OmegaMom

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.

Remember how OmegaDotter told me that as soon as I left for my vacation, she and OmegaDad were going to have a disco party?

Unbeknownst to me, OmegaDad was sent off by his mother, lo these many years ago when he was a teen, to actually learn to disco.

The things you find out about your spouse.  First I discover he knows all the words to a variety of Carpenter’s songs, then I am blindsided by the fact that he actually knows how to disco.

In addition, while I was on vacation, he shared this knowledge with the dotter, who has been happily disco-ing ever since.

So, since New Year’s Eve is traditionally a time to party, I decided to share OmegaDad and OmegaDotter disco-ing around the living room.  Please ignore the dawg; please disregard the large blank spaces on the walls; please do not worry:  the Christmas tree has not fallen down yet, nor has anyone been impaled by needles, nor have Christmas ornaments been demolished.

There is one spectacular cartwheel.

There is no sound track of OmegaMom snickering helplessly as she recorded this scene for posterity.

So this is my wish for you, my readers:  That your life may be filled with as many pleasant surprises as mine in 2009.  And that you PAR-TAY! for New Year’s Eve.

I am sitting in GrannyJ’s office, watching it snow.  Nothing is sticking here, but up the hill in Small Mountain University Town they have actually closed Small Mountain University due to “severe weather”.  Everyone–from the desk personnel at Budget Rent-a- place to the family friend we had dinner with last night–has made jokes about how “cold” it is here.  I just goggle at them, thinking, “You keep saying that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

(By the way, GrannyJ says that I needed to precede the previous post with the all-important words “After I got off the plane in Phoenix”, so that folks know where I am.  I am here [at GrannyJ's], and OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are back home.)

Even with the “winter”, though, and its associated cloudy skies, I am getting twice as much light here as at home.  Here, the sun rose today at 7:2 a.m. and will set at 5:22 p.m.; back home, the it came up at 10:13 a.m. and will go down at 3:34.  In essence, I get double the daylight.  Woot!  It makes an amazing difference.

In all, it’s just quiet and pleasant and relaxing, which is what I have been needing.

Back home, the first disaster was the Gingerbread Toast.  We had a lovely gingerbread house.  It was still being decorated, bit by bit.  It was awaiting the final touches at the hands of my husband and dotter, snugly stashed away in the oven.

You can see where this is going, right?

OmegaDad decided to make “hot dogs on a stick” for the dotter Sunday night.  This requires the broiler.  Alas, he had forgotten that the gingerbread house was in the oven.  The end result:  toasted gingerbread house, with charred decorations.  He has promised me that he took photographic evidence, so when I return home, I will post before and after pictures.

Tomorrow, I write about homework again…

Pool.

OmegaDad discovered an online quick-fire pool game the other day.  As a result, he and I have, at varying times, been found in front of the computer at odd hours, trying to beat the clock shooting virtual pool.

Step with me back to the days of yesteryear.

When I met OmegaDad, back in the mists of time in Los Alamos, we spent a lot of time hanging around Ashley’s Pub with the kids.  As we were, at 34 and 29, the oldest of the group–the rest were all dewy-eyed fresh-faced college kiddies–and we were wildly in love, we spent all our time together there.  We’d all drink beer and shots and mixed drinks of varying foofiness, eat burgers and chips from the restaurant, and crowd into the pool room, shooting pool.

OmegaDad was short and scrawny and wiry and lean, with a tight little ass, a lop-sided chin, a blonde mustache, and below-the-ear wavy blonde hair that was whitened by the sun.

He was hawt, guys.  Oh so hawt.

And he could play pool.  Dayum, could he play pool.

He’d swagger around the pool table with a cocky little strut, glance around, and suddenly lean over the table, cue in hand, pop off a shot with arrogant ease, and sink that puppy into the pocket while he was turning around and laughing at something someone else was saying.  He always seemed to vibrate, like a plucked violin string, sizzling and fizzing with life and zest and interest.

It was a mighty fine sight to see.

I hadn’t played much pool prior to our getting together, but so much of our time was spent there that I soon was enjoying myself greatly.  Let’s not mention that, since he was ostensibly “teaching” me to play pool, I often found myself wrapped in his arms as we leaned over the table edge, his head next to mine, his mustache tickling my ear, his hand on mine, guiding the pool cue…

Um.

Excuse me, is it getting warm in here?

Anyway, this cute little computer time waster has brought some memories rushing to the forefront.  These days, we don’t play pool; we haven’t been to a bar or pool parlor in umpty-ump years, and we’re staid old married folk.  But when he sits down at the computer to play him some pool, he’s still got that nonchalant ease.  I struggle to get an accuracy rating of greater than 50%; he regularly hovers around 83%.  I have managed to get a score up to around 3,500; he has managed to get a score up around 12,000.

What can I say?  The boy obviously has pool in his blood.

Visit NaBloPoMo
Eh.  I’ll give it a try this year.  Last year, I forgot all about it until it was a couple of days into November.  Oops!  The year before, I was doing great until the last two-thirds of the month, in which I tried a timed post which got posted too early because of time-zone differences.

Bah.

But–into the breach, dear readers!  Let us try, once more, to conquer November!  Woot!

That said, November started off badly, to wit:  OmegaDad left the garage door open all night long.  It got down to zero last night.  The water pipes froze.

BUT!

Luckily for OmegaDad, there is that “but”.

He caught it in time!  He closed the garage door, turned the garage heater on full blast, fiddled with a valve, and we sat around for hours waiting for a plumber, sans water, fearing the worst…

Only to be told by the plumber that OmegaDad had actually left the valve closed.  So the plumber opened the valve, and voila!  Water!  Gushing out of open faucets all over the house!  Woot!

The plumber says that, yes, the pipes had frozen.  Just barely.  And the garage heater had thawed things. 

Then the plumber suggested to me, as I was writing the check, that it might be a good idea to get a thermostat alarm thingummy (which he wasn’t sure where to get, but he kept meaning to find out, because he thought it would be a good idea to stock them, because of people like OmegaDad).  It just so happens that I had been suggesting the very same thing to OmegaDad!

So all is well that ends well.  OmegaDad is showering as I type.  Shortly I will be able to wash clothes, clean house, do my normal weekend-ly things.

And there is no husbandly body stashed under the front stairs.  This is a good thing, don’t you think?!

“Dear diary:  Today I did a lot of things, and da worked on my playhouse.”

Many years ago, OmegaDad told OmegaDotter that if she saved her money, he would match her money and they would buy the materials for him to make her a playhouse.

This summer, GrannyJ presented us with a check, a nice sum to do with as we pleased.  One of the things “we pleased” was to use some of it to buy a Grand Edifice for the backyard.  The dotter’s savings amounted to $125 or thereabouts, and we used that as part of the money to purchase the Grand Edifice.

Or to purchase the parts to a Grand Edifice–the construction that I have been calling the “Taj Mahal”, a grandiose frivolity for a dearly loved one.  I knew that the Taj Mahal was built by an Indian rajah to honor his wife; what I didn’t realize that it was a mausoleum to house her remains after she died.  Oops.  But that’s what I named it in my mind, and that’s what it’s going to stay in my mind from now on.

OmegaDad has been working on this creation for weeks, in and around bouts of bad weather.  Yesterday he took the day off work and worked on the Grand Edifice, and he worked on it today as well.  So now the Taj Mahal is now almost complete.  It is definitely complete enough that it can be played upon by an eager and excited OmegaDotter, who at bedtime, after her hug and kiss from daddy, said to him, “Daddy?  Thank you for my playhouse!”

Behold, the edifice:

The pink and purple blob you see in each picture is the dotter gamboling upon this construction.  The glowing white spots are the hey-it-works! light-reflecting strips from her winter jacket.  Alas, the light was fading, so the picture of her and me swinging is too dark to be lightened up without becoming grossly grainy, so you don’t get that picture.

All I can say is that she’d damned well better play on the damned thing every single day.  Harrumph.

(I, myself, may end up playing on it every day.  It’s quite grand.)

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.