OmegaMom

Bobcat:  So we bought a kids plaything with swings and slides and a tower, courtesy of some money GrannyJ provided us, plus savings from the dotter’s dollar container.

This requires installation, of course.

Which requires a spot in the yard.

Which requires that OmegaDad make things complex, by planning to dig the area out, surround it with beams, and fill it with wood chips.

All very well and good, but there’s this “digging out” that needs doing.  Yesterday a.m., OmegaDad dresses in his scruffiest work clothes, grabs his shovel and pick and wheelbarrow, and sets out, all manly-like, to do his yeoman duty.

I wander out a little later, and he mutters about how it would all be easier if he had a Bobcat.

He mutters it to me a little later.  And once more.  And I say to him, “Well, why don’t we rent one?”

After some to-ing and fro-ing, we decide to do it, he calls the rental place, they bring a Bobcat over, and he starts to work.

…

Have I mentioned it’s been raining like crazy lately?  And that the yard is soaked?

…

Do you know what happens when you drive a Bobcat around a rain-soaked lawn?

And when someone who used to be expert at smoothing out lawns but hasn’t done it for 20 years decides to go at it?

Let me just say that at a point yesterday, I was out in the yard and just peered sadly at the large hole.

To add insult to injury, it rained like crazy last night, as well.  So the hole is now a big mud hole.

OmegaDad promises me that it will be fixed and by next summer the lawn will be looking bee-yoo-tiful again.

Drama:  We had OmegaDotter’s current BFF, K., over to spend the night.  The end result was two full-on scenes with tears and misery on both sides, and one time OmegaDad asking why they bothered to be friends, since they made each other miserable, and one time OmegaMom did the same thing.  When they weren’t fiercely hurting each others’ feelings, they were busy running around and being happily noisy.  How two girls, 6 and 7 years old, can make the house sounds like it’s filled with an entire soccer team of little girls, plus a couple of elephants, I have no idea. 

More Drama:  The Mother of All Bailouts.  Treasury Secretary Paulson is running a $700 billion save-the-markets-from-total-meltdown program by the Congress and the President as I type.  The markets were down 900 points in two days until rumors of the bailout began floating, at which point the markets gained more in two days, percent-wise, than they have since…

…are you ready…

…1929.  Oh, boy, isn’t that reassuring?!

The current plan is all of one page long.  It includes this fun little piece:

“Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Ahem.  That’s not funny, folks.

This $700 billion is to be spent purchasing assets of unknown worth from faltering financial companies, then figuring out how to sell them to someone else.  The problem is that many of those assets are backstopped by mortgages on real estate where the price is still falling.  No-one knows how much that stuff is worth.  But Uncle Sugar Sam is gonna make everything all better, you betcha, and those financial companies that went blindly ahead playing with money on the assumption that real estate always goes up (wrap your head around that one for a few minutes) are going to be taken care of, all nice and tidy.

My personal preference is a conglomeration of suggestions from various commenters on various financial websites:

• Rather than create this new, sweeping agency/power backed by $700 billion, increase FDIC to $500 billion, or the entire $700 billion.
• Increase deposit insurance to $250,000 per depositor. Insure money market deposits and interbank loans for 12 months.
• FDIC judges ACTUAL capital ratios (not fakery reported on balance sheets), and seizes banks that don’t meet existing FDIC regulations.
• FDIC seizes BIGGEST weak banks first (the original commenter names a bank rumored to be very big and very much in trouble, but I’m removing that) and moves down, to maximize positive impact on public trust.
• FDIC corrals bad assets and auctions them off slowly over time. FDIC sells good assets and deposits to good banks.
• Investors in seized banks are treated as in a bankruptcy: equity is wiped out, debt is worked out based on remaining equity, if any.
• Executive management of seized banks, is fired, blackballed from other seized banks, and passed to FBI for investigation.
• Dividends of $.01 from all financial companies until things are cleaned up.
• Any “golden parachute” clauses for current financial company executives are null and void.
• Institute a website that lists each transaction purchased by the government. This could list the details of the asset, the PAR value, the selling institution, the underlying characteristics, the originators of the loans, the price the government paid (and eventual sold the asset for) and any other relevant detail.

Right now, there’s wrangling going on.  The Dems are saying, well, if you’re going to throw $700 billion at this problem, let’s add some more money to create another stimulus check.

Shee-it.

Look, the whole financial market went into a tailspin and almost froze up last week.  There are plenty of commenters at my regular blog stops who think the Paulson plan is only going to postpone things.  There are plenty of people who are terrified that if nothing gets done, and quickly, the tailspin and freeze are going to continue on Monday.  I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure I don’t really like the plan as it currently stands…

It has been raining for days.  Endless, ongoing, sometimes gentle, sometimes a downpour:  Rain.  This is what I remember from last September, as well.  Sure enough, when I google “average precipitation Suburban Alaska”, there it is:  September is the rainiest month of the year.

This afternoon when I drove OmegaDotter off to her gymnastics class, the clouds parted, and I saw Tamatuska Peak to the east.  There, on the peak and down the flanks, was snow.  Real snow, with a real snow line.  I remember this from last year, too.

We are smack in the middle of the extremely short autumn that we are graced with here.  The deciduous trees are turning gold, some of them orange; the houses in Suburban Alaska are peeping out again as their privacy drapes–the leaves–go cascading down.  Each rainfall strips yet another layer from the trees, scattering the leaves willy-nilly on the lawns and revealing, bit by bit, the structures that lie hidden in the summertime.

The Big City newspaper had a slide show that introduced me to a new term:  “Termination dust”.  Well, dayum, I thought, they’ve even got a name for the dust that comes down from the glaciers when it’s windy!  (In conjunction with the rain, we have had high wind warnings for areas of the valley.)  But reading further, I couldn’t figure out really what they were talking about, so I had to resort to Teh Google again on that one. 

Lo and behold, it’s a grim and somewhat poetic description of the first noticeable snowfalls on the mountains.  See, it’s a “dusting” of snow, and it marks the “termination” of summer, the entrance to our fleeting autumn, and a harbinger of Things To Come.

The sun is coming up at 7:30 a.m. and setting at 8:15 p.m.

The nights are getting colder, though with the rain the low end stays relatively high…we’re down into the low 40s at night, and up around 50 during the day.  When the cloud cover breaks, the nighttime temperature dips, so I expect our little veggie garden will soon be informing us that all the leafy greens are gone for the season.  We have been enjoying our sweet little carrots, experimenting with kohlrabi and rutabagas, handing out lettuce to neighbors and deliverymen and soon, probably, OmegaDad’s coworkers.  When the next-door neighbor kids play with the dotter, I send them over to the peas (our poor, measly crop this year was due to our late start in getting things planted), or pull out a carrot or two for them.

The cute stubby ones are either Parmex or Thumbelinas; the long orange and yellow ones are Kaleidoscope, and the red ones are Purple Haze.  The Purple Haze and the stubby ones are the best, sweet and crisp and flavorful.

We can expect our first measurable snowfall down here in the valley in mid-October.

(See?!  I can talk about something other than the financial mess.  I won’t mention Washington Mutual auctioning itself off, or Morgan Stanley suddenly talking to Citic, a Chinese company, about being purchased, or how the Dow Jones tanked again even after the Feds performed a miracle last-minute bailout, but I will link to an amusing hand-written sign (amusing in a gallows humor kind of way) found by a Calculated Risk reader at his local WaMu branch…)

So sue me.  I’m fascinated by the mushrooms, by the wild variety, by how pretty they are, by where they grow, by how quickly they appeared after we got some serious moisture.  OmegaDad and I spent Sunday cleaning out the Massive Pile O’ Rotten Scrap Wood out from behind the stable.  OmegaDad would drag out a piece of old, water soaked lumber, turn to fling it onto the “have OmegaMom stand on the wood on top of an old tire so I can saw it in half so it will go into the dumpster” staging area, glimpse a mushroom, and call out, “Wow!  Here’s a grand one for your blog!”

Thus, in between flinging sodden lumber into the wheelbarrow, wheeling the barrow down to the dumpster, flinging sodden lumber into the dumpster, and wheeling the barrow back up to the stable-now-a-coop, I kept grabbing the camera and taking snaps.

Here we have a very phallic ’shroom.  Dig the hairy fibers in the middle and the neat black, oozy gills down below:

Using MushroomExpert.Com, my guess is that this is a “Shaggy Mane“.

The one below has the typical bright colors that scream out “DON’T EAT ME!!!”.  That would be because it’s an Amanita, well-known for being…um…not good to eat.  In fact, all amanitas tend to be poisonous.  (I like the highlighted, bolded comment, “You are stupid if you eat this mushroom” in the article.  Apparently there’s a coterie of folks who do eat this mushroom, looking for cheap psychedelic thrills.  And then they end up in the emergency room.)

I don’t know what these little dainties are, but they were just cute as…well, buttons!  (While wandering through the mushroom guide, I came across something that indicated it might not be a good idea to pop any old small, brown mushroom into your mouth.  I can assure all my readers that I am not planning to eat any of these ’shrooms, just admiring them.)  Note the bug on the cap at the top of the picture.

This is what they look like opened up:

This guy is a more aged version of one of the mushrooms in my previous post:

This guy was inside a stump; he looks quite leathery and not tender at all!

I’m sure you’re all tired of mushroom pictures.  But, honestly, I’m finding them fascinating and beautiful.  At the very least, it’s a pleasant reward for lots of rain and lots of grey days.  (The local newspaper has been running stories all about how everyone in the area is sick and tired of cold, grey, sometimes rainy days.  The article I last read pretty much said, straight out, that the local populace had been “spoiled” by 2004, 2005, and maybe 2006, which were, apparently, bright, sunny and warm.  Damn.  I’d like some of that.)

While it’s been grey and chilly here for, it seems like, months on end, we haven’t really had any rain to speak of.  The past few days, however, have remedied this problem.  And suddenly, we have mushrooms again.

So I got out the camera while OmegaDad was planting our new perennial bed (woohoo!) (pictures tomorrow), and started fiddling around with the “macro” setting, which I’d never played with before. 

The end result, I must say, is rather nice.  Above is the macro–below is the close-up.  This little batch of fungi would be almost overwhelmed in the greenery that surrounds us (OmegaDad calls it “the annual chlorophyll orgasm!”); the macro setting makes it pop quite nicely.

If I were really anal, I would correct the color on the macro to match the close-up; the shrooms were actually that lovely peach-orange color.  But I also liked the way the macro version looked so much like a flower.

We have one of the red spotty mushrooms out front.  I knew we had one, but couldn’t locate it where I thought it was, so didn’t photograph it.  Of course, when OmegaDad and I went out for dinner, he spotted it.  I will try to get a shot of it tomorrow.

There’s nothing to give spatial context on the shroom above.  It is actually about the size of a salad plate, and it is leaning over like that.  I assume it was just too top-heavy.

The little dainty above was hiding away.  He’s nothing special; about an inch-and-a-half across, white, pretty much “eh”.  But the contrast between it and the greenery was just too nice to pass up.

In the meantime, we are enjoying an evening off:  OmegaDotter is spending the night at a friend’s house.  When I called at 5, she excitedly told me that K. has her very own guitar!  And it’s real!  It’s not a toy!  Whoa.

There is something profoundly satisfying about being able to toss a small bomb at a living creature and feel righteous about it.  It gives me a teeny tiny glimmer of understanding about people who are willing to subsume themselves into hatred and prejudice; it’s visceral.

In other words:  I threw a firework at a pair of moose who were in the yard and felt a warm glow of achievement as these huge critters went barreling off through the woods.  Into one of our neighbors’ back yards.  Oh, well.  They’ve lived here a long time, surely they already have the moose thang sussed out, unlike us hapless Alaska newbies.

Aside from that, nothing is roiling my brain right now.  OmegaGranny sent me a link to a blog post about kids books and end-of-the-world catastrophism, prompted by a write-up in Newsweek.

Eh.

Frankly, the majority of stuff that kids read right now is so fluffy and frilly and substance-less that a few more meaty books here and there don’t bother me.  After all, we’ve got Barbie and Bratz and My Little Pony and CareBears and sweetness and light all over the place.  (Speaking of “sweetness and light”, have you seen JibJab’s take on the latest presidential campaign, in particular the very amusing part about Barack Obama?  And you should read their blog about pulling it all together, too.)

Good old-fashioned disaster lit just takes one back to an earlier, more gritty age, when Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to try to fit into the glass slipper, and one princess’s evil stepmother was forced to dance at her wedding in iron-hot dancing shoes.  It’s not like catastrophe, disaster, vengeance, killing, and what-not is anything new.  Bambi’s mother, for instance, is shot.  And Disney movies are run through-and-through with dead or absent moms.

Anyway, if the disaster lit wasn’t written specifically for juveniles, you can be assured that the juveniles will just find grown-up disaster lit to read.  Or movies to watch.  Poseidon Adventure, anyone?  Towering Inferno?  On The Beach?  Godzilla?

I think that humans are hard-wired to want drama.  Humans against humans!  All against the backdrop of war! or disaster! You’ve got yer Ulysses.  You’ve got yer Beowulf.  You’ve got yer Bayeaux Tapestry, Don Quixote, Les Miserables, Gone With The Wind, The Day After Tomorrow…  Probably those ancient humans who did the cave paintings in Lescaux had their own version of the disaster/drama/horror story while sitting around fires and eating freshly slain bison.

Right now, my personal desire is for a rockin’, sockin’ disaster novel that ends up with the End Of All Moose, and the Flourishing Of All Veggie Gardens.  I’ll settle, however, for a few books that are due to show up in my mailbox within a week or so, good old-fashioned escapist fantasy and science fiction, replete with–of course–catastrophic end-of-the-world shenanigans…

(ETA:  Ack!  I forgot to mention Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog!  You must check it out within the next two days, before they make you pay for it!)

Yesterday evening, we thinned out the spinach and pak choi and hong tsin choi and Swiss chard and beets, and had a whole mess of baby greens.  This, of course, cooked down into a small mess of baby greens.  They were awesome to eat, tender and tasty and lovely.

So today I was going to wax rhapsodic about our veggie garden.  There was a planned chortle about how nice and big our broccoli plants were getting.  A close-up or two of our tender tiny carrot plants.

Earlier this morning, the neighborhood dogs were going nuts, howling and barking and generally being noisy.  I couldn’t see what had set them off, so marked it off as a puzzle.

Then, later, I was sitting in my office, reading my blogs, and OmegaDad wandered in to tell me, “Keep an eye out for any moose; I saw one up the hill at the neighbor’s house.”  Aye, aye, sir, I responded.  He headed off to take a shower, and I popped out the kitchen door for a smoke.

Then…Then my eyes alighted on our veggie garden.

Things looked…different.

I thought to myself “Moose?  Garden?  Time to check things out,” and headed down the back stairs towards the garden.

As I got closer, I could see evidence of the massacree.

Moose tracks and shorn plants:

A discarded plant:

A row of cabbage plants with the tasty tops munched off (they were not yet “heading”):

Cropped and dumped brussels sprout plants:

Now, I’m aware that it could have been worse.  We still have lots of tiny spinach, beets, chard, lettuce, etc.  Our peas, in the back, were undisturbed.  There were some plants that had been pulled up, roots and all, so they have been replanted.  And most of the plants that were eaten can regrow.

But I was just damned angry.  If a hapless moose had been anywhere in sight at that moment, I might have done something stupid, like charged it in a red haze.

Damn moose.

While I was out taking inventory of the damage, I heard loud, angry shouts and stomping and thumping from the neighbor across the street, so I am assuming that the moose made the rounds and visited other yummy plant buffets.