OmegaMom

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.)