OmegaMom

Hail thee, festival day!
Bless’d day that art hallowed forever–
Day whereon Christ arose,
Breaking the kingdom of death!

I am not religious, in any manner whatsoever.  But I have lovely memories of Easter Sundays as a child, going with my grandparents to Easter service at a high Episcopalian church with The.  Most.  Awesome.  Pipe organ.  And singing that particular hymn, which is indelibly engraved on my memory.  The pipe organ would play the deepest notes possible, making the flagstone pavement vibrate, and then…then, when the Joyous!  Triumphant!  part of the hymns was hit, the trumpets making a blaring fanfare to celebrate.  (Much to my dismay, a long, detailed article about that organ is no longer available.)

So today was Easter.  Of course, we had an Easter basket for the dotter…but we had no dotter for the Easter basket!  She spent the night at her friend A.’s house, and blew eggs and dyed them and hunted them there.  So our Easter basket sat on the table, alone and forlorn:

(Note the mini basket up front, for her doll Ling.  Credit for this entire creation goes to OmegaDad.)

While we hung around (in blissful quietude!), OmegaDad was making pita bread, tortillas, and lavosh.  Yum!  The pita bread/lavosh dough produced a lot of gas, so much so that it looked like the rising bowl was going to…well, rise itself!

Eventually the dotter decided she wanted to come home, at which point she dove into the basket:

Inside the basket was a bounty of crinkle-cut paper confetti in many spring colors, in place of the green plastic grass that ends up being eaten by pets the world around on Easter day.  OmegaDad and the dotter decided to pile it on top of my head, topped off with a whirling yellow pinwheel:

Then she and I had to dye eggs, which is always fun.  We had a polka-dotted affair:

We had a starburst:

And we had one that really, truly looked like a planet.  It wasn’t just me who thought so; I was staring at it pensively thinking how much like Jupiter it looked, when OmegaDotter saw it and gasped, “OMG!  It looks just like a planet, Mom!  Let’s make it Saturn!  Let’s paint a ring around it!”  So I did; in fact, I painted two rings:

From this angle, alas, it looks either like the X chromosome or like an elongated infinity sign (the dotter’s notion, again) or an analemma.  (Windows LiveWriter, by the way, does not recognize the word “analemma”, harrumph.)

Our array of eggs:

I hope your day was as fun and filled with confetti as ours!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, gators.

ETA:  Oh, my!  I totally forgot:

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

I bought a Very Special Gift for OmegaDotter this Christmas.  It was very small.  So I decided to do the box-within-a-box-within-a-box approach; I wrapped the VSG, put a bow on it, and a note saying it was the last box, dumped it all into another box, gift-wrapped that one with bow and note, etc.  The end result was nice and big.

I was actually rather nervous about doing this:  either she would think it was funny, or she would get horribly frustrated, and I had no idea which way she would lean.

Anyway.  Since she opened it first, I wasn’t ready with the camera, so the settings were wrong for the first box:

Second box—she was kind of perplexed:

Third box—she was getting the hang of it, and was amused.  I have a picture of her laughing, with the box already unwrapped, so we’ll use this one:

Fourth box—she’s giggling:

The VSG revealed—I think she likes it:  she screamed!

What was it?  An iPod nano, filled to the brim with songs I knew she liked.  She has since wandered the house with it connected by umbilical cord, belting out various songs—in particular, Fireflies by Owl City, which has been an earworm for both of us, as well as various Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus songs. 

Now, onto the consumer review:  OMG.  Apple has the “user-friendly”, ergonomic approach down to an art.  Or a science.  When I was setting it up for her, I pulled it out of its little box, plugged it into the computer, and *boom*, it hooked to my iTunes and started walking me through it.  Once it was loaded with music, *boom*, I was using it.  I am truly, truly impressed with the ease-of-use of this gadget—the dotter had figured out all the buttons (in particular, how to replay Fireflies over and over and over again) within a short time.  Now I want one…or maybe an iPhone, which does all the same stuff, plus.

The flurry of Christmas wrapping is done, and the presents are under the tree.  OmegaDad has almost completed his piece de resistance, the gingerbread barn, which is awesome.  Tonight’s dinner:  salmon and potato fans—yum.  The dotter has demonstrated to me—many, many times—just what technique she is going to use to jump upon me and OmegaDad tomorrow early in the morning to wake us up for Santa presents.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, peaceful Kwanzaa, and a joyous Festivus to all my readers.

I’ve got a little list of music to buy the dotter for Christmas, to go with her Big Present from me.  We’ve got some Don Henley, Elton John, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Petty, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, Feist’s “1-2-3-4″, Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, Taylor Swift, Kidz Bop, a Beyonce, some Chris Rock, a Sean Kingston, some High School Musical and Shrek…and to fill in the Chinese pop section, we have some Wilber Pan, Angela Zhang, S.H.E., and Jolin Tsai.

But I need some suggestions for classic or older rock, more C-pop, and new American stuff.  So, parents of 8-9-10 year olds:  What are your kids listening to?

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!

My father was a veteran–he joined the Army at the end of WWII, and spent a year or two in Japan as part of the Occupation Army.  My uncle, too, was a veteran, who was also in Japan at the same time.  I never knew whether dad joined first, or Uncle C.; they were best of friends beforehand, and Uncle C. returned home to marry my father’s sister.

My brother joined the army as a way to pay for college.  For two years, he was stationed in Germany and wrote long, funny letters to anyone who would send a letter back, illustrated with little comic characters and drawings.  Since I was one of the ones who wrote back, I got a lot of letters from him.

Just a thank you to all the veterans out there.

Saturday night, OmegaDad snuck into my office, opened up a plastic bag from the local grocery store, and showed me the bag of miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that was inside.  “These were on sale–half off!  Hide this!” he commanded.  So I slid it into the drawer to the left of my computer.

The plan was, of course, that he and I could share it, and it would be safe from the dotter.

In the picture above, you see the reality of things.  OmegaDad should be a pusher.  I can see him now, dressed in a trenchcoat, leaning against an alley wall…as I walk by, he hisses, “Pssst!  Hey, there.  Want some cho-co-late, little girl?!”

The only thing that makes me feel better about this is that a serving size for these little diet busters is five pieces.  So, in reality, this is only two servings.  Only 440 calories–the majority of which come from fat.

And there is still one left in the bag.

Really.

And it will still be there tomorrow.

Really.

What am I doing?  Oh, I’m just going to get my coat and car keys.  Why?  Oh, no real reason.  Oh, no, I’m not driving off to the grocery store for more Reese’s.  No, no, no!  Not at all!  Perish the thought!

OmegaDad has become quite proficient with building edifices out of gingerbread over the years.  And his dexterity with piping royal icing has become quite deft.  And, frankly, anyone who can figure out how to color icing dead black and bright orange deserves an A+ for ingenuity.

(Actually, it turns out that the way to do it is to buy the expensive food coloring at the local gourmet kitchen store.  Alas for my shattered illusions!)

He found out how to make ghosts out of fondant on the internet.  He came up with a way to make tombstones out of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies and white chocolate chips.  He is a dab hand at outlining windows and creating spiderwebs out of icing.

The piece de resistance was the roof, a square slab of homemade sugar candy, colored orange.

Behold!

We have ghosts.  We have tombstones.  We have little pumpkins on the steps.  We have spiderwebs.  We have gables.  Also, notice the way the side looks like a face…

I am most satisfied.  This one came out way cool.

A close-up of the path (made of rock candy) and front door (made of chocolate wafers):

Tombstones and a ghost:

The “ground” is Cocoa Crispies.

The “tree” is some twigs blown down by the incredible winds we have been having yesterday and today, anchored in a squished up caramel.  (We’re supposed to have gusts up to 75 mph tonight; when I took the dotter off to school this afternoon for “Trick or Treat Town” the mountains across the inlet, over by Big City, were obscured by what could have been fog, except that it was coming down through the passes, rather than up from the inlet.  The pseudo-fog was, in fact, dust being scoured from the various glaciers by the winds.  Big City was under an air quality advisory as a result.)

Some fun Halloween links:  The very best Mrs. Incredible costume…jelly jar candle jack-o-lanterns…a real-life Transformer costume (watch the video!)…an incredibly punny Halloween tale from Miss Cellania.

Enjoy your spooky day!

OmegaDotter long ago decided that she wanted to be a Rock Star for Halloween.  This would be, thankfully, a generic Rock Star, not, say, Miley Cyrus or Lady GaGa or anyone in particular.  We tossed around ideas for a while, finally settling on a long-haired wig, an electric guitar, camouflage pants, and a jacket.

All, of course, in the dotter’s favorite color:  PINK.  (Oy.)  (But, hey, someday she will decide that PINK is, like, so totally boooring–like her mother–and come to like some other colors.  There are hints that she will welcome other colors beginning to burgeon, so I have hope.  Maybe by the time she is 13 or 14…)

I had seen pink camo pants on Target.com, so assumed they would be available at our local Chez Target.  We set out for a shopping trip.  Much to my dismay, there were no pink camo pants to be found.  So we scrounged around the store and finally settled upon a pink and black leopard dress, and the Rock Star transitioned from a hard-rocker (though PINK) to a more glam-rocker.

The dotter had been hankering for months after a Barbie play electric guitar; I sniffed.  Barbie.  Humph.  Play guitar.  Humph.  So, to counteract this, I told her she had to buy it herself.  Our shopping trip was her chance; she raided her money jar and quite happily purchased this plastic faux confection.  Much to my amazement when we got home and I had liberated it from its multiple-tie-down jail, it turned out to be fairly cool–once one got past the huge Barbie logo and the PINKness and the whiteness and the daintiness.  It has pre-loaded tunes.  It has the ability to do some rockin’ screamin’ guitar noises.  And it has a “wa-waaaa” lever to emulate the guitarist sliding her hands up and down the guitar strings.  All in all, much more tolerable than I had expected.

Then there was the wig.  We purchased a wig, even though I knew it wasn’t what she wanted.  But it was blonde and it was curly and it had some Disney princess or other on the package, and the dotter oohed and ahhed.  Hey.  It was nine bucks; what harm was there in purchasing the darned thing so that she could try it on and discover it was…well, not the look she wanted.

So the question remained:  what to do about the wig.  Amazon, of course, came through with a long-haired hot-pink wig with bangs…but I forgot to order it.  The dotter kept reminding me at the wrong time–say, as we were getting out of the car at gymnastics, or as she was doing her daily homework, or while we were out shopping.  Since my mind is a sieve these days, these reminders didn’t do much good; she would tell me, I’d nod and say “Yeah, will do!”, and then, a few minutes later–Oh!  Look!  Something shiny!

Somehow I managed to remember it last week; I believe the dotter wised up and reminded me as she was falling asleep, so that I would get online afterwards.  So after getting her down to bed, I wandered down to the office and ordered the thing, paid for it, and then figured all was well.

Until I bothered to actually read the confirmation email, which mentioned, rather nonchalantly, that the delivery date was anywhere between October 27 (good) and November 3 (ooops!).  I read the email on Tuesday, when I was wondering when the darned thing would arrive.

I didn’t tell the dotter about that November 3 date.  Nope, nosirree.  I figured if it didn’t show up, we would figure something out.

But today it arrived, and as soon as the dotter arrived home from school we went into full-fledged dress-up mode.

She tried it on first, of course, in her school clothes, then I had to try it on while she dashed upstairs to get the rest of her outfit:

And then she pulled everything together, like so:

The pink flannel pants are more orange-y, so we’re considering whether leggings might work instead.  Anyway, there you have it, the Saga Of The Rock Star.

We have also carved the pumpkin, OmegaDad and the dotter have been putting together a gingerbread haunted house, we have made fondant ghosts, and it seems that A. is on for Trick-or-Treating again, thus allowing me to avoid the whole K. question.

(Oh, yes.  The dotter did deliver her apology notes this evening at gymnastics, which went over very well.  She got an approving nod from Coach John and a hug from A.  Afterwards, while she was starting her session, I saw them comparing notes and chuckling over the idiosyncratic spelling…”Couch John”, and she was sorry she “heart A.’s arm”…)

They were celebrating Founders Days in Small Town Alaska this weekend, so we sashayed over there to enjoy some good old-fashioned carnival fun.

First, there was a pony ride.  Even though last weekend’s road trip included a spur-of-the-moment (sort of) and expensive real horseback ride for an hour, a pony ride around in a circle was still A-okay with OmegaDotter:

Then we had to feed ourselves with Fair Food, which means cheap food sold at not-so-cheap prices.  We plopped ourselves down in the shade and drizzle-protection of a circle of small trees and ate.  Then the dotter demonstrated the muscles that she has garnered from gymnastics, and proceeded to climb a tree.

Only a few years ago, tree-climbing was beyond her abilities.  But now that she has matured a bit, she can plan ahead, scoping out the best way up, and she has those muscles (hard-as-a-rock muscles in her legs, if you please) to grasp and propel her way up.  Not that these were very big trees, but still, she enjoyed it.

Then we had to check out the rides in the carnival.  OmegaDad does not like carnival rides, so it’s up to me to accompany the dotter.  First we did the spin-the-apple ride:  first we watched the folks before us and determined that it was much more fun if you got the apple spinning as fast as you could.  Once we climbed in, we figured out how to do it, and we were soon spinning merrily along, enough so that I was incredibly dizzy when the “apples” came to a halt.

Then the dotter and I had to do the mini-roller coaster.  One of these days, I will have to take her to a bigger fair or carnival type thing, where she can have a real roller coaster ride; in the meantime, this will have to do.

I think that the picture was actually taken before we started moving; a set piece, as it were.  We have video, but I’m not going to inflict it on you.

Of course, the dotter had to buy some things, and this is what we came home with:

I have come to a momentous conclusion:

When telling people when to visit Alaska, I should say, “Come in May.”

Rain?  What’s that?  Sunshine?  Oooh, lots.  Greenery?  Yup.  A few flowers–not as many as later on, but at least there’s no drizzly, chilly, rainy days.  It has just been glorious, and I highly recommend it to non-Alaskans as a good way to get to know Alaska.

The dotter tried to do her homework in the hammock this afternoon.  First there was the flat-on-her-back approach:

Then there was the sitting-up approach:

It ended up not working.  Too many distractions, too much sunshine, the breeze kept blowing her papers around, and then there was the problem that her pencil’s eraser was worn down.  Which, of course, meant she couldn’t do her work.  Oh, well; it was a fun afternoon anyway.

I might note that this is my hammock, now dangling from my new Pawley Island hammock frame, a Mother’s Day gift from the hubby and the dotter.  The hammock was my gift many years ago, and was hung between two trees in the back yard of our house in Small Mountain University Town.  Here, however, I was adamant that I needed a frame, rather than putting the hammock between trees; I wanted to be able to grab the sunshine, and anywhere we had two trees properly spaced, we didn’t have sunshine, or else it was right next to the next-door neighbor’s driveway. 

The lilac buds are proceeding apace.  The one bush is loaded with buds on every branch:

The other two bushes are just beginning to get their leaf buds, but I fully expect them to do just as nicely.

The pasque flower that was a bud last week is now fully open:

My other Mother’s Day gifts were a cake, decorated by the dotter:

And, of course, the obligatory hand-made Mother’s Day card:

Note the nascent cursive writing.  She’s not supposed to be doing cursive at school, but is busily producing her own version.  This will probably cause problems next year, or whenever they introduce cursive (if they do at all?)…

I would do Deep Thoughts about Mother’s Day, but will just give you the gist:  Mom’s day is one of the hardest holidays an infertile woman can cope with.  To all my readers who are still struggling with infertility, all I can say is that I hope you, too, will one day be getting the hand-made cards and the gifties made at school.  Another Mom’s day thought is that I found myself thinking of OmegaDotter’s birthmother a lot; the girl is so damned amazing and fun (and irritating and whiny) and smart (and capable of doing incredibly silly stuff), and I wonder what her mother is like, and feel sorrowful that she’s missing out on such a cool kid. 

Follow-up:  Not only did the New York Times quote OmegaMom, but Inside Edition emailed me, wanting to know about flu parties.  Since I don’t know diddly about flu parties, I passed the query on to one of my Tweets, who was interested in doing one.

The daffodils OmegaDad purchased for me last week are still going strong; this is what they looked like the day after he got them:

OmegaDotter made my birthday cake all by herself, with coaching from OmegaDad.  It was my favorite from my childhood, an orange cake with Solo apricot pie filling in between the layers (OmegaDad searched all over for that stuff, and finally located it, and informed me that this was a once-in-a-great-while cake because the one can of Solo pie filling cost about $5.00) and a lemon buttercream frosting.  Yum.  Yes, the picture is blurry; all the pics OmegaDad took that day were blurry except the one where my eyes look sunken like I’m strung out on heroin or something.

You note the red dress above?  OmegaDotter wore it twice.  She wore the purple stripe dress below to school on Tuesday and Friday, and all day on Saturday and Sunday, and I had to promise (pinkie promise, up, down, left, right) that it would be cleaned this very night and ready to be worn again tomorrow.  Note how old she looks in this pic.  Doesn’t she look like she’s 11 or 12?  It’s scary.

The Easter basket.  Last night, OmegaDotter informed me, in a surreptitious whisper as we were doing our bedtime ritual, “Mommy!  I think Daddy does the Easter Bunny footprints!”  I responded with an aghast, “NO!“, and she assured me that it must be so.  She did not, however, add two plus two to get “OmegaDad is the Easter Bunny”.  That will happen next year, I am sure.

The basket had, actually, very little candy.  OmegaDad has been carefully collecting small tchotchkes that cost about $1 each, such as an assortment of cute Easter-themed erasers, a set of mini-cookie cutters, a bead necklace set, a little bunny-shaped bottle of bubble-blowing stuff, plus a horsie and a set of spring/Easter themed chef wear, which the dotter is wearing below as she prepares to help daddy cook dinner.

Our new chicks have names now–the Australorp is named Adelaide (Addie for short), and the Buff Orpington is Serafina (Sara for short).  They are utterly adorable.

I really do have a serious post or two planned, which I’ve been noodling about in my head for a while, but today was a day of marathon laundry plus starting the taxes, so what you see is what you get.

Because you’re all pretty kewl:

1. Eat your heart out, 2. I (heart) balancing rocks, 3. Heart with Flowers Pendant, 4. Mountain Dew Heart Whole, 5. Heart no. 1, 6. M&M Heart, 7. black hearts, 8. I Heart Flickr, 9. my heart, 10. free texture . heart bokeh, 11. This heart is a stone, Acid House Kings, 12. Human Heart, 13. ~ I give you my heart ~, 14. Drops and hearts, 15. More Hearts!, 16. With my heart on my hand, 17. My burning heart, 18. Heart with Hearts, 19. The Voice of a broken heart, 20. Flickr Hearts Fun, 21. Heart of flowers, 22. Heart of Glass, 23. a lost heart, 24. Mirrored Sea Shell Heart, 25. my heart is on your hands.

All are Creative Commons items, but you do need to go and look at the originals, and check out these photographers’ other works.  Also check out the “Hearts” Flickr stream; great fun.

The dotter dressed all in pink yesterday for school.  Pink, pink, PINK.  She looked mighty darned cute, but boy-oh-boy am I getting sick and tired of PINK.  She returned with cards and candy.  Then we had to go to the Sock Hop at school.  I did not want to go; I was feeling pouty (complete with lower lip stuck out!).  But OmegaDad whispered to me, “Please come.  I’d really like it,” in a sort of puh-leeze-don’t-leave-me-alone-with-screaming-kids-and-loud-music-puh-leeze!  I gritted my teeth and went.

And had fun.  Who’d'a thunk it?!

It’s 25 below zero here.

Our furnace isn’t working.

The temperature in the house is ever-so-slowly dropping.  Downstairs, it is 60F, upstairs it is a bit warmer.  I figure we’re dropping a degree or two an hour.

Bahahaha!  “Happy New Year!” indeed.

Luckily, at least one plumber is at work on New Year’s Day.  (The others, even though they advertise 24-hour emergency service in the phone book, are apparently sleeping off hangovers.)  He’s getting his truck warmed up and will be on his way soon.

Remember how OmegaDotter told me that as soon as I left for my vacation, she and OmegaDad were going to have a disco party?

Unbeknownst to me, OmegaDad was sent off by his mother, lo these many years ago when he was a teen, to actually learn to disco.

The things you find out about your spouse.  First I discover he knows all the words to a variety of Carpenter’s songs, then I am blindsided by the fact that he actually knows how to disco.

In addition, while I was on vacation, he shared this knowledge with the dotter, who has been happily disco-ing ever since.

So, since New Year’s Eve is traditionally a time to party, I decided to share OmegaDad and OmegaDotter disco-ing around the living room.  Please ignore the dawg; please disregard the large blank spaces on the walls; please do not worry:  the Christmas tree has not fallen down yet, nor has anyone been impaled by needles, nor have Christmas ornaments been demolished.

There is one spectacular cartwheel.

There is no sound track of OmegaMom snickering helplessly as she recorded this scene for posterity.

So this is my wish for you, my readers:  That your life may be filled with as many pleasant surprises as mine in 2009.  And that you PAR-TAY! for New Year’s Eve.

Santa says, “Merry Christmas!” to you.  Isn’t he cool?!  The dotter made him “freehand”.

The dotter also, after great and careful thought, got me this for Christmas:

I’m sure you’re wondering, “What the hell is it?!?!”  It is a beanbag chair for my office; I have been wanting a chair to sit in and read while OmegaDad is playing Scrabulous Lexulous or pool on the office computer.  What does it look like when someone is sitting in it?

Okay, well, that’s two people.  But I was very impressed with how the dotter (a) came up with the idea herself, and (b) apparently pretty much paid for it herself.

So I hope all my readers had enjoyable holidays and are sick and tired of eating and drinking and gifts and family and whatnot, and ready to get back to Real Life.

(Hm.  In looking at that picture, I think there’s an area around my face that may actually be background.  I’m not sure.  Hm.  Anyway, the chair is very comfy.)

I am back in the snowy North, arriving back from the snowy Southwest.  But this doesn’t seem to be any different from the rest of the United States:  it’s snowy everywhere.

I haven’t felt like writing anything for a week now, and it doesn’t really seem likely to change soon.  So, in the meantime, herewith is the tale of the Gingerbread Inferno.

First, we have the original gingerbread house, GH v. 1.0:

There was more:  a sleigh…trees…decor on the door…a flagpole.  But, as I wrote before, OmegaDad forgot it was sitting in the oven awaiting finishing touches, and he torched the thing accidentally, leaving it looking–as he said–like a classic “home burnt in a California firestorm”:

The back wall had fallen.  The roof collapsed.  The peppermints had melted into puddles of goo.  The candy puffs outlining the walkway had puffed up, like Peeps in a microwave, rather than melting.  The M&Ms had split.  It was a sad, sad sight.

So OmegaDad and the dotter pulled themselves together, like all fire victims, and rebuilt:

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.  We are pulling together various gifties for the dotter and for each other, and having a marathon wrapping session.  There is Santa’s present to put together, too, which required just a wee foretaste of Things To Come…the dreaded wrangling the wrappings…as we decided to have a soft pony straddling the package since there was no room for it inside the box.  This required de-tangling the beast. 

I have written about packaging and Christmas before.

Suffice it to say that I think Amazon.com, Best Buy, Sony, and Microsoft are doing A Good, Good Thing in deciding to nix the ultra packaging in a “frustration-free packaging” initiative.  Woot!

More later, I promise.

Context is everything, right?

So I just posted a one-liner and decamped yesterday; it was late, I was tired, I had just spent a while snuggling with the dotter, and I wanted input.

So Beth and YouKnowWhereYouAreWith responded, and I thank you both very much!

The thing is:  Ages ago, pre-dotter, while I had drunk the Kool-Aid extensively, I thought Ms. Brown was a bit much.  Her emails tend to be…um…harangue-y.  And in the workshops, she’d take the kids off by themselves and not tell you what they did!  Ack!

But here we are now, almost six years after the first time we held the dotter in our arms.  She’s almost seven (Ack, indeed!).  And every so often, I have to cuddle her at bedtime and listen to her missing her birthmother, and I have to tell her that while OmegaDad and I can certainly sympathize and understand, we can’t know exactly what it’s like.

Jane Brown is coming to Big City this spring, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to try to register us for the playshop/weekend.  I asked the dotter last night if she’d like to go to an activity where there were lots of other boys and girls who were like her, who didn’t look like their parents, who were adopted, who missed their birthmothers, and there was someone who would do plays and skits and artwork and help the kiddos talk about missing their birthfamily and being sort of the odd one out.

She said yes.

Sooo…That’s why I was looking for input.

In the meantime, the dotter produced this artwork this morning.  I thought it was grand:

Who is this young lady?  The one who looks all grown up?  The one who makes me think that in just a few years, we will be beating off the boys with sticks?

Today was supposed to be our annual trek to the Nutcracker.  We were going to take the dotter’s friend K. with us, as well.  But yesterday the weather gods decided it was time to dump a big ol’ load of snow on the area, around 12 inches.

Now, in Small Mountain University Town, where they regularly get 26-plus inch snows, they have clearing the highways and byways down to a science.  Yes, readers from SMUT, they really do, though you may not think so.  Anyway, a 9- to 12-incher wouldn’t phase the county crews from SMUT; they’d have the snowplows parked by each highway exit, engines running, when the snow reached one inch…and then those plows would be cruising the highways over and over and over again, scraping things down, so that the afternoon after the snow began to fall, it would be fairly clear.

Hereabouts…well, it doesn’t seem very intuitive:  Here in Alaska, Land Of Ice And Snow And Bitter Cold, they’re not quite as good about it.  Oh, in a few days, the highways will be clear, but in the meantime, driving on the highways would be an iffy proposition.

So at 11 a.m. this morning, I wimped out.  OmegaDad is still sick, hacking and coughing and not being very happy, so it would have been just me with the two girls.  And I had foolishly gotten tickets for the 5 p.m. show, which would mean driving both ways in the dark.  In the cold dark.  In the snowy cold dark.  In the snowy cold dark on snow-packed and icy roads.

In a word:  Yuck.

The dotter, when informed that we were wimping out, climbed into my lap and let the tears roll.  But a promise of hauling her and K. off to the bouncy haus for a few hours of good clean bouncin’ fun, plus a chance to dress up in her fancy new holiday finery for a few minutes so mom could take a picture, made up for it.

So there she is.  That girl is only six years old.  I swear!  Really!  But doesn’t she look…um…mighty damn fine?  And like she’s on the verge of teen-hood?  Dayum.  It’s scary.  I swear it was only yesterday that she was shorter than the dining room table, and we could keep things safe from her by pushing them towards the middle of that same table.

It breaks my heart.

Something else that breaks my heart:  When doing the Right Thing is all wrong for a child.  The picture at the head of the story says it all to me.  I read about Anna Mae and my heart sinks.  Oh, she’ll adjust in a few years, and she’ll be a fine young lady when all is said and done, but I think of my dotter having to leave our family at the age of 8–only another year–and it just makes me miserable.  The whole story was so horrid, in every way, and I wish that both sets of parents had found some way, very early on, to resolve things.

Damn.  Now I have to find some way to cheer myself up…

So yeah, tomorrow is this United States holiday called “Thanksgiving”, in which all and sundry are supposed to take a moment or two away from their busy lives (watching Macy’s parades and NFL) to soberly reflect upon the Good Things in their lives.

Since I am at the moment dying ten thousand deaths from a virus that my dotter very generously shared with me, and sporting a fever and eyeballs that feel like eggs fried on a summertime Phoenix sidewalk, “giving thanks” is not what I want to do.  Frankly, if it didn’t take way too much energy, I’d like to throw the Mother Of All Tantrums.  Or just grump.

But, hey, “thankfulness” is the meme of the day, so here goes:

OmegaDad:  What can I say?  I am sooo thankful I ran into this scrawny, geeky Oklahoman with an accent lo these fifteen years ago in Los Alamos.  He is kind, thoughtful, sweet, loving, intelligent, introspective, silly.  He makes me laugh.  Regularly.  He is an unending font of deliberate malapropisms that leave me in awe:  How can anyone just spout off these gems of silliness, one after another, so fluently?  There are times when my love and awe overflows, and I seriously consider doing an autopsy on him when he’s dead to see if there’s an area of his brain that is clearly labeled, outlined with purple neurons, that says “Here lies whimsy”.  On the other hand, he spoils the dotter dreadfully.  Hmm.  Oh, well, he spoils me, too, so I guess it all evens out in the end.

Seriously.  This man is way kewl.  He may not be what my Dream Fella looked like oh-so-many-years-ago, but he’s damn fine.  And he makes me–in all my late-40s mommy spread, frumpy and plump–feel sexy and hot.  Man.

OmegaDotter:  She is amazing.  She’s smart and funny, too.  She’s learning to read by leaps and bounds, and is at that stage where she’s trying to read anything that passes into (and out of) her sight.  She regularly illustrates her math homework with grand drawings, which drives me nuts on the one hand and pleases me outrageously on the other.  (The nuttiness is because these drawings make one problem in math homework stretch out to ten minutes.  Homework that could be done in the course of twenty minutes thus ends up taking an hour.)  She is tall and muscular, and is learning to do backflips and bridgeovers in gymnastics.  She can take a few pieces of paper and tape, and build a house for her dolls.  She can turn two Kleenex boxes into a poodle.  She can fill an entire piece of college-lined paper with hearts, flowers, and “Drake!  Josh!”  (Oops.  Okay, I’m not thankful for that, but definitely very amused.)

GrannyJ:  My mom is amazing.  She’s now 81, but is still trekking about Prescott with her camera, finding interesting aspects of the most mundane of things, illustrating the ins and outs of life in a small mountain town.  She is a friend, as well as my mom, and most of you can understand what a wonderful thing that is; many people love their family members, but don’t necessarily like all of them–my mom is someone who is just plain interesting, loving, and fun.

I’ve got more:  Even though I feel at Death’s Door right now, in general we’re all healthy and hearty.  We have a house, we have jobs, we have transportation, we have this opportunity to explore The Great North…

Here’s wishing all my readers a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.  Enjoy.

What does it spell?  Halloween!

The dotter decided she wanted to be a cheerleader this year.  (This was after first wanting to be a princess, then wanting to be a “really mean witch!”)  So I looked at cheerleader costumes online, and got more and more frustrated, because it was either cheesy cheap faux cheerleader costumes from High School Musical or another TV series, or trampy cheerleader costumes.  Nothing in-between.

So I went to a cheerleader supply store online, got her a purple cheerleader outfit and pom-pons, and we went with that.  She was delighted.  (Yes, it’s really purple, but the camera got blue, and the editing software made it slightly bluer.)

She’s actually wearing a shirt under the top, and leggings, ’cause it’s c-o-l-d here.  Like, “tenth coldest October on record” type cold.  Bah.

Let’s see a cheer jump, why don’t we:

We made our ghost tree, but never put it out. 

The plan–yes, we had A Plan–was that we would go to her school to do the Halloween Town trick-or-treating, then go swing by her buddy K’s neighborhood, then would go to Small Town, where OmegaDad’s office is, to do T-or-T-ing there.  Why not here?  Well, because we’re in a neighborhood of one- to two-acre lots, and it’s a pain in the butt to even think of T-or-T-ing here.

But when we got to K’s house, her mom invited OmegaDotter to go trick-or-treating with them.  So OmegaDad and I went out for dinner, and never got around to putting out the ghost tree or the jack-o-lantern.  Bad folks.

Anyway, goodness knows whether we had trick-or-treaters or not.  It’s not like our old neighborhood, which really wasn’t any great shakes for kids, but at least was better than this one.

I owe people emails; please don’t think worse of me for putting things off.  I’ve been feeling kind of punk lately, and just doing the minimum to get by for the past week.  Aside from a rant or two.

Score so far:

Gap curvy jeans, size 14:  too big.  Way too big.  Off to return them and ask for a smaller size.

Nordstrom’s Not Your Daughter’s Jeans, size 14:  Fit perfectly in upper thighs/hips, too big in waist.  Have washed, will see what happens; will probably end up going to a seamstress/tailor in town and getting them taken in.

Still waiting on the Land’s End made-to-fit jeans, but those are supposed to take about a month (a month?!).

Aside from that–we went to the State Fair yesterday, with tickets to the rodeo.  It rained.  The dotter was a pill.  After a few hours, I ended up telling OmegaDad and OmegaDotter that I would have more fun back in the car.  So there.  So I went back to the car.  OmegaDad Had Another Talk with the dotter (the “I would have more fun back in the car” was my result to a very grudging forced “I’m sorry” from the dotter as the result of the first Having A Talk).  Both OmegaDad and I said that if she didn’t shape up, we were going to forego going to the State Fair next year.

The rain was followed by fog this morning.  This is actually very rare in our neighborhood, but I remember it from last fall.

The birch trees’ leaves are already turning yellow and starting to fall off the trees.

Sunset is now at 9:30 p.m., sunrise at 6:35 a.m.; a great galloping loss of light.

The end result of this weekend is that I’m bummed.  Wah.

That’s what I am.

To the mosquitoes.

OmegaDad, on the other hand, is not.

This is hugely frustrating.  I can remember, as a child, the same thing occurring with my father.  My mother and I would be eaten alive, and dad would be bite-free.  Now, as we hang out in the yard, the mosquitoes find any nook and cranny that isn’t slathered with Off, and take yet another step on the journey of life, sex, and death.

I suppose it’s a small consolation that I am providing the seed money, as it were, for yet another generation of voracious insects.

We’ve been quietly (or not so quietly) enjoying the yard this Fourth of July weekend. 

First, there was the Quest for Lilacs.  One of the things I remember most of growing up in the Chicago area is that springtime was a time of lilacs.  You’d walk down a street and encounter a huge old lilac plant, and the scent would be strong enough to make you stop, close your eyes, and lean into it, breathing deeply through the nose.  Sometimes, it was so alluring that you’d walk right up to the lilac bush (almost a tree), and bury your head in the blossoms.  With the eyes closed, your senses would focus on the scent and the soft caress of a springtime breeze and the hypnotic sound of the bees hovering around the flowers.

It turns out that this area of Alaska is prime for lilacs.  This does not surprise me, as–aside from the mountains, which are, admittedly, kind of hard to ignore, and aside from the spruce, which are also hard to ignore–the surroundings here remind me most of the Midwest.  So early summer is Lilac Time here, and I’ve been wisting after lilacs, yearning for some of our own.

The morning of the fourth, we ventured forth to nurseries.  Closed, alas.  We finally went to Home Debit, which was open and had lots of lilacs for sale.  The problem was that they were labeled “various”.  I had a plan; I wanted a lavender lilac, a pink one, and a white one.  After examining all the lilacs in search of some label related to color of blossom, I finally sent OmegaDad off on a quest for a helpful sales associate.

The helpful sales associate quoth:  “Anything that says ‘syringa’ is going to be purple.”

The helpful sales associate was full of shit and we knew it.  For evidence, I give you a Google image search for syringa.  Note all the different colors.  We debouched to Lowe’s.

Lowe’s didn’t have any lilacs at all.  Pout.

So we went off to Freddy Myers, not expecting anything at all.

Lo and behold, we found our pink, purple, and white lilacs.  All, by the way, labeled as “syringa“, which is not surprising, given that syringa is the Latin name for…lilac.  (I am still rolling my eyes at the clueless sales associate at Home Debit.)

Then OmegaDad and I spent a while working on the chicken ark.  A chicken ark is a portable coop for outdoors.  More on the ark in a later post.

Then OmegaDad and the dotter headed off on a search for fireworks, and we did some observational research on less-than-noisy fireworks for next year’s celebration.  Why get quiet fireworks?  The neighborhood is full of dogs, including our own dawg, who I discovered, when I returned inside after our relatively quiet fireworks in the backyard, cowering under my desk, as far back as he could go.

On Saturday, OmegaDad and I spent quite a while with his newly constructed soil sifter, him digging dirt where the garden is going to go and sifting it, and me ferrying the wheelbarrow full of rocks over to the veggie garden pathway.  Over and over again.  And picking up rocky detritus.  And exposing my skin.

Did you know Off wears off fairly quickly?

I do now.

I spent most of today doing laundry and scratching.  Hands?  Check.  Feet?  Check.  Arms?  Check.  Neck?  Check.  Scalp?  Check.  Even one quick bite in a previously undiscovered hole by the pockets of my sweats which some swift, incredibly fit mosquito found was not covered with Off.  There were enough bites and enough of a reaction that I spent half the day in a haze of light fever and misery.

OmegaDad claims it’s because I’m sweet.  Har.  Very flattering.  I’d rather not be sweet; frankly, at this point, I’d like to be poisonous as a virper to mosquitoes, and watch them fall, twitching in insect misery, at the slightest penetration of my skin by a proboscis.

Just a moment to thank all those who have helped to protect our nation.

Our veggie beds are all filled with dirt and planted with seeds and plants.  OmegaDad, realizing what a tasty treat he had just set out for various varmints, is off to Lowe’s or Home Debit to get some orange construction fencing, which is reputed to scare moose.  Or he may end up with moose repellant.  (I never thought I’d be googling that phrase, but life is full of interesting surprises.)

This week is Ballet Recital Madness.  Tuesday evening is the full run-through.  Thursday is the dress rehearsal.  Friday and Saturday are the performances.  Luckily, the schedule is not as bad as I originally believed; someone in charge had sense enough to tell the littlies to come later.

I signed up as a backstage mommy for dress-rehearsal day.  That was before I knew that it was the Longest Day.  I will know better next year.

And if I ever complain about one of the dotter’s teachers, please remind me of this story and ask me whether it’s as bad as that.  I am far too mellow today to take that one on, but just let me say it left me speechless.

Yes, life is a circus around here.

The new vet, who was doing emergency surgery on a bird when OmegaDad arrived at 10:30 p.m., immediately dissected the lumpy thing the dawg had thrown up.  It turns out it was a piece of toy rope.  A large chunk of toy rope, actually.  They did x-rays, they hooked the dawg up to an IV, and kept him overnight.

The thing is, the chunk of toy rope was all white; the latest toy rope we have is blue and white.  The last time we had a white toy rope was many years ago back in Small Mountain University Town.  We are stumped as to where the dawg got this thing.

He’s home, but still very unhappy.

Onto the real circus, the kindergarden circus.

To get you in the mood, clowns abound:

The kiddies do their songs, en masse:

Dancing bears:

Prancing horsies:

The mighty elephants:

Roaring lions, who also jumped through "flaming" hoops and went "RAWR!":

Send in the clowns:

I missed pictures of the strong men and the acrobats.  The strong men lifted "weights" made of aluminum-foil-covered paper plates attached to picture tubes.  The acrobats did (dreadfully lousy) cartwheels and walked across a balance beam.

The dotter afterwards:

Too bad you can’t see her truly elegant mane and tail!  Note her horsie shirt, claiming "Best Friends 4-Ever".  If I remember correctly, this was a Christmas gift from OmegaGranny.  Also note the gap-toothed grin; her two front top teeth are missing.

A good time was had by all.  I decided not to blur out features because all the kiddlies were covered in make-up and not really recognizable at all.

Or, more properly, the eggs and us.  Or we.  Or something.

Today was egg-dying day.  This year, OmegaDad read the instructions before preparing the dye (as opposed to after), so this year’s pink was…pink.  Rather than last year’s watery, pale, washed out color, it was deep and rich and dyed the eggs quickly.  Which, of course, suited OmegaDotter just fine, as she is still deeply into the Pink Phase of life.

Note the predominance of pink. 

This year’s egg-dying kit was a bug-themed thing with lots of unnecessary plastic objects.  OmegaDad had previously purchased a Princess egg-dying kit.  I am utterly, thoroughly, completely, absolutely over the Princess Thing.  Luckily, OmegaDad showed me his score late at night after the dotter was asleep.  I took one look at it over the top of the book I was reading, sighed, and said, succinctly, "No.  No more princesses.  Let’s find something else."  Bless his heart, he found something else last night, just about the only egg-dying kit left in all of suburban Alaska.

The dotter and I set to coloring eggs.  Note my dubious expression.  (Please do not look at the bags under my eyes.)  Note the dotter hamming it up.  (Please do not look at the holes in her OMG favorite T-shirt.)  (Also note the blue dye around the lips.  I have no idea how that happened.)

Some egg-cellent results (with pink):

The bugs were actually quite fun, once I decided to squelch my inner wet-blanket, which was snarling at the obsessive use of petrochemicals and the overpackaging of all U.S. consumer products, and join in the fun of decorating with stickers and plastic and wings and stuff.

The bugs posing:

The bugs at rest around our table centerpiece:

The dotter really wanted to hide the eggs immediately.  OmegaDad and I, thinking of the dawg and the cat that comes upstairs, and considering waking up to half-eaten eggs around the house, or considering waking up to an Awful Smell sometime in the future, nixed this idea.  We will hide them for her tomorrow, she will find them, then she will hide them for us, and we will be sure to find every last one of them.

The Easter Bunny is set to show up this evening.  The dotter has been asking me, multiple times and in multiple ways, if OmegaDad and/or I are/am the Easter Bunny.  "S. thinks that it’s the parents!" she informed me.  When she asked me if I were the Easter Bunny, I was quite happy to say "no".  Not a lie:  OmegaDad is the Easter Bunny.  He’s also Santa Claus.  I am the Tooth Fairy.  Anyway, I gave her one more year of ambiguity.  Maybe next year The Truth Will Out, but I hope that by that time she is in the frame of mind to love the magic even though it’s her (gasp!) parents doing it…

…the dotter is getting better.

The pediatrician (nice lady!) thinks it’s an adenovirus, and it just has to take its course.

I’m hoping to the Kozmik All that she will be all pink-eye-free by Monday, so she can go to school when it starts up again.  As she is still pink-eyed, even after five days of one eye prescription and a half-day of a different eye prescription, she still can’t go back to her out-of-school care place. 

Am I a bad mommy if I just say:  AGGGHHHHH!!

The dotter has been out of commission for just over a week now.  Today’s visit to the pede was graced with OmegaDad’s presence because I pretty much informed him that I was burned out, I was tired to the bone, and it was his turn to help.  Anyway, luckily the illness never reached Dotter Stage 3, but has chugged along at Stage 2 forever. 

Can I say that I am really really looking forward to next Monday, and a healthy child??  I had all this time off, and didn’t get to use any of it as planned.  Wah!

In other news:  The planned mural in the dotter’s bedroom has been languishing in my fertile imagination for months now.  See, I was looking for horsie coloring pages or silhouettes or pictures that I could dump into my photo/art program and manipulate into all being about the same size.  But the pics I kept finding were…well, some were small, some were large, some were fuzzy, some required lots of fiddling…The end result, alas, is that the horsie mural stayed in my head, rather than showing up on the dotter’s bedroom wall.

However!  Since one of OmegaDad’s shameless bribes incentives for the dotter to take her medicine (which she has had copious amounts of) is a dip into the "goody bag" filled with cheap (aka less than $2) toys-n-things, he has had to replenish the stock a few times this week.  Today…today the dotter pulled out…

…a horsie coloring book!

A veritable bonanza of all things horsie!  And all in more or less similar sizes and styles!  And we have a scanner!  So after I post this post, I will be diligently scanning coloring pages so I can create templates so I can paint that damned much-anticipated mural!  Woohoo!

Onto more topical things:  Johnny wrote a post about New Year’s resolutions, in which he states, "I just believe that the best resolutions are those you keep to yourself."  This is something that resonates with me for a different reason:  I fear stating my resolution and then falling flat on my face.  Julie, over at Using My Words, had a post about resolutions, too, that ended up essentially saying her resolutions this year were more "general goals" than specifics with action plans–which fits right in with another blogger’s approach, to unify your resolutions under one word to direct your life for the coming year.  (I thought Julie had pointed me to the Christine Kane post, but it wasn’t her, and now I don’t remember whose post I read about her post on…)

Anyway, I think I have a goal this year.  But, like Johnny, I’m not going to talk about it.  Neener, neener.  It is, for me and for us as a family, a breathtaking and exciting goal.  Goodness knows if I will succeed.

As you drive the highway between Small Alaska Suburb and Austin, AK, the sides of the highway are peppered with various signs. 

There’s the "Watch for moose" signs, and the accompanying tally of how many moose have been hit by cars on the highway since (date).  And, yes, that truly does happen; while we were stuck in the Shoebox and I was doing laundry at the laundromat, I managed to overhear a lady who was still recuperating from a broken back and leg from when she had hit a moose in March–and OmegaDad’s boss and wife hit a moose last year while driving to see their son (who lives in our neighborhood).

There are the requisite "don’t trash Alaska" signs.

Speed limit signs, of course.

Then there are the never-ending "No fireworks allowed in Hataniska-Satsuma Borough", followed by a list of borough regulatory paragraphs that cite this.

But as you enter Austin, AK, on the highway, you are greeted by HUGE signs.  Gorilla Fireworks.  Hippopotamus Fireworks.  Buy Your Fireworks Here CHEAP!  And more.  When you drive out the other side of Austin, once again the highway signs admonish you:  No fireworks allowed!

I figured that the Austin fireworks stands–which always look deserted when we drive by, but we haven’t driven by in a long time–were legal by Austin’s regulations (thus avoiding the problem with borough regulations), and were probably jumpin’ joints around Independence Day.

Um.  I need to be thinking of those daylight hours again.  Because around Independence Day, the sun doesn’t officially set until midnight.

But on New Years’ Eve…?

In the deepest, darkest depths of winter…?

The sun sets very, very early.

And the "not allowed" fireworks start at about 8 p.m.

And keep going.

And going.

And going.

Until about 1 a.m.

This is a major culture shift for us, folks.  We’re used to living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods…in the tinderbox-dry woods…where the municipal July 4 fireworks display has been canceled mere days before the date three out of the last four years.  Back there, anyone who was insane enough to fire off lots of private fireworks around July 4 were fined huge amounts, and shunned and scorned by anyone with any grain of sense.  New Years’ Eve?  Eh.  We’d have one or two neighbors who would fire off firecrackers directly at midnight, and that was that.

Last night, in our area, it was like a freakin’ war zone.  Fireworks.  Firecrackers.  Roman candles.  Streamers.  Bang!  Bang!  Bangity-bangity-pop-pop-pop-pop.  Quiet.  Bang!  Whiiiiiizzzz-Bang!  Quiet.  Pop!  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!  Bang!  Boom!  Quiet.

I have never, ever, in my life, lived in a place that did this.

Our dog was, luckily, not frantic, but definitely perturbed, and he kept following me or OmegaDad around the house and startling when a particularly loud (read:  direct neighbors) bang sounded.  Our cats were missing in action.  The dotter was both enchanted (when she could see the fireworks from the bedroom) and terrified (when all she got was the bang-bang-bang-BOOM! effect).

I was able to see fireworks from the porch next to the kitchen, looking northwest.  I was able to see them from our living room, looking southwest.  I was able to see them from our bedroom, looking northeast, and looking southeast.

We decided that the borough police department must make its yearly income from all those fireworks, that they’d be able to just cruise around almost anywhere and hand out tickets left and right.