OmegaMom

Somehow or other, this little girl:

Has turned into this OMG-how-did-this-happen tween (oh-so-ironic picture taken at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History):

It happens while you’re not looking.

I have been incredibly busy today, zipping to and fro, getting my boobs squished, telling the car mechanic I have to bring the car in on Wednesday, not today, ferrying a boatload of fudgsicles to school, wrapping gifts, dragging the girl off to gymnastics, buying cupcakes for the kids at gymnastics, running home, writing this blog post, then it’s off to pick up the girl and all of us head out to dinner at her current favorite Chinese restaurant.

Oh, yes:  this year, her putative birthday happens to fall on the Chinese New Year.  Happy year of the Dragon to y’all!

I have more to say, but no time to say it in.  Ack!  More later, gotta run!

Bella asked for an update on the move.

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

That is how the move is going.

::frenzied rictus in place of a grin::

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Mexico, here we come!

OmegaDad accepted a position in Big City, NM, yesterday.  The job starts in about 8 weeks.  We took OmegaDotter out to dinner after her team gymnastics for the day and told her…

She cried.

Sigh.  I remember what it was like for her when we moved here to Suburban Alaska, those first few weeks when she didn’t know anyone at all, and I spent time cuddling her every day after school for a week while she processed being away from her One And Only True Love and her friends from Arizona.

Now she has to go through that again.

Oh, I know quite well that within a year, she’ll have new buddies galore, and thanks to the Miracles Of Modern Technology she will be able to keep in touch with her old buddies.  But for a few months, it will be very difficult for her.

In the meantime, I have been struck—quite unexpectedly!—by sadness at leaving Alaska.  While I will never, EVER miss the long, cold, dark dark dark winters, which leave me dull and depressed and miserable, I will miss the mountains, the long summer days, the fun of having daylight change so rapidly from short to long to short again.  I will miss the chance to see the northern lights.  (Alas, last night, when the latest wowza geomagnetic storm hit, it was overcast here and the almost-full-moon was shining behind the overcast.  So we got a lovely pearlescent sky, but none of it was the northern lights, wah!).  I will miss having actual seasons.  I will miss the thick, sweet, peaty smell of the wet boreal woods, which is so different from the light, dusty, vanilla scent of dry ponderosa forests.

I will also miss that odd plus to living in Alaska, the yearly PFD check.  While we should have banked it, we used it for such things as flying down to…the Southwest!…right around Christmas, or, last year, out to the Southeast.  Those trips were something that kept me sane during the darkest days near winter solstice.

I don’t have many friends here, myself; we managed to deposit ourselves squarely into the Bible Belt of Alaska, filled with conservatives.  I remember during the last presidential campaign arriving at the dotter’s gymnastics facility to be greeted with a bleacher full of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” pins.  On the other hand, our next door neighbor is a lovely liberal lady with her equally liberal female partner (who has had to deal with some really ugly experiences as a result); I will miss her and her family dearly.  Also, the family of OmegaDotter’s dearest friend are liberal and laidback; I’ll miss them too.

But it’s a new adventure!  Onwards!

As of today, we have been in Alaska for four years.

OmegaDotter has grown from a little girl going off to kindergarten in a strange place, with tears after school for the first week, to being a 9.5 year old mini-diva who is deep into discussions of (ACK!) periods, breasts, and boys with her buddies.  Luckily, these are things I have talked with her about long since, so she comes back to me and talks about her buddy discussions with me.

I’ve discovered that pop music is an excellent “in” to some more tricky topics about sex and drinking and “being pretty” versus “being yourself”.  (“Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack”, for instance, was a good conversation starter…)  There are times when my eyes bug when I’m listening to the songs, and I swear things are Just Too Racy!, but then I think back to the songs my friends and I listened to, in the Dark Ages, and I realize a lot of it was the same stuff, with more drugs in the songs back then and more alcohol in the songs now.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll.  The perils of being the mother to an almost-tween.

She is now almost up to my chin in height.  When we moved here, she was still below my breasts.

Speaking of breasts…things are beginning to move in that direction for her, too.  Oy.

Part of me wants her to just stay my little girl for a lot longer.  Another part of me is finding these discussions interesting, and finding her becoming a bit (just a wee tad) more mature and interested in some more almost-adult topics that don’t revolve around sex and puberty.  Alas, she still hasn’t become enchanted by reading, so I am considering a strict bribery-for-reading regime this school year.  A dollar a chapter?  Something like that, to push her past her “Ewww, reading is boring!” stage.  At least, I hope it’s a stage.

She and I went to Arizona for five days in mid-July and had a wonderful time hanging out with my brother and 18-year-old niece.  Niece and dotter adore each other, and almost all the pics I have of the dotter from that trip include pics of K. as well…but here is one where I cropped out K. so you can get a grasp of how leggy my girl has become:

In other news, our puppy is now 50+ pounds and six months old.  Everywhere we go, we get comments like, “Oh! What a pretty dog!”  What they don’t know is that our dog is like one of the brontosaurs of old, the kind that needed an extra almost-brain in the end of their tail.  I call him our lummox, because he is so cute and friendly and goofy and just plain…well…dumb.  I actually think he will turn out not so intellectually challenged as he grows older, but right now he’s got the “I’m a goofy dawg and need to chew things and get tangled up in my leash and whap things with my tail (as HARD as I CAN!) and Bounce Like A Tigger!” stage down pat.  It is trying.  Especially when the shoes get chewed up.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on right now.  More later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was up in the 50s today.  Yay!  Woot!

The rhubarb are beginning to show little red pen1ses, just the very starts of the explosion of greenery to come.  I posted pictures last year from about two weeks later, and you can see how they end up looking like weird red brains before they open up fully.

The snow is almost all melted from the back yard, the sunny side of the front yard, and the driveway.

OmegaDotter has taken to wearing her flip-flops.

The twilight has now extended to about 11 p.m., which means that any opportunities for watching Northern Lights is now vanishing into the mists.  Oh, if there’s a whopper of a solar flare, I might stay up until 1 a.m.  But then again, I probably won’t.  At least this year I finally saw some aurorae, and was totally, absolutely jazzed; all the result of the sun—at last!—gearing up from the solar minimum and producing some flares and plenty of sunspots.

There are pussy willows popping out; I have been watching their spread from the lower regions—which are warmer—up, bit by bit.  The pussy willow line has almost reached the altitude of our house.  (This is not to say that our house is high up; we are at about 700 feet above sea level.)

Many thanks for the virtual “there-there”s about the dotter’s foray into tween-hood and the relationships between the sexes.  I have told her she can be T.’s “girlfriend”, which consists of maybe holding hands and taking walks, but dating waits until she’s 14 or 15.  There are other issues, but they are related to living in a redneck-y, Bible-belt-y area of Alaska, and I may or may not discuss them in another post.

Right now, though, I’m just enjoying the real beginning of spring.

OmegaDotter is now nine years old, and in third grade.

She has a crush on T., who is ten and in fourth grade.

“He’s so beautiful!” she told me one afternoon a week or so ago.  We drove past his house on the way to gymnastics, and he was outside; she was right—he is a very nice looking boy.  At bedtime, I snuggled with her and asked her whether he was a nice boy, and that just because someone looks pretty on the outside doesn’t mean that person is nice.  She rolled her eyes at that, because she’s heard it often enough that she was able to recite the words with me as I said them.

The next day she didn’t have the crush.  T. was mean and a bully.

A few days later, she did.  He was not mean and not a bully.

A few days later I., who lives nearby, came by with T., she went off with them to play, and all the kids hung out.  She danced into the house later that evening and said, “I just went on a sort of…date!”

:: BOGGLE ::

Okay, almost immediately she allowed as to how it was not a real date, that they had all played on the trampoline at T.’s house, and gone for a walk, but boy howdy, did she have a crush on T.

The dotter informed me that night at bedtime that T. “cusses a lot.  I don’t like it.”  (Somehow or other, we have managed to raise a child who, though snotty and sarcastic and an almost classic Queen Bee [ugh], does not cuss.  In fact, she has started taking OmegaDad to task for his “bad language”.  This amuses me to no end, because OmegaDad is, in fact, quite restrained in the cussing department.)  She said she was going to tell him he shouldn’t cuss.

I thought it might be a good idea to phrase it differently—we are working on “I” phrases and explaining how things make us feel—so maybe she should say that she really doesn’t like cussing and would he please try not to cuss around her.

I am, in the meantime, still boggling.

This evening, I. and T. came by just before I was picking the dotter up from gymnastics.  When we got back, I said that the dotter could go over and play, but had to be back by 9:30.  She returned home at 9…when she realized what time it was, she announced she was taking the dog for a walk, she’d be back in a half hour, and went back out.

Of course, she went by T.’s house.

T. walked her home.

The dotter then informed me that T. had asked her if she would “go out” with him.

Oy.

So she has been informed that she can go out with him in a group of friends, hang out, play at his house, etc., but she cannot “go out” with him on dates because she is much (OmegaMom gasps, swoons, places a trembling hand upon her forehead) (did I mention MUCH?!) too young to be going on dates.

OY.  Isn’t this kind of stuff supposed to wait for a few more years?!  I have been rather blindsided by the whole thing.  I am, of course, immensely pleased that she’s sharing the whole dang thing with us, and that she’s been discussing whether he’s a nice boy or not with me, and giving examples.  But for Kozmik All’s sake, I thought we were safe from this insanity until she was 12 or 13 or something like that.

OY.

She told me that she told him her “Two Secrets”.  These turned out to be a) how old OmegaDad and I are, which kind of embarrasses her, and b) that she’s adopted, and it was hard to tell.  When I mentioned that it was pretty obvious that she was adopted, she said that she meant it was hard to talk about being adopted.  Sigh.

Anyway, does anyone have any advice?  Puh-leeze?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been a bad day.

We had our family meeting with the therapist.  When we got home, OmegaDotter was to do her homework before heading to the gym.  OmegaDad headed off to the bathroom.  OmegaDotter finished a couple of problems, then looked at one and started whining about how she couldn’t do it.  I got snarky.  She got whinier.  I got snarkier.  She got hysterical.  OmegaDad emerged from the bathroom.  It escalated.

I ended up shouting loudly at OmegaDad for quite a bit, then storming out of the house.

I found myself at a local bookstore-cum-coffeehouse.  I bought a book.  I got myself a hazelnut mocha.  I got a slice of key lime pie.

While I was eating it, I began to cry.

Because, you see, key lime pie was Mom’s favorite type of pie.  And today is her birthday.  And she’s not here.  And it just sucks in general.

This evening as I was driving the dotter home from gymnastics, she was talking about M.’s two sisters, who are both pregnant—one at 15 and one at 18.

Luckily, I have indoctrinated her enough so that she commented that they had made “bad decisions.”  Yo, baby, that’s what I like to hear!  She further went on to say that the younger sister, now at 6 or 7 months pregnant, was now big and ungainly (well, okay, she said “fat”, which bugs me, but let’s continue on), and I added that her back probably hurt a lot, and her legs, and she had been sick to her stomach early on…

OmegaDotter asked me how on earth I knew, since, well, I’d never been pregnant (okay, two weeks pregnant…).  I allowed as how I had gotten sick to my stomach, but that was it.

She then said that it was good that I hadn’t been pregnant, because if I’d been pregnant, we wouldn’t have adopted her.  Well, she’d still have been adopted by another family, but we wouldn’t be her parents.

And then she added the kicker:  “I’m a lucky girl.”

Ack!

So I quickly told her that we were the lucky ones, because we got her and we love her and she’s smart and funny and blah de blah de blah.

Which segued into how we didn’t have a choice, and didn’t get to choose her, which led into how (so far as I know), the folks at CCAA actually read the files on the kiddoes and read the files on the parents and try—at least a little bit—to match the personalities of the parents to the kid.  Of course, it’s hard when you’ve got nannies’ perceptions of what a little baby is like, but I occasionally read the translation of their description of the dotter, and the thing that stood out was that she was intense and thoughtful and liked music—all of which were definitely mentioned in our homestudies.

But still…”lucky girl”.  Sigh.  “Lucky” to have her birth family be forced—whether by law, by custom, by economic issues, by overbearing inlaws, or what-have-you—to abandon her where she would (hopefully) be found.  Or, possibly, “lucky” to have her birth family decide to sell her to a finding service (Brian Stuy, at Research China, has been writing about how his research seems to be leading to a great deal of baby selling earlier than previously thought).  “Lucky” to have been taken out of her birth culture…

Oh, yeah, sure:  We love her, she loves us, we’re a (generally) happy family.  She’s smart, she’s getting a good education, she’s doing great in gymnastics, she’ll have college and support, and become a fairly successful middle- to upper-class U.S.A.ian woman.  That part is all good.  But underlying it all is a basic fact:  she started out being abandoned.  And maybe it will mean a lot to her when she’s an adult, maybe it won’t.  But there are plenty of adult international adoptees out there on the internets who write about how that one basic fact forms a foundation for the rest of their outlooks and attitudes.  (Please don’t label these people “angry adoptees” or “unhappy adoptees”—typically they’re quite happy with their lives; it’s just that there’s a facet to their personalities that those of us who grew up in our birth families don’t have to cope with.)

This year, OmegaDad made sure to have some little gingerbread houses for OmegaDotter to do all by herself, because she gets tired of having to follow daddy’s directions.  She wants to let her creativity reign; he wants to rein in her creativity (in this case only!), because he always has A Vision for his holiday gingerbread creation.  Anyway, he made four tiny little gingerbread cottages for the dotter to decorate, while he immersed himself in his pagoda-on-the-hills creation.

I helped the dotter, but only as directed.  What she said, went.  So here’s the overall view from above:

You have four gingerbread cottages with green and red tiling; a car on the road, two pine trees (one decorated), a little pond, and Santa and an elf making snow angels.  You can’t see them, but each of the cottages has a wreath made of chewing gum.  Chewed chewing gum.

This is a close-up from the side of the front scene, in which you can see the decorated tree much better, plus the candy-cane fencing:

Santa, being so eager to run out and make snow angels, had dropped his bag off at the entry to the village:

While all this was going on, OmegaDad was sculpting his Santa of fondant:

Santa was going to be skiing down one of the hills, so he had to be on skis.

The finished product has ski poles, and the hands are wrapped around the ski poles, which is why Santa is handless in these pics.

So here is the grand product, the pagoda on the hill.  Note there are no ninjas.  I do not know what happened to the planned-upon ninjas, they just sort of vanished.  Maybe they are so sneaky that they are invisible, but they’re really there?!  Note the lovely, smooth, glass-like lake.  See Santa skiing downhill?  He was originally up higher, but…he skied further down the hill, and OmegaDad decided that this was the spot Santa needed to be at.

The night scene:

In the back of the pagoda hill, there is another tree and another panda:

A close-up of the pagoda and its Christmas tree:

The pagoda, alas, started tilting early on.  At this point, it is the Leaning Pagoda of Alaska, and OmegaDad and I figure that sometime soon, when the dotter is bouncing around, it will fall and go boom.

You might think this is a very sparse, little decorated gingerbread scene, and thus not very much work.  I assure you, it was a lot of work.  Three huge batches of rice krispie treats.  Many, many, many batches of fondant and royal icing.  The pagoda itself is made of stacked circles of rice krispie treats with gingerbread roofs made by coating the outside of pot-pie tins with carefully draped gingerbread.  The trees are made of fondant, rolled out, cut into graduated circles, then carefully given points by pressing with the pointy part of a heart-shaped cookie cutter.  And on and on.  OmegaDad’s creations are always fun, and always a lot of work, and always (though it may not seem like it) a lot of work.  Please applaud his project!

(I note that, even after lo these many gingerbread projects being featured on the blog, I did not have a “Gingerbread” category.  That has been rectified.)

From our house to yours:

It has been a busy week here.

First up, we had the lunar eclipse.  OmegaDotter had her best bud A. over, and the two of them were running all over the place, but not interested in going out into the cold, cruel backyard, so we managed to steer them to the window on the entryway landing, where they could see it as it happened.  In the meantime, OmegaDad and I were in and out and peering and photographing and trying out my dad’s small telescope (which, lacking a spotting lens, was a bust).  I took many shaky, blurry pictures, but finally wised up and braced myself against the corner of the house to get this view of the almost-totally eclipsed moon and some stars (faint):

Cropped and blown up, it looks like this:

I was pretty pleased.  Not bad for a hand-held camera, though there were a number of truly lovely pictures floating around the web from people who had Real Live Telescopes to photograph through.  Sigh.

Then—then!—We had winter solstice.  Not that we did anything to celebrate, but boy howdy, let me tell you, looking at NOAA’s weather website for Big City, which always shows how much gain or loss of sunlight we have had, and seeing a positive number–all five seconds of it!—thrilled me no end.

“But, but…,” you’re saying.  “OmegaMom—what were the LOLs about?!”

Ahhh.

Well.

Over the past year, I have been propagandizing OmegaDotter about Locks of Love.  This propaganda was my attempt to make her think of others, think of doing things for others, with it being a serious donation, not just a “Oh, well, I don’t like that toy anymore; put it in the donate bag!” approach.  OmegaDotter has adored having long hair, and loved the various hairstyles we can do—French braids, joined ponytails, “French” ponytails, plain braids, buns, high-up ponytail, low-down ponytail or braids, etc. etc.

When I first started talking about Locks of Love, she shied away immediately from the whole idea.

I didn’t push it.  I just mentioned it now and then.

Then, a few weeks ago, a long-time blogging buddy who also adopted from China posted about her daughter having her hair cut for LOL.  I showed OmegaDotter the pictures.

And suddenly—suddenly it clicked.  Firstly, “ooh, a cute short haircut!” clicked.  And secondly, donating her hair clicked.

So we made a date, all three of us.  OmegaDotter would donate her hair and get a short haircut.  A. would get his hair cut shorter for basketball.  I would get mine trimmed so it wouldn’t look so shaggy while I’m growing it out.

So off we went.

Here she is, pre-cut:

Her hair was down to her waist.  The hairties are to separate her hair into ponytails for donation.  The hair stylist took the ponytails and braided the hair, then ::snip!:: off they came:

This is what she looked like post-shearing and pre-styling:

We had researched short hair styles and found her a style she liked—a bob with the hair cut shorter underneath, so it curls under.

This is the end result:

We got it done at Great Clips, and it was free (which I didn’t expect).  They even handled packing it up and sending it in.

OmegaDotter loves her flippy new do, and has even figured out how to pull the top layer back into a ponytail to keep it out of her face for gymnastics.

I’m very proud of her.

OmegaDotter is off spending the night at a friend’s house, so OmegaDad and I took the opportunity to Get Things Done. 

What this consisted of this evening is me wielding a hair dryer to warm up wax paper stuck to slabs of chocolate Rice Krispie treats, and OmegaDad carefully cutting and gluing them together with buttercream frosting.

Why?

It is time for OmegaDad’s Christmas gingerbread house.  This time, he is doing a pagoda on top of a Guilin-esque hill, beside a stream.  The great secret behind many a creation here is the structural use of Rice Krispie treats; in this case, the hill is made of layers of them.  He had made three cookie sheets full, then covered them with wax paper while they “cured”; the problem is that the wax paper had adhered completely.  The first slab, we picked the wax paper off veeeerrrry carefully.  Then OmegaDad had his flash of brilliance, scurried off to the bathroom, returned with my hair dryer, and voila, the deed was done quickly and handily.

Now, I realize that many adult adoptees will cringe at the decor ideas for this year’s gingerbread fantasy, but keep in mind that these particular ideas come straight from OmegaDotter:

There will be pandas made of fondant.  Here’s one of the pandas, already made:

Isn’t he squee-fully cute?!

Then, OmegaDotter insisted that there be ninjas.  She likes ninjas, so ninjas there will be.  She and OmegaDad spent a happy evening researching how to make fondant ninjas on Google images.

There will be a stream of vivid blue rock sugar.

There may be a Chinese-style bridge over the stream.  It is in the plans, but OmegaDad sounds kind of dubious about it.

The pagoda will be a round pagoda, somewhat like this hexagonal one.

OmegaDad told me this afternoon, while surrounded by heaps of dirty dishes and carrying the last slab off to the dining table, that The Food Network was letting everyone down, because their Cake Challenge show never showed the immense work that had to be done in the background to allow the stars to do their stylin’ cakes—the people who made the fondant, the royal icing, the buttercream, the layers of cake.  All you see is the finished pieces being carved and put together, but behind all that is the unsung work of many others.

And while we were doing that, the Senate was voting to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  It’s about time!  And both of Alaska’s senators voted for the repeal—yay!

So we put up the tree this past weekend.  Since we rearranged the living room a few months ago, we had to make a new place for the tree—rather than in front of the window, as in past years, now it is in a corner by the stairs up from the entryway.  It’s very pretty.

This is the tree:

Here are OmegaDotter’s ballet slippers (the ornament):

A nutcracker:

A snowman:

OmegaDotter’s horsie ornament, given to her by GrannyJ a few years ago:

The pickle:

Another snowman:

And many more eclectic ornaments, gathered over the years.  A pineapple, a strawberry, mushrooms, red-and-white striped balls, tapestry spindles, an artichoke, an onion, a garlic, a collection of glass petit fours, stacked glass presents with a bow on top, cowbells, wooden apples, horns…

This is the new cat:

He looks the very picture of innocuous innocence.  Sweet, kind, unassuming, loving, overweight.  He is the cat I brought home from Mom’s house in February, when I returned after moving Mom into the extended care facility.  She didn’t want the responsibility at that point—she didn’t even want more than a couple of her immense collection of plants, because it seemed like too much to take care of them.  So the cat returned to Alaska with me.

He likes to lick people.  He has the teeny-tiniest purr, barely audible.  So he purrs, and licks, and drools, and then starts nipping, all very gently, but quite persistently.

We think he has never experienced a Christmas tree before.

O, the delight!  O, such glittering goodness!  O, such tinkly bells!  O, such rustling needles when you bat at the ornaments!  Truly, a Christmas tree is a heaven-sent gift for felines!

Right?

Worst of all, this innocent cat has been leading Wooly, survivor of many Christmases at our house, astray.  Newman bats at the ornaments, they sway and jingle and glitter, and Wooly has to bound over to see what’s going on, slither around the base of the tree, and bat at an ornament or two himself.

I have spent every evening since we put up the tree hunting down ornaments, or sweeping up broken ornaments.  So far, thank heavens, the only ornaments that have been broken are the boring ones, the plain glass balls of various ho-hum colors.

At least we haven’t had any cats climbing the tree.

Yet.

I leave you with a shot out my office window, a “this is Alaska” moment.  Today, while I was working, I heard a crunch-thump very close by, and caught a glimpse of a large shadow; I turned and there was the moose, and then there was the mooselet.  They sauntered stilt-legged across the backyard, nosed in the snow-covered raised beds for a bit, then cruised past the (long dormant) ornamentals and flowers by the greenhouse wall.  So of course I had to catch a picture of mama and baby:

We were rumored to get northern lights last night…alas, I did not see any.  Maybe tonight.

…on December 8, we stepped off a plane in Nanning, got on a bus, drove to our hotel, and started filling out lots of paperwork.  Two hours later, we were handed a quiet, intense little girl dressed in a multitude of layers.

Sometimes I still wonder what on earth they were thinking.  They gave us a baby, fer cryin’ out loud!!!

Well, she’s definitely not a baby anymore.  Far from it.  At dinner tonight, OmegaDad was rerunning our old story of how our first dinner out went, with us eating noodles with chopsticks, and her eyes following every move of the chopsticks, her little mouth open, just waiting for us to drop a noodle in, like a bird.  OmegaDotter was clearly not amused; she was giving off an emanation of, “Oh, lordy, Daddy, not that story again!”

Hah!

The first moments:

Our first Christmas.  Somewhere, I have a picture of her happily chewing wrapping paper:

First year:

Second year:

Third year:

Fourth year:

Fifth year:

Sixth year:

Seventh year:

Eighth year:

And so it goes.  It’s been a splendid eight years.

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

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

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

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

We built a snowman:

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

OmegaDotter did some sledding in our yard:

She and I dressed up for Thanksgiving dinner:

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

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

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

I’m thankful that this year is almost over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Whoa!  Say what?!

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

The creative crafty genius contemplating his blank canvas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turkey head installed:

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

Here’s a close-up of the head:

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

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

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

Right?

Wrong.

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

Which we did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weeks, months, years.

I am tired of it all, right now.

In addition to suddenly being bereft of all ties to the older generation, we are dealing with the younger generation in the person of our dotter.

It is, we guess, attachment issues.  And possible ADD.  The only good thing that is holding me up right this moment is the fact that the Bad Days are coming exactly 24 hours after a therapy appointment…which, when I realized it, lifted a bit of the misery and gloom and desire to just walk away, get on an airplane, and fly to Arizona where I have a house of my own, free and clear, because if there’s such a direct correlation in response, then maybe, just maybe, the therapy might be helping.

Maybe.

And, hell, what we’re dealing with here is minor, compared to serious attachment issues.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how people deal with major attachment disorders in their children; this is wearing enough.

But, to break the mood of this post, I will pass on Allie Brosh’s latest, over at Hyperbole and a Half.  I hope it makes you howl with laughter, the way it did for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More later!

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

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

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

Um.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That would be me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

Yah, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oops.

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

Manana, folks.

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

This one was for auditions for the school Christmas play.

OmegaDotter wanted to try out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While I sit here alternately reading election returns and berating myself for reading election returns (“Why are you hitting your head against the wall?”  “Because it feels so good when it stops!”), I thought I would put together a post on our Halloween shenanigans.

Mostly, our annual Halloween haunted gingerbread house.  This was last year’s version.  This year, OmegaDad decided that we needed a haunted movie theater.  It would have a movie screen, and various ghouls and ghosties and witches and whatnot sitting in the audience, and you would only be able to see it through holes in the decorated walls…

First, he and OmegaDotter decided on a movie to be playing (Monsters Versus Aliens), and then the dotter produced a sketch of what should be showing on screen  (I like the “Dude!”):

While OmegaDad was putting together the walls, the dotter worked on translating her sketch to the royal icing movie screen:

With this as the end result:

Note that working with edible ink pens on royal icing is, frankly, a pain in the butt.  She’s great with pencil on paper, and good with markers on paper, but the edible ink pens/royal icing combo was killer for her.

Then she and OmegaDad spent a while creating theater seats and various monsters to inhabit the seats.  At the front, you will see three ghosts, a Frankenstein, and a witch off to the side; behind them are tombstones and the beginnings of two Candy Corn Creatures.  OmegaDad is working on the movie house framework and, I believe, beginning to populate the theater:

The inside was completed, and before they put the roof on and finished the outside, I took a photo:

I love the candy corn wall sconces!

And then they really got to working.  I present to you—The Boojou Theatre!

This is the front.  Note the movie poster for Monsters Versus Aliens, the skeletal booth attendant, and the Candy Corn Creature.  (OmegaDad downloaded a variety of monster movie posters, shrunk them, printed them out, and then plastered them onto slabs of royal icing.)  A close-up of the front:

The left side, with "The Creature From The Black Lagoon”, “The Giant Gila Monster”, ghosts, tombstones, Candy Corn Critter, and a view inside, and the back, with a monstrous spider, glowy-eyeball black cats, and another movie poster:

A view of the right side.  The movie poster is “Beach Girls and the Monster”.  You can see the movie “playing” inside:

So, it was grand and grand fun.  On the whole, however, both OmegaDad and I preferred last year’s creation.  He is already planning next year’s, which currently is slated to be a haunted disco, and titled “BOOgie Nights”.  Har!

OmegaDotter was a sorceress for Halloween, with a grand black-and-white wig which she very carefully styled into a sixties-style hairdo.  There was purple eye shadow and purple lips, and a splendid staff made of black painted PVC with a purple/pink painted wiffle ball and glowsticks inserted inside. 

She insisted that I dress up a bit, so we scampered around Sunday afternoon and pulled together a Mama Bunny look:

We both discovered that the face paint itched like crazy after a while.

So that was our Halloween!

Now…back to reading ::sob!:: election returns.

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

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

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

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

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

And a quick break for hula-hooping:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting the first one put in:

And this is the final result:

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

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

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

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

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