OmegaMom

Many years ago, when the dotter was three, she and OmegaDad went on a daddy-daughter date to Jackson’s Grill, a fairly nice restaurant back in Small Mountain University Town.  Of course, being “fairly nice” means it’s also “fairly slow”, and after they had ordered, and eaten all the bread and rolls, and were waiting for dinner, the dotter, being three, got antsy.  OmegaDad did this, that, and the other to try to keep her occupied, but she was still fretting, and still hungry.  In a moment of desperate inspiration, he grabbed a big linen napkin from the table, wrapped it around his hand and tied a knot, leaving the extra fabric standing straight up as ears, and said, “Hello…” in a nasal voice.

The dotter was entranced.

Thus was Sheepie born.

Think of Sheepie as a low-rent version of Lambchop.  If you don’t know who Lambchop was, I don’t want to know:  it means you’re way too young.  He has a very distinct personality.

Sheepie was just between the dotter and OmegaDad for quite a while, but then he started making an appearance now and then at the dinner table, and became quite the standby attraction during Eleven Minutes, the flexibly-timed daddy-daughter playtime between dinner and bedtime.  (Why is it “eleven minutes”, and not, say, a nice even number such as “ten”?  This is one of OmegaDad’s little quirks [just like Sheepie]; he doesn’t like “nice even numbers”, and insists on programming the microwave for 53 seconds, rather than 60 seconds.)

Nowadays, we find ourselves talking to Sheepie everywhere. 

Let me rephrase that:  I find myself talking to Sheepie everywhere.  My husband, of course, is Sheepie, but he converses with Sheepie also.  Sheepie will pop up to make silly commentary at odd moments, such as while we’re shopping, or when we’re at restaurants, or driving.

Sheepie has taken to making risque asides to me while playing with the dotter.  I can kiss OmegaDad, and Sheepie gets jealous.  I can kiss Sheepie, and he swoons gracefully onto the nearest flat surface, while OmegaDad rolls his eyes.

What can I say?  We’re weird.

Anyway, while OmegaDad was being prepped for his colonoscopy, he was flirting with the nurse, and somehow they got off on the subject of chickens.  Somewhere during the conversation, he managed to mention that he’s a relaxed kind of guy because he talks to chickens.  And everyone should talk to chickens; there would be a lot fewer wars and ugliness if everyone just took some time to talk to chickens.  The nurse took it all in stride.

That evening, Sheepie poked his head over my shoulder and started flirting with me while I was working on the computer.  Both OmegaDad and I had the same thought at the same instant:  Just imagine the nurse’s response if he told her he held conversations with his hand all the time?

She thought talking with chickens was weird enough.

Have I mentioned I love my husband?

I have crawled from my death bed to scrawl this note.

(Okay.  It’s not a “death bed”.  Really.  It’s just a “bad back bed”.  An “I can’t bend over” bed.  An “If I twist this way, a jolt of fire goes down my leg” bed.)

So yesterday, while congresscritters were voting down the bailout and the stock market was crashing (only to resurge again today), OmegaDad had to have a colonoscopy in Big City.  Which meant I had to drive him there and back again.  But it was at 2 p.m.–a very awkward time, to be sure, because the dotter gets off her school bus at 3:45 p.m., and there was no way on Gawd’s green earth that we would be back in time.  And our next-door neighbor, rescuers of choice in such situations, aren’t there in the afternoons, because Mama Neighbor is now working three jobs.  Ack.  So I called on M., mother of H., in a panic yesterday morning, and M. agreed to pick up the dotter and help her do homework, have a snack, play with H., all the good things…

And, oh, by the way, was the dotter invited to S.’s birthday party?  Because it was that night at 6:30, and H. was going.

Um.  Noooo, the dotter was not invited to S.’s birthday party.

But, aside from the “I’m not invited to S.’s birthday party!” woes that this would bring up, no problemo, because we surely would be back home before M. had to drive H. off to the party.

Right?

Wrong.

Because there was an accident.  On the other side of the highway.  Which caused both directions to close down.  Starting at 5:20 p.m., right around the time we were headed towards the highway.  Which we got onto at 6:45, because the feeder road we were on was also backed up, because no-one could get onto the highway.

When we drove by the accident site, OmegaDad growled about rubberneckers backing up traffic.  I said surely the accident was on both sides of the highway. 

Surely?

Nope.  When we finally got home, after picking the dotter up and apologizing profusely, up and down and left and right, I bopped onto the local newspaper’s site, and, yup, the accident was on the other side of the road.  Grrr.

Which, of course, made me think about a lot of scientific research being done on turbulent flow and the psychology of traffic jams, none of which I feel like researching on the internet right now and posting links about, but trust me, it’s there, and both types of studies are highly relevant.

Anyway, driving all that time with a bad back has ended up making me feel like shit today.

Wah.

Pretzel asks why we don’t see stars here very often.  That’s because during the summer we simply don’t have night at all, just a long, bright twilight.  And when we do have night, we often have cloud cover, so no stars.

Mrs. Figby (now at Halcyon Mama) accidentally hooked into my self-doubt with her comment “You are such a good mama.  Challenging her, and then letting her off the hook.” about the hike.  Lemme tell you, I didn’t feel like a “good mama” at all.  At the time, I was almost panicking, because I was afraid that me pushing her to try the higher part of the butte was going to End Up Very Badly.  It was looking, at one point, like the only way we were going to get the both of us down was by me carrying her.  I shudder at the thought (and not just because my back hurts like hell).

Del posted a grand story about getting stuck in the mud delivering a bobcat to a customer, long ago and far away, when the world was young…I just thought I’d make sure people saw it!

And GrannyJ commented that the first pic in the Walk in the Woods post was very similar to one of me at the same age, also in the autumn.  Mamasan, I have to say that I took a much more reminiscent photo (and I was thinking of that exact same picture), but, alas, it was blurry.  Bah!

Bobcat:  So we bought a kids plaything with swings and slides and a tower, courtesy of some money GrannyJ provided us, plus savings from the dotter’s dollar container.

This requires installation, of course.

Which requires a spot in the yard.

Which requires that OmegaDad make things complex, by planning to dig the area out, surround it with beams, and fill it with wood chips.

All very well and good, but there’s this “digging out” that needs doing.  Yesterday a.m., OmegaDad dresses in his scruffiest work clothes, grabs his shovel and pick and wheelbarrow, and sets out, all manly-like, to do his yeoman duty.

I wander out a little later, and he mutters about how it would all be easier if he had a Bobcat.

He mutters it to me a little later.  And once more.  And I say to him, “Well, why don’t we rent one?”

After some to-ing and fro-ing, we decide to do it, he calls the rental place, they bring a Bobcat over, and he starts to work.

…

Have I mentioned it’s been raining like crazy lately?  And that the yard is soaked?

…

Do you know what happens when you drive a Bobcat around a rain-soaked lawn?

And when someone who used to be expert at smoothing out lawns but hasn’t done it for 20 years decides to go at it?

Let me just say that at a point yesterday, I was out in the yard and just peered sadly at the large hole.

To add insult to injury, it rained like crazy last night, as well.  So the hole is now a big mud hole.

OmegaDad promises me that it will be fixed and by next summer the lawn will be looking bee-yoo-tiful again.

Drama:  We had OmegaDotter’s current BFF, K., over to spend the night.  The end result was two full-on scenes with tears and misery on both sides, and one time OmegaDad asking why they bothered to be friends, since they made each other miserable, and one time OmegaMom did the same thing.  When they weren’t fiercely hurting each others’ feelings, they were busy running around and being happily noisy.  How two girls, 6 and 7 years old, can make the house sounds like it’s filled with an entire soccer team of little girls, plus a couple of elephants, I have no idea. 

More Drama:  The Mother of All Bailouts.  Treasury Secretary Paulson is running a $700 billion save-the-markets-from-total-meltdown program by the Congress and the President as I type.  The markets were down 900 points in two days until rumors of the bailout began floating, at which point the markets gained more in two days, percent-wise, than they have since…

…are you ready…

…1929.  Oh, boy, isn’t that reassuring?!

The current plan is all of one page long.  It includes this fun little piece:

“Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Ahem.  That’s not funny, folks.

This $700 billion is to be spent purchasing assets of unknown worth from faltering financial companies, then figuring out how to sell them to someone else.  The problem is that many of those assets are backstopped by mortgages on real estate where the price is still falling.  No-one knows how much that stuff is worth.  But Uncle Sugar Sam is gonna make everything all better, you betcha, and those financial companies that went blindly ahead playing with money on the assumption that real estate always goes up (wrap your head around that one for a few minutes) are going to be taken care of, all nice and tidy.

My personal preference is a conglomeration of suggestions from various commenters on various financial websites:

• Rather than create this new, sweeping agency/power backed by $700 billion, increase FDIC to $500 billion, or the entire $700 billion.
• Increase deposit insurance to $250,000 per depositor. Insure money market deposits and interbank loans for 12 months.
• FDIC judges ACTUAL capital ratios (not fakery reported on balance sheets), and seizes banks that don’t meet existing FDIC regulations.
• FDIC seizes BIGGEST weak banks first (the original commenter names a bank rumored to be very big and very much in trouble, but I’m removing that) and moves down, to maximize positive impact on public trust.
• FDIC corrals bad assets and auctions them off slowly over time. FDIC sells good assets and deposits to good banks.
• Investors in seized banks are treated as in a bankruptcy: equity is wiped out, debt is worked out based on remaining equity, if any.
• Executive management of seized banks, is fired, blackballed from other seized banks, and passed to FBI for investigation.
• Dividends of $.01 from all financial companies until things are cleaned up.
• Any “golden parachute” clauses for current financial company executives are null and void.
• Institute a website that lists each transaction purchased by the government. This could list the details of the asset, the PAR value, the selling institution, the underlying characteristics, the originators of the loans, the price the government paid (and eventual sold the asset for) and any other relevant detail.

Right now, there’s wrangling going on.  The Dems are saying, well, if you’re going to throw $700 billion at this problem, let’s add some more money to create another stimulus check.

Shee-it.

Look, the whole financial market went into a tailspin and almost froze up last week.  There are plenty of commenters at my regular blog stops who think the Paulson plan is only going to postpone things.  There are plenty of people who are terrified that if nothing gets done, and quickly, the tailspin and freeze are going to continue on Monday.  I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure I don’t really like the plan as it currently stands…

Let’s see…

Nobody would buy Lehman, so it’s on a bankruptcy watch.

Bank of America, after turning down Lehman, is in talks to buy Merrill Lynch (my favorite new name:  “Lynch America”).

AIG–the insurer of all those humongous multi-level mortgage bond marketing schemes–is “looking for capital“.

Somebody named Bob Brinker apparently said something like “get all your money out of Washington Mutual”.

(Update:  A good quick round-up of the weekend’s financial shakeups.)

All the big news sites are still talking about Ike (which, thank heavens, wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been).  The financial stuff is only a sidebar, and only one of those items is being discussed.

So tell me, who’s the economy wonk on McCain’s team and on Obama’s team?  Whoever it is had better be prepared for a long, hard ride…

SiteMeter moved to a new system.  My problems with it…hmmm…1) It won’t “remember” me as logged in; 2) every time I try to load the stats in the new system using IE7, I get an endless “Loading Reports…” screen (though it works in Firefox); 3) hitting the “Refresh Stats” button sends me back to the home page, no longer logged in.  I’ve already sent through one help ticket and am contemplating sending in another, so I go to the SiteMeter website I have open, hit “Refresh Stats” just to see if anything happens, and I get a “404 not found” error.  So I go back to the SiteMeter homepage, and what do I see?

Whoops!

Aw, man, it must suck to be on the SiteMeter development team right now…Just like it must suck to be in that high-level group of financiers that was called into a weekend-long emergency meeting by Paulson.

OmegaDad’s four-ganger box for the regular light timer, the heating lamp thermostat, the ventilation fan thermostat, and Something Else is too small.  (This is in the Junior Coop.)  He is irritated.

The good news?  The “Alaska Women Reject Palin” protest in Big City was apparently very well attended.

Back when the chicken project was still just a gleam in OmegaDad’s eyes, we had A Plan.  Part of this plan consisted of the dotter being the chicken keeper.  Ha.  I’m sure those of you with children are very well aware of what happened to that particular aspect of the plan.  The second part of the plan was that the dotter was going to collect eggs, and we got first crack (bahaha!  I “crack” myself up! [bahahaha!]) at the eggs, but she could sell the second dozen of every two dozen we got.

Now that the girls are cranking them out (hey, we got three eggs the other day!), the dotter has been hounding us to let her sell the eggs.  We have a reservation from a buddy with whom we went bowling yesterday…

(We interrupt this blog with an urgent public service announcement!  If you by any chance have wrenched your back one day, do not go bowling the next day!  Your back thanks you in advance.  We now return you to your regular blog reading…)

Ahem…Anyway, D.J., A.’s mom, would be more than willing to buy eggs from the dotter.  This is good.

We also planned to ask the neighbors.

The dotter wanted to give the neighbors a whirl this morning, so OmegaDad handed her the dozen eggs, pulled out the camera, told her what to say, and sent her on her way.

Looking at eggs:

Running up the hill:

A few minutes later, she came back.  There was one slight problem.

She had forgotten to tell them she was selling the eggs.

She gave them the eggs.

Which is, of course, all well and good; we like our neighbors, they like us, I’ve already handed them lettuce and carrots, and they’ve watched over the dotter a few times while we had to do things together (like drive into Big City for an endoscopy, say).  And I’m definitely planning to make arrangements with 17-year-old girl next door to babysit while we go off and do such wild-n-crazy things as, oh, maybe go to the symphony, or a movie, or some such silliness.

Anyway, the dotter was somewhat crestfallen.  I think a little role-playing is in order here.

In other chicken news, you will be–no doubt–surprised to hear that OmegaDad and I think we may be somewhat weird.  Why is this?

Well, you see, we now can tell whether a chicken has hit puberty, and it has nothing to do with laying eggs.

Before puberty, the chickens all had nice quiet sweet little voices.  If they were roused, they’d SQUACK once or twice, but most of the time, they queeped.

“Queep, queep, queep,” murmurs Winnie, our gold-laced Wyandotte.  And thus we know that Winnie has not reached puberty yet.

Because all the other girls (including our dainty silkies Fluff and Puff) now have raucous, riotous calls.

“Buck, buck, buck, bwaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!” hollers Angie.  And Comet.  And even fluff-brained Buffy, our “blonde” bird.  The calls are hoarse, insistent, pushy, and loud.  They still queep and do a fair amount of plain “Buck buck buck”ing, but every now and then, they start their rowdy “I’m a lean, mean, egg-laying machine!” calls.

Our dainty silkies don’t have the hoarse call.  They’re just loud.

(Did you know we still have a chicken in our downstairs bathtub?

Um.  Yes.  Hem.

That chicken is going into the Junior Coop tomorrow, come hell or high water.)

Anyway, Fluff has become quite attached to OmegaDad, who visits her with great regularity.  She has become so attached that when OmegaDad is so self-absorbed as to–Kozmik All forbid!–leave her, she starts screeching, demanding his immediate return.

We have another clue when the birds are pubescent.  If you go to pet their backs, they will…um…”assume the position”.  This entails something dismaying similar to a cat in heat, who when petted puts forequarters down and hindquarters up and begins to do some rather grotesque wiggling of the butt.  So:  The chickens.  When petted.  They crouch down.  They bring their wings up (and, I assume, out of the way), and waggle their legs and butt a bit.

I am constantly telling the girls that I Am Not A Rooster.

I don’t think it has sunk in.

Anyway, we know that Winnie is still a sweet, innocent damsel, who has never had a large calcareous orb emerge from her butt.

I spoke too soon.  Virus re-appeared on one computer, and I’m scanning the other computer right now, as I type.  I am considering Desperate Measures.

In the Department of Obviousness:  I had to drive OmegaDad into Big City for an endoscopy.  We found ourselves behind a city bus.  There was an ad for the bus system on the back.  The “slogan”?  “Ride the bus” in big font, “to travel around Big City” in smaller font.  No!  You’re kidding me!  I thought you rode the bus for, say, some other reason!  (Picture OmegaMom rolling her eyes.)

You know you’re married to the right person when you both move directly to putting down the Big City Rapid Transit advertising department at the same time, without pausing to say anything like, “Did you see that idiotic ad?!”

The Chicken Coop Deux is coming right along.  It seems that having one chicken coop construction project already under his belt, doing another is a mere bagatelle.  In other words, the first took four weeks (five weeks?); this one is taking two.  Or less.

This is the Junior Coop.  It’s for the silkies, Fluff and Puff, who are bantams, and small.  It’s also in the lower section of the outskirts of the shed–the former stables–and thus the roof is low.  With our excellent 20/20 hindsight, we know that we should have made one big coop and split a portion of it off; however, we’re stuck with the configuration we have.  So, we have Senior Coop (big and with high ceiling) and Junior Coop (small and with low ceiling).

Essentially, the Junior Coop would make someone a fine walk-in closet.  I admit to standing inside it today, the roof mere inches above my head, and thinking, Dayum.  Why can’t I have a closet like this?  See…I could put the closet bar over there, and the shelves over there, and…

Suffice it to say, even though my years of closet envy are behind me, and we now have closets galore, I still found myself wisting after this chicken space as my own.

Anyway.  Back to the topic at hand:  Doors.

Two chicken coops require two doors.

(Whoa.  I am tracking back to this paragraph:  Senior Coop has a closet.  The closet also has a door.  The two chicken coops required three doors.)

Our first door was a first two doors were “found” doors; in the Great Pile of Rotting Lumber And Scraps, there were two doors leftover from home renovations.  We figured it they would make a fine chicken coop doors.

Of course, putting a door in requires that arcane art known as “hanging the door”.  This is one of those sweet mysteries of construction life.  It’s like the construction version of computer networking:  a black art, known only to a few, and a source of general angst and unease amongst the common folk (like me and OmegaDad).  We had hung a few doors in the old house, after fixing up and painting the bathrooms to get it ready to sell.  The actual performance is mercifully lost in a misty haze; what I recall is that it required a great deal of snarking and snapping and–just perhaps–some cursing.  At each other, and at the universe in general.

Anyway, while we were hanging these chicken coop doors, inching them this way and that, using the hammer to get the hinges together, and swearing a cussing, a pattern began making itself known to my mind.

The great secret to hanging doors?  (In my experience, only!)  You can’t get the hinges together with the door closed.  The only way to get everything to fit right so you can get those damned hinge pins in is to do it when the door is opened.  And then it happens very quickly.

Voila.  My great secret revealed.

So when the time came to Do The Door for the Junior Coop, the first obstacle to overcome was that it was going to be…short.  Like, OmegaMom-height short.  That would be five-foot-two (eyes of blue) (has anybody seen my gaaaaaal?).  A hollow-core door was out of the question.  And we had used up all our assorted extra doors.  So we had to purchase a solid-core door ($50).  Then we had to measure it.  Then we had to cut it.  Then OmegaDad had to use his way-kewl brand-new Black And Decker door-hinge/doorknob cutting set to create mortised areas for the hinges and holes for the door knob kit.  All of which I helped with by sitting on the door on top of two sawhorses, to hold it steady.

And then came time to hang the door.  At which point, as we were putting the door in (after we had trimmed an additional 1/8″ off the bottom), I remembered my great revelation about door-hanging, which I shared with OmegaDad.  He scoffed.  We tried getting the hinges together with the door closed.  I shared my revelation with him once again.  He relented.  We opened the door and I held it up in line with the hinges.  He tapped here, he tapped there, the pins went in, and voila.

OmegaDad is busy putting trim up in the Junior Coop.  We plan to paint tomorrow.  We hope to have Fluff and Puff in their very own coop, and out of the claustrophobia-inducing makeshift coop-in-a-wading-pool and the bathtub quarantine in just a few days.

Ah, the first day of first grade:

Much to my dismay, the picture is blurry, goodness only knows why.  Here’s the first day of kindergarden, as a contrast.

It was also her first day on the gymnastics team, three hours of which wore her out completely.

It was also the day of the first…

Eggs!  Yes, we now have hens that are laying!  Here’s the egg in the nesting box:

And here’s the dotter discovering the egg (okay, it’s a re-enactment, but, hey…):

And here’s the dotter showing mom the first eggs:

All in all, a very momentous day.

In the meantime, OmegaDad is sick and miserable.  We thought he had pulled a muscle over the weekend.  I hauled him into the doctor, and we decided to do a two-fer:  him for the pain, me for my horribly itchy, scratchy head, which I feared might be lice.  But according to the doc, it’s a staph infection.  Um.  This is good, right?  Rather than lice?  Anyway, OmegaDad got progressively worse over the course of the day, and when we returned from the gymnasium, he was running a fever of 102F.  Which does not sound like he pulled a muscle, after all.

There are a few culinary disasters in my past that still make me wince, like the time I made a birthday cake for my mom using baking powder instead of baking soda (or was it vice versa?).  Another time relates to biscuits.

The No Exit Cafe in Rogers Park was a semi-hippy/semi-Bohemian kind of place, where people played chess or Go while sitting around, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and listening to folksy acoustic music played by women with long curling hair parted in the middle and held back by tie-dyed scarves folded into headbands.  My cousin K. was very fond of the No Exit, and for a period made a point of hauling me there along with him and his latest girlfriend.  For some reason, that Thanksgiving I was not doing a family do, and K. invited me to join in a community Thanksgiving meal at the No Exit.

In my innocence, I figured that I’d bring biscuits, because, well, hey:  biscuits.  Plain.  Simple.  Easy.  Right?

The cooks in my audience are howling with laughter now.

Of course, it turns out that biscuits–plain, simple, easy biscuits–are distressingly easy to make badly.  There are females in many families who are spoken of by descendents in reverential whispers when it comes to biscuits, because they know The Biscuit Secret. 

I did not know The Biscuit Secret:  my contribution to the feast was a bowl full of beautiful golden hockey pucks:  hard, rocky, flavorless.

Sigh.

That was enough to make me swear off making biscuits forever.

Perhaps I have learned by this time to never take something I’ve made for the first time to a potluck or gathering…

A few years ago, OmegaDad announced to me that he was on a quest to learn to make biscuits.  I wished him well, but was dubious.  His first batch was very similar to my original batch.  But he persevered, making an occasional biscuit batch now and then.

Tonight we had “breakfast for dinner”.  Bacon, scrambled eggs, biscuits, butter, apricot preserves.  Notably not a “healthy” dinner; I could feel my arteries slamming shut as I chowed down. 

The bacon was perfectly crispy, falling into bite-sized pieces with the merest crunch of one’s teeth.

The scrambled eggs–which are one of the things I do cook very well–were light and fluffy and gently seasoned with Italian seasoning.

And the biscuits–ahhhh, the biscuits.

Each biscuit had, on one side, a dainty little split beginning.  I would insert a fork at the split, and the biscuit would fall open like a flower, with a faint puff of steam rising into the air.  A little pat of butter, and then a tablespoon of apricot preserves, and I would open my mouth to a little bite of heaven.

OmegaDad’s biscuits, these days, are a piece of culinary artwork.  Delicate, fluffy, delicious, they are meltingly wonderful, and I can’t stop at one.  They are comfort food at its peak, and I hope that the dotter will be able to pass on to her children and grandchildren that she learned how to make biscuits from her father, who had the Best Biscuits Ever.

I love OmegaDad dearly.  We have been together (OmegaMom pauses, counts on her fingers and toes, and continues) 14 years.  We’ve known–since the very start–that we Belong Together.

True wuv.  Ain’t it wonderful?

But I have discovered something extremely disturbing recently.  Something that made me pause, and wonder if we really, truly Belong Together.  It has shaken my world to its core.

While driving back from Big City last night, we were listening to a rerun from Kasey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown from 1974, a blast from the past indeedy-o.

We were up to, oh, number 16.  The song started.

OmegaDad started singing along with it.

(Now, OmegaDad couldn’t carry a tune if you held a gun to his head, or to my head, or our dotter’s head, and said that the trigger would be pulled if he didn’t sing in tune.  I’ve known this from the beginning.  It was, actually, directly contrary to my early musings about how any man I decided to marry must be able to play a musical instrument, sing in tune, and be able to take me dancing.  I think OmegaDad might be able to haltingly blow out a ditty on a saxophone; there was a period in his early teens when he took it up for about a year.  But aside from that, my deeply held beliefs on musicality and rhythm were knocked asunder by the Tide Of Love which swept over me when we met.  Bah.)

Those of my readers who are of a "certain age" will understand my shock and horror when I realized…

…forgive me, I must take a moment to regain composure here…

…OmegaDad knew…Every.  Single.  Word… 

…to The Carpenters’ "I Won’t Last A Day Without You."

Puh-leeze.  Oh, my eyes were rolling.  Especially since he was soulfully gazing at me (and not at the road, dammit), putting his hand on my knee (and not on the steering wheel, dammit), and crooning, "I can take all the madness the world has to give, but I won’t last a day without you".

Gak!  My good lord, the syrupy sweetness!  The pap of the bubble-gum pop! 

He also knew all the words to Olivia Newton John’s "Please Mister, Please".  (I have to admit, I knew them, too.  I called it Newton-John’s "country period".  He claimed the song didn’t get airtime on country music stations.  A few minutes later, KK said it made it to number 4 on the country charts.  Hah.)

He did not know all the words to Three Dog Night’s "The Show Must Go On".  In fact, he claimed he didn’t recognize it at all.  I, on the other hand, did know the words to that song.  All of them.

This is the difference between a woman of city beatnik heritage and a man who was raised in small-town Oklahoma.

I don’t know if I can go on living with these shattered illusions.  My life is blighted.  How can I sleep every night next to a guy who knows the words to Carpenters’ songs???  Who knows what other twisted personality traits he has been hiding all these years???  Who…who, I ask…is this stranger in bed beside me???

I said "No" to the horsie idea.

I said "No" to the plan to get goats.

But OmegaDad recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life and was charmed by the tale of Kingsolver’s daughter, who became a wheelin’, dealin’ nine-year-old mini-entrepreneur when presented with the idea of raising chickens and selling eggs. 

Now, I will tell you a great secret.

I have wanted chickens for quite a while.

Yes!  Really!

I swoon for Silkies and Sultans.  I wist for Gold-laced Wyandottes.  I pine for Polishes.  I yearn for Yokohamas.

Fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have known one from the other.  But then I met up with OmegaDad.  And he started hauling me off to county and state fairs.  And I discovered these way kewl fluffy chickens.  All of them owned by darling gap-toothed ten-year-olds who would cuddle them on their laps (when they weren’t cuddling their equally adorable flop-eared bunnies in the bunny barns).  The chickens were soft and fluffy and friendly (lots of handling!), and I wuz sunk.

So when OmegaDad broached the subject of chickens to me, I said…yes.

Behold.  OmegaDotter with two (yes, TWO!) cream-colored silkie chicks:

OmegaDotter putting the Buff Orfington into the makeshift chick coop in the garage:

"Mommy" proprietarily gazing upon her flock:

The Sign:

So.  The Omega Flock consists of two cream-colored Silkies, one buff Orfington, a gold-laced Wyandotte, a Brahma of some sort, and a Comet (?) of some sort.

The plan is that OmegaDotter is to take care of these creatures (with assistance, of course), and when they start laying eggs, she is to gather the eggs.  We will pay her $2 per dozen.  She is welcome to sell any more than one dozen per week to the neighbors for whatever price she can get.

There is also a thought of a gap-toothed six-year-old maybe entering a hen into the state fair.  First, though, we need to make sure they (a) live and (b) lay the eggs.

The dotter was absolutely beside herself with delight.  Last night at bed time, she kept bouncing up and saying "Chickens!  We have chickens!  I’m so happy!"  We will see how long that lasts!

I had, somewhere in the midst of my old collection of LPs, the Angela Lansbury/George Hearn Sweeney Todd production.  It is a queasy-making musical, weird and fantastic and creepy and hair-raising…and full of quite hummable songs that talk about murder, violence, twisted lust, cannibalism, yadda, yadda, yadda.

One of these days I’m going to have to rent the Johnny Depp version.

So why discuss "the demon barber of Fleet Street"?

OmegaDad had a thing growing under his chin.  It grew quite fast.  We decided to send him off to the doc-in-a-box to get it checked out.

Dr. SledDog, the doc-in-a-box, shot him full of local anesthetic, whipped out his scalpel, and cut his throat.

Eeek!

Well, okay, not his throat, but the large goiterous mass under his chin.

And ever since OmegaDad came home with this humongous bandage under his chin, covering his beard, I have been humming "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" in my brain.

Grossitude ensued (really, this is a warning that you may not want to read the next bit):  Dr. SledDog, when he shot him with the anesthetic, had to shoot him four or five times, because each time he plunged the plunger on the opposite side of the growth, the anesthetic went squirting back out the other side.  When the growth was opened, some pus emerged, but Dr. SledDog had to reach inside with his scalpel and dig stuff out…which, apparently, was somewhat crystalline in make-up.  Then Dr. SledDog packed the entire thing up with gauze, slapped the bandage on top, shot OmegaDad with a butt-load of antibiotics, and sent him home with instructions to come back this morning for a follow-up.

Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter listened to me when I requested she not bounce OmegaDad, and was quite gentle with him for the entire evening.

This morning, OmegaDad went in for his follow-up.  He has returned, after having to have a CAT scan (?!).  He needs to go back again to learn the results.  It seems that there is more swelling and what-not that is not reachable, and Dr. SledDog needs to know what’s going on before plunging his straight razor scalpel back in and noodling around with it.

Many years ago, I had outpatient surgery to remove a cyst from my lower back.  (This cyst is apparently a genetic thing; Great-Grandma had one there, and so does OmegaGranny.  I didn’t know it at the time.)  The docs who did it told me it would be a quick-and-easy thing, in, a few numbing shots, slice, remove, sewed back up, and out the door.  Well, firstly, it was much bigger than they expected; a lot of it was subcutaneous.  Secondly, since it was bigger than they expected, they kept running out of numb skin.  That was fun.  Not.  So they ended up chasing the scalpel with more shots and digging further.  Finally, when they got it out, the whole thing was about the size of my thumb.  Ewww. 

Anyway, gross description aside, the thing I remember most was just how much that "small" surgery took out of me.  I was wasted for days; my feeling is that bodies are not made to be cut open on a whim, and doing it can send a finely-tuned collection of skin cells, nerve cells, hormones, chemical signaling pathways, and what-not into a great tizzy.

OmegaDad is feeling the same way.  I’m just waiting for Dr. SledDog to sew him up, fer cryin’ out loud.  And I’m really hoping that the CAT scan doesn’t show anything extraordinary, just more pus and where it is…and hoping that the antibiotics kick in and things calm down and OmegaDad can go to sleep at night, and then I can go to sleep at night.

One of the things that Alaska is famous for is cabbage.  World-class cabbage.  HUGE cabbage.  At the State Fair, one of the biggest competitions is who gets to take home the award for the biggest cabbage of the year.

OmegaDad decided he, too, wanted to try his hand at Big Cabbages.

This required researching Big Cabbage seeds.  And buying same.  A number of different varieties.

Which, of course, required planting a number of each of a number of different varieties.

He set up his indoor "greenhouse"–a set of metal and wood shelves with grow-lights and heat and a plastic covering sealed with velcro–and set up some flats.  They were not all cabbages.  Thank heavens.

However.  We now have…oh…fifty? cabbage plants just about ready to be transplanted outdoors.  (It would help if we had (a) the vegetable beds set up and (b) no snow.  We’re getting there on both aspects.)

This evening at dinner, OmegaDad served a concoction of sauteed sliced cabbage, crisp bacon bits, and red onion.  It was better than his last cabbage concoction, and actually somewhat tasty.

He eyeballed me over dinner and said, portentously, "You know…we need to come up with cabbage recipes."

‘Tis true.  If all goes well, we are going to be swamped with cabbage.

Now.  I like cabbage, in moderation.  A nice small cabbage head, cut into quarters and boiled until just tender-crisp, and slathered with butter–yum.

Once in a while.

I much prefer our yearly bounty of beans and sugar-snap peas and snow peas.  And little bitty tender lettuce leaves, which make a splendid salad.

Cabbage, on the other hand…hmmm.

Anyone have any good cabbage recipes??  We’re really going to need them.

In your next life, when you meet a lady and and move in with her and she tells you, "You should go see a dentist", what will you do?

Will you wait 15 years, until your teeth are a horrible mess?

Or will you say, "Gee!  What a great idea!  I think I’ll make an appointment right now!"

I know which one I think you should do.

I think your wife in your next life will be very happy if you do that.

I know that your current wife, in your current life, is not a happy camper that it took you writhing in pain last year to finally go to the dentist.  At that visit, a tooth was removed.

And a root canal was performed on another tooth.

And more was scheduled.

But then we moved.

And you put it off for a while, until you were writhing in pain once again.  At which point, another tooth was removed.

Luckily, you seem to have finally seen the dental light.  You have been awesome at scheduling things and getting things done.

But, my love, the reason you had three teeth worked on today with the prospect of one of them being a root canal job, and are doped up with steroids and demerol, and wincing at the thought of eating right now is because you waited fifteen years to start the dental work.

In my next life, I will be sure to be a mommy if my husband says, "Yeah, yeah, you’re right…" and never goes to the dentist.  I will make sure I make an appointment right then and there, instead of saying, each year that I go to see the dentist, "Dear, you should go see a dentist."

Your loving wife, OmegaMom.

(For those who say, "Woman!  Why didn’t you make an appointment for him 15 years ago!", I say:  "Pish tosh!  The man was a grown up!  He could have picked up a phone!  I make appointments for myself and for my dotter, who is a child!"

Okay.  I’ve learned my lesson.  I’d much rather have been a mommy-type for my husband all those years ago than see him dealing with the consequences of putting things off.  The poor dear is truly in pain.  But, dayum.  Why does it take the equivalent of a mouth meltdown to finally get the wheels set in motion?!?!)

OmegaDad is not what you would call the most macho of men.  He is, in fact, a sweetheart, kind, thoughtful, generous, intelligent, and totally, totally funny at times.  He sniffs at football.  Sneers at racing.  Used to hunt, but claims it was only for the socializing, the male-bonding bit.  He seems to find most male posturing something to look at askance, mock gently, and imitate wildly (for that totally, totally funny part). 

Definitely not your typical Oklahoma redneck dude.

But lately…lately the man has gotten me worried.

He’s found a pursuit–a sport, if you will–that has him posturing and gesturing and uttering manly-man crows of victory and macho snarls of aggression.

It’s a totally new side to him.  It leaves me gawping in amazement.  And amusement.

I’ll be wandering downstairs after getting the dotter off to sleep and enter the office only to hear him yell, gleefully, "HAH! I’ve got you now!"

What, you may wonder, is the pursuit in our office that has roused the prehistoric male in my quiet husband?

Scrabble.

Online Scrabble.

Specifically, Scrabulous.

Now, I have sung the praises of Scrabulous previously, have my own account, and do, occasionally, dip in.  But OmegaDad has become obsessed.  He has become quite snooty about who he will play; he will only play folks whose history shows that they’ve been around for a while, people who have a rating similar to his, he challenges people to "put up or shut up", he has the arcane two-letter combos practically memorized, he prides himself on getting bingoes (seven-letter words that use up all the tiles) at least once per game…

There’s an arcane formula that Scrabulous uses; all beginners start off with 1800 points, and usually drop precipitously from there to bounce around about 1200.  A good player will have a higher score coupled with a long history, because if you win enough games, you gain points.  A really good player will have a long history with 1800 points or more.

OmegaDad has become one of those players.  In the process, he’s become a spectator sport for me, because it’s just so fun watching him bounce about, letting out shouts and groans and snarky comments like, "Well, buddy, are ya gonna open it up for us, or am I gonna have to do it?!"

So if you’re at Scrabulous and want to check him out, look for wannallamanow.  If you play him, realize that you are just feeding a sad, sick addiction–my amusement at this oh-so-macho side of him which is devoted to…a word game!

One thing we get here in Alaska that we never got in our mountain home in Arizona is frost due to fog on freezing nights.  It’s not actually "hoarfrost", it seems, but rime frost, but I thought it was hoarfrost and it made a splendid post title.

Last night, we were under a dense fog advisory, with visibility down to 1/4 mile.  This morning the dotter woke me up with a question:  "Mommy, why are the trees so white?"  Blurry with sleep, I replied it was because we have birch trees, and they have white trunks, unlike the pine trees in Flagstaff.

But then I woke up, and actually looked out the window when the sun came up.  It was a lacy, icy fairyland.  All the trees were covered with a soft feathering of ice crystals, looking like flocked Christmas trees.  You could see where the fog level had been; since we’re down in a hollow, the fog didn’t get all the way down to the ground, but about halfway down the trees.  Many of the spruce (? firs?) in our yard are much smaller than the birch trees, so we have an interesting effect of lacy white branches on trees with white trunks, towering over dark green spruce.  It’s really quite picturesque.

Of course, I’ve kept meaning to take pictures all day, and now, as I sit down prepared to write this post, the light has disappeared and I can’t get that picture.  Bah.  Tomorrow, I promise!

Household-wise, OmegaDad finally bit the bullet and hauled the dotter out with him to look at furniture for her bedroom, specifically storage furniture.  Why are we doing it so long after we moved?  Well, there was another plan originally, consisting of painting the rustic low-level bookcase-ish thing made of orange crates and boards, and then moving it into the dotter’s room…it kept being discussed, but never done.  Then finally OmegaDad wiffled and waffled and allowed as to how he really wanted that particular item to go into the storage shed, for his use.  Ahhhh!

So, anyway, the two of them went out yesterday and returned with two Cubeicals, a little storage bench, and a bunch of pink and faux-zebra and faux-leopard fabric drawers to fit.  OmegaDotter chose these herself.  It’s amazingly kewl.

So OmegaDad has spent the day hammering and swearing, while I try to keep OmegaDotter out of his hair.  I will, of course, provide pics of that, as well.

Later than planned, but here it is:

OmegaDad makes a sad face because he has never made a gingerbread house in his life.  A deprived childhood, obviously.  (We’ll leave aside the fact that OmegaMom has never made a gingerbread house, either, shall we?)  Anyway, it made a fine excuse for him to insist on making a gingerbread house with the dotter.

But he didn’t get too carried away.  None of this make-it-from-scratch silliness, for instance.  Nope, he scoured the local grocery stores for a gingerbread house kit, which you see over to the right.  It comes with walls, roof panels, icing packets, geegaws to decorate with, and a little gingerbread man to put out front.  The knife doesn’t come with the kit; it is a special OmegaFamily tool for opening shrink-wrapped gingerbread house components…

Dad and dotter examine the kit and decide how to approach things:

Note the dotter’s pink T-shirt.  Note the holes in it on the shoulder.  Note that OmegaMom was firm in her demand that the dotter wear a sweatshirt over that old thang when she wanted to wear it to school the other day.  Note that when OmegaMom picked up the dotter at after-school care, the sweatshirt had been long since pulled off, and the dotter had been rampaging around the classroom in the gnarly, holy old thing without a care in her heart.

Starting the construction:

Three walls up:

Raising the roof:

Holding down the roof (you have to get the icing to “set”):

Making the front door:

Dotter decorating with dots.  This is serious work, y’know…:

The finished product!

The purple-y thing by the sidewalk is the gingerbread girl; the purple is her hair.

Of course, once the gingerbread house was completed, the dotter wanted to eat it.

What?!?!  Gads, no! sayeth OmegaMom, wanting a cute little gingerbread house gracing the top of the glass-front bookcase as part of Christmas decor.

Well…yesterday, I succumbed, and told the dotter she could eat the gingerbread girl to see whether she liked it or not.  Thus, if she didn’t like it, the house would be saved.

Alas, she liked it.  The house still stands, but I don’t know how much longer.

For your amusement:  The TRUTH about wireless devices!

Remember, I didn’t participate (whew!).  But bunches and bunches of my regular blogstops did, and the whole slew of them are getting practically giddy with relief now that today is the final day and they are out of Blogging Durance Vile.

As a reader, of course, this sucks, because I’ve been happily seeing 25-30 new posts every morning by some of my faves.  And then 20 more as the day goes by.

But they’re giddy, I tell you!  Yelling “Whoopeee!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Thank GOD that’s over with!”  Dancing in the blogging streets.  Setting off fireworks.  Revelry. 

Bah.  Pooey.  Pbbbbbttt to the lot of them.  Harrumph.

Cast yer eyebones over to the left.  The Giving Tree is gone; all my Donors Choose projects were funded, though not all the way by my readers.  In its place is the Shameless Commerce Division (shamelessly cribbed from Car Talk), an experiment wherein I signed up with the BlogHer Ad Network.  We shall see; I’m hoping it doesn’t end up stalling blog loading.  If it does, please let me know.  Goodness only knows if I’ll get a few cents per month.

I need to send you on to Almost Quintessence, BlueGrassGirl’s blog, for a particular post all about having a dead bird in the freezer.  BGG is the sister of Jozet (of Halushki fame).  There’s obviously a hilarity gene, and the girls have got it.

The OmegaFamily is working very hard on the concept of “frustration” and how to handle it.  OmegaDad, in a fit of genius, came up with “The Attention Game”.  He told the dotter all about using her “ability”, which included listening and paying attention.  He tests her by giving her tasks, and if she does them, she gets a point.  If she doesn’t get it right, he gets a point.  They’re playing up to 30 points this weekend.

This has been prompted by the dotter’s absolute inability lately to deal with frustration, in any way, shape, or form.  She melts down and goes into stubbornness mode, wherein she keeps trying to do whatever it is that is frustrating her, and is crying and keening and whining while she does it, and is generally a drama queen about it.

This frustrates me to no end, and makes me snappy and snarky.  OmegaDad rode his white horse to my rescue this evening with this game.  I’m hoping it actually sinks in a bit with the competitiveness aspect, because the dotter’s response to her frustration is just irritating as hell.  I end up feeling like I want to run screaming into the street, far, far away.  The dotter, of course, thinks I’m abandoning her, and follows no matter where I go.  This makes me more uptight, and makes me want to retreat, and she gets more panicky and wants to cling, and it turns into a Spiral of Disturbance.  Bleah.

I go away now and play with Etsy.

In a comment to the previous entry, Kate said I should try the Lindy Hop.

Come with me friends, to a time long ago, a simpler time, a time when OmegaMom was a carefree single living in Chicago…

There was (and still is) a “lifelong learning” organization in Chicago called The Discovery Center.  After many times flipping through their monthly course catalog and looking yearningly at the dance classes, I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a Swing Dance class, even though (being single) I had no partner.

It was a great class.

The teachers started out slow.  We partnered up with each other, and switched partners after every little bit of practice, and then, at the end of the evening’s class, they put on some nice slow jazz and we’d practice our mostly-klutzy-but-slowly-improving dance steps.

(Part of the idea, of course, was to introduce singles to each other.  Sort of a pseudo-mass-dating scene.)

It was an eight-week session.  By week six, Mr. Police Officer Into Nudism and I were heading out after class to Jukebox Saturday Night, on Clark Street, and tripping the light fantastic on the dance floor.  We danced well enough, I might add, that we got applause and had people asking us how long we had been dancing together.

(Let us pause for a moment while OmegaMom preens herself.)

It was grand fun.  Let’s put aside the fact that Mr. Police Officer kept a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants at all times.  And that he really, really wanted me to come to the nudist club with him for a weekend.  And that I was too uptight to even consider it.  I got some experience with a radar gun and some dates out of the whole affair, and we both had fun at the nightclub.

The problem is that this was at least twenty years ago.

The additional problem is that OmegaDad has the rhythmic competency of a piece of driftwood:  i.e., none.

The third piece of the puzzle is that, while OmegaDad actually can dance if he is very carefully handled by my cousin Sissy (I have seen this with my own two eyeballs), my cousin Sissy has the patience of a saint.  I do not.  So any practice would need to be done by OmegaDad and Someone Else.  But OmegaDad is finicky about things…for quite a while, he would get insulted if some cute thing flirted with him in the checkout line, because he was Married! dammit!  My explaining that the flirter probably didn’t see his wedding ring wouldn’t cause him to pardon her; she was automatically placed into the category of Bad Person.  Anyway, I can hardly imagine how he would respond to dancing with some woman who wasn’t OmegaMom.  Except for cousin Sissy, who is a special case.

Anyway, once upon a time, OmegaMom could dance quite well, and all the credit should go to the method of teaching, which was:  slow, steady, and practice over and over and over again.  And have fun.

Which is what I was talking about in my previous post.

And to all and sundry who said they’d take one of these courses if I started one, I will merely point out that I am in Alaska, Land of Wild Freedom, and you all are Outsiders.  (That’s what they call the Lower 48 here: “Outside”.)  It would be quite difficult to hold a class for someone who lives in Kentucky, someone who lives in NJ, someone who lives in Oregon, and someone who lives in Arizona.

But!  If we were all in the same neck of the woods…!  Hey, we’d have to just hire ourselves a dance teacher and have a grand ol’ time.

Right?

While we purchased our (very expensive) (medium-sized) pumpkin a few weeks ago, we only got around to doing the carving this evening.

This Halloween, in fact, has been characterized by a slew of delays.  We have the dotter’s costume–but I still need to iron it.  OmegaDad is out buying milk and tights–tights for the costume.  We have no idea whether people do trick-or-treating here in our cul-de-sac, or anywhere near our neighborhood.  Since everyone lives on one-acre lots, and the houses are set back a bit, it means a bunch of schlepping to-and-fro, enough to cause the dotter to wear out quite early on.  In addition, from what I can tell of our neighbors, we don’t have anyone with kiddos nearby.

I suggested to the dotter this evening that we might want to do a Halloween party or two instead.

You might have thought I was dissing the Pope or some such thing.  She gasped.  She wailed.  The words, “I don’t want to go to a party!” emerged from her shell-like lips for the very first time ever in her life.

I dither.  We shall see tomorrow.  The dotter’s general 5-year-old pillishness at the dinner table had her father threatening her with no trick-or-treating this evening.

All that aside, like I said, this evening was pumpkin carving time.

First, we had design work.  Note the intense look on my face, the laughter on the dotter’s.  The bit of white showing beneath the child’s knee is her notepad, on which she was drawing various jack-o-lanterns as design ideas.

Me at work some more:

The dotter wanted a “princess”.  Now, normally I’m quite good at doing evul looking pumpkins, but I originally bowed out on the princess design.  The dotter tried.  She didn’t like it.  OmegaDad was called upon.  After about fifteen minutes of him hemming and hawing, I offered.  I had a plan of almond-eyed Betty Boop-dom, with curvaceous lips and arching eyebrows.  This is what we ended up with:

First, the annual OmegaDad-as-psycho-killer picture:

Alas, the pink bottle brush standing upright on the counter sort of (a) blocks the knife work and (b) just doesn’t fit the mood of pyscho-killer.

Two heads are better than one, especially if one has a knife protruding from it:

Scoopage was next.  The dotter actually scooped some stuff herself this year, instead of being staged with pre-scooped stuff from OmegaDad. 

Here, OmegaDotter channels sixteen-year-old Muffy–”Ooh!  This is like, so totally gross!  I can’t believe how gross it is!”:

OmegaDad then took pity and took over the scoopage.  Of course, there was the obligatory “threaten the dotter with ooey gooey pumpkin innards” which resulted in much squirming and hilarity:

Just call her Priscilla Pumpkin, please:

After the carving was done, and the candle inserted and lit, this is the end result:

Not quite the sexy lady/Betty Boop look I was aiming for, but more like an evil djinn.  This is OK.  To get the sexy lady, OmegaDad would have had to do a lot more fiddly curly stuff, with eyebrows that arch more and trail off more, and a more bow-like upper lip…all of which would require a much more delicate pumpkin-massacring (sp?) instrument than our ancient and rusty drywall saw.  Every year, I flinch as he does the carving, praying to the Kozmik All that his hands don’t slip and we don’t end up at the emergency room with geysers of blood and tetanus shots galore.

OmegaDad has returned with tights and Halloween candy.  Luckily, there are no KitKats and no Reese’s Stix.  I will have to be content with the Hershey’s Special Darks…

On Saturday, OmegaDad tumbled down the stairs, carefully cradling the shopvac while variously his ankle, knee, hip, ribs, and arm whacked (bump, bump, bump!) against the stair risers.

I was busy vacuuming (using the Dyson, which truly sucks, yay!) the uncovered heating phalanges in our bedroom, so I didn’t hear the catastrophe.  OmegaDotter, playing in the oh-so-crowded living room (all the bedroom furniture had to find a home, eh?), heard, and solicitously followed to make sure he was okay.

That evening, he sported a truly awesome baseball-sized goose-egg on his ankle.  We iced and wrapped and elevated, and he gobbled ibuprofen, and after a few days he was decorated with the putrid yellow and green markage that shows a bruise on its way to healing.

Then, yesterday, it started hurting again.  Carrying the dotter up the stairs on his shoulders (ahem, OmegaMom is rolling her eyes here for a variety of reasons) made his ankle feel “weird”.  And yesterday night, when we examined the bruising, there was a new, large, purplish line of bruising underneath his ankle.  Hm.

So, to err on the side of caution, we marched off to the urgent care center this a.m. to have a doc look at it.  The doc agreed an x-ray might be a good idea, so we had that done, and as luck would have it, all looked okay, and OmegaDad has been pretty much told to tough it out and gobble more ibuprofen.

Anyway, while we were awaiting the doc, we cruised the urgent care clinic’s magazine collection.  I picked up Time and Newsweek.  OmegaDad picked up Field and Stream.

Then he had to share his running commentary.

He started from the back of the magazine.

Featured on the back is a truly Klingon-esque crossbow.  Scarily medieval looking.  Lots of pointy stuff.  Lots of cut-outs.  Flashy.  Truly studly.

OmegaDad started flipping forwards through the ad section, muttering, “You need to see this…the whole point to this magazine…Nope, that’s not it…nope…nope…”

He paused momentarily so I could gape at a small ad featuring a picture of Big Foot, or maybe an Ent.  Or possibly a walking haystack.  OmegaDad disabused me of these notions, snorting, “Woman!  Don’t you recognize manly camouflage when you see it?!”  I pointed out that in the picture, the man, walking across a mown green lawn, wasn’t camouflaged at all.  “Picky, picky!” complained OmegaDad.

He continued flipping.  Then he hit two full-page ads, and proclaimed, “Ah-HAH!  Now, see, this is what hunting is supposed to do for you!  You go hunting and become a Manly Man!”

The ads were for “male enhancement”.  Har!

He soon found another ad for “male enhancement”, which featured an amazingly urbane looking gray-haired dude in suit pants and white tailored shirt (this is a hunter?  Where’s his camo?) with a True Babe climbing up his body, her legs wrapped joyously around his waist, her back arched, her long red-brown hair tumbling down, her head back…

OmegaDad said, “Just by reading this magazine, a man’s penis grows long enough so he can have intercourse with a woman riding his shoulders!”

Then he flexed his arms and gave a manly “Hunh!“

Then we paged forward some more to look at rugged, manly ATVs in full-blown camouflage.  And knives (”Hoo hoo hoo!” hooted OmegaDad, like a gorilla).  And more crossbows.

You could feel the testosterone oozing from the pages.

OmegaDad, let it be said, grew up in Oklahoma and spent his entire late teens and early 20s out hunting with his buds.  So he is behaving kind of like me if I started poking at my now-deceased eldest brother; it was okay for me to diss him, but I didn’t want to hear anyone outside the family dissing him, y’know?  Thus OmegaDad and hunting/fishing magazines.

Next time, we need to do Cosmo.  Or Ladies Home and Garden.  Or, god help us, a teeny-bopper’s magazine…

(Update:  I can already foresee that this particular post is going to end up being one of my most popular ever.  It has been up for all of two or three hours, and already I have a hit on “male enhancement”. Har.  Surely it will outstrip gl0bal warm1ng in no time at all!)

When we went looking at properties here in AK, OmegaDad wanted to find a place with more than one acre that was a horse property (i.e., zoned or HOA’d into allowing horses).

Lo and behold, we now have a greater-than-one-acre horse property.

Of course, a horse is far (may I reiterate that?  FAAAARRRR.) into the future.

However, OmegaDad Has A Plan.

The plan includes goats.

Ahem.

It goes:  We get two goats, cheap.  We feed them, we take care of them, we milk one of them, they have baby goats, we sell baby goats, we stash the $$ in an account, lather, rinse, repeat.  His plan has two prongs:  first, get the kiddo into the habit of tending to helpless animals; second, build up the $$ for a horse.

Now, me, personally?  I’d be more than happy to buy a horse and board it somewhere else.  Wandering around the back forty of our lot has reminded me that horses produce vast amounts of horse poop.  Vast.  We have large heaps back there of nicely decaying horse poop that will no doubt have a good future as mulch for gardens.  But it has driven into me the question:  What exactly does one do with all the horse poop?

Not to mention the thought of any poor critters being dependent upon the dotter for care.  Not to mention the corollary to that, which would be Someone Else Will End Up Tending The Goats.

All of that aside, OmegaDad and dotter are thinking goats.

OmegaDad purchased a magazine at the local pet store all about goats.

Yes, there is a goat magazine.

Cute little buggers, actually.

Anyway, the milking question came up.  The dotter refused to believe you could milk goats.  OmegaMom, ever the computer junkie, located a bunch of videos on YouTube about milking goats.  The dotter was fascinated and grossed out.  Her succinct comment:  “EWWWWWWW!”

So OmegaDad had her practicing on his hand.  That wasn’t really working, so he got out the hand condoms.

(What, you ask, are “hand condoms”??  Latex gloves, used in various areas in the house, such as when painting, when washing lots of things, etc.)

He blew one up.  It was a hit.  We are all sitting in my office, the dotter practicing “milking” the balloon-like latex gloves.  We are slightly giggling.  At some point, the dotter decides to be a goat, and positions the blown-up glove beneath her so OmegaDad can “milk” her.  Some Twister-like confusion occurs, in which the balloon-glove goes whirling around the room, emitting a fart-like sound.

“Daddy!  You pulled my udder off!”

All of which made us giggle even more.

So then OmegaDad decided the dotter needed a somewhat more lifelike imitation of udders.  He and she vanished into the hinterlands of the house.  Then a snickering dotter returned to the office to demand my presence in the downstairs bathroom.

The latest latex glove had been filled with water.  But not filled enough.  It drooped.  It stretched.  It wiggled.  It pointed udders in wildly varying directions.

It made me and OmegaDad howl with laughter.  So much so that my stomach hurt; I haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time.

OmegaDotter was not as amused, and thought we were very silly.  Which, of course, made us howl more.

Alas, the water-filled pseudo-udder popped sometime overnight.

We are such sophisticates.

(Aunt Jean says that L’s issues were due to a series of strokes, not Alzheimer’s, but that it was horrible nonetheless.  Noreen mentions that I should investigate drug side-effects–I think, however, that the memory issues are merely the mental fog of early menopause.  Johnny asks why no pics on the “Wah!” post about the painting job; I tried, Johnny, I really tried, but every picture came out looking blue.  That aside, the paint, when dry, looked better, we have done a second coat, and I think we are content.)

(Gah.  Forgot.  Two more things:

1.  Do please check out my DonorsChoose challenge, and donate $10 to my selected teachers’ projects.  They’re nothing major, just small potatoes.  Can you help?

2.  Is anyone else having problems with the side columns on my blog?  If you resize the browser widthwise, the side columns appear and disappear for me.  Does it do the same for you?  Does anyone have any clue what might cause that?)

Most people, when they paint a room, go in, slap some masking tape on, and start painting.

OmegaDad, on the other hand, becomes a perfectionist freak.

First, he finds every.  Single.  Spot.  On the walls that is even slightly scuffed or marred.  Then he patches it.  Then he sands it.  Then he sprays texturizer on it.

Then he masks of every.  Single.  Piece.  Of non-paintable stuff.

Our latest brainstorm was to purchase a paintsprayer, thinking this would make things easier in general.

Bwahahahaha!

Excuse me while OmegaMom goes outside and double over in paroxysms of laughter.

Bwahahaha!

Now we have the opportunity to not only mask things off, but to put plastic all over things!

OmegaDad and OmegaMom spent the morning taping plastic sheeting on the ceiling of our bedroom.  Admittedly, this could have been avoided if OmegaMom had wanted the entire bedroom to be the same color, but I’d like sage walls and creamy white ceiling.

Even OmegaDad, the painting perfectionist, said at one point, “Y’know, if this room were even slightly smaller, it would be easier to just use paintrollers.”

Ya think?

Ah, well.  OmegaDad is out purchasing WD40 or a similar unguent, needed for the paint spraying machine.  When he returns, he will enter into the bedroom, close the door behind himself, put up plastic sheeting and masking tape over the doorway, and spray himself silly in his hermetically sealed bubble.

At least this time he has had the sense to purchase a respirator.  Normally when OmegaDad plays with chemicals in a spray format, it’s to clean bathrooms, and his philosophy is that if a little bit is good, a lot should be a lot better.  Then he gasses himself, spends the rest of the day in a headachy daze, and leaves the house smelling vaguely like an industrial waste site.

(My whole thought about the spray painter was that it would be handy for such things as, oh, painting our workshed out back–the exterior.  Or painting various pieces of furniture.)

It snowed last night.  Not much, pretty much just a dusting.  More is predicted for tonight.

Living in a shoebox has some side effects.  One of those is, since we are sans washer and dryer, we must visit the laundromat.

OmegaDad did the honors the first time.

Now…I hate crowds.  I hate noisy situations.  Too many people making too much noise around me makes my back start twisting up, my adrenaline level rise, and my teeth grind.  Figlet recently asked “What’s Your Krazy”–this is one of my very biggest crazies.

OmegaDad has it much, much worse than I do.

So he returned from his excursion to the world of coin-operated washers and dryers frazzled to a fare-thee-well, his teeth set, and his psychic aura emitting “KEEP AWAY FROM ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!!” on a continuous loop.  He gritted his teeth at me and hissed, “YOU are doing the laundry from now on!” and then went on a tirade about the quality of people at the laundromat, the level of noise, the problems he had simply moving about, on and on, for half an hour.

I nodded my head, rolled my eyes, and said, “Yessir!”

I’ve been visiting the laundromat once per week ever since.  OmegaDad gave me the hairy eyeball last week and asked me, “How come when you go to the laundromat, it’s empty and nice and quiet, but when I go to the laundromat, it’s a seething mob scene?”

I dunno.  I’d guess it’s my laundromat karma.

You see, I love doing laundry.  It’s soothing.  It’s calming.  I go into a Happy Place mentally.  I zone out.  I plunge my hands into heaps of warm, fresh-out-of-the-dryer clothes and could just get wiggly like a small puppy.

And the laundromat doesn’t seem noisy to me, because all the things making “noise” are making white noise.  There are washers washing (schloop schloop schloop) and dryers drying (rumble rumble rumble thunka rumble rumble rumble thunka) and video games going bleep bloop and various people chattering to each other, which, with the white noise as a background, blends right in.

Okay, so I’ve been lucky:  No great huge fights have broken out, no whacked out druggies have suddenly started seeing spiders crawling down the walls, no fundamentalist nutcase has started preaching The Word at the top of his (or her) lungs.

Given the current close quarters at the Shoebox, going to the laundromat has an added plus:  I am gloriously alone.  OmegaDad drops me off with the clothes and accoutrements, and then hauls the dotter off to do shopping.  I get myself a frappucino, read a book or the Sunday paper, and just relax.

Part of this being-in-the-moment and zoning out to the white noise is related to having grown up and living as an adult in the big city.  Chicago (and any other big city) is filled with noise.  There’s the sound of traffic.  There’s the sound of people’s boomboxes and TVs.  There’s the sound of the couple two floors down having yet another fight.  There’s the El rumbling by a block away.  There’s the distant rumble from the expressway.  There’s the kssshhhh-SCREECH of buses stopping.  There’s the sound of jets taking off and landing and circling around waiting for a chance to land.

The city is an ocean of noise.  And to survive, people who live in cities learn to let the noise mash into a generic background wash, like the sound of ocean surf.  Because if you paid attention to all those different noises while living in a city, you would go utterly insane.

The only time I wasn’t able to put city noise into the general white noise mishmosh was when visiting my buddy Suz when she lived in Wicker Park in a walk-up that was directly behind the El tracks.  That noise was impossible to mesh with the rest of the ocean surf.  (However, as I recall, Suz herself said that after a few weeks, it started to blend in with the rest.)

Today was our last wash day at the laundromat.  I get to do laundry in the peace and privacy of our own home Real Soon Now.  I’ll be able to do the weekly laundry without spending $20.  I’ll be able to nosh in the kitchen, piddle in the office, wear my jammies, and sort my damned clothes into as many different color piles as I want starting tomorrow.  Yeehaw!

But I’m going to–in a weird way–miss the laundromat zen.  A bit.

OmegaDad has been sending pictures from the Al-Can highway.  Right now, I’m using a chintzy, cheesy “easy” picture editor from Microsoft, so the end result for the pictures is ell-oh-you-ess-why, lousy.

But I thought I’d share them with you anyway, and when I have access to my own laptop again, I’ll re-do the pics and re-upload them.

Firstly, we have road signs. 

Welcome to the Northern Rockies:

Moose crossing:

Sasquatch crossing:

Caution!  Buffalo on the road!

Then we have the real things:

A Sasquatch (alas, wooden):

Another piece of high human artistry, the Big Beaver:

A couple of “awwww”-worthy babies:

(a fox baby, then a baby moose…note the car window at the bottom of the picture.  OmegaDad says that he could have swatted the baby moose on the bottom, he was that close…)

The buffalo, apparently, is much bigger than the Plains buffalo OmegaDad is accustomed to; he estimated about a third bigger?

A trio of bighorn sheep.

And, in closing, some just plain drop-dead gorgeous scenery…Muncho Lake:

An unnamed river:

My cousin, also visiting GrannyJ, when viewing these pictures told me, in a dire, warning voice:  “You’re going to be there a loooong, loooong ti