OmegaMom

The moose have been tromping around our yard since twilight.  When OmegaDad went out to the garden to gather some thyme, he found that we had had a visitor who had very carefully removed all the fall flower garden detritus and stomped footprints into the moist soil.

(Yes, “moist”.  We have been frolicking in balmy weather; it has snowed, but the snow is wet and slushy, and the temperature has been regularly in the forties—FORTIES!!—here in mid-November.  The past month, temperatures here have been far above normal, as evidenced here:

The dark gray band is the “normal” range of temps; the red marks are what our temps have been for the past few weeks.  Let us not mention the dread words Gl0bal Warm1ng!  So, rather than slowly freezing solid, as should be happening now, our ground has become slurgy and saturated.)

Then OmegaDad heard thumps and bumps in the front of the house.  Peering out the living room windows, he saw Moose by the front porch.  So he went to investigate…

…and discovered that our flower boxes, normally perched upon the porch railings, had been knocked off, and that Moose had actually been upon the porch landing, and dragged a flower box down the stairs and over by my parked car.

That is one tenacious Moose!  No doubt, he found the remnants of our petunias to be particularly tasty.

Spring has finally arrived Chez OmegaMom.  The snow has completely melted from the yard.  Robins are serenading us in the morning and deep into the “night”.  The gloaming is creeping up; it is 11 p.m. as I write this, and it’s still late twilight outside—sunrise was at 5:51 a.m., sunset at 10:05 p.m.  The trees and shrubbery are filled with leaf buds, which I swear seem to grow as you watch.  You can definitely see the changes from day to day.

Within a few weeks, all the houses on all the streets in our area will be hidden from view again by the riotous abundance of greenery surrounding them.

And, as happens each spring, the rhubarbs get a hard-on.  Thick, red, hard penile stubs emerge from the ground in clumps and look infinitely pornographic for a few days.

Then the hard-ons explode into wildly wrinkled, alien looking baby leaves.  A week or so later, suddenly the plants look like ordinary rhubarbs:  the aliens have vanished.

It’s an amazing transformation.

Alas, the pics we had of the hard-on stage were out of focus, but here we have some aliens emerging from the penile cocoon:

Here’s a more pornographic looking item; imagine it without its crinkled taffeta skirt:

Brains for the vegetarian zombies:

The rhubarb plants give my hubby and me something to giggle about in delayed adolescence.  Then, later in the year, they give my hubby rhubarb to make pies.

I, unfortunately, am not fond of rhubarb pie.  Hopefully we’ll be able to ship one off to OmegaGranny.

Aside from that, I have been walking in the mornings, enjoying the sunshine, the explosion of growth, the rich smells of moist dirt and growing things.  And getting mosquito bites—of course.  And raking—endlessly—the yard, in bits and pieces.

This past fall and winter, we had two hens die, so now that it is springtime, the husband’s thoughts lightly turned to—of course—new baby chicks.  So, this fine Easter weekend morning, OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trekked off to the local hatchery and brought back a Belgian Bearded d’Uccle Bantam (mille fleurs variety) and a Frizzle, both about two weeks old.  We now have Miss Frizzle:

And Millie:

They are happily ensconced in a heated plastic tub in the garage, and I am, of course, falling in love with them because they are so cute.

Yes, spring is rapidly springing here.  The snow has melted off the north side of our front yard.  Now, you’d expect it to melt off the south side first, but the south side of our yard is shaded by trees, so the north side gets freed up first.  In the back yard, the back two vegetable beds are now snow-free, and we have purchased black plastic to wrap the beds to heat them up and thaw the soil in preparation for planting.

In our rock garden at the foot of the kitchen stairs, one happy Leopard’s Bane is leafing out luxuriantly.  In the garden behind the house, the lilacs are budding their leaves. 

A mama moose and her calf have been wandering the neighborhood eating everything they can find that has sap running through it, so I am planning to cut up strips of Bounce to tie onto the lilac bushes (this is rumored to keep moose away).

The trees have pussy willows bursting out at the tops.

Today it unofficially hit 50F here in Suburban Alaska.

Spring!

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

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

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

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

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

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

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

Carrots.  Really!

We planted many carrots this year.  Many many many carrots.  And all our carrots grew.  We have spent the summer happily pulling a few carrots here and there and snarfing them down.

But now it is mid-October, and more than past time to be clearing out the veggie garden before the soil freezes and it becomes impossible to remove the veggies.  So OmegaDad spent the afternoon today pulling carrots.

Many many many carrots.

The picture above is one hod of carrots.  We had more than that.  (The moose did not get the carrots; the veggie beds are protected by PVC pipe-and-netting contraptions, covered with translucent plastic since things have started getting chilly.  The moose ignored the veggie beds entirely.  Alas, our brussels sprouts were not in the veggie beds.)

We also had a sink full of carrots:

We spent the afternoon trading off the task of cleaning carrots.  This is the end result:

You will note, above the sprawl of carrots, a bowl.  In the bowl is a loaf of bread.  This may give you some context as to how many carrots there are in the picture.  I might also add that the heap is about four inches deep, up to six inches deep at the center.

It’s a lot of carrots.

They’re very tasty–the frosts we have had in the past few weeks have sweetened them up amazingly.  They are almost candy sweet.

But, still.  It’s a lot of carrots.

(The song, of course, refers to bananas.  Mashed bananas.  “There were thirty…thousand…pounds…of mashed bananas…of bananas…of bananas…!”)

OmegaDad hauled the dotter and me out to pick various berries in the yard–he plans to make rose-hip and rhubarb jelly, and maybe tart it up with cranberries.

While we were out there, I came upon some pretty mushrooms and fungus:

The dotter and OmegaDad in the midst of foliage:

The takings - cranberries:

And rose hips:

Rose hips are chock-a-block full of pectin, but they’re not very tasty.  Fairly bland, as a matter of fact.  So hopefully the rhubarb and cranberries will make the end result more interesting.

As the majority noted, it was, indeed, Pippi in the dotter’s picture.  (Lauri–No, I wasn’t trying to get very deep!  ;-)  Just wanted to see if people who didn’t know beforehand could recognize the subject of the picture.)  I am torn at this point between the idea of sending the dotter off to take some “art lessons” so she can learn about perspective and shading and various techniques, and the fear that the same thing could kill her creativity.  If someone were to squish that outpouring of creativity, I think I’d get…violent.

After dinner, I was heading out to the kitchen porch for a smoke whilst the dotter cleared the table and chatted with OmegaDad.  While I was lighting my ciggie, I heard a crunch-crash-crunch noise; I poked my head out to peer in the direction the noises were coming from.  Lo and behold, we had a Mama Moose and Baby Moose chowing down on the cow parsnips in our front yard.

Of course, I had to alert the dotter and OmegaDad, and we spent much time “ooh”ing and “ahh”ing, and OmegaDad managed to dash down to the office, grab the battery charger, run upstairs with it, reload the batteries in the camera, and snap off a few pictures.

The colors are off because it is cloudy and dim right now; the second shot, I believe OmegaDad managed to get some flash into the ambient environment.

So we were delighted and amused (baby doesn’t look too very old to me).

But then…

…then…

THEN OmegaDad decided to check the veggie garden:

The moose had knocked off our veggie garden covering on one of the veggie beds (you can see the pipes and [just barely] some of the netting behind the bed), and they had mown our chard and beet greens down like machines.  Sigh.

They were very luxurious, leafy plants only a few hours ago!  The beets themselves are still okay; the moose and baby didn’t eat those.  But boy howdy, they really liked the greens!  And the big lettuce that we were letting go in the next-over veggie bed.  They didn’t touch the celery and carrot greens, though–the devastation stopped where the chard stopped.

I guess it’s time to get out the firecrackers again…

Today we thinned out the beets.  We had two sizes–itty bitty embryonic beets, and almost-beet-sized beets.  We ate the mess of embryonic beets, cooked with their greens, and it was yummy.  Tomorrow or the next day, we will eat the almost-beet-sized beets.

Sunday, OmegaDad made homemade peach ice cream, brownies, and bread.  Saturday, he brought home two pints of the best blueberries I’ve had in ages.  It’s been a few days of eatin’ around here!

ETA:  Oh!  I forgot!  Today was the anniversary of the first moon landing.  I don’t remember it very well, but do remember watching it at my grandmother’s house down in Jacksonville.  We were telling the dotter about it, and she kept asking, “He was the first man ever to walk on the moon?!  EVER?!”  Then she asked who was the first woman to walk on the moon.  We said no woman has ever walked on the moon.  Now she wants to be the first.  Anyway, in honor of this occasion (warning:  language, but quite appropriately inappropriate!):

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

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

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

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

And this is what it looks like now:

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

I am most satisfied.

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

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

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

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

This is the bunny:

You can’t tell, but he’s HUGE.

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

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

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

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

Fame!

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

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

I’m leaving on a jet plane

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

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

We now have a wild duckling in the garage.  It’s name is Rhubarb, Ruby for short.

I arrived home late from the morning trip to Big City, having dumped the girls at China Camp, dealt with Miss Emily telling me about coping with OmegaDotter and others who were…shall we say, enthusiastic, with the kung-fu instructor, to the point of being annoying.  “Enthusiastic” means climbing all over him, swooning on him, teasing him, following him–you name it; Miss Emily did not have to tell me in any detail, because I immediately knew what it was like.  OmegaDotter still has a lousy sense of other people’s personal space, and when she likes her instructors, she hangs on them.  Literally.

Anyway.  OmegaDad had planned to take the day off to attack painting the interior of the greenhouse, so that we can put up the poly-plastic sheets that will let the sun shine in.  I fully expected to get home & find him off in the back yard, doing his thang.

Instead, when I drove up, there he was in front of the garage, with heaps and piles around him, and making strange faces at me through the window of the car, gesturing for me to get out ASAP.

I thought he had decided to remove the last of the detritus from behind one side of the villa complex.  I was vexed, because I thought the plan had been for him to wait to do this until Sunday.  I was all prepared to grump at him as I emerged from the vehicle.

At which point, he informed me he needed help, and did I notice that all the various boxes, pieces of wood, etc. were making a makeshift corral around the rhubarb plant?  (Um, no.  But now that he mentioned it…)

“Oh, by the way, there’s a baby duck in the rhubarb plant.”

…

I knew, immediately, what this meant.  This meant that we were now the proud owners of a duckling.

As soon as we could get it out of the rhubarb plant.

For those who think this is an easy matter, let me remind you of the effects of 20 hours of sunlight and 4 hours of twilight upon vegetation.  This is not your ordinary rhubarb plant; there is no such thing in the state of Alaska.  This is a monster plant, a jungle unto itself, with leaves the size of an HDTV, rearing up taller than the dotter and almost as tall as me.

ONE rhubarb plant.

Anyway, I stood guard outside the OK Corral while OmegaDad rummaged in the rhubarb jungle for the duckling.

The tale was that he had heard the dawg going nuts while he was in the shower.  He emerged to hear all the neighbor dogs going nuts out front.  He peered out the living room window to see what the ruckus was (usually a moose).  He saw Bad Dawg, from next door, pestering something on the ground while an adult duck fluttered and squawked and attacked it.  He went bounding out the front door, snapping out a loud and firm, “LEAVE IT!”  Bad Dawg retreated, and lo and behold, a duckling rocketed up our driveway and into the rhubarb forest by the corner of the house.  So he quickly began making the OK Corral out of whatever he could lay his hands on from the garage, and waited for me to come home.

So we could capture the duckling.  Which was supposed to be about so big (hold your hands two handwidths apart).  Which turned out, when OmegaDad captured it, to be practically newborn with its egg tooth still on, and about the size of the palm of my hand.

Newborn wild ducklings, let me tell you, are quite jumpy.  As in, at a day old, they can escape from Chicken Prison in the garage, and we find ourselves searching through the garage for small, dark hiding places.  Chicken Prison has now been turned from a minimum strength leisure spa into Mad Max maximum security as a result. 

Here’s a lousy picture–she won’t hold still for pictures at all.

Since we’re still having gorgeous, clear, hot weather, OmegaDad is taking some days off from work to paint the formerly-stable-soon-to-be-greenhouse.  Here’s what it looked like before he started his work, a month ago:

Pretty cheesy.  I have photos of the whole process, but here’s what it looked like this afternoon:

In this picture, OmegaDad is hosing off the shed portion of the “villa” (as he calls it) in preparation for primer, which has already been applied to the greenhouse framing.  Looks a lot better, doesn’t it?!  We’re going to paint it to match the house; dark blue-gray with light blue-gray trim, and we’re going to put a square deck in the area between the two “wings”.

ANYWAY.  This is all preface to what is the main point of my post.  The dotter (shown in her painting T-shirt, which once upon a time was OmegaDad’s painting T-shirt) has been painting on pieces of plywood with the white primer.  Yesterday’s painting was of a horse (of course).  Today, though, when I came out to see how things were going, the dotter was working on a different painting.  This one:

Which I just think is very cool.

OmegaMom opens the door and peers into the bloghouse.  She’s carrying a feather duster, which she uses to quickly dust off the blogroll.  She tidies up the BlogHer ads, re-arranges a few Twitters, sits down on the sofa, and sneezes at the poof of dust that she stirred up.  She looks around, frowns, taps her teeth with a fingernail, and says, “Hm.  What we need are some flowers!”

“I think I’ll put some lilacs here.  It’ll make things smell so lovely!”:

“This spot here needs a close-up of some of our wild rose.”:

“Tsst, tsst, tsst…hm…what next?  Ah!  Let’s put some trollius over there.  That’ll make that spot bright and cheery!”:

“Now, to keep the wildcats away, let’s bring in the Leopard’s Bane.”:

“And I think I’ll finish the decorating by putting some sprigs of this mysterious blossoming tree right here.”:

Well!  It’s been a while, hasn’t it?!  Ahem.  I was brought back to my blog-ly duties by a plaintive email from my Unka Bill, who was wondering why every time he visited my blog and hit refresh, it was still showing May 27.  Um.  Well.  Yeah.  See, I’ve been busy enjoying the flowers and the sunlight and the rain.  And yard work.  And being chief cook and bottle washer for OmegaDad whilst he rebuilds the formerly-stable-soon-to-be-greenhouse.

Then there was the pizza party, when OmegaDotter’s friend A. came over to spend the night and we made homemade pizza.  He was a hoot (as he always is), and we had a grand time, though he and the dotter stayed up incredibly late.

Then I found a new author and series.  Um.  Seven books in about ten days?  That sounds about right.  I do love me some hot post-apocalyptic science fiction!

Then I got sick.  Not badly, but enough to put me in bed for a day and a half, sleeping it off.

And then I was turned onto Broken Picture Telephone, a game which is like the classic game of Telephone, except with notes and pictures instead.  I have been busily scribbling and writing notes for two days now.

Anyway:  HI!  I’m back!  Didja miss me?!

Yesterday was spent ferrying the dotter off to a “Fun Meet” at her gymnastics place (what the heck do you call it?  “Gymnasium” doesn’t quite work.) for the entire morning.  Everyone who participated got a trophy (at least the ribbons were awarded based on points).  Oy!  None of my photos turned out well.  Oy!  The dotter had fun–hey!  And even though she needed prompting as to what came next, her floor routine was the best of her group.

Gratuitous video:

Today…today, OmegaDad and I spent scaring ourselves by removing the old wall to the outer part of the “stable” and framing in the new wall.  Why bother?  Well, just as a quick graphic showing the reason, we have the “foundations” of the two pieces on either side of the “door”:

It’s a miracle that thing has actually stayed upright (note, I do not say it has actually been plumb, or level.)  Not to mention that the cross-bracing on the back of these pieces of wall were cribbed* to within an inch of their lives by the previous horsie tenants.

Anyway, tomorrow’s post is going to be a pictorial history which will no doubt bore my readers to tears, but it’s history, dammit, and we have a very bad habit of taking dumpy stuff and turning it into nice looking stuff, and having no “before” or “during” pictures to point to.

While we were doing this (by “we”, I mean that OmegaDad did all the manly-man work, while I climbed ladders, held boards, helped measure, and fetched and carried pens, hammers, crowbars, drills, nails, and screws), we came across a surprise inside the upper portion of the wall–to wit, an ancient, dried-up hornet nest:

It was so pretty that I had to take close-ups:

Inside this splendid creation were dead old yellowjackets, mummified eggs, and the honeycomb-shaped cells:

I thought it was fascinating.  Believe me when I say I do not find a live hornet or wasp fascinating; they terrify me.  Yellowjackets I can cope with, and a long-abandoned nest filled with wasp-y cadavers actually makes me feel very good:  they are dead!  DEAD!  AND GONE!  Bwahahaha!

The dotter was very patient and hardly whined at us at all (it’s that maturity thang coming into play), so I rewarded her by hauling her off to the local lake for an hour.  Unfortunately, while it was toasty warm at our house, sheltered from the breeze as it is, the lake area was breezy and a bit cool, and the lake itself was still icy cold.  Given that three weeks ago, there was still ice there, this is no surprise.

*Non-horse folk:  “Cribbing” is when a bored horse chews whatever it can reach with its mouth. 

It was a sunny day today, so I had to sneak out to get some pictures around the yard.  Yesterday was actually much more interesting; it was sunny and there were clouds and snippets of fog, but, alas, every time I decided I was going to ditch work for 15 minutes for some pics, a cloud or fog would filter in front of the sun, and things stopped being pretty and started being dingy gray.

But today was nice.  First up, we have bird tracks in the snow.  OmegaDad has been feeding the birds; it’s not quite time for us to be worrying about bears, and it’s far enough into the winter season that the birds are voracious when they find a feeder.  They frolic around, dive-bombing each other and bashing into the feeder, knocking seed into the snow, and then the ones who are being fought off discover the seeds in the snow and gorge themselves down there.

We circle into the back yard now to take pics of other things, such as a snow-bedecked seed head of the cow parsnip which infests our back and side yards:

A twig in the snow:

A snowy stump in the very back, up against the woodsy area:

The sun peeping through the trees on the southeast side of the yard:

All very pretty.  Alas, the coming of the sun has made me antsy for spring; as you can see, spring is still far away.  But it’s getting light before 8 a.m. and dark after 6:00 p.m., so we are making progress.  Various of my blog feeds are featuring pictures of buds, and all I can do is offer a heartfelt, mental “Pppbbbbtttt!” at them, and cling to the knowledge that in a few months we, too, will be seeing buds.

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.