OmegaMom

Ages ago, while living in Small Mountain University Town, I noticed a little massage school next to the pet store we liked to frequent.  I poked my head in, and discovered that they had students doing massages every weekend, and that you could get an hour massage for very small amounts of money.

Later on, Small Mountain University’s classified employee council made an arrangement with that massage school to get an additional percentage off the price for university employees.

I was in heaven.  Maybe once a month, once every six weeks, I’d traipse off to SMUT Massage College and get myself an hour-long massage, emerging limp and noodly and relaxed.

Since moving to Alaska, however, I have been unable to indulge.  Oh, we have massage schools off in Big City, but, hey, it’s an hour-long drive there, and the benefits of the massage would be outweighed by the drive back, in my experience.

When I landed in Arizona again to take care of my mom—which included watching her like a hawk while we were snowbound, preparing small meals and trying not to cry as she barely ate anything, then getting her off to the hospital and being ready to fight anyone who claimed it wasn’t “medically necessary” for her to be admitted to the hospital, then keeping an eye on the staff at the nursing home until it became obvious that they were caring, gentle people who really wanted to help, then spending hours making appointments and visiting and touring assisted living facilities in the area—

Well.  It was, to put it mildly, making me uptight.  Really uptight.  I was finding myself unable to sleep because my shoulders were in knots, and my brain was in overdrive, producing item after item after item to worry about or to remember to take care of the next day.  Something had to be done. 

So I called one of the local massage colleges, to see if they had any student clinics going on.  Lo and behold, though they didn’t have beginning students, they had an “advanced” clinic running for the month.  I signed up.

O what a blessing is a good massage.  What a release of tension.  What a lovely hour or so of mindless bliss, melting into the massage table, feeling the horde of knots loosen—even those that I hadn’t realized were there.  It helped so much that I threw monetary caution to the winds and signed up for one a week while I was there.  I loved every minute of those three hours.

Some specifics:  This was through ASIS, in downtown Prescott.  The masseuse was named Jill H., and she was awesome.  She was gentle, asked questions, sent me a note via mail after the first massage (!!), remembered what I had told her and where all the knots had been on the second and third visits, and was, all around, a boon to me during a tough time.  I highly recommend their services, and especially highly recommend Jill.  (She is also working with a local chiropractor…I have, unfortunately, lost the card she gave me, otherwise I would say which chiropractor.)

::OmegaMom walks into the blog space, blows some dust off the furnishings, looks around…::

Hey there.  It’s been long enough for a post from me that BlogHer advertising sent me a “tsk, tsk” email and turned off the ads.  Hah!

Oh, well; I’ve been busy and tired and uptight enough that blogging (and Twitter) has taken second (third?  Last?) place in the scheme of things.

The good news is that my mom is so, so, so much better.  We moved her into assisted living yesterday; she has all the furniture she needs and today’s chores include moving some plants and paintings and photos so that her space is even more her space.

Every day in the past two weeks has been jam-packed with things related to getting her better, getting the move coordinated, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, vacuuming, cleaning.  Twenty-five years at one location does tend to make one accumulate stuff…and much of it, as mom says, “Nothing precious”.  My main learning point–aside from the need for retirement funds, and how expensive assisted living is–is that the investment in a weekly cleaning person is a Must for those who do not have the cleaning gene.  All the dust and the stress has combined to give me a lovely cold with a dollop of super-duper sinus infection on top.  Hah!

Arizona has been irritatingly sunny and beautiful, all the while I have been unable to rest and enjoy it.  Grrr.

My brother arrives today–yay!  Someone else to take the burden!  And I head home on Sunday, to a dotter who finally last night broke down during our nightly phone conversation to say, “I want you to COME HOME!!!”, with her voice cracking into tears on the last two words.  Oh, yes, OmegaDad wants me home, too, but he hasn’t cried–it’s been me bursting into spontaneous tearfests on his long-distance shoulder every few days.  He’s a good dude, y’know?  I’ve done something right to have the Kozmik All let me find him all those years ago.

My main focus with mom’s move–aside from, well, the move–has been to create a colorful and welcoming space for her in her new place.  One of the things I did was taken directly from a blog that my commenter and long-time virtual friend Kaz pointed me to named Attic24.  The lady who writes Attic24 is a lover of all things bright and colorful, and her January 21 post made me re-assess my inward sneer at tulips.

I have always thought that tulips are just too, too niffy-naffy and snooty for words.  Stiff, formal, upright–ptooey.  But in the midst of her posts filled with bright mixes of color, A24 showed a vase jam-packed with multi-colored tulips.  It was bright, springy, the furthest thing from “formal” you could imagine.  So I started searching the local florist shops for tulips.

Of course, none of the local florist shops had gotten the word:  tulips in arrangements meant all one color, all stiff, semi- to very formal, and very little variety in color.  Red was big.  So was white.  And pink.  Never in the same store, though!  Bah.  But Monday I was at the local grocery store, struck by the “manager’s specials” of leftover Valentine’s Day bouquets and tchatchkes, and was lured into their flower cooler.  There, in the corner, was a bucket of tulips, gathered into groups of five stems, each group one color.  But they had orange.  They had red.  They had purple.  Pink.  White.  Yellow.  A riot of colors.  So I cornered the young lady who was putting “for sale!” signs on the manager’s specials, and described what I wanted.

She came through!  One of the nicest things about the move was walking mom into her new place and having her delighted with the (beginnings of) big splashes of color…one of which was a small vase jam-packed with tulips of all different colors, sitting on her dining table.

It’s the small things that make me happy sometimes.  That vase of colorful tulips was a symbol to me, a symbol that mom’s life is not going to shrivel up into a blank nursing home stare, that she’s going to have spring and life and color for time to come.

Since I know some of mom’s regular readers are reading, here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on:

When I got here, she was not herself.  She wasn’t getting enough oxygen, was very weak and tired (couldn’t walk from the front door to the kitchen), and I was very very worried.

And we were sort of socked in by the weather, ugh.  Some parts of Small Mountain University Town got up to five feet of snow last week!  We didn’t get that much, but we did get a fair amount of soggy snow…

Anyway, when we could get out easily on Saturday, I rented a car and we set The Plan into motion.  The Plan was to call 911, get her into the hospital, and see if they couldn’t (a) figure out what was going on, and (b) help, and (c) get her into a nursing home for a month (standard Medicare limit) to rehab her.

At that time she was saying that she didn’t think she could handle assisted living, and should just be put in a nursing home for good.

Well.  At the ER, they found that she had a mild case of pneumonia, which they (luckily) admitted her to treat.  She is feeling much better, says she is breathing better than she has in months, but she is still extremely weak.  I’ve been running errands, running back and forth to the hospital, trying to make various arrangements, and trying to keep her (and my) spirits up.  The hospital is arranging with a local nursing home to take her in, but we’re not sure a bed is available yet.  If so, she’ll be moved there tomorrow; otherwise, maybe Wednesday.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments.  I’ve passed on the comments from her blog to her, printing them out in batches as they come in, and they have been so warm and wonderful and cheering for her.  Kate from HighAltitudeGardening sent her a bouquet of bright and colorful flowers, and they grace her hospital room right now, keeping things cheerful.  Catalyst from Oddball Observations phoned, and just knowing that made her feel special and appreciated (I will call back, just have been busy with family phone calls & emails!).  The outpouring of love for her has been heartwarming.

I will post more later.

Well.

When I wrote that last post, it was going to be followed up by the “And she’s all better now, whew!” post.  But I had things to do that weekend, and places to go, so didn’t write.

But I did notice that mom hadn’t blogged for a few days, and she hadn’t sent me any email.  So I picked up the phone to call her (I previously had been calling her every day, but then thought she was better, so stopped).

At which point, she asked me to come out to Arizona again, saying that things were worse.

So here I am in Arizona, with mom.  I managed to sneak in during a break between the storms that have hit Arizona (and California before that).  The airplane was delayed two hours on the tarmac in Big City due to a malfunction that turned out to be a Ghost In The Machine, and missed my connecting flight in Salt Lake City…but Delta showed how absolutely wonderful it is by automagically rebooking all the people who had missed their flights onto the next available flight.  This was very cool–all we had to do was take our existing boarding pass, run it beneath a scanner, and a brand spanking new boarding pass for the rebooked flight was printed out.

But when I got to Phoenix and got to the car rental place, a snag occurred.  It seems that we didn’t have enough money in our account to cover any car rental (if I had had a credit card, that would have worked, but they automatically block out more money for debit cards, no matter how little an amount of time you want to rent)…paychecks being deposited on Saturday didn’t help.  I was tired.  I just wanted to get up to mom.  So I parked myself on one of the chairs in the middle of the huge car rental complex and proceeded to sob my heart out.

Then I called OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love OmegaDad?  Well, okay, just thought I’d mention it again.

Anyway, he arranged for the inter-city shuttle to pick me up and get me up to Prescott.  Yay, OmegaDad!

Driving up was an adventure–but the good kind.  See, since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have to worry about all the water crossing the road, or the high winds, and was perched up nice and high so I could peer out the windows and see over concrete barriers on bridges and wash crossings.  All of which were flooded with rushing water.  Waves.  Crests on the waves.  Waterfalls coming down the rocky roadcuts that we were traveling between.  Snow mixing with the heavy rain when we got to Prescott.

(Up in Small Mountain University Town, they have had something like four feet of snow.  Roofs are collapsing on businesses–the ice rink, the big, comfy used bookstore, the fabric store, more–and the city mayor has declared that all businesses must clear their roofs or face a fine.  The powers that be also closed the main highways around SMUT for 24 hours.)

Anyway, I am here with GrannyJ.  We are working on getting her into a nursing home for a few weeks, to see if they can do anything.  We’re talking about her maybe moving to live with my brother.  Lots of things to talk about.  She is not doing well, but she is–as ever–my sharp-witted, fun, sweet mom.

In the meantime, consider me a poster child for the Sandwich Generation:  OmegaDotter’s birthday is tomorrow, and she is in her first “real” gymnastics meet tomorrow, too, with judges and not every participant getting a trophy.  We had a little birthday dinner Wednesday, and gave her the family presents, but I wasn’t able to arrange her party in time…that’s up to OmegaDad.

I know a lot of bloggers who are having issues with their moms these days.  Kat Kaz (damn, should proofread when I’m posting at midnight!), Laurie, Lorrie, V…I’ve kept so quiet with them about their problems because…well, it’s kind of a “La, la, la, I’m ignoring things!” approach.  But we’re past the ignoring problems part here, and I want to apologize and shout out to all of you to say, “Hang in there, kiddos.”

I will keep all & sundry posted; I wasn’t planning to post tonight, but saw Anon in AV’s comment, and thought I should update.

When you’re a new parent, with a small life depending on you, you find yourself doing strange things sometimes.  One commonality that I’m sure my readers have experienced is how new moms and dads can find themselves stopping by their child’s bed in the night and watching—urgently, because you can’t hear the breathing and you’re afraid that something’s wrong.  You wait, suspended in the moment, your anxiety ramping up, until you see the slow, gentle, up and down movement of your child’s torso in tune with her breathing, and you move on, reassured.

I found myself doing that with my mother while I was visiting over Christmas.

I’d be padding into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and find myself popping in to hover at the side of her bed over her, watching, suspended in the moment, my anxiety ramping up, until I saw that slow, gentle, up and down movement of her torso in time with her breathing.  The anxiety was always there.  I’d find myself sneaking in while she was taking a nap, just to be sure.  The sound of her oxygen machine—which she’s used for years now—receded into the background, becoming part of the everyday noises of the house, but it was still loud enough so that when I’d check her, I’d have to get very close to see the small movements of breathing, to hear anything.  I hovered, just checking.

When we first got there, my brother and family were ensconced in the living room, so we made a nest for OmegaDotter by the side of mom’s bed, and I slept in the bed with her.  It wasn’t reassuring.  She was not her normal self; she was lethargic, quiet, enervated.  We were all worried.  Bro and SIL had taken her on an overnight trip down to Tucson, and from the pictures, it looked like mom hadn’t gotten out of the car much.

So there I would be, in the middle of the night, waking up with one of my infamous hot flashes, and I’d hear mom gasping for breath, with a soft moaning sound that turned into a whimper.  I would sit up and watch her, my brows furrowed, my heart aching.  If it kept on, I would nudge her slightly awake, so that she would close her mouth and breathe from her nose instead, the nose which had the cannula of the oxygen tube.  Then she could breathe, and I would be able to fall asleep again.

Her cardiologist had put her on a huge dose of Lipitor in mid-December.  My brother—at least twice her weight, and with cholesterol levels much, much higher than hers, was on 10 mg per day; she was on 80.  The theory, as we understood it, was that it was a jolt-dose, a purposeful systemic shock—but even so, it was unnerving.  Especially since the medical listings of Lipitor on the web included “enervation”, “exhaustion”, and “weakness” as possible side effects.  We made her promise to go to the doctor after we left to find out exactly why she was put on such a high dose, and see if he wouldn’t lower it.  In the meantime, I suggested that she simply halve the pills and take half the dose.

The day before we were supposed to leave—after my brother and family had left themselves—we went out on a drive to the lake, to see the (vile, mean, odious, scary) geese who had chased me and grabbed my pants legs and pecked the back of my knees in a vain search for bread while I was videotaping them.  It was chilly, but bright.  The dotter and I wandered around, she fed the ducks and geese, I took photographs…and mom stayed in the car.  Yes, it was chilly, but this was not like her.  She said later that day that every day she felt just a little bit worse.  Not a lot.  But enough.  And she was hardly eating at all.

That night, in the kicthen, as I was giving her a hug, I leaned my head on hers and whispered in her ear, “Would you like me to stay a bit longer?”  She reached up her hand to cover mine on her shoulder and said softly, “I think…yes, I would.” 

Hi, all…I’m still in Arizona, and will be for a few more days.  Mom (GrannyJ) isn’t feeling all that hot, and I decided to stay on longer than planned, so I can ferry her to doctors to have her looked at and her meds examined and all of that kind of stuff.

For those who have had to change/cancel flights, a word of warning:  Travelocity customer support told me that the cheapest replacement fare (if we were to change our flights) was going to be $1500 (give or take a few dollars) per person.  At the same time, I was looking at the Travelocity search, and for the same day, I saw many flights in the range of $500 to $700.  Something was just Not Right.  So I went ahead and cancelled the tickets, and we now have a credit to be applied to the rebooking, so even with the rescheduling fee it will be much cheaper.

Later, gators.

ETA:  Oh, my!  I totally forgot:

Happy New Year!  May 2010 be a wonderful year for you all!

The real estate agent who helped us find our house (and is a dear, close, personal friend of our ex-governor’s) is a relentless saleswoman.  We get letters in the mail with helpful tips and tricks!  We get–at irregular intervals–a coupon to a local ice cream store or dollars off on purchases at a locally owned business.  And, this Thanksgiving, we were given a pie, apple or pumpkin.

So, we now have a store-bought pumpkin pie for free, sitting in our fridge.

We have a turkey thawing out, alternately in the sink and in the fridge.

We have lemons and rosemary and garlic to stuff the turkey with.

We have taters, parsley, and cheese for OmegaDad’s trademarked Green Smashed Potatoes.  (Om nom nom!)

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

All that’s left is for us to put together the feast.  I will provide chopping and dicing; OmegaDad is le chef and I will do only his bidding in the kitchen.

It is time to list the things in life that make us thankful.  Really, it would be a good idea to do this on a regular basis; maybe the world would be a better place for it.  So long as it’s quiet and private and not trumpeted to the world.  My tidbits of thankfulness wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the world; they’re all small and personal and, face it, pretty damned selfish.  What I am thankful for, someone else may find picayune, and vice versa.

Number one on my list is OmegaDad.  This guy is an endless font of incredible spoonerisms and malaprops that leave me laughing at the same time as I am left in gaping awe at his inventiveness.  I have asked how he does it, and he shrugs:  it just sort of “comes out–I don’t do it on purpose…”  We have been together for almost 16 years, and I still find things to talk with him about, still find him gentle and sweet and thoughtful and intelligent.  And, dayum, he cooks up a storm, dontcha know!  This year’s focus has been bread, and we have been the recipients of yummy flatbreads, lavosh, pizza dough, challah, plain white bread, breadsticks, French bread, tortillas, and homemade hamburger buns.  Wow.

Next is OmegaDotter.  She’s just amazing.  OmegaDad recently challenged her to finally pin down her back flip, offering a differing amount of money depending on how long it takes her to get it solid.  In the course of a week, she has managed to reach the point of always flipping over and 75% of the time ending up on her feet again.  (The practice is on our bed.)  She is reading by herself, and we alternate nights when I read to her with nights when she reads to me.  Every once in a while she will bestow a piece of artwork on us that makes my jaw drop.  And she’s beginning to bring out more and more unasked-for flashes of empathy and moral grounding.  Yee-haw!

Then there’s GrannyJ.  She’s 82 and still going strong, walking her small town, taking photographs, blogging and nourishing a local blogging community, and challenging me with new and interesting science fiction authors all the time.

We have our health.  We have our house.  We have friends and family.  We have a standard of living that would make 70% of the world gasp in awe.

We had Kai for eleven years–that’s good.  We’ve discovered that chickens, though they may be pretty damned dumb, still have a lot of personality.  Our garden overflowed with vegetables, even though we were moosed at times.  We have long, lovely hours of sunshine in the summer to balance out the cold dark months of winter.

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. friends and readers, and generally thankful warm fuzzies to my non-U.S. followers!

We got to see the dawg at the vet’s office today; he was totally stoned on pain meds, but even so looked much better than he had yesterday morning.  So we loved on him and snuggled with him, and then left, with promises of being able to check him out tomorrow morning, and maybe take him home.

Mom is out of the hospital, yay!

And I?  Am worn out.  Just plain tuckered.

It has been a bad few days.

A few days ago, I noticed the dawg wasn’t eating much, or drinking much.  Then yesterday a.m., early, the dawg started barfing.  And barfing.  And barfing.  And soon, there was nothing to barf up…but he was thirsty.  And he couldn’t keep that down, either.  At which point, dawg-worrying became intense enough to have us call the vet.

The dawg doesn’t like vets, so we needed both OmegaDad and myself to be there to calm the pup down for an exam.  Then x-rays.  Then blood work.  Then shots (an anti-emetic and an acid suppressor).  Then instructions to wait until evening, then try him on water, then white rice & boiled chicken this a.m.

We walked out having spent $380.  Ack!

The dawg stopped barfing for a bit.  Then we tried him on water later that night, which he slurped right down.

And then promptly threw right up again.

All through the night, the same thing:  drink water, throw it up.

So we called the vet again this a.m., and the vet said it was time for the barium x-rays:  fill the dawg with a barium-spiked fluid and trace the movement to see where the blockage was.  So I schlepped the pup off to the vet again, and dropped him off, with an estimate of another $300.  Ack!

Two hours later, the vet calls, saying that the barium didn’t move more than an inch beyond the end of his tummy, and the only thing to do was exploratory surgery, and here’s the estimate:  $1000 to $2000.  ACK!  ACK, ACK, double ACK!

At which point, the qualms start.  Ooookay, we’re talking serious bucks here.  Ooookay; if it were the dotter, we wouldn’t be balking at the cost, but scrambling to find ways to cover it.  Ooookay; there are people in the U.S. who need that money to get health care.  Ooookay; a dawg is worth it/a dawg is not worth it.  Oookay; there are people who would think we were nuts to even think of paying for it.  Ooookay, there are people who would think we were cruel and horrible for even thinking of not paying for it.  Ooookay; we don’t have the extra bucks right now, but we will have them when our PFD check comes through in two weeks–and yeah, we wanted to buy some toys with the money, but isn’t Kai worth it?

Et cetera.

It was a very odd feeling.

The end result:  A “Care Credit” card, a credit card offered for paying for vet bills.  You can apply over the phone.  Oh, goody.  Just what we need…

So we signed and the dawg went in for surgery, OmegaDad and I went out to lunch, and then I went home.

To be confronted with a message on our phone from a friend of my mother’s saying “She’s ALL RIGHT, but your mother is in the hospital, just released from the ICU, and here’s the phone number…”

Oh, shit.

Two days of ongoing worry were suddenly replaced with frantic panic.

Talking to my mom, and then talking to her doctor, reassured me (currently).  Seems she went in for day-surgery for a blockage in her leg; all went well.  She stayed with her friend for the night, and in the night, her leg and foot started hurting.  She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t go out for her regular weekly breakfast with her buds, so she finally called the doc and asked is this was normal.  He immediately told her to hie herself off to the emergency room.  When she got there, the ER folk all panicked about her heart flutter and kept talking about how she needed a pacemaker right now.  Her doc finally got them straightened out on that (she has had the flutter for quite a while, and has a “strong heart” according to two cardiologists aside from the flutter), but she was admitted to ICU for observation and testing.  While she was there, some bloodwork came back indicating she might have internal bleeding, but everything else was okay; they moved her out of ICU into PCU (?!) and decided to keep her for another day or two.

The end result:  I have been on the phone now to fifty kazillion people for hours.  (I tried calling my Unka Bill in Australia, but when I got through, he couldn’t hear me, so I had to email him [Unka Bill, check your email!].)  Our finances are in a holding pattern.  I’m tired.  I want my mommy.  My mommy wants her camera and a laptop because she’s bored out of her gourd…

Oh, yeah, and mom’s friend says that she’s due to go back for roto-rootering of her other leg in 10 days…

Oh, yeah, and I finally talked to the vet’s nurse, who said that the surgery took longer than expected (that means more $$), they had to take out a piece of the dawg’s intestine, and there was a blockage which looked to be the knotted end of a rope chew toy.  At which point, I was amazed:  we haven’t given the dawg a rope chew toy for more than a year, when this incident happened.  The nurse scoffed.  She said it wasn’t possible.  Well, I can tell you that we removed the dawg’s chew toys that very afternoon, May 17, 2008, and haven’t given him one since, and he’s not allowed out unless we’re with him…sooo…where’d the chew toy come from if it hasn’t been sitting in his stomach since then???

Wah.

Our (green)house is a very, very, very fine (green)house

So the greenhouse is complete, except for some trim work, as of today.  We happily lugged our two “baby” chickens into the greenhouse to provide a contained greeting spot for old hens and new chickens to get accustomed to each other, in preparation to migrating the new birds into the large coop.

I have to say, the greenhouse is awesome.  OmegaDad did a wonderful job.  It’s neat, tidy, sunny, light and warm inside, roomy, has lots of beams to hang plants from, and looks like it may provide a very nice spot to hang out on chilly days that have some sunshine.  Not that I’m thinking of lazing about there in the dead of winter, mind you.  But it’s really, really nice.

To refresh the memory, here’s what it looked like before:

And this is what it looks like now:

(Pay no attention to the detritus in the foreground of the second picture–there’s a pair of sawhorses with plywood making a work surface, which is covered with paint cans, tools, scrids and scrads of lumber and foam molding, and it provides a nice place to lean rakes, shovels, brooms, etc. while they’re in use.  The whole affair is due to be removed Very Soon Now.)

I am most satisfied.

The bunny…the bunny…oh, I love the bunny

The day after our baby duckling died (I am still sad about that), OmegaDotter went off to play with some neighborhood friends.  An hour later, one of the girls poked her head around the back of the house to ask if we, by any chance, had some carrots?  Why?  Well, see, there’s this bunny that we’re trying to catch…

So I provided some carrots, and figured they’d have a grand time unsuccessfully trying to attract one of the wild bunnies that hang out in the neighborhood (some of them are very interested in our veggie garden, but we have netting over it to deter moose, and it seems to deter the bunnies as well).

An hour later, three girls show up in our backyard lugging the world’s most enormous bunny.  OmegaDad and I take one look and know it’s someone’s pet bunny, but whose?  So we stash the bunny in our downstairs bathroom, animal refuge par excellence, I print up a bunny flier with a picture, and we send the girls out armed with fliers and tape to attach same to mailbox clusters around the neighborhood.

This is the bunny:

You can’t tell, but he’s HUGE.

A day later we get a call from Kelsey, who says she thinks it’s her bunny.  Since at that point I had no idea where the bunny was–A. and G. had taken it home, then A2 and her sister had taken it to their home–I asked her to call later when the dotter was home, so we could return the bunny.

A few hours later, she called and asked if we wanted the bunny.

So now we have a bunny.  His name is Copper.  He’s 7/8ths Belgian giant, 1/8 satin, three years old, and “frisky”, according to Kelsey’s dad.  “Frisky” means he’s not neutered, and thinks people’s legs are sexay female bunnies.

He, too, is moving into the greenhouse as soon as we get the (utterly gross yucky stinky peee-yew) bunny cage and shelter that we got from Kelsey’s family cleaned up.

Fame!

In my last post, I talked about Michael Jackson’s death and how I thought it was tragic.  Please understand, I am not trying to make him out to be any sort of hero.  To me, “tragic” does not necessarily correlate with “heroic”; I was thinking more on the lines of “tragic waste”.  I just think of a boy star who grew up surrounded by people who wanted a piece of him, and not having the maturity to realize that your friends are the people who will pull you up when you’re doing something stupid and say, “What on earth are you thinking, man?!”  There you are, young and rich and talented, and you’ve got people who call themselves “friends” who are not “friends”, but enablers, and they poison your mind against the ones who want you to stop and think for a few moments…to the point where all you have around you are the sleazebags, the sycophants, the wimps who *do* like you for yourself but aren’t strong enough to pull you back.  That is the tragedy to me, that someone with so much promise went off into La-La Land.

Oh, it’s not a new story; it’s so old it shows up in fables and folk tales and (no doubt) the Bible.  But it’s still a sad story, to me.

I’m leaving on a jet plane

The dotter and I board a plane very late this evening to head off to visit GrannyJ for a few weeks.  We leave poor OmegaDad behind to cope with introducing chickens to each other, figuring out how to make a bunny hutch out of the plywood and lumber we have left over, and being left alllll alooooone.  Right now, I’m in that state of semi-frantic obsessive list-checking.  Alas, some things on the list were destined to not get done.

I’ll try to post some entries, but am not sure how often.  The first week coincides with a visit from my bro and his family, so you’re more likely to see stuff after the end of the week.

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…

I had promised GrannyJ that I would stop at Trader Joe’s on my way up to buy her some lemon-dill sauce and some tuna steaks.  I had a plan:  I would go to the TJ’s I know, at 99th and Thunderbird, then head on up the hill.  No problemo; the route was engrained in my head.  So I pulled out of the rental car complex and let my autopilot take over:  turn this way, turn that, get on I-17, drive, drive, drive, turn off on Thunderbird, drive, drive, drive.

I arrived at 99th and Thunderbird, and there was the familiar shape of the TJ’s mall.  But it looked different. Where were all the cars?  I turned across the intersection and pulled in, realizing, with a sinking feeling, that TJ’s was gone. Yes, I had the right spot:  there was the familiar shape of the TJ’s store front.  But where the “Trader Joe’s” sign had been there was only a fading memory burned into the creamy adobe by the sunlight, a dim shadow of where the letters had been.

Oops.

So I pulled into the Wells Fargo parking lot, pulled out the phone, called mom.  Sorry, I said.  I’ll be there in about an hour and a half.

I decided it would be fun to drive up 99th (the Lake Pleasant Road) up to the Carefree Highway, though I knew it would be painful.  The last time I had done the drive, the encroaching ticky-tacky boxes had been pushed further north, but surely there would still be some desert out there that I could drive through in the setting sun.

I drove up 99th, just getting into the swing of things, and was abruptly stopped at a T-intersection where 99th ended.  Before me was a mall, a swanky earth-colored eminence with neon lights advertising eateries and clothing stores.  The cross street was called “Lake Pleasant Parkway”.

Say what?!

I had to make a snap decision, and was not in the left-hand lanes…goodness only knows how things had changed further, and perhaps the better thing to do would be to just turn right, head back to I-17.

As I was driving the broad new parkway, expecting to head towards the highway, it started curving.  I noticed a cross street:  Beardsley.  Say what?!  That’s not right, I thought–doesn’t Beardsley intersect with the highway?  I kept on, but started looking ahead for cross-street signs.  And I realized that the setting sun was no longer behind me, but off to my right.

There ahead of me was Union Hills.  ACK!  Yes, I was right:  ”Lake Pleasant Parkway” had morphed from a possible intersection with the highway into something heading directly south–back the way I had come.  I turned on Union Hills, and saw that LPP had, at some point, turned into 83rd Avenue.

But despite this unexpected detour–which had taken an extra 30 minutes–I soon made it to the highway, and was motoring north through the edges of Phoenix…and passing yet another “Photo speed enforcement zone”.  They were littering the area on all the highways, and they were new.

I passed Deer Valley and hit construction:  a long, long passage of arrows pointing left, then pointing right, the highway lanes swinging this way and that, the Arizona Department of Transportation widening the highway and rerouting it.

I passed an intersection labeled “Jomax Road”.  Once, only 10 years ago, Jomax Road was a small dirt road that fed into 99th Avenue in the middle of the desert, a lonely sign on a 2-lane road, that led into an area of old 2-acre spreads with dowdy ranch houses.  Now, it was big enough to warrant an entrance to the interstate.

I passed the construction on the new, expanded interchange with Carefree Highway.  It was dark now.

The newness passed away; now I was on familiar ground.  Coming up on my bete noire, a development called Anthem.  Once upon a time, the road there was called Desert Foothills; now it was called Anthem Way.  Once upon a time, there had been a (for the desert) lush forest of palo verde trees, one of my most favorite spots to drive through in springtime, as the wildflowers carpeted the ground and the pale chartreuse leaves popped out on the trees.  When Del Webb came through and raped the desert to install its huge development out by New River, they made very sure to keep all the saguaro cacti–it was required by law.  But all the palo verde trees?  The thing that made that spot unique?  Poof.  Gone.  See, they weren’t required to do anything with them.  So they brought in their bulldozers and ripped them out of the ground to make way for hundreds of square adobe-colored McMansions.  McMansions purchased by people who wanted inexpensive housing near to Phoenix, out in the desert where the nights were an endless expanse of darkness filled with hundreds of stars.

Of course, now that those McMansions are there, with their associated street lights and porch lights and their carefully saved saguaros, the velvety nights with the tiara of brilliant stars are no more.

I’m sure the people who had lived in New River for years beforehand were pleased to have their night skies removed like that…

Most of the drive between Anthem and Prescott was the same, thank heavens.  Long sweeps of emptiness with a blob of lights around Black Canyon City, and scattered spots of light marking old houses out in the chapparal.  A small spot of newness at the entrance to Prescott, where ADOT is remodeling the old highway interchange, but not too much difference.

The past ten years have changed so much about this land I love.  The relentless expansion of Phoenix has chewed up an amazing amount of the desert, and it saddens me.  It especially saddens me to realize that–according to reports I have heard–many of those new houses, built to cash in on the real estate run-up of 1997-2006, are empty or on the verge of foreclosure.

Ah, well.  I am at mom’s house.  Her street is the same as it has been in the past ten years; the changes came here before that.  We spent yesterday visiting the local Gingerbread House Village, hanging out, and going out for dinner.  It’s quiet and relaxing, and I find I miss my dotter very, very much.

“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.)

OmegaDotter drawing a picture for Grandma Julie:

“I’m putting the sun up here…Now I need some clouds, but not a lot, because I don’t want to hide the sun.”

“Grass…I need grass down here.”

“And a spider!  I like spiders.  In pictures!  It has one…two…three…four…five, six, seven, eight legs.”

“This is a tree.  I need a tree to hang the web for the spider from.”

“Oops!  Two branches for one apple!  Oh, well!”

“That’s a bee hive.  And these are bees, and they’re flying to the apple.”

“Oh!  And I need a flower here.  The bees are flying to the flower, too.”

“This is Grandma Julie.  She always has a pony tail.  I’m drawing her with a dress and high heels because that’s how I always draw women.”

“And this is me, next to her.”

“Now what should I draw?  A house?  Okay!”

“I think I need another flower over here!  And the bees are flying over to this flower, too!  And they’re flying over Grandma Julie’s head, not behind it!”

“We need an envelope.  No, Mommy, I used up all my envelopes.  What should I do?  I know!  I can get a piece of paper, and we’ll make an envelope!  No, I’ve used up all the paper up here…I’ll go get one from the printer!  Here it is, Mommy!  Oh, the scissors are to cut the paper–”

“Oh, okay.  I guess I don’t have to cut it.  Yeah, we’ll fold it like that!  And then we have to tape it up the sides, like this.  Oops, I need more tape.  Mommy, can you untangle the tape for me?  Okay, now we need another piece.”

“How do we fold up the letter, Mommy?  It’s not going to fiiiiiiit!”

“Oh!  Yeah!  Let’s do it that way!”

“How do you spell ‘Grandma’ again?”

“Puh…lllll…ay….essss.”

“How do you spell ‘Prescott’?”

“I’m going to draw a label here.  I’ll put our phone number on it!”

“Why not?  I want to put our phone number on it, for Grandma Julie!”

“Oh, okay…I know!  I’ll put Oh…em…ay…guh…ah…duh…aw…tuh…r in there.  See!  And some hearts.  No, no, Mommy, I need to put more hearts on it!”

“I’m going to draw a stamp right here.”

“Why not?  Oh, okay, but let me put the stamp on.”

“Now don’t forget we have to take it to the mailbox!”

Note and drawing on its way to Grandma Julie’s house.  Although I seem to recall that I forgot to put a zip code on your address, so it may take a while…

Another long day spent out and about.  The OmegaFamily had done the first part of the drive before, up Margaret Pass to the alpine summit lake.  At the lake, I found some purty flowers.  This is some type of sedum, and really very small:

At the lake, we had marmots and ground squirrels and magpies eating dead critters.  GrannyJ got one pic each of the marmot crossing the road (”Why does the marmot cross the road?”  “To get to the other side!”  Peals of laughter from the dotter) and of the magpie chowing down.

Yesterday, we went beyond the lake.  Here is the road we took through the mountains after going past the little lake:

There were mines (one is a state park and defunct, the other is a Going Concern).  There were oodles of purty alpine flowers that GrannyJ was trying to photograph, so here’s a shot of the lady in action:

And the dotter and I clambered about a bit, too:

Then we drove on down the road pictured above, through the tundra above the tree line, and then following a lovely mountain stream down into the beginning of the trees.  The beavers love this stream–everywhere we looked, there were beaver ponds, and a fine beaver lodge or two (the heaps of dead twigs by the side of the pond):

As we went further down, the stream got bigger, and so did the trees.  The dotter spent a delighted few minutes at this stop collecting “gold!”, aka quartz rocks.  We had purchased a vial of gold up at the mine, so she was determined to add to it.  OmegaDad warned us at this stop that it looked like Bear Country and we should Make Noise.  The dotter happily obliged, but, as GrannyJ noted, the stream made so much noise that it didn’t seem like it would make a difference.  We did not see any bears.

Another purty flower from this area, I believe–I think it’s valerian:

Our back road ended at the highway, and we turned northwards in hopes of getting a glimpse of The Big One.  Alas, there were clouds directly over the peak, so we never saw it.  We went on to the tourist town at the confluence of two rivers, which delighted GrannyJ with oodles of moose kitsch.  These were the only moose that she has seen so far in her visit; our marauding garden moose seem to have found greener pastures for the past few weeks.

There was a painting in one of the galleries that I swooned over and would love to own…alas, it’s $800, and that’s enough money for more practical purposes, so we won’t be getting that painting.  We wandered down to the beach by the rivers, and the dotter and I practiced skipping stones, both of us managing to skip a stone at least twice.  Woot!

The dotter is sporting a grand knit cap which was her gift from OmegaDad, and which she slept with (”It’s my nightcap, mommy!”).

Then we ate a tourist-town-priced dinner, and moseyed our way back, with a stop at this little lake to catch the setting sun:

That picture, by the way, was taken by the dotter.

We arrived home at 10 p.m., and all fell into bed soon thereafter.  Today:  a day of rest.  I mowed almost all of the backyard before the heavens opened up and poured down hail and great big fat raindrops; we are now getting afternoon thunderstorms (thunder!  Yay!) growing downward from the mountains.

More sunny days…we think GrannyJ brought them with her, which, of course, means she will take them away when she leaves.

Yesterday, we took advantage of the hint of sunlight we saw, and headed off to The Glacier.  We were rewarded with the kinds of views that show up on Alaska tourism magazines.

Mountain and river:

Dad and dotter sharing some laughter and nose-rubs alongside a lake:

The lake and mountains looking very picturesque:

GrannyJ in front of The Glacier:

The glacier is advancing at the rate of a foot a day.  At the same time, it used to be where GrannyJ is pictured, and has actually retreated to where it is in the view (half a mile back?).  So the end result:  if it weren’t advancing as quickly as it is, it would have receded quite a bit further.

In reality, what GrannyJ is standing on is frozen icy debris.  It’s astonishing how much grit and dirt and rock this honkin’ heap o’ ice has left behind.  Anyway, you drive to almost this point, then hike the half mile to the real glacial stuff.  The keepers of the private property on which the glacier ends claimed that we could drive GrannyJ to the foot of the glacier…ahem.  They wuz wrong.  Or maybe they didn’t quite understand when we asked how close she could get to it.  Technically, yes, she’s “on” the glacier.  But what we wanted was something like this:

The ice is incredibly blue.  The dotter was poking at one of the numerous rivulets of water rushing across the surface of the ice, and you get an idea of the blue-ness:

The dotter had to try sliding down the ice:

We followed the trail to the lake at the real foot of the glacier:

You can’t tell just how big this is, but I have another picture of the same shot, just a little angled to the left, which has a trio of people crossing the ice midway down, and the people are little ant-like spots on the ice.

At this point, we should have turned around and taken the trail back.  But, hey, we’re wild and crazy and adventuresome.  We wanted to go a different way “out”, so we followed the stream back out from the bottom of the lake.  We had to cross numerous times, one of which ended up with OmegaDad nearly being swept into the water when the “solid ice” in the middle of the four-foot-wide rushing icy stream turned out to not be solid and sank beneath him.  This so freaked out the dotter that at bedtime, when we were doing the Feeling Game, her “I was scared by…” was this, and it led to a discussion of what would happen if he had been drowned, and what would happen if we both were drowned, and “how would I get home?” 

There were some grand carved canyons in the ice:

But after a great deal of slipping and sliding and schlepping through icy rivulets and slurgy muck, we made it out. 

We drove further up into the mountains, above the tree line, and got a grand postcard-like vista:

We ate dinner at a roadhouse which had this lovely little jewel of a tundra lake behind it:

And then we drove home.

All told, about 10 or 11 hours out-and-about.  I have to say that by the time we were about 20 miles from home, I was ready to kill my dotter.  This child cannot stop chattering.  It was endless.  I was at the point where I was desperate for peace and quiet!

But there you have it:  Yes, there is sunshine in Alaska.  Yes, there are glaciers and forests and mountains and lakes and rivers in Alaska.  I am mentally storing up all the sunny days in my memory, so that if it keeps raining, I’ve got that sunny memory to keep me going.

Tap, tap, tap…

Pffffttt…Pfffftttt…

“Hello?” Tap, tap.  “Hello?  Anyone there?”

Yes, it’s OmegaMom, reporting after four days of silence.  Hi, there.  Yes, I’m alive.  Yes, OmegaGranny is alive.  My computer is being filled to the brim with OmegaGranny’s pictures, which I am supposed to burn to CD or DVD just before she leaves.

I fully expected to find at least one, maybe even two comments taking me to task for my vaccination post.  Nope.  What a disappointment!  That was supposed to be controversial, dammit.

Oh, well.

What have we been doing?

Let’s see:  Driving in to Big City at midnight to pick up OmegaGranny, arriving back home at 2 a.m.  A day spent recuperating and peering out at grey and gloom.  Two days wandering around the area in the sunshine.  (YES!  Sunshine!  TWO DAYS of it!) 

Two failed attempts to return OmegaGranny’s fancy-schmancy portable oxygen doohickey which she used on the airplane (the little franchise store was closed, even though the sign claimed it was open.) 

One failed written drivers’ license test, courtesy of yours truly.  Ahem.  Hey, look, I just didn’t read the manual, and had no idea what the basic speed limit on roads was if it wasn’t posted (55 MPH), got my solid and stripy lines mixed up in a passing zone question (I thought I was on the stripy side), and depend totally upon my insurance agent to tell me how much insurance we’re supposed to have.  Ah, well; we’ll try again on Monday.

And a visit to the veterinarian.

With a chicken.

Yes, I took one of our chickens to the vet.

This was at OmegaDad’s behest.

Winnie, our golden-laced Wyandotte, had cracked her beak, you see.  I figured it was like a fingernail; it would grow out and all would be well.

But OmegaDad wanted it checked out.

OmegaDad, many years ago, was concerned about the big black spot of rough skin on our 2-year-old butterscotch Teddy Bear hamster.  I told him, “Hmmm…It looks like cancer.  She is two years old.  There’s not much we can do if I’m right…”  So he took the hamster to the vet.  The vet looked at the hamster, poked, prodded, and said to OmegaDad, “Hmmm…It looks like cancer.  She is two years old.  There’s not much we can do if I’m right…”  Then he added, “But we could do a biopsy, if you really want to…”

OmegaDad did not get the biopsy done.  Our hamster lived happily for another six months, slowly going bald, and getting incredibly wrinkly skin.

Anyway, he wanted me to take Winnie to the vet.  I made sure we all returned early enough from our excursion that day that we had time to put her in a box and haul her off.  When I entered the vet’s office, a customer at the counter looked at me, and the box, and the dotter, and said, “Oh!  You must be the chicken!”

Yes, we were the chicken.  Apparently, our appointment was a great source of amusement for everyone.

Anyway, Doctor Sheila–a fine vet–came in, exclaimed at how beauteous Winnie was, and how tame, gently chucked her under the chin, peered at the beak, and called her “Sugar.”  (Doctor Sheila calls all our animals “Sugar”.)  Winnie, normally a high-strung bird, drank it all in.  The only evidence of chicken nerves was when Doc Sheila came at the beak with a trimmer, at which point I had to put Winnie into a chicken-hold.

I kept explaining that it was my husband’s idea to take the chicken to the vet.

Doc Sheila reassured me by telling me that she had done much more ridiculous pets than that…for instance, she had done surgery on both a goldfish (!) and a frog (!).

So Winnie’s beak has been trimmed, we have been reassured that she’s a splendid specimen of a bird and quite healthy, and I’ve been ferrying OmegaGranny and OmegaDotter hither, thither, and yon to various splendid scenery and tourist spots.  I now have some 300 posts in my BlogLines roster to wade through…

Many years ago, when I was growing up in Chicago, my mom and I would go to the Jewel on Clark Street to go grocery shopping on Saturdays.  We’d take a taxi off to the store, do our shopping, then I would hang out with the filled shopping cart while mom went into the drug store to buy cigarettes, and then we would call another taxi and head home.  (Keep in mind that this was many moons ago, when the taxi rate was something like 5 cents per one-sixth of a mile.)

Normally, mom’s foray into the drug store wouldn’t take too long, so I’d sit perched by the cart on the metal railings cleverly designed so that you couldn’t get the carts out into the parking lot, and daydream.  Cars would come and go, people would squeeze through the openings in the railings with their bags of groceries, the sun would dart in and out behind clouds.

Once in a while, though, she’d take "too long", as measured by my ten-year-old mind.  At which point, my daydreams would take a distinctly dark tone.

She’d been kidnapped.

There’d been a robbery, and she was shot, lying in the store by the cashier’s counter in a puddle of blood.

I knew I would sit there for hours before anyone would think to tell me that she was in the hospital on her death’s bed.

Something Dire (but unspecified) Had Happened.  My life was about to come crashing down.  Stuff like that.

And then she’d show up, purse and purchases in hand, and anticlimactically we’d await the taxi.  I was always very relieved, though I kept it to myself.

To this day, when someone precious to me takes "too long", as judged by my forty-mumble-year-old mind, I go off into that panic zone.  This is, of course, very silly.  "Too long" is extremely subjective.  But if, say, OmegaDad informs me that he and the dotter are going off to Home Debit to get some specific drill bits, my brain puts a fuzzy-logic time limit on that expedition.  Home Debit + "specific drill bits" = Not Too Long.  So, if the expedition expands to include, say, a stop at Greasy Fast Food Palace for burgers, fries, and sodas without my knowledge, a swirling mass of evil starts emerging around their heads (in my imagination).  It starts small, then grows.

When it reaches a crescendo, when I’m just about to start asking myself out loud, "Okay.  Is it time to start worrying for real yet?", this is, of course, when the garage door opens and the dotter comes barreling in, junk food in hand, with OmegaDad behind her.

"Precious" is one of those words that has been devalued and marginalized by pop culture.  "Oh, isn’t she just precious!" is the saccharine coo that the word conjures up these days.  Or–worse yet–gooey sweet big-eyed pastel figurines.  In our society, "precious" is something oh-just-so-darling-and-cute.  Oy.  Now, take Gollum–Gollum knew how to treat something precious: he obsessed over it for centuries.  That is "precious".  Something very important.  Very special.  Very loved.  Something you are protective about.  Something to be treasured and cherished.

For some reason, now that Great-Grandma is gone, the idea of my mom gallivanting around the U.S. on her own is much more disturbing than it was.  Before, mom was the "accompany-er", the travel companion for Great-Grandma.  As such, the focus of any worry, the need to care for and cherish, was Great-Grandma.  Now, however, mom is planning to travel off to visit OmegaBro and family, and OmegaCuzes and families, in one fell swoop.  The outer, more mature part of me is delighted, is glad that mom no longer has to stay in town to worry about her own mom and can be free to do such traveling.

But there she is–my one and only mamasan.  I have one aunt and uncle left alive, and mom.  None of the other forebears are alive.  She is doubly–triply–precious these days.  My safety net of elders has thinned, and I find my over-imaginative ten-year-old coming to the fore with Visions of Disaster.

Not too often, mind you.  But there it is.  Because she’s precious to me.

Wouldn’t that be a great title for a blog?

My brother and I spent the time at mom’s ferrying her around to appointments, grocery stores, phoning banks and brokers to learn the procedures for establishing death, purchasing various technical toys and gadgets, and taking her out into the woods to look at water flowing over dams.

At one lake, there was a sheet of ice covering one end, with a hole in the middle of the icy expanse.  The ducks and geese who like to hang out there, eager for handouts from visitors, congregated in the hole and made occasional forays outward when they saw suckers visitors who might throw food stood by the shore.  At which point, the ducks would start waddling towards the suckers visitors in a single file line across the ice.

One boy out on the frozen-in dock kept yelling out with wild enjoyment, "Mom!  Mom!  Look!  It’s a mob of angry ducks!"

They weren’t actually angry, nor were they a mob, but they made for great pictures.  Unfortunately, all the pictures I took were with mom’s camera, and are now happily ensconced on mom’s (new!) external hard drive, rather than here, so I can’t provide illustrations.

So.  I am home.

I have a cold, which my body determinedly held off while we were at mom’s house.  I have one of those horrid itchy noses that keeps saying "I’m gonna sneeze!  I’m gonna sneeze!" and then, moments later, "Gotcha!  Hah!  Pwned!", leaving me with sneezus interruptus.  The scratchy throat and cough are par for the course, but the I-really-wanna-sneeze feeling is the worst.

When I finally pulled up to the house last night, after an interminable day of traveling, the dotter came barreling out into the garage, clad only in her gymnastics leotard, dancing around, jumping up and down and screaming, "Mommy!  Mommy!"  When I walked into the garage, she flung herself at me, jumped into my arms, wrapped her legs and arms around me, and said, "I missed you.  A lot!"  Wow.  A person could get used to a greeting like that.

Apparently, while I was gone, she informed OmegaDad that while he was allowed to travel, she didn’t like it, but that Mommy Was Not Allowed To Travel.  At all.

My mom is a kick-ass mom.  Did you know that?  And boy howdy, can she make me cry.

So I’ve been whimpering about the lack of sunlight.

What does my mom do?

She sends me a package.  A mysterious package.  It didn’t say who it was from, and I didn’t remember ordering anything, so there was this big, flat package handed to me by the postal person that was just puzzling me.  Then I opened it up to reveal this:

And then, the following day, she sends me this:

The first is hung already, and we have a place for the second.

There’s nothing like a well-thought-out gift to make one feel…just plain happy and warm-n-fuzzy and like Someone Out There loves you and cares for you.

Thank you, mamasan!

Y’know, like cow-tipping?  Hyork hyork hyork.

So OmegaGranny got tagged with this list for bloggers.  You’re supposed to star the ones you think are most important, and add a few of your own.

Here they are:

1. Look, read, and learn.
2. Be EXCELLENT to each other
3. Don’t let money change ya!
4. Always reply to your comments.
–>5. Blog about what you know & love.
6. Don’t use filthy language-buy a dictionary.
7. Blog about something educational.
–>8. Be yourself; others will follow.
9. Don’t have too many blogs that will become a chore to maintain.
10. Keep it simple, user-friendly, interesting and organized!
11. Keep the blog simple and sweet!!!
12. Share with others your thoughts and don’t be shy!
13. Never ask for link exchange. Blog hop to increase traffic.
14. Don’t clutter your blog with ads all over the place. IT’S IRRITATING.
15. Don’t comment for the sake of commenting. Some looked too fake and it’s a big turn off!
16. Share something interesting and you will gain more readers.
17. Show that we care to all bloggers, treat each other as friends.
18. Pictures say a million words. Keep them coming!
–>19. Blogging should be fun or you’ll get tired of it pretty soon.
20. Don’t think people will come to your blog if you’re not willing to pay a visit to them.
21. Everyone loves read short posting and, best, illustrated with a picture.
22. Try not to publish more than 5 posts in one blog a day. Even if it’s from feed reader, it’s quite hard to digest and catch up reading everything.
23. Blog: the other window to peek into people’s life, minus the trouble. Keep a certain level of privacy to yourself.
24. Never tell your readers that you are going on vacation. That’s basically telling them to not visit your blog for a week. Instead, write several posts, and take advantage of the timestamp feature.
–>25. Try and write with people in mind that are somewhat similar to you. Allow your audience to identify with your blog and feel at home.
26. The key to a good article is a good introduction. A joke, a question or a picture does wonders.
27. If you are looking to earn an income blogging read StevePavlina.com and Problogger.net, you will be amazed at what you can learn.
–>28. Write for yourself first. Remember that it takes time, effort, patience…and above all, daring.
29. Photos for your blog should always be shot in the RAW! No, not in the buff, but in RAW format. That leaves you a lot more room to play with your subject.
30. Blog about what you’re interested in, and what you want to share. And it’s your blog, you make your rules.
31. Scared of the new digital camera? Go out, take lots of pictures, slowly learn the bells & whistles. Enjoy!
32. I disagree with Rich — until you’re ready for heavy-duty PhotoShopping on a pro basis, stick with .jpg’s. Easier to handle.
33. Resize your pix before downloading to the Internet; you won’t eat up your on-line storage space nearly as fast. Remember, too, that the resolution on most screens is 72 pixels/inch. I resize all my pictures to 6″ wide x 72 pixels/inch (and hype the contrast — the Internet flattens pix). If you have a picture good enough to steal, it won’t have definition good enough for a commercial use; let them get in touch with you for permission to use.

Now, my additions.  Um.  So I have to think here.  Um.

I think my suggestions are themed towards building readership a bit, which isn’t necessarily what bloggers want.  But here goes:

34.  Build a community–either find other bloggers whose styles are similar to yours and comment on their blogs, or find other bloggers who are interesting to you (not necessarily the same thing).

35.  Submit posts to blog carnivals.  Or join a “blog theme of the day” group, such as Julie’s Hump Day Hmms.  Or tag another favorite blogger for a ROFL Award or Thinking Blogger Award or Perfect Post Award.

36.  Post regularly.  You don’t have to post multiple times in a day, or even a week.  But be sure to post regularly or else your readers will go *poof*.

37.  If you do decide to go the Pay-Per-Post way, please, please, please (a) don’t let it take over your blog, (b) do write your own copy in your normal voice, and (c) don’t let it take over your blog.  Did I mention, “don’t let it take over your blog”?  I have dropped a couple of bloggers who went that path.

38.  If you add a group widget, or any kind of widget, first check to be sure it doesn’t break your blog theme.  Then check to be sure the damned thing loads nicely.  Clear your cache, delete all cookies, close your browser, then call up your blog.  If it takes more than a few seconds to load, and causes your computer to slow to a crawl while it’s loading, ditch the new widget.  Also check it in more than one browser; try IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari.

By the way, even though I didn’t star #27, I have to say Darren Rowse’s blog is often fun and interesting, and he does themed post carnivals now and then as well.

So now to tag.  Who to tag?

Sheesh.  It’s hard to think of people to tag.  Hm.

Oh, now, wait.  Here’s a person who will have good tips:  Miss Cellania.  She built her flagship blog around daily joke collections, then parlayed that into guest stints at other blogs, and then managed to get herself some paying blogging gigs so that she supports herself from home.

I’ll also tag Blog Antagonist.  BA has built herself a nice readership since she started a blog to…reject all things blogging.  Har.  BA writes some nice posts.

Another one who has built up a good readership and gotten some pro blogging, too, is Julie over at Using My Words. 

There ya go, Ma.

OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump moved to Arizona in 1981.  I was 22.  Everyone in the family was amazed.

OmegaGranny had lived in Arizona, on and off, as a child, and remembered the Arizona mountains fondly.  Her mother lived in Sun City, near Phoenix.  She had aunts and uncles who lived there, also.  So as she and Uncle Grump were nearing “retirement age”, she kept propagandizing Arizona as a place to move.  She and Uncle Grump subscribed to a real estate catalog for Arizona, and began daydreaming.

One day, out of the blue, the family got the word:  Uncle Grump, who had hardly ever left Chicago since he returned from Japan after World War II, had not only gotten on an airplane to fly to Arizona–spur of the moment!–but had signed for a piece of property in the central Arizona mountains in a nowhere spot on the map called “Wilhoit”.  OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump were moving!

After they moved, I spent all my vacations out there with them.  I’d fly out, drive up to the spot on the highway called Wilhoit (miles away from anything resembling a real town), and we would spend a week or two driving the backroads of central Arizona, exploring canyons and forests and Indian ruins.  They were in the (lower) mountains, and the view from their house went on forever–rolling foothills, dark canyon slashes across the hills, mountains in the distance.  As the days progressed, the light from the sun would shift angles, and every moment, the old view would morph into something new and beautiful.

Now, if you speak to people about “Arizona”, the immediate stereotypical image they get is of saguaro cacti, deserts, coyotes, and the Grand Canyon.  (In the typical tourist’s mind, the Grand Canyon is somehow smack in the middle of the desert.)  And Phoenix and Scottsdale.  So the generic view is that Arizona is all desert, all flat, all dry, and always 110+F in the summer.  It was my view, too, as all I had to really define the state was my visits to grandma in Sun City–which is definitely not the way to experience Arizona.

This wasn’t the Arizona my parents introduced me to.  The one my parents showed me was, in my mind, heart-rendingly beautiful.

So after a few years of visiting them on my vacations, and realizing that I was crying on the way back to Chicago, missing the mountains and the wide open spaces and (of course) my mom and dad, prompted by my dad having back surgery, I decided to move out there.

It was great.  There was only one problem:  money.  Where mom and dad lived (they had moved into the city that was 18 miles away from their spot on the road, because they were spending all their time there anyway) was a cute town, and very pretty and piney, but there was a distinct lack of good jobs.

So I moved out to the Bay Area, got a good job, paid off a whole slew of debt, decided to go back to college and finish off that damned degree, met Mr. OmegaMom-to-Be, and moved to (ugh) Lubbock to be with him (trust me, this is a sign of True Love).

As Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be finished off his Master’s degree in soil science, he started looking for jobs.

At the same time, he was currying favor with the in-laws by sucking up to OmegaGranny.  To do this, he regularly shared gardening tips, cool info he could come up with related to his degree subject, and anything more.  He knew that there was a government agency that had–free for anyone who wanted the information–surveys of various areas.  He called up the state soil scientist of Arizona so that he could get the survey for OmegaGranny’s area.

They started talking.

It turned out that there was going to be a survey of the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead starting that summer.

It just so happened that Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be was due to graduate with his master’s degree that summer.

State soil scientist told Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be to keep in touch.  MOMTB did.  And that summer, as mentioned, the surveys were opening up and being staffed.  MOMTB applied, was accepted, and there we were…

…moving to Arizona.

But not the Arizona of the stereotypes–the Arizona of my experience.

Once, when OmegaGranny and I took the shuttle down from Former State Capital to the Valley of Death to visit elderly relatives, we were stuck with a young man from the East Coast.  Philadelphia?  Baltimore?  Boston?  I can’t remember.  But what I do remember is that he spent the entire trip complaining about how BROWN and DRY and UGLY and HORRIBLE Arizona was, and how he couldn’t wait to get somewhere where it was green again.

OmegaGranny and I just raised our eyebrows at each other…because, to us, Arizona is beautiful.  We see the high chaparral, with its junipers and pinyon pines dotting the scrubby grasslands, as glorious.  We love the stark beauty of the geology that is revealed by highway roadcuts.  We love the way the dun and brown grasslands turn vivid emerald green when the rainy season starts.  Walking in the piney woods when the sun has been baking the bark of the trees so that the vanilla scent makes your head spin…or smelling the sharp, metallic aroma of rain hitting the rocks somewhere within a 30-mile radius…clambering through the riparian tangles that line creekbeds as we look for a particularly good area of petroglyphs…The shshhhh of snow falling in the wintertime (yes.  You can hear the snow fall.) or the shshhhh of snow melting in the sunlight…the constant yammer of the ravens and the jays…the vivid flash of mountain bluebirds flying by…the splash of color from pink penstemon or vivid red Indian paintbrush or the crumped-kleenex look of prickly poppy flowers…

There’s no way to describe just how much I love the real Arizona, the one that so many people will never encounter.  I will miss it.  I hope to return “home” someday.

Yesterday, in the midst of my bleary-eyed weariness, I managed to make contact with Singing Bird to arrange to meet for lunch.  SBird is headed off to the East Coast to introduce her daughter, The Bee, to the family, and we wanted to get together before she left.

So OmegaGranny and OmegaDotter and I all managed to pull ourselves together, get bathed and dressed and hair combed to look presentable, and schlepped off to the local eatery to meet up with The Bird and The Bee.

The Bee is–to put it bluntly–a darling.  She’s smart and funny and sweet, and amazingly well-behaved for a two-year-old.  As a result, I have baby lust (again).

The dotter was charmed.  A baby!  Somewhere in the midst of all the socializing, she said to me, in a somewhat harried voice, “I’m sounding just like a mommy!”  Dotter and Bee colored together, and played the hand game (you know the one, where people layer their hands on top of each other, and the person with the hand on the bottom pulls it out to plop it on the top of the heap, and it ends up with everyone just flapping hands all over the place and laughing…).  The dotter, at the same time, was not charmed at not being the center of attention (her preferred spot), but did a yeoman job of trying to put it behind her.

After a yummy lunch, we kidnapped SBird and Bee over to GrannyJ’s house, where we played puzzles and the dotter decided to paint Bee’s fingernails with her new purple fingernail polish.  Bee wasn’t quite sure how to take this, and kept turning puzzled and somewhat perturbed looks at her mom, as if to say, “What on earth is this person doing to me, Mommy??”

Bee was a special needs adoption; she has a cleft lip and palate, which need some more surgeries (due in September).  In the meantime, her parents have taught her sign language, and she “talks” up a storm.  Right now, she’s not allowed to have milk products, as the pediatrician is trying to figure out if she has allergies; the dotter’s milk cup ended up next to Miss Bee, and Miss Bee, wasting no time, tried to abscond with it.  I removed the straw, thinking that would stop any prohibited substance abuse, but Miss Bee immediately picked up the lidded up, eyeballed it, saw where the straw came out, and promptly tried getting milk out of the straw hole.

Oops!  Little stinker!

It was a delightful interlude.

Onto other subjects:  OmegaDad is bedded down for the night in Great Falls, Montana.  While he thinks most of Montana is “kick-ass gorgeous!”, Great Falls falls flat for him.  The dawg is behaving well, OmegaDad thinks satellite radio rocks, and, since he has the laptop, he is able to play Scrabulous while talking to me and the dotter on the phone.

In the meantime, I am sitting on the floor with a borrowed laptop, hooked into mom’s DSL router, writing this blog post while she writes her own.  It’s very handy having her available so I can ask, for instance, how to spell “yeoman”, and whether it is “Great Falls” or “Grand Falls”, and she can gripe to me about her photo program saving edited photos in mysterious places.  It ends up being a very sociable approach.

OmegaGranny was recently interviewed about her blog and blogging for a podcast.  Check it out!

(I tried embedding it, but that didn’t work.  Bah.)