsi, Coca Cola, and orange juice. The write-ups all say cola drinks should do it; however, the Dr Pepper we tried doesn’t seem to have done anything.

So OmegaDad has had a blog for a year; he wrote one entry quite a while back, then stopped (to play Scrabulous!), and has been writing a bit again.  Go read and say “Hi!”

Why move my feeds from Feedburner to Google?  Well, because Google bought Feedburner, and pretty soon will be forcing me to move my feeds.  Right now it’s just an option, so since others in my blogroll have migrated, I thought I’d do it too.

Later, gators.