OmegaMom

I have crawled from my death bed to scrawl this note.

(Okay.  It’s not a “death bed”.  Really.  It’s just a “bad back bed”.  An “I can’t bend over” bed.  An “If I twist this way, a jolt of fire goes down my leg” bed.)

So yesterday, while congresscritters were voting down the bailout and the stock market was crashing (only to resurge again today), OmegaDad had to have a colonoscopy in Big City.  Which meant I had to drive him there and back again.  But it was at 2 p.m.–a very awkward time, to be sure, because the dotter gets off her school bus at 3:45 p.m., and there was no way on Gawd’s green earth that we would be back in time.  And our next-door neighbor, rescuers of choice in such situations, aren’t there in the afternoons, because Mama Neighbor is now working three jobs.  Ack.  So I called on M., mother of H., in a panic yesterday morning, and M. agreed to pick up the dotter and help her do homework, have a snack, play with H., all the good things…

And, oh, by the way, was the dotter invited to S.’s birthday party?  Because it was that night at 6:30, and H. was going.

Um.  Noooo, the dotter was not invited to S.’s birthday party.

But, aside from the “I’m not invited to S.’s birthday party!” woes that this would bring up, no problemo, because we surely would be back home before M. had to drive H. off to the party.

Right?

Wrong.

Because there was an accident.  On the other side of the highway.  Which caused both directions to close down.  Starting at 5:20 p.m., right around the time we were headed towards the highway.  Which we got onto at 6:45, because the feeder road we were on was also backed up, because no-one could get onto the highway.

When we drove by the accident site, OmegaDad growled about rubberneckers backing up traffic.  I said surely the accident was on both sides of the highway. 

Surely?

Nope.  When we finally got home, after picking the dotter up and apologizing profusely, up and down and left and right, I bopped onto the local newspaper’s site, and, yup, the accident was on the other side of the road.  Grrr.

Which, of course, made me think about a lot of scientific research being done on turbulent flow and the psychology of traffic jams, none of which I feel like researching on the internet right now and posting links about, but trust me, it’s there, and both types of studies are highly relevant.

Anyway, driving all that time with a bad back has ended up making me feel like shit today.

Wah.

Pretzel asks why we don’t see stars here very often.  That’s because during the summer we simply don’t have night at all, just a long, bright twilight.  And when we do have night, we often have cloud cover, so no stars.

Mrs. Figby (now at Halcyon Mama) accidentally hooked into my self-doubt with her comment “You are such a good mama.  Challenging her, and then letting her off the hook.” about the hike.  Lemme tell you, I didn’t feel like a “good mama” at all.  At the time, I was almost panicking, because I was afraid that me pushing her to try the higher part of the butte was going to End Up Very Badly.  It was looking, at one point, like the only way we were going to get the both of us down was by me carrying her.  I shudder at the thought (and not just because my back hurts like hell).

Del posted a grand story about getting stuck in the mud delivering a bobcat to a customer, long ago and far away, when the world was young…I just thought I’d make sure people saw it!

And GrannyJ commented that the first pic in the Walk in the Woods post was very similar to one of me at the same age, also in the autumn.  Mamasan, I have to say that I took a much more reminiscent photo (and I was thinking of that exact same picture), but, alas, it was blurry.  Bah!

Or something.

Today, I decided to do some squats while the microwave was zapping my popcorn.

Bad idea.  Bad, bad idea.

Because shortly thereafter, my lower back started hurting.

And it kept hurting, more and more.

And if I turn the wrong way, it shoots down through my butt.

Wah!

OmegaDad just informed me, after reading the subject line of this post, “You’re still a hot and sexy young thang to me!”  Which garnered him major brownie points.  Then he lost them, as he continued in the “llama voice”, “…As I push you in your wheelchair down the hallway…”

(Some day I will record him doing the “llama voice” and post it on the blog.)

Anyway.  I’m watching Hurricane Ike worriedly, as it vacillates every which way.  It’s supposed to landfall around Galveston.  At the same time, it’s pounding the coast around Louisiana.  OmegaBro and family are in Louisiana…

And politics goes on.  Apparently, the use of simile and metaphor is lost in the U.S. these days, except amongst certain people.  There’s a video where Obama essentially starts to say, “What the f…?!” about the whole “lipstick on a pig” hoorah that I thought about showing, but this one from David Letterman yesterday is better, and he avoids any pitfalls with the phrase “what the…”:

I hate to let Carosgram down , but I’m sure it’s no surprise to her that I am actually planning to vote for Barack Obama, and hope to heavens that the Republicans really don’t win.  I just feel frustrated that whoever wins the election is going to get stuck with the mess that has been the result of 8 years of Bush policies, and that whoever it is, no matter what kind of job he does, is going to end up being The Mean Mom of U.S. politics and thus voted out of office in the next election.