OmegaDad joked that, between us, we have “a glass”.  That’s because he sees the glass as half full, I see it as half empty.

As an example:  This evening I have been doing the annual round o’ gifties for various teachers and what-not at OmegaDotter’s school.  Tomorrow is her last day of first grade (OMG!).  But this year’s gift round is bittersweet, because we are losing two people at her school who I think are Just Awesome:  the principal, and the music teacher.

Before the dotter got into school, I mainly thought of a principal as just an administrator–someone who made the decisions and got things done, but who wasn’t really important in the grand scheme of things.  But Mr. Big, the current principal, has made me aware of just how much influence the principal has in creating and maintaining an environment, an atmosphere, in a school.  OmegaDotter’s school, under Mr. Big, has been warm, caring, nurturing.  It’s a good school (even if I find myself irked that the front-desk workers have [gag] Thomas Kincaide screensavers with Bible quotes on their computers).  There are ongoing “fun” things being done, that make the kids feel part of a large family, like the sock hop and the family movie nights and the welcome and farewell barbecues.  There is good communication with parents.  (Mr. Big endeared himself to me forever with his response to the “Chinese girls are mean!” incident last year; he knew just how much that would hurt the dotter and her family.)

So he’s going.  A new school has been built, and he gets to start it up next fall.  We’re getting a new principal, who seems like a boring Marine type.  We’ve met him, but had no real interaction; in my typical “glass half-empty” way, I’m sure he won’t be as good as Mr. Big.

The music teacher, Mr. L., came to us last fall fresh from his music education graduate degree.  He’s young, cute, enthusiastic, and he has a true gift for teaching children about the joys of music.  He instituted school-wide concerts, one in the winter and one in the spring.  He taught beginning band to fourth- and fifth-graders.  He started a special chorus for those who wanted to join and do the work.  The dotter came home after her music days humming and telling us about digeridoos and drums and trumpets.  In the concerts–well, it was amazing how well he did with the fourth- and fifth-graders playing recorders.  The younger kids all sang in tune and together.  The older kids demonstrated that they could sing multiple parts and fortissimo and pianissimo.  And the tunes he selected were just plain fun.

Then there was the time he challenged the school kids to bring in their coins for a special charity by saying that he was going to shave off his long locks and the kids who brought in the most money would be able to do the shaving.  Four of the dotter’s classmates were amongst the kids who got to do the shaving, and it was great fun for everyone.  (I did miss the long hair, though; sigh…)

He’s going too, to follow Mr. Big to the new school.  It’s a fabulous opportunity for him, to be able to set the tone for the school music program and make it his own.  And I, being “glass half-empty”, am feeling like there’s no way on earth to find a music teacher as good as he was.  OmegaDad, of course, regales us with tales of the new music teacher in his elementary school, and how the new teacher was So Much Better than the old one.  The difference here being that, in his case, a new young teacher was replacing an old, worn-out teacher who was retiring…

So it’s bittersweet.  Tomorrow the dotter goes off to her last day of first grade, then we swing into summertime activities, and the fall lurks ahead like a great unknown…

I am seriously going to miss Mr. Big and Mr. L.  They were part of what makes the dotter’s school so good.

OmegaDotter’s school has a revolving “extra” class each day–one day it’s gym, another it’s music, and the third is a visit to the school library.

She tends to bring home horse books of one type or another, with, every once in a while, a Jack-and-Annie book or a topical book (The Halloweiner for Halloween, for instance).  Today, she brought back “How To Draw a Horse”.  She was very perturbed, and claimed it didn’t really show “how” to draw a horse.  So while she was spending a lot of time on the phone with her best buddy A., drawing a thousand dollar bill for her and A. to use in their restaurant (A. was similarly drawing money on the other end), I opened up the book and started following the instructions.

Herewith, a horse head:

And a Welsh pony (I think; it may have been a Shetland):

I think they turned out rather nicely.  If the dotter keeps up with her art books, I may end up learning something.  That’s what kids are for, dontcha know?!  Fergeddabout the hugs and kisses and snuggling and all that–it’s a way to learn things you carefully avoided for many years.

I am no longer “forty-mumble” years old.  Today I hit the official half-century mark.

I can remember years ago, when I hit twenty-five, having a phone conversation with my dad.  I told him I didn’t feel like it was possible that I was twenty-five.  At the time, it seemed “old”…He told me that he couldn’t imagine being in his fifties, and that all the time he felt like he was still in his 20s or 30s.  Now I know how he felt.

What has gone on in those years?

In no real particular order:  Sputnik.  The JFK assassination.  Martin Luther King Jr. being shot.  The Civil Rights movement.  The Apollo program and the moon landing.  The Summer of Love.  Riots.  Woodstock.  Kent State.  Watergate.  Gas lines.  Jimmy Carter sitting in the White House wearing a cardigan sweater.  Huge computer rooms filled with spinning tapes morphing into 8-1/4″ floppy drives morphing into boxy 10-MB hard drives morphing into the first Apples and PCs morphing into desktops and laptops and netbooks; cabling turning into wi-fi.  IBM Selectrics being perfected and then *poof* disappearing into the mists of time.  Reagan being shot.  The first shuttle take-off and landing.  Saturday Night Live.  The Iran hostage crisis.  Northwestern University, Loyola University, community college in Arizona, California State University.  The Blue Angels performing in Chicago, and San Francisco.  Three loves and one husband.  MTV.  A shuttle exploding.  Another shuttle exploding.  The Loma Prieta earthquake.  The Oakland Firestorm.  Usenet.  Mosaic.  Netscape Navigator.  The Internet.  Bulletin boards.  YouTube, Twitter, blogs.  The dot-com crash.  Bush I.  Dubya.  Clinton.  9/11.  Weddings.  Births.  Funerals.  Amazon.com.  Chicago, Arizona, the Bay Area, Lubbock, Arizona, Alaska.  The invention of in-vitro fertilization.  The Beatles, the Who, Jefferson Starship.  Heavy metal.  Punk.  Rap.  Hip-hop.  Grunge.  Us trying IVF.  Adoption from Korea fading, adoption from China growing.  Us adopting from China.  Gay rights.  The first black president of the U.S.  The Segway.  Hybrid automobiles.  Hubble telescope.  Katrina.  Glasses, contacts, LASIK.  Mini skirts, maxi skirts, the Marcia Brady look, tunic sweaters with legwarmers and straight-leg jeans.  Star Wars.  Cell phones as a status symbol turning into cell phones in the grocery store checkout line.  Mix tapes turning into Walkmen turning into iPods.  Sushi, tapas bars, Pop-Tarts and GoGurt.  The Food Network, Bobby Flay, Rachel Ray.  Congresscritters Twittering.  Three hundred and forty four extra-solar planets known so far.

It’s a weird, wonderful world.  I wonder what the next 50 years will bring?

My mom blasted me with a series of “happy birthday” YouTubes in my email today.  She was born shortly after TV was invented.  I have a seven-year-old; who knows what she will see in the years to come?

Fifty years ago, a long-distance phone call was expensive.  Yesterday, I was able to share a scary moment with friends across the world, and they were able to reply to me in seconds, minutes, hours. 

It didn’t start that way.

In fact, it started really nicely.  It started yesterday afternoon, when I went to meet OmegaDotter at the bus stop and stopped at the mail box congregation on the way only to find a Big Box from Ms. Lizard (an oft-time commenter here).  I deftly made the dotter think it was for me, and she only realized that it might be for her when I had it open on the kitchen table and started pulling out clothing from the Hanna Andersson Mothership.  Oooh.  Oooh, yeah.  A red velour dress, a purple and lavender striped day-dress/play-dress, and a poofy multi-colored skirt thing.  The dotter was in girly heaven; she wore the red velour dress all evening long, and this morning she couldn’t wait to pull on the purple striped dress (”It feels like pajamas!”).  (Note to Ms. Lizard:  VERY greatly appreciated!  VERY!)

And last night OmegaDad went on a late-night run to the grocery store and surprised me upon his return with a clump of cut daffodil buds.

That’s the nice start.

Then there was the earthquake around noon.

That’s our earthquake showing up on the Redoubt volcano monitors.  I was sitting in the office, shortly after ending my (short) work day, when I heard a bang (?) and definitely a rumble and the dog started to bark.  I thought it was the garbage truck picking up our roll-off box.  But then everything started to roll and sway.  Just when I was beginning to think “Now is the time to duck under my desk!”, it stopped.  Shortly thereafter it showed up on the volcano seismometers and OmegaDad called to ask if I felt it.  It was initially labeled a 4.7, now a 4.6.  They’re calling it a “light” earthquake.

OmegaDotter was frustrated that she missed the earthquake; the kids were coming in from recess right then, so no-one noticed.

Then there was the homework fuss.  Things have been very quiet on the homework front for months now, since I last vented about it, but today was a Bad Day.

But what made it a no-good, very bad, terrible, horrible day…

OmegaDotter and I went out for a walk with the dawg before dinner.  We went walking down the street that has her favorite horses.  We were having a grand time.  The dawg was well-behaved.  The horses were great.  The dotter was skipping and laughing and bright and cheerful.  But then came decision time:  Turn around and do the long block back, or go around a longer block in a circle?  She wanted to turn around and walk back past the horses.  I wanted to go around the longer block. 

We’ve been talking about her maybe being able to walk to friends’ houses this summer, by herself.

She said (or I said, I can’t remember at this point) that she could walk back down the street, I could do the long block, and we’d meet back at the end of the street.

She thought we should make a race of it.

I asked if she was sure.  She was.

I was a little dubious, but we’d been talking and talking about her walking the neighborhood by herself.  I know that many of my readers are probably gasping in horror at this point, but dammit, we live here, we are familiar with the people, there are fifty kazillion kids who run wild in the area when it’s nice out, the kids are allowed to walk to school in April/May and September/October, and I’ve been influenced by FreeRangeKids…

We head our separate ways.  I walk as fast as I can, knowing that my route is longer.

I get there, and there’s no OmegaDotter in sight.

I think she’s lingered too long at the horses.  I walk down the street (remember:  rural/suburban area; 1- and 2-acre lots; dirt roads; no traffic to speak of and all the traffic that is there takes wide detours around kids and dogs).

No OmegaDotter.

Not at the horses, either.

I am hyperventilating at this point.

I walk very fast back to the corner where we’re supposed to meet, hoping that she was “hiding” to try to surprise me.

No OmegaDotter.

I start shouting her name.  Loudly.

Oh God.  What if she was too bouncy around the horses and got trampled?  What if she ran into an aggressive moose?  What if she was climbing one of the little hills in the woods to hide from me, and fell down, and hurt herself?  What if some freakazoid just happened to come across her, kidnapped her, raped her, killed her, and we would never know?!

But maybe she decided to walk all the way home.  KILL HER MYSELF if she did!

I start walking the rest of the way home, calling her name, very loudly, getting more and more panicky.

And just as I turn the very last corner before our street, there’s the car with OmegaDad and OmegaDotter in it.

I am about ready to KILL HER; she must have walked home by herself, she must have forgotten to wait for me, OMGWTFBBQ I am going to KILL HER for scaring me so badly…

I climb into the car and start the “OMG I AM SO GOING TO…” when OmegaDad, in a fury, informs me that she had gotten scared, started crying, some nice lady stopped to help her and let her use her cell phone to call home and he went to pick her up…

…and on and on.  I felt (and feel) lower than the lint in a worm’s navel.  I also still feel scared.  I also felt (and still feel) angry at OmegaDad for even thinking that I had just abandoned her to walk all the way home by herself.  This had the salutory effect of making him angrier because I was making him the Bad Guy.

Oh, yes, and after collapsing in hysterical tears just after I got home, I went upstairs to grab my little coffee and smokes with some vague idea of running off somewhere so I could recuperate, and hit a box that hit the kitchen island that made the shelves in one of the sets of cupboards in the island come tumbling down, complete with many containers of coins.  (We think the shelves were loosened by the earthquake.)

So.  It was very bad.  I don’t think I’ll be repeating that little experiment for quite a while.  I spent quite a while snuggling the dotter, realizing that it could have been much, much worse.  Gah.

ETA:  Just in case it’s not apparent:  I am horribly guilt-stricken.  I have apologized numerous times to the dotter for scaring her like that.  I have been wandering around wondering what the fuck I was thinking, and realizing that the only thing I can say is that she seems such a big girl these days that it just went *poof* out of my head that she’s seven, she’s still a little girl, she still has serious problems with being alone and being abandoned, and I can kick my own ass quite enough.

A snippet of correspondence:

This a.m. I was starting to heat water for OmegaDotter’s macaroni & cheese, in the blue enamel pan, when I noticed that water was pretty much pouring out the bottom on one side.

Upon inspection (holding said pan up to the light), there were three holes finally eaten through the pan bottom along the edge.

Let us take a moment to remove our hats and remember the glorious lifetime service of the blue enamelware pan…

I have interred it in the garbage can.

exohme

The response:

NO!!!

Don’t throw it away….

That was the first piece of cookware I ever purchased… 27 years ago. I still remember the time/place where I bought it. (Hardware store, Blair Oklahoma, Late Summer Afternoon, May 30, 1982.)

Can I keep it… Please?

Xxxoooxxxoooxxxoooxxxooo, OmegaDad

Further:

You, my dear, are the world’s most sentimental dude, bar none.

I will retrieve it from the garbage. You will put it somewhere, like in the garage, where you can gaze upon it now & then and think back to Blair, OK.

I love you, but I am rolling my eyes.

exohme

OmegaDad and I have an ongoing…discussion…about whether we are going to keep the baby bottle we bought in China to feed a wee OmegaDotter for the first time.  If the dotter ends up being a packrat, I will know who to blame.  (Mostly.)  (My sentimental stuff tends to be letters, Christmas cards, photos.  His tends to be things.  Letters, Christmas cards, and photos take up a helluvalot less space.)

Ash fall actually hit us last night; while it was, apparently, pretty dreadful to drive in, when we woke up in the morning there wasn’t a huge amount of it. 

Enough for OmegaDad to haul both cars off to the carwash to remove same, but mostly–as the Weather Service said–a “dusting”.

And now it’s time for Stupid Mommy Tricks.

This afternoon, OmegaDotter got on the computer while I was shifting various loads of laundry, and started up Wilber Pan’s Wuha video.  When I got back to the office, she was in kung-fu pose wanting to do some “Wuha-ing” of her own.

I got the bright idea to show her a move that I thought might actually work.

I did not have the bright idea to, say, warn her ahead of time.

I just had her give me her hands, took them in mine, reached forward with my right leg, hooked it behind her left ankle, and pulled towards me, pushing her away from me at the same time.

Hey!  Guess what?!  That trick really works!

And if you’re not expecting it to work, you get yanked off balance and are sent tumbling forward right onto your “opponent”.

In this case, that would be me smashing into OmegaDotter.

She landed on her back.  I managed to bash her eyeball and nose with my arm and elbow.  It all seemed to be happening in slo-mo; I managed not to get her in the solar plexus with my knee by somehow twisting around and getting my knee off to the side.

Which means, while I was whacking her a good one in the eye and nose, I was also whacking my knee something fierce on the floor.

There’s a particular feeling of oh-my-god-ness to the realization that you may just have really hurt your very own child.  I was terrified that I had broken her nose; she was curled in a ball crying, and I was pulling at her going, “Omimgod baby are you all right omigod baby I didn’t mean it I’m so sorry omigod are you all right sweetie talk to me?!?!“

After a twenty-minute bout of crying snuggled in my lap, and me carefully poking at her nose and waiting for a nosebleed or swelling or purpling, I managed to make her laugh somehow, and all was well.

Except for the fact that my knee is now swollen and quite painful.  She, of course, is doing fine.

So there’s your PSA for the evening:  Don’t play around with faux martial-arts moves when you don’t know what you’re doing; you might actually hurt someone.

There is a bad side effect of naming your chickens with similar names.

OmegaDad and the dotter were going out to check the chickens and take a new bag of chicken feed out to Le Grand Coop; I sat down at the computer to listen to some Chinese pop singers on YouTube and read an intense description of freezing almost to death.  While I was sitting there, suddenly the dotter pops up at the window, thumping on it and yelling, “Come quick!  Daddy needs you!”

WTF?  Hunh.  Okay.  So I schlep out to the garage door, put on boots and jacket, whap the garage door opener, and start out, only to be confronted with a teary dotter and a somber OmegaDad.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Buffy’s dead!” the dotter cries.

The bad side effect I mentioned up above comes into play here:  I thought–given that Puff has been broody lately–that it was Puff who was dead.

OmegaDad hustled us into the house, where I promptly cuddled up with the sobbing (sobbing!) dotter on the futon in the family room.  While I was surprised and slightly upset, I wasn’t quite understanding why the dotter was in such tears; Puff, though quite cute, isn’t really the most lovable of chickens.  (Not bad, mind you, but not exactly an overwhelming personality.)

I was nonplussed and feeling guilty:  my very own OmegaDotter was collapsed in tears on my lap and I was feeling…well, surprised and slightly upset.  So I’m patting her and cuddling her and stroking her and saying I’m sorry, and feeling overwhelmed with the question of How To Deal With A Griefstricken Dotter.

OmegaDad returns and explains that it seems that the chicken appears to have been flying and flown into something and broken her neck.  I’m sitting there thinking it’s broody Puff who has died, and the last I knew (a) Puff can’t fly and (b) she’s broody, and broody hens don’t do anything approximating the amount of energy it takes to fly.  So, in addition to being nonplussed and surprised and slightly guilty, I’m now puzzled.

And the dotter is sobbing in my lap.  And then crawling over to OmegaDad to be snuggled and cry in his lap.  In my confusion, I mutter something about how I knew she was broody, and was he sure it was an accident and not broodiness that did her in?  In his confusion, he asks, “Broody?!  Buffy was broody?!”  And I’m still hearing “Puff”, and this orthagonal conversation continues until there’s a blinding light in my brain as the neurons finally connect, and the word “Buffy” connects with “beautiful apricot colored chicken who is a total sweetheart who loves to cuddle and likes to sit on top of OmegaDotter’s head” and Oh. My. Gawd.  Buffy’s dead!

At which point, I understood the dotter’s grief, because Buffy, fluffhead though she was, was the OmegaFamily’s absolute favorite of the chickens, and suddenly I wanted to start crying.

Obviously, we are not cut out to be farmers or pioneer types.

Anyway:  OmegaDotter was truly in distress for quite a while this evening.  And even after calming down, and all of us going out to dinner (whilst OmegaDad surreptitiously disposed of the corpse) and having fancy desserts and chardonnay for me and a Shirley Temple for the dotter, at the late, late hour of 10 p.m., when the dotter finally was put to bed, she needed to do our nightly Feeling Game ritual, and needed to talk about Buffy.

Sometimes being a parent just blindsides you…

So Joanna tagged me with the 25 Things meme.  Right now, I am fresh out of ideas for a blog post, and this was handy, so…

1. I broke my leg in the Grand Canyon and got a helicopter flight over closed airspace as a result.
2. I wanted to write best-selling historical romances as a living when I was in high school.
3. I still bite my fingernails.
4. I went to four different colleges before I got my degree.
5. When studying higher mathematics, I got to the point where I would do proofs in my dreams.  Some of those proofs actually turned out to be solutions to homework problems I was stuck on.
6. I have lived in Chicago; Prescott, Prescott Valley, and Flagstaff, AZ; Orinda, Lafayette, and San Leandro, CA; Lubbock, TX; and here in Alaska.
7. My earliest memory is of flying to visit my grandmother in Florida with my parents.  I was very small.
8. Before I had LASIK done, my eyesight was something like 20/600 in one eye, and 20/700 in the other.
9. When I was a teenager, I wanted to have five children, like my aunt and uncle.
10. I like floofy mixed drinks.
11. I have a knot on my left arm where I was caught between a wall and some girls’ room lockers that friends and I were pushing over in seventh or eighth grade.
12. I can recite The Jabberwock from memory.
13. I hate white chocolate.
14. Yesterday I learned that the part of the guitar’s neck where you are supposed to press down on the guitar strings is not the metal bump of the fret, but between the metal frets.
15. I am supremely lazy.
16. I abruptly dumped my very best friend, with no explanation, when I was around 20 or 21, for what I still think were very good reasons.
17. I have fallen in love three times.
18. I spent three weeks writing (long-hand) in a blaze of creativity while I was in my last bout at college; I was writing so much and so fast that it gave me a case of carpal tunnel syndrome that recurs now and then.  It ended up being about ninety pages on the computer.  I still have it on a hard-drive that is currently inaccessible.
19. I am a wuss and back away from confrontation on a regular basis.
20. I have phone-phobia, which was a problem when working as a magazine writer.
21. We lived near Cabrini Green when I was growing up.  I believe it has since been torn down?
22. Our house was set on fire by teenagers walking home from school in the alley behind us.
23. I save cards and letters others send to me.
24. Sometimes I like to watch golf on TV; it’s soothing.
25. I will be fifty on my next birthday.  This is bothering me.

Your turn!  You’re tagged!  Write it up somewhere and post a link in the comments!

I grew up in a musical household.  When I was the age the dotter is now, we had a baby grand piano in the living room (with, at one point, a caught mouse in a little cage sitting on it).  My father, who had played piano from a very young age, sometimes playing hours per day, would play Beethoven and Bach and other composers.  At other times, he would pull out the banjo or the guitar and play folk or classical music on them.  And sometimes, his friend Ray would show up with his guitar, or his bagpipes, and we would get an evening of the two of them jamming.

Most of the time, I didn’t pay serious attention; it was like having background music to my life.

There was a point where I asked Dad to teach me to play piano.  This did not work out; he was very serious and intense, but his philosophy was that, if anyone really wanted to learn, that person would practice on his own.  Hah!  As you might imagine, this didn’t mesh very well with a little girl’s outlook on life.  The “lessons” lasted, if I remember correctly, about a week.  See, I wanted to immediately be able to play like he could; the very concept of starting basic, practicing, and developing into that kind of pianist was, shall we say, a wee tad beyond my seven- or eight-year-old comprehension.  And if I couldn’t play like he could, well, then, I was a failure, and we might as well forget the whole affair.

It took me an awful long time to get beyond the whole mindset implicit in that last sentence.  But finally, when I was 27, on a lark I decided to learn to play the piano at the local community college.

I loved it.  So much that–for a short while–I decided to follow the music program at the CC, including music theory (ack, so hard!).  I signed up with their best pianist for private lessons, and she was a joy and a delight to learn from.  She also had a Steinway concert grand in her living room, a piano that was made for wet dreams; the movement on the keys was buttery soft, and the sounds that came from that piano sent shivers down my spine.

But life–in the form of unpaid bills and a desire to have more money–intervened, and I moved off to the Bay Area to get a job that paid better.  The piano went bye-bye, but I still wanted Music.  One day I chanced upon an advertisement for the Berkeley Community Chorus, which proclaimed that you didn’t need to audition to join.  So I sashayed off to the first meeting of the session, and was hooked.

I can remember driving across the Bay Area to my job in SF with the practice tape in my car’s cassette player, singing alto along with Handel’s Messiah, or some arrangement of old folk tunes, or–best of all–Mozart’s Mass in C Minor.  (One of the nice things about being in a chorus is that when you practice in your car, no-one is listening, and when you sing in the chorus, no-one is listening to you; they are listening to the whole chorus.  And boy, does that make a difference.)

Yesterday night, for some reason, I wanted some Big Music, so meandered off to YouTube to listen to Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor, then Orff’s Carmina Burana, then Verdi’s Dies Irae.  The Verdi and Orff are choral music, so there were a bunch of other choral suggestions, and there was the Mozart…So I had to play some.

There is something very special about being part of a large chorus, to be one voice in a whole melange, to be part of a grand musical instrument.  The Qui Tollis in Mozart’s Mass is…amazing.  Being in the chorus when this is sung makes me break out in goose bumps.

The end result of this bout of YouTubing was that I went to bed singing in my head and realizing just how desperately I need some music back in my life.  Pop and rap and listening to classic rock with my dotter is all very well and good, but I need to be making music again.

Today I:

• Kibbitzed over the dotter’s shoulder while she played Farm Mania.
• Spent about an hour “helping” her do gymnastics.
• Snuggled with her while she read GrannyJ’s latest letter (a few weeks after we received it).
• Helped her type an answering letter.
• Played Farm Mania myself.
• Spent too much time reading Twitters.
• Got ridiculously defensive when boss asked if he and coworker could help with the website revamp.  Why?!  Partly because I’m trying to get rid of years’ worth of accreted code schmutz and I don’t want to have to explain each and every step, partly because I’m trying to develop a “style” using the stylesheet and I need to write it down before passing it on, partly because…?
• Reveled in daylight when I was driving the dotter to school–we’re gaining five-and-a-half minutes each day, woot!
• Tried very hard to keep away from depressing here-comes-the-Depression websites.
• Read the memo from school about What To Do If The Volcano Blows.  (Yes!  We got an official memo about it!)
• Spent all day in my pajamas–driving the dotter to school, working six hours, helping with homework, playing, hanging out, eating dinner–and didn’t feel guilty about it, though did make sure not to turn on the video when we had a Skype meeting at work.
• Dipped in and out of Godel, Escher, Bach, which I am enjoying immensely, even though it’s–at the same time–immensely slow going.
• Suppressed any sneaky moments of gloom-n-doom.
• Determined that Wall Street is sorely in need of a good overall PR person, or else a bunch of sadly lacking common sense.
• Tried to figure out if I agree with the various incarnations of the stimulus plan or not.
• Felt amazed, astounded, and somewhat affirmed and proud that the dotter’s recital of friend S.’s tendency to peek at her math work at school and copy it ended up with, “That’s bad.  She’s not learning it.”
• Felt equally amazed, and very happy, that the dotter said about her latest assigned book from school, “I want to keep reading–it’s like TV in your head!”

I am finding that simply getting out of the house each day, and doing a little bit of exercise, plus a heapin’ helpin’ of commiseratin’ commentary from my readers, has helped keep the blues to a minimum for the past few days.  Fingers crossed that this continues!

Won’t you take me to Funk Town was my alternative title.  Notice that’s not “funkY” town.

For the past few weeks, I have been sinking deeper and deeper into a funk.  Enough so that my lovely OmegaDad is upstairs doing kitcheny magic kinda things for OmegaDotter’s birthday party tomorrow, rather than me.  When I wandered into the kitchen and said that he was taking things over, he said, “Well, I thought I ought to, because you seem to be in a funk, so I thought I’d help.”

“I see a red door and I want it painted black.”  Everything I try to think of to cheer myself up is not working. 

My internal dialogues are going somewhat like this:

Happy Me:  Oh, look at all the beautiful fresh new snow!

UberFunk Me:  Yeah.  Snow.  Still more snow.  I am so sick of snow.

Happy Me:  And the sunshine sparkling all over the snow–isn’t it wonderful?!

UberFunk Me:  You mean the sunshine that is just now coming back?  The sunshine that isn’t warming anything up?  The sunshine that’s going to go into hyperdrive and not let anyone sleep in just a few months?  That sunshine?

Happy Me:  You could go out and play in the snow, you know!

UberFunk Me:  Ugh.  It’s cold out there.  And the snow will get in my boots and melt, and then my feet will freeze and I’ll get frostbite.  No thanks.

Happy Me:  Oh, c’mon!  In a few more months, it’ll be spring, and you’ll be able to hang out in the yard all the time, and the grass and trees will be a lovely green and the flowers will be blooming.  Keep thinking of that!

UberFunk Me:  Excuse me.  To think of that, I have to think of “a few more months” of winter.

Happy Me:  Well, at least the volcano isn’t erupting, this is good news!

UberFunk Me:  Volcano.  It’s not enough that we have cold and snow and winter for another three months; I have to worry about a goddamned volcano, too?!  Just wait until it erupts and the ash fall hits.  That’ll be fun.

Happy Me:  But it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not likely to.

UberFunk Me:  Whoop-de-doo.  It’s gonna erupt, and we’re going to be buried in inches of ash, and we’ll have to wear dust masks and goggles and buy a dozen new car air filters and change them over and over again…

Happy Me:  … Well, if it does erupt, it won’t last too long.  Hey, look on the bright side:  When you start your new shorter hours in a few weeks, you’ll have all that extra time, and you can go exercise, or check out the yoga place!

UberFunk Me:  Yup.  That’s just ducky.  I have to have shorter work hours plus no-pay furlough days because our economy is in the crapper.  We’ll also have to keep a tighter rein on our spending, and change our eating habits, and what are we going to do about summer camp?!

Happy Me:  Um.  Well, hey, at least you’ll still have a job!  Lots of people don’t have that any more, so we’ve got it good, right?

UberFunk Me:  …

Happy Me:  Changing the subject!  Isn’t it cute how excited the dotter is about her birthday party?!

UberFunk Me:  Yeah.  Right.  I should be the one upstairs figuring out how to do a unicorn cake, not OmegaDad.  I’m letting everyone down.  I’m no fun.  I’m no good.

Happy Me:  …

UberFunk Me:  I just want to go into the bedroom, draw the drapes, lie down, and stew in my funk.

Happy Me:  … 

This is with my happy pills and with my magic light.  I’d hate to think of what it would be like without them!  So tell me what you all do when you’re stuck in a funk and can’t seem to get out!  Surely I’m not the only one who gets into the doldrums like this (though it has been a hella long time since I’ve been in a funk like this).

I mean, aside from being Really, REALLY sick for an eternity (read: weeks).  And cooped up inside due to inordinately misery-generated low low low temperatures.  And having no brain to speak of.

But:  Yes.  A case of blogger’s block.  This is what has kept me from posting lately.  I open up LiveWriter, am presented with a lovely, pristine blank space of white waiting for my pearls of wisdom to flow forth, and…

…nothing.

Big, fat, nothing.

I have ideas.  Oh, yes!  Ideas!  Seeds of posts.  Waiting for that Divine Spark to flourish, grow, blossom, blah-de-blah-de-blah.

But it’s winter, yannow.  So the seeds of posts just wait, beneath a blanket of icy cold snow, wait for my brain to engage again.

Um.

I swear I have a brain in here somewhere.

Hi!  Did you know yesterday was Official De-Lurking Day?  I didn’t.  So can we have an Official OmegaMom’s Delurking Day?  And have some of my commenters (regular or not) just say something, anything, ask me a question, tell me “There, there, everything will be all right, the sun will come up tomorrow–Tomorrow Is A Brand-New Day!”?  Puh-leeze?  I’m feeling lonely and brain-dead and would appreciate some outside input.

TeenDoc, at Welcome To the Dollhouse, posted an interesting challenge:  Write your life in 100 words, no more, no less.

I thought I’d take it on.  Now, having re-read TeenDoc’s paragraph, I feel mine doesn’t have “flavor” or “depth” or something (in other words, I liked her approach much better).  But, nonetheless, here goes:

Born in Chicago to Beatnik parents.  Father intense, musical, mathematical, gifted.  Mother calm, artsy, pragmatic writer.  Lonely, awkward geek through my teens.  In college, ignored programming in favor of writing historical romances. Dropped out to work on magazine; returned to college and dropped out again two more times. Moved to Arizona, then California. Returned to college and decided programming was okay after all. Applied to national labs internship for the hell of it. Met OmegaDad there. Moved to Lubbock. Started trying for a baby. Moved to Arizona. Endured infertility and failed IVFs, then healed emotionally and adopted OmegaDotter. What’s next?

So, it’s your turn.  Do your version in the comments here, or post on your blog and link back here.

In the meantime, some notes:

In the “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth” department, OmegaUnk commented on our record-breaking string of below zero days by mentioning it was 95F in his neck of the woods that day.  My response:  Ppbbbbttttttt!

In the “Gee, thanks, that really helped a lot!” department, Kate of High Altitude Gardening commiserated with me on my recent hidden-object games addiction, asked me to start a support group, and then told me to download Madame Fate.  Which I promptly did.  Ahem.

In the “I know it doesn’t make sense, just trust me” department, Pretzel told me where to find humidifiers.  So:  Yes, it doesn’t make sense, because all my life I’ve needed humidifiers during the icy cold months just like you suggested, but in this house, we need a dehumidifier.  Currently what’s happening is that any time we bathe or run the dishwasher or boil water, more moisture enters the air, and the house is so well sealed that it congeals on the windows and around the doorjambs, and it’s cold enough outside so that what congeals on the windows and doorjambs freezes.  This is Not Good for the house.  And frustrating for us.  In fact, it’s mighty damned embarrassing to have to thump and whack on the door from the inside when there’s a cold Pizza Hut employee with (supposedly) hot pizzas waiting on the outside, just because the door is iced shut and it’s the only way to shake loose the ice and open the door…

In the “Mem’ries” department (from two respects–first off, I should have answered this weeks ago, and secondly, it’s about our trip to China to adopt the dotter):  Yes, Elaine, I did, indeed, belong to the September 2001 DTC email list, and I do think it was me and OmegaDad you met on the bridge on Shamian Island!

In the “oh, just go check her out!” department:  I’ve been meaning to write up something about women in science, sexism, and displays of femininity, prompted by a series of posts by Dr. Isis, with associated incredibly thoughtful commentary.  But finally, my brain still frozen, I’ve decided to just point you to her blog to say “Go Forth And Read!”  She’s snarky, funny, and a rollicking good read who enjoys being a scientist and a fashionista.  Enjoy.

Or, alternatively, “Help me, Obiwan Kenobi!  You’re my only hope!”

What OmegaMom has been doing for the past two days, while sorting and washing laundry, is quickly becoming addicted to puzzle games on the computer.  Specifically, “hidden object” games.

Let’s back up a year or two.  At one point, OmegaDotter wanted (gag!) La Casa de Dora, a computer game.  We had a trial version, which lasted an hour.  So I signed up with BigFishGames–the “Jumbo Club” option–thinking that we would be downloading games on a regular basis, and downloaded La Casa de Dora.

Then I promptly forgot about my Jumbo Club membership.

So…OmegaDotter has gotten more mature, more able to figure things out, more deft with a mouse, and a month or two ago OmegaDad downloaded trial versions of some other games for her, specifically SuperCow, The Scruffs, and Feeding Frenzy.

Once again, the trial versions expired.

The dotter really liked SuperCow.  I really liked The Scruffs, a hidden object game with a sense of humor.  I decided–o brilliant idea!–to buy her these games for Christmas.

But when I went to BigFishGames, I tried signing up with my regular email address, and The Powers That Be told me I was already registered.

Whoops!

But!

But!

I now had 9 game credits!  Woot!

So rather than spending $10 per game (with the super-de-duper holiday game savings coupon), suddenly they were free!

I promptly downloaded the three games, and then spent hours the night before Christmas working my way through The Scruffs.

And then I decided I wanted another “hidden object” game, so I went to the game site and found “Mystery Case Files:  Ravenhearst”.

And then on Christmas day and the day after Christmas, I went through Ravenhearst.

And then I decided I wanted another Ravenhearst game (because I had seen it on the front page of the game site) and I downloaded it.

And I have been playing these damned games for days on end.

This is not good.  I need a magic word (like “Xyzzy!”) to transport me away from this sudden addiction.  Or I need a rescuer, like Obiwan Kenobi, to fight off the Dark Side of the Force.  I have a real life, dammit.  I have a dotter (who is enjoying working the puzzles with me, at least, so we’re doing a Family Fun Time Activity).  I have a husband.  There are errands to run.  There are stairs to shovel, because we’ve had a foot of snow on top of older snow, and 45-mph winds blowing the snow hither and yon.  We have a broody hen segregated in the garage (more on that later).  I still have laundry to do.

…but I still need to free the twin girls’ ghosts and find all the objects and figure out all the puzzles, and it’s calling me.  (Cue ominous music.)

OmegaDad is sick.

I French-braided the dotter’s hair.

The dotter and I went off to the Bounce Haus and bounced our heads off.  In other words, the dotter wore me out.

I also discovered that my bladder control is dreadful.  There is nothing more quietly embarrassing than realizing that if you jump up and down in a bouncy castle–like you should–that each time you hit the bounce floor, you leak.  This is not a realization I shared with the dotter.

The dotter and I went off to the St0ne C0ld Creamery and chowed down on ice cream.

The dotter and I then went to El Cheapo Hair Salon.  The dotter who a day ago insisted she didn’t want any kind of haircut now insisted she have a “very tiny” trim.

After months of not having a hair cut–and my hair growing down to my shoulders and flattening out as it always does–I relented and returned to the same ol’ same ol’ haircut I have been getting now for about 20 years.  I read bloggers who are going off to hair salons and getting new hairdos all the time.  This makes me envious.  My hair is thin, wispy, fine, flat.  If it’s longer than a few inches, my face starts looking horse-y.  If I get a perm to solve the flatness issue, one side will be perfect and the other side will be frizzy.  Or else I will end up looking like a poodle.

But hope springs eternal:  every few years, I find myself growing my hair out in the hopes that this time, it will morph into a glorious mane, full of body and wave, bouncing enticingly off my shoulders.  And every time, without fail, I reach a point where I look into the mirror, heave a heavy sigh, and say, “Oh, dammit, let’s just chop the whole lot off.”

Now my head feels light and airy, and the slightest breeze makes the short hairs stir about in interesting ways.  It will take a few days at least before I become accustomed to it.

We will not discuss the ongoing alien effect, wherein what used to be deep mahogany brown locks floating down to bedeck the plastic salon cape are now wildly speckled and striped with white.  That’s not related to being forty-mumble years old; it is, obviously, some creature from light years away who is now living in symbiosis with my scalp and sucking the vital juices from my hair follicles for sustenance.

So Dr. FreeRide, over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, posted about The Typealyzer, which purports to take the URL of your blog and tell you what “type” (as in Myers-Briggs type) your blog is.

Let’s just gloss over the question of whether a piece of writing can have a Myers-Briggs type.  Ahem.

Anyway, here’s what The Typealyzer had to say about Omegamom.com:

ESTP - The Doers

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.
The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

My response?  Bahahahaha!  OMG.  I must use a totally different area of my brain when writing than when, say, living my life.  Every single time I take a Myers-Briggs assessment, I end up being typed as an INTP.  Every once in a while, since the dotter has entered my life, I type as an INFP.  (Oh, well, at least I got the TP out of it…)  This is so far off from my own personality type that it’s like night and day, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

If you have a blog, you must run it through this little black box, and come back to tell me what “type” your blog is, and whether it is as far off from your “type” as this one is for me.  I’ve just gotta know!

Over the snow-covered valleys of Alaska, as the sun begins to rise, they gather.

Mist wreaths the peaks as the fog rises, and the half-moon glimmers overhead.

A wind collects the top dusting of snow and scatters it joyously in the air, where it sparkles and shimmers, then falls to the ground.

This…this is the morning ritual.

The harbinger of change is heard in the distance, chains rattling and brakes squealing.

Join us as we watch…The Running of the Moms.

The small fry circle around the nest.  The mother patiently watches for the signal that it is time, time for the migration.

The swift, the brave, the leaders:  they will catch the signal early, and their young will be waiting.

The slow, the sloth-like, the sleepy:  Their young will be left behind, to struggle to their destination and arrive late.

This leaves the ones in between, neither swift, nor sloth-like.

They are the ones who watch for the signal, ready to run, but not quite realizing that the signal they are paying attention to is delayed, or that the gathering, the preparation for the migration, will take too long.

They wait.  They see the signal.  They gather their young.  They prepare the small ones.  They dart here and there, collecting necessary items.  They chatter their warning cries, and their young, being young, dawdle and delay.

Finally, they are ready.  They emerge from the warm, safe nest, where they have bedded down for the night, and peer out into the slowly lifting darkness, eyes blinking, breath frosting the air.

The entrance to the nest is barricaded again.  The mother and the offspring swiftly move to the gathering place.

Or, at least, the mother swiftly moves to the gathering place; the young, in this case, dawdles some more.

The messenger, the leader of the group, is heard approaching, like the thunder of a herd of buffalo.

The adult picks up speed, protected feet crunching rapidly through the days-old snow.  The young follows behind, distracted by the glittering snow, by the ice-covered branches, by…who knows what.

The time is coming, fast, and they must make it to the gathering place in time, or be left behind.  The adult, hearing the leader, breaks into a run, feet sparkling, breath huffing, galloping up the hill to the meeting place.

The young one drifts behind.

The adult calls out, an urgent noise, beckoning forward.

The young one dawdles.

The monstrous beast comes to a halt at the top of the hill, and–miracle of miracles–waits!  The soft rosy pink of the dawn gleams through the windows and silhouettes the driver of the bus.

The adult, worn and tired by its journey, staggers to a halt by the lumbering messenger, and waves a limb in greeting.

“Hah.  It’s always the moms who run; the kids, they take their time,” says Carmina, who is used to this.

And the dotter, suddenly realizing that, oh, maybe she should be moving her feet a little bit faster, breaks into a run at the very last possible minute, and climbs onto the bus.

I sometimes wonder if salmon are the same way.  If mother salmon are darting to and fro around their young, off to spawn in the streams, urging, “Do you have your eggs?  No?!  Where are they?  I told you to get your eggs ready!”  And then swimming before their offspring saying, “Are you sure you have everything?  C’mon!  We need to get going!  It’s time!  No, you don’t have time to poop, dammit!  We’re late as it is!”

Har.

This morning, as the schoolbus pulled in to stop at our corner, the dotter turned to me and quickly said, “No kissy!”

It was like a dart to the heart.  No goodbye kiss?!  What?!  Is she already going through that stage of “my mommy is soooo embarassing!  Ew, no, don’t kiss me in front of everybody!”

Later on, as I was coping with the tummy cramps from whatever-horrid-bug-it-is that I’ve caught, I realized that it wasn’t a case of being embarrassed.

It was a case of internalizing warnings from mommy and daddy; to wit:  don’t kiss someone who is sick.  I had already almost sent her off to the bus stop by herself, fearing a need to dash to the bathroom toot sweet.  So she was merely protecting herself.

Much better than growing up!

Pretzel asks if it has gotten cold here.  Well, yeah, considering that we’ve had a number of snows.  We’ve had lows in the teens.  Bleah.

Sarah (MotherOfSonOfThor) asks if we used online plans for our chicken coops.  I think OmegaDad used them as starting points, but we had an issue:  rather than starting from scratch, as it were, we were retrofitting the coops into the (way off kilter, old, dumpy) stable-ish area off our yard shed.  This meant a lot of home designing.  I think OmegaDad did a bang-up job.  The nesting boxes were also designed using online plans as a starting point.  They were very easy to do, in general.  Chickens, I must say, don’t need much; give them food, water, and a nice quiet boxy space for nesting and they’re pretty happy.

I always thought someone gave you a handout when you became a mom that listed all the strategems and cliches used by mothers the world over for various parenting situations, sort of like a study guide for Mom 101.  It would have things like, “Have you brushed your teeth?”, “I’m not your friend, I’m your mother!”, or “I’m not angry; I’m just…disappointed.”  It would, of course, make life easy if there were a Mom 101 course, and a Mom 102, a 200-level series, and even graduate work, because people like me, who are addicted to college and university courses, would have a blast.

But somehow or other, I find these cliches leaping to my mouth unaided when the time comes that it is needed.

Today, I needed the “I’m just…disappointed.” line.

Lately, we have allowed OmegaDotter to watch far too much “real” TV (versus her video library, much of which is safely kid-oriented).  Hey, when you’re building chicken coops on the evenings and weekends, having a dotter who neeeeds attention all the time when she’s with you can be difficult.  So we’ve schluffed off, and it shows.

So we told her that we were going back to the “no TV on weeknights” regime.  We got some pouts, some fusses, and OmegaDad allowed her to “trade” TV nights–which ended up not being a “trade” at all, but “extra” TV.  Hem.

This afternoon, after we did homework and checked chickens and I fed her a snack, she begged for a “trade”.  I nixed it, and then bopped into the office downstairs for a bit of my latest soap opera addiction (the continuing saaaaagaaa of the financial crisis).  She popped a video into the machine in the family room, then a while later closed my office door.  I continued reading, then looked at the time and realized we had ten minutes until I had to take her off to a sample baton-twirling class.

(Give me no grief about this.  We figure it’s another physical activity, plus her BFF K. is in the class.  Two birds, one stone, all that…)

So I open the office door and head into the family room.  The door to the stairway is closed, and the dotter is not in the family room watching her video and coloring.

I head upstairs.

She’s in the living room, watching Drake and Josh.  (Urg.  She loooves Drake and Josh.  She also loooves iCarly.  These are teenager-y shows on Nick.)

She had closed my office door, closed the door at the bottom of the stairs, gone upstairs, and turned on the TV, with the volume down.

She had snuck around so she could watch TV.

I really wasn’t angry.  I really was disappointed.  I was saddened.  I was upset.  And, lo and behold, out of my mouth came that parenting cliche:  “OmegaDotter.  I am not angry.  I am disappointed.  I told you not to watch TV, and you deliberately snuck up here and turned it on…”

And on and on.

Gah.

Then I pulled out the big guns:  No baton-twirling for you! quoth I. 

There were tears.  There was begging.  There was pleading.  There was OmegaMom saying she was going to consult with OmegaDad; no drama, no shouting, no anger, just implacability.  There was OmegaMom pulling the cable jack out of the back of the TV.  There was OmegaDad who, when informed, had the same response.  There were more tears, more begging, more cajoling.

Oy!

I don’t want to be a grown-up.  It’s a damned pain in the ass sometimes.

OmegaDotter is in Big City.

I am at home.

OmegaDad is off at a conference about permafrost.

Did I mention OmegaDotter (six years old) is in Big City?

That’s like 65 miles away from here.

I am not there.

A friend’s mom offered to take the gals off for the day to go to Chuck E. Cheeze and various other spots.  I said, "Sure!"  And I was absolutely fine about it until about, oh, 11:30, about when friend’s mom was supposed to be picking her up from summer camp.

Immediately, my mind started thinking of Large Moose on the highway.  You know there are lots of moose around here, right?  And that hitting them at highway speed is a Bad Thing?

Or big earthquakes.  You know there are earthquakes around here, right?  And that we had a Huge Biggie back in ‘64, and even though our oodles of itty bitty 2- and 3-point earthquakes are probably releasing tectonic plate tension left and right, sooner or later we’ll have another biggie?

Or of the dotter just getting lost.  In a mall.  And being scared and lonely and wanting mommy.

Um.

It’s a good time to clean house; no Tigger-like six-year-old bouncing off the walls and stuff.

So I do a little, then think of moose.  And do some dishes, and think of earthquakes.  And do some laundry, then think of tired six-year-olds getting tired and cranky and saying or doing something that will scandalize friend’s mom forever.  And sweep a floor, and think of bizarre electric shorts in pizza joints that send everything up in flames in mere seconds.

Damn.  This was supposed to be relaxing!

(And, of course, about 15 minutes after I posted this, friend’s mom called and said they were having a grand old time and could she take them out for ice cream etc.?)

My maternal grandfather was a ham radio operator.  They had a huge antenna attached to the back of the house, and his ham setup was in his den, just off the kitchen.  My cousins and I would hang out on the daybed in his den, listening to him call out to the world and get responses from all over.  Mostly it was just chat, but he had some regular buddies with whom he’d play long-distance chess.

The code for "hey, there, is anyone out there and wanting to talk?" was "CQ, CQ, come in, CQ.  This is W4HWA, calling CQ.  Come in, CQ."

The CQ code is, supposedly (according to Wikipedia), related to the French word sécurité; the idea is that the sound of the letters CQ are like the first two syllables, and, since it originated in telegraphy, the shorter, the better.

So I’ve been under radio silence for a week now.  Mostly, it was a case of the blahs, a serious case of the blahs.  I’d wake up in the morning, and it would be grey.  I’d end work for the day, and it would be grey.  I’d go to bed, and it would be grey.  So I ended up feeling grey and gloomy, dull, dismal, uninteresting, and not wanting to inflict my "wah, wah, wah" on the world.

The blahs are such a sad excuse for depression.  My blogroll is full of people who have serious reason for complaint:  There’s Clueless in Carolina, who is dealing with a mom descending into Alzheimers.  There’s Boomerific, whose home was lost in the Iowa floods.  There’s BrooklynMama, who is dealing with a husband with cancer, and a new baby, and a four-year-old who wants to know where daddy is.  There’s Mrs. Figby, whose mom is having serious problems.  

And there I am, just stewing, for no good reason.  Hell, me, myself, just a few years ago, had a much better reason to be miserable…and, at the time, I was, and it was much worse, more agonizing.  This is just…blah.  Poor OmegaDad is at a loss, wishing I were happier.  So do I, of course.  I figure it’s a function of being in a new place, with a totally different outlook and climate, and being away from my mom and my friends, and that in a year or two, things will be much better.

Which is, of course, not much consolation right now.

So, instead of nattering on about that any more, I will merely post this lovely video, which made me smile and feel happy and warm and connected in a global way (okay, everyone, let’s start singing "Kumbayah", eh?):

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I said "No" to the horsie idea.

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

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

Now, I will tell you a great secret.

I have wanted chickens for quite a while.

Yes!  Really!

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

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

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

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

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

"Mommy" proprietarily gazing upon her flock:

The Sign:

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

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

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

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

Ah…

Ahhh…

AHchew!

In my early 20s, I would visit Grandma down in Sun City on a regular basis.  As planning would have it, there were a whole slew of elderly aunties and uncles that lived there, too–my grandfather having decided, as he was nearing the end of life, that he should move himself and Grandma to that area so that they’d have family around. 

Great Aunt Iola lived down the street from Grandma.  A tall, rangy, raw-boned woman with a deep voice, she was one of my most favorite of the elderly aunties.  Her austere exterior argued for a no-nonsense kind of woman, someone who was brusque and cold and distant.  In reality, though, Auntie Iola was a sentimental pushover, warm and loving and fun.  She introduced me to the wonder that is ginger-ale floats, a much better concoction than root beer floats, trust me.

Auntie Iola had a Siamese cat named Greta, cross-eyed and with a creaky voice, who loved to sun herself in the little courtyard attached to Auntie Iola’s Sun City duplex.  Greta would bask in the sunlight, and, when the mood struck her, would roll about on her back in the dust for minutes at a time.

Given that this was Arizona, and in the summertime, with low humidity (obviously pre-monsoon season), Greta’s fur would fill with static and she would return from one of these dust baths with her fur filled with torrents, masses of dust.

This is how I learned that I was allergic to dust.

KtChew! Ahhhh….ahhhhh…

Because Greta was a sucker for luvins.  So one day, when I was visiting, she returned to the house after her daily dust bath, leapt up onto the table in front of me, and did some serious nose-diving, begging for luvins.  I obliged, scritching around the base of her ears, scratching gently under her chin, pushing her over to massage her tummy.  And within minutes I erupted into the absolute worst allergy attack I have ever–before or since–encountered.

…chew!  Ktchew!

In this area of Alaska, the prevailing winds come looping up the coast, circle inland a bit, and barrel down the glaciers.  The satellite loops look like immense commas, great big swooping spirals of cloud that march in on a regular basis, dumping the moisture sucked up from the ocean.

Right now, though, they’re not dumping moisture.  What they’re doing is kicking up dust from the glaciers and riverbeds as they go.

Small Town Alaska, to the east of us, where OmegaDad works, has been shrouded in clouds of dust for days.  Suburban Alaska, where we live, hasn’t.  Until this weekend.  Suddenly, the laminate flooring upstairs has this fine layer of dust, blown in through the open windows.

We were outside in the back yard almost all weekend.  Early Sunday afternoon, my eyes started itching.  A few hours later and my nose was streaming, and sneezes were exploding from me like the snooze alarm on our clock.  A little series of sneezes–ktchew!  ktchew!  ktchew!–and then a momentary rest where I could snurfle up the runnies with a sound like the honking of a goose, and then another eruption of sneezes.

Antihistamines don’t seem to be doing very much good, either, though I suppose if I weren’t taking them, things would be worse.

So even though it’s gorgeous weather, the sun is out, the trees are green (yes!  green!  woot!), and we have actually had a series of red flag warnings due to (it is to laugh) "low" humidity and high winds, I am praying to the Kozmik All for a good drenching in the next few days, just to get the dust to settle.  And pollen, too, I suppose.  But mostly the dust.

Ahhhh….ahhhhh….

KtChew!

It’s Mother’s Day.  OmegaDad and OmegaDotter let me sleep in, and then marched in with breakfast in bed.  Whoa!  It was little Nancy’s quiches and strawberries, plus one of my Frappucinos…they then brought in their own and joined me, and presented me with a cardboard box which contained truffles (yum), three "flowers" made of pipecleaners and seed packets (some nice pansy varieties), a large abalone shell from the dotter (which I had given to her ages ago), a scarf from the dotter (which I had given to her ages ago), and another shell.

It was, actually, quite charming and loving, and I loved it. 

So much for being a "non-mom mom".  Har.  I’m cynically amused at how Teleflora and NBC scrambled all over themselves trying to recoup from that blunder.  At the same time, I’m glad that they did.

I’m sure they’d flinch at including birthmothers in any way in their motherhood tribute–too ambiguous for their tastes.  After all, they’d have to figure out how to present birthmothers as saintly martyrs who are gently satisfied with their choice, and avoid all the questions that even thinking about birthmoms brings to many folk.

OmegaDotter wrote a letter to her birthmother this morning.  She was happy to do it; she had asked me a while back if she could write a letter to her.  This entailed, of course, explaining that while she could write a letter, we had no way of delivering it because we didn’t know where her birthmother was or if she was okay.  But, I said, we could make a special box, and put letters to her birthmother in the box.  This morning, when she wrote the letter, she had completely forgotten that we couldn’t actually send it, and was all excited (momentarily) about getting a letter back.

::whimper::

But I explained again, and the dotter took it in good stead.

The letter was pretty short, but the first thing the dotter quickly wrote out was "I forgot your name."

::whimper::

She wrote that she can do cartwheels, and that she is good at learning.  And signed it, "Love, OmegaDotter".  Then she put it in an envelope clearly labeled "CHINA", and put it on the refrigerator, held by our very best, strongest magnet.

Then, that done, she merrily went on her way, demanding to help OmegaDad with building the veggie garden, helping me rake (yes, more raking), dipping into the house to build a picnic basket out of paper, and then dashing off next door to play with the kids there for a while.

I know that I have readers who simply don’t understand why we do things like this.  That it seems like a way to make the dotter feel capital-A-adopted.  That we make too much of it.  That our lives are all adoption angst.

First off, no, our lives are not all adoption angst.  In fact, there’s very little of it.  It’s just part of the tapestry of life for us and for the dotter; there are some things that remind her of being adopted, and we talk about them, and she chews on them a bit, and life goes on.  She goes to school, she has to do homework, we play with friends, we deal with Ballet Recital Madness, she practices her gymnastics, and on and on.

The thing is, she is adopted.  She’s our dotter, through and through, but somewhere out there is a birthmother and a birthfather, and a big question as to "why?"  From our readings of musings by adult adoptees, it seems that even the most happy, well-adjusted (female) adoptees think about birthparents and the circumstances of their adoption throughout their childhood, adolescence, adulthood.  And a lot of the adoptees who have written about it say that they were afraid to talk about it with their parents, that they feared hurting their parents by even thinking about another set of parents, by even wondering about their biological background.  Or that they tried talking about it, and their parents brushed it off, and they learned, very quickly, that it was a subject not to be touched.  And many of those adult adoptees said that they thought about the subject of birthparents a lot and were hurt and worried that they couldn’t talk about it with their parents.

Also, there’s OmegaDad.  OmegaDad’s mother died a week after giving birth to him.  He thought about her a lot.  He, too, learned early on that it was a sore subject; of course, it was because she died young, leaving a bereft husband and sons and parents, all of whom remembered her and were hurt by her early death.  So OmegaDad remembers wanting to know more about his mother, and not being able to talk about her.  So he feels it incumbent upon himself to make sure that OmegaDotter know that it’s okay to talk about her birthmother to both of us.

We’ve told the dotter her adoption story since we brought her home, too small to even understand what we were saying.  "Once upon a time, there was a lady in China who had a beautiful baby girl…" was how it started.  And "on the other side of the world, there was a man and a woman who really wanted to have children…"  And ending, "And they drove up the mountains to Small Mountain University Town in the little white car, and got home just a few days before Christmas, and that was the Very Best Christmas Ever."  As she’s grown older, the story has changed, gotten more detail, specifics have been fleshed out.

It’s all a little bit like sex, actually.  Well, not having sex, but talking about sex.  You want to keep the channels open.  You don’t want One Big Just So Story scene where you talk about sex when the kiddo is 17 and that’s that.  So you start out basic, you get comfy talking about the whole idea (omigod omigod i can’t even think about the dotter having sex omigod omigod), you try to not get tied up in knots when A Question comes up. 

I dunno.  It works for us.  Somewhere on the other side of the world is a woman who gave birth to our dotter.  Goodness knows why she had to abandon her–it could be that the dotter has an older sister, and her birthparents were trying for a son; it could be that her birthmother was a young, single woman who couldn’t keep a baby; it could be that there were in-laws who took her away and told her birthmother she was dead, in hopes of a future son to carry on the name; it could be that her birthmother couldn’t afford to keep her…We don’t know.  On a day like this, though, I think of her missing being able to watch this amazing girl grow up, not knowing her belly giggle, not knowing her artistic creations, not knowing her need to bounce and thump.  The least I can do for this other woman out there is to keep her memory alive and not flinch away when the dotter wants–or needs–to talk about her.

Adoption ranting alert!

Whoop!  Whoop!  WHOOP!  Brrrp…brrrp…brrrp…brrrp!

At this point in family life, I normally let the usual mainstream media faux pas (tell me how to pluralize that?  Please?!) about adoption pass me by.  At this point, life is less about Deep Musings About Adoption and more about how to survive the few weeks at the end of school year that are jam-packed with stuff like "Teacher Appreciation Week" (please bring a dish–Monday is breakfast, have it there by 8:30!, Tuesday is casseroles, Wednesday is sandwiches–but the staff are bringing the makings so don’t bother, Thursday is salads, and Friday is desserts) and "The Kindergarden Circus" (in which the dotter is being–natch–a "prancing horse"–and they really need volunteers to help sell popcorn before the circus) and ballet picture day (scheduled for the middle of the morning?  Oh, well, at least it’s not in the middle of school, since school ends two days before) and Ballet Recital Madness (update:  no, littlies don’t need to be there at oh-dark-thirty and stay for 24 hours straight, thank heavens!).

In other words, general adoption stuff has taken a back-burner to Real Life.

(Which is not to say "general adoption stuff" doesn’t happen, and isn’t important.  It does, and it is.  It’s just that what pops into the ol’ noggin to write about tends to be more on the panicky side than on the thinking deeply side.)

But when egregious mainstream media cluelessness attacks, I just have to sit up and take notice.

Brought to my attention by two adoption bloggers is this little lovely:  The category in the Mother’s Day TV special "America’s Favorite Mom" that is called–wait for it–"Non-Mom Moms".

I had a few "non-mom moms" in my life.  There was Aunt Lou, my mom’s best friend.  There was Mrs. Crysanthemum, who lived next door to my paternal grandparents, and who stunned me, absolutely stunned me, when she announced to me, at 16, that I should stop calling her "Mrs. Crysanthemum" and call her by her first name.  It took me years to be able to follow that request without feeling both awkward and disrespectful.  These were women who spent a lot of time with me, disciplined me, gave me hugs, fed me, let me have adventures with their kids, knew me from the time I was a wee chee-ild until I was a grown adult.

I never, ever though of Mrs. Libby, who lived on the other side of my grandparents and had an adopted kiddo, as a "non-mom mom".  Honest!  She was just Jarrett’s mom.

NBC and its minions, though, would place her (and me, and every other adoptive mommy on earth) smack dab into that category.

There it is, in all it’s glory, among the "semi-finalists" in the category "Non-Mom Moms":  "She was an adopted child who is now mom to her own daughter, plus six adopted children who started life as "meth babies"."

First off, even by their skewed standards, she’s a "mom mom":  she has "her own daughter".

OmegaDotter, of course, is not "my own daughter".  I’m just play-acting mommy for her.

Secondly, there’s that old cliche, the "crack baby", recycled as the "meth baby".

Thirdly, she’s not being a "mom" to those adopted children, oh no.  She’s being a "non-mom mom".

Sweet Kozmik All above.  Don’t these people think?  Don’t they have any concept of what "adoption" is?  Don’t they realize how they’ve dissed all the adoptive moms in their audience by that casual sweep of the semantic hand that dusts adoptive moms off into the "non-mom mom" dustbin?

Gah.  Get a grip, NBC.  My dotter has two moms, and they’re equally valid and important in my dotter’s life.  (Which I will talk about on Mother’s Day, I think.)

Frick-frackin’ rowrbazzlin’ dim-witted dismissive twits.

Nothing is going on with our lives.  Okay, yeah, the dotter ends her first year of Real School in a week and a half…it’s spring and I’ve seen one tree with all sorts of itty bitty pale green leaves bursting out, so that’s exciting.  And we have rhubarb growing.  And Mother’s Day is coming up.

But I?  Am in a rut.  Nothing seems interesting or exciting to me right now.

So, channeling my mom, I hear:  "Just join a club!  Go to a Mensa do!  Go take walks!" et cetera.  And I say it to myself, too, especially the "go take walks!" or the variation, "go get some exercise on a regular basis!", but it doesn’t help.

My life is boring.  My blog is boring.  Nothing is going on.  The most exciting thing that has happened to me recently is that I stabbed myself beneath my fingernail with a cactus spine opening the kitchen window.  And it hurts.

I even went off to The Daily Meme to see if any of the subjects might amuse me or incite me, and it was all…meh.

The dotter is losing teeth left and right.  The last one was one of the two top front teeth; this left the second one, also loose, all on its lonesome and able to stick out by itself when her lips were closed.  It was cute and adorable.  It also became quite wiggly.

At which point, it is my job to supervise the evening ablutions.  While both OmegaDad and I get the heebie-jeebies at really wiggly teeth, I have teeny-tiny heebie-jeebies; OmegaDad gets wigged out and has to leave the bathroom entirely.

Of course, it reached that particular point that parents the world over know:  it wiggled itself loose on one side and not on the other, and the dotter had reached the pinnacle of impatience.  I assured her it would come out over the next few days, but OmegaDad decided to promote the tie-a-string-around-the-tooth approach.

This resulted in severe dithering.  First it was "Oooh, yeah!"  Then it was "Ewwww, no!  Stop it!"  Then it was "Maybe I’ll try it."  Then it was tears and "I can’t do it!"  And all of this was before the string ever reached the tooth.

Like going zero to 60 and back to zero within a minute.  Whiplash!

So we abandoned the attempt and the dotter and I headed off to her bedroom for story time.

At which point, she decided she wanted to try it again.

This time, we avoided the bathroom, so she couldn’t see what was going on.  Apparently, it was seeing that was scaring her.  So we plopped her down on a dining chair conveniently scooched near the kitchen door, took the neat little lariat that OmegaDad had made out of cooking twine, and I slipped it over her tooth and cinched it down almost tight.

At which point, she decided she didn’t want to try it again.

Foreseeing an hour or two of this back-and-forthing, I reaching for the string, saying "Okay, okay, kiddo!  I’m taking the string off!" and surreptitiously yanked with one hand on the string while the other was making ineffectual forays at the string-encased tooth.

Pop!  Out came the tooth (of course).  (There was one moment of resistance, and I had a queasy fear that it wouldn’t work and the dotter would be both in pain and brokenhearted that Mommy was torturing her.)  The dotter had one moment of "Owww!" and then realized what had happened.  Much surprise and great swelled-headedness on her part:  "I did it!"  She totally thought that I had really been trying to untie the tooth…

Later on, in her bedroom, I whispered to her, "You know what?  I was sneaky.  I wasn’t trying to take the string off, I just yanked…"

She thinks it’s hilarious.  She has spent the last day giggling about it, and saying, "Ooooh, you’re so sneaky, Mommy!"  (Tee hee!)

She now has a two-tooth gap.  Another tooth is loose.  The Tooth Fairy is soon going to have to make another run to the bank for Sacajawea dollars.  I have it on good authority from the girls at gymnastics that at least one kid gets $20 per tooth, and another $8.  Whoa.  I got quarters.  The dotter gets the nice golden Sacajawea dollars.  And the Tooth Fairy is running out Real Soon Now.

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.

"Make new friends,
But keep the old,
One is silver
And the other gold…"

Anyone who’s been to Girl Scout camp knows that song.  I remember singing it (among others much less uplifting) while we hiked from our area of platform tents to the main mess hall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  (I also remember that the much-sought-after reward for doing clean-up at mess hall was to get the "cows", the huge plastic bags that held milk for the milk dispensers, which made very nice inflatable pillows for the camp cots…)

Today I got a call from an old friend.

The sun is out, the day is warm, and I got a call from a good friend–what more can I ask?

Like many of my blogging buds, I am rather introverted.  It takes me a while to make friends, and I usually only have one or two "good" friends at a time.  Some were friends for long periods of time, some for shorter; I’ve lost touch with a bunch, which makes me sad.

I had lost touch with J–life being life, small kids occupying one’s mind and time–and hadn’t talked with her for about two years.

But last week, she called OmegaDad at work, having heard via the network that we moved to Alaska, and using her mad Internet research skillz to locate him.  He gave her our phone number and various email addresses, we coordinated times through email–me being out here in the Final Frontier, she being on the East Coast, and many hours of difference dividing the two.  And today, her being out and about on her own to go shopping and me being home after work hours coincided.

A good friend is the kind of friend who you can talk to for an hour on the phone after a lapse of two years and it’s like you haven’t been away from each other at all.  Sort of like my faux Ugg boots, or a good armchair–comfy and cozy and…well, friendly.

We have, of course, been making tentative social moves here, reaching out and getting to know people.  We’ve hung out with A’s mom and dad (A being adopted from the same area of China, one day older than OmegaDotter, and also in her gymnastics class), and it seems like there might be potential with S’s mom, too (another gymnastics bud).  It’s nice to start feeling less isolated.

But still.  Still, having an old friend call, and falling into the old, comfy conversational back-and-forth…ahhh.

(I can’t, for the life of me, remember the name of the camp, but it was in Virginia, we paddled canoes on the Potomac, learned to carve rudimentary artwork in redwood, hiked through forests, had sing-alongs around the campfire, and collected shark’s teeth.  All was good.)

The dotter is better.  It seems to have been a 24-hour bug; she was sick long enough for me to cancel a visit to a buddy on Saturday, but by the end of the day was able to eat regular food and keep it down, yay!

Yesterday was sunny, but we pretty much did nothing all day–the dotter, still recuperating, laid about and napped a few times, and I wasn’t feeling up to par myself.

But today–today was sunny and warm again.  Up in the 50s.  Oh, joy!

We now have slightly more than an acre.  About a fourth, I would say, is wooded.  The remainder is lawn.  One spot in the yard gets sun more often than any other, and it was free and clear of snow.  So I began raking it at 11 a.m.

By 4 p.m., that part of the yard was looking awesome.

I, on the other hand, now have been informed by both OmegaDotter and OmegaDad, on separate occasions, that my butt is quite dirty.  ("Hey!" says OmegaDad, "So sue me!  I like looking at my wife’s ass!")  I have a raw spot from where I was raking without gardening gloves.  Luckily, I realized it in time and grabbed the gloves, so it’s my only raw spot.

But my arms!  My legs!  My back!  Ack!

And it ends up I’ve only done about one-sixth of the yard.  I look out my office window into the back yard–the endless expanse of back yard, where the snow is rapidly shrinking, and say to myself, "Myself:  Look at that yard.  Maybe we want to let the woodlands come back."  Myself shakes her head and says, "No, no, me.  We need lawn so kids can run around and get tired out, and besides, we can’t let the woodlands grow over the septic tank or we will be sunk.  We can do this!  We’ll just do bits and pieces over the next few weekends, and then it will be time for OmegaDad to start mowing…"

By the way–underneath all the leaves?  The grass was green.  Not everywhere, just in spots.  But it was such a lovely, lovely color to see!