OmegaMom

Dear Very-Distant-Coworker:

When I sent you the email asking you a whole list of questions about how many copies of a particular document you received, I didn’t want a reply of “Yeah, I received a bunch.”  I asked you who you received them from, how many copies you got, and when you received them because (whaddasurprise!) I wanted answers so that I could track down the problem at our end.

Sincerely, OmegaMom-the-support-person

Dear Coworker-of-OmegaDad’s:

When he sent you the email stating that he would be in your town to do training, that he needed all people there for training, and asking what would be a good week for this, he did not need a two-page reply outlining all your difficulties, listing everyone’s schedule for two months, and a request for special trips to train Joe, Moe, and Schmoe.  Please don’t get angry when he replies quoting his original email and repeating that he needs all people there for the training.

Sincerely, OmegaMom-the-spouse-who-likes-to-see-her-husband

Dear L0we’s:

Please train your cashiers to use the L0we’s part number, rather than the manufacturer’s part number, when entering data.  That way, we won’t be told that parts that we know are in stock are out of stock and now on special order.  Oh, also, you won’t charge us for special ordering.  And we won’t have to deal with the front desk or the head cashier to get a credit.  Which we can’t use anywhere else.  Which might have been nice to have in our bank account, instead.  Hey, maybe you can start offering, say, checks to people for such overcharges?

Also, this time around, please be sure to deliver when you say you’re going to deliver.

Also, this time around, please be sure to deliver everything we ordered, which was in stock when we ordered it, rather than surprising us at delivery time by not having everything we ordered.

Does this make sense?  Good.

Thank you, OmegaMom-and-OmegaDad-about-to-embark-on-another-chicken-coop-for-smaller-birds

Dear Fruit Flies:

This is a declaration of war.  Die, die, die!

Sincerely, OmegaMom-the-lousy-housekeeper

Dear Kozmik All:

What have I done that I should deserve this ongoing itchy scalp?  The doctor’s antibiotics are not helping.

Sincerely, OmegaMom-the-itchy

Zooillogix today featured Martin Amm’s fabulous macro photos of bugs in nature, specifically the “wet bugs” pictures.  You have got to see these photographs.

There was a partial lunar eclipse on last Saturday, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day featured a way-kewl time-lapse photograph of the event this week which shows just how big the earth’s shadow really is.

Read all about the work, devotion, trials, and tribulations of a state-fair champion pumpkin grower working to grow this year’s entry.

Remember my parable about vakseens?  Respectful Insolence takes notice of today’s news about how the number of measles cases in the U.S. so far this year is the highest since 1997.

A compare-and-contrast duo:  Back in April, Lenore Skenazy was taken severely to task by NY Times readers for her story of allowing her 9-year-old son to ride the NYC subway all by himself!  Oh, the horrors.  So she created the website FreeRangeKids, posted the column again, and now has 440+ comments.  Today, in a weird sense of deja-vu, I read the post “Riding the subway–to school?” on ParentDish, all about kids 8, 9, and up riding the…wait for it…NYC subway all by themselves to go to and from school.  The semi-approving post has had all-of-three semi-approving comments.  Where’s the outrage there was for Skenazy’s column?  Ironic.

Speaking of judging others’ parenting styles, check out CrabMommy’s tale of being dressed down for dressing down her tot in public.  I am so glad I was able to wrassle OmegaDotter out of various stores while in full tantrum mode without anything like that happening to me.  I seem to recall one time when I hauled her out of Costco under my arm, plopped her into the carseat in the car, slammed the door, and sat out on the hood of the car while she completed her tantrum, and got actually applauded by a few passersby who had seen the whole scene erupt.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen very often, and is now a thing of the past.  I seem to recall it being closer to her fourth birthday than her third, but that was long ago.  Yay!

Readership:  I probably won’t futz with the RSS feed, mainly because I’m too lazy.  Har!  But also because, if even one of my readers finds partial feeds inconvenient, it’s not worth it to me.  (Ahem.  See my halo?  I think I’ve shown it off before.  It glitters, y’know!)  Of course, the same day I was lamenting low readership stats in a half-concealed plea for people to please visit my blooooog (and so many of you took pity, thank you!) someone “Stumbled Upon” me, and I immediately got a big boost for the day.  Isn’t that ironic?

OmegaMom drifts off, humming Alanis Morisette to herself.

Sort of a this-n-that thing.

OmegaGranny is coming to visit, arriving in Big City at about midnight tomorrow night.  As a result, we have been cleaning.  This means I’ve been busy busy busy.  Lots of reading and thinking, but no late night posts forming in my brain fully written, sort of like Venus rising from the sea.

Let’s see:  Since the weather’s been so bad, it got written up big time in Big City’s newspaper, and the anti-gl0bal warming crew have seized upon that article, saying, “See?!  See?!  Why haven’t the gl0bal warming believers been waving this about?  Could it be they have Something To Hide?”  Or words to that effect.  To which I say, it may have been a cold summer, but it’s still in the top quarter of the past hundred years of weather records.  (Which makes me think:  Ack.  You mean we could be having a colder “summer”?)

(Note to Lisa:  There is no set time for us to leave Alaska.  OmegaDad loves his job, which is really a Good Thing, compared to how he felt about his job back in Small Mountain University Town.  So there’s no calendar I can cross days or months off, looking forward to a move to warmer climes.)

Anyway, in the midst of all the cleaning and laundry and what-not, we purchased a volleyball/badminton kit.  Can I just say that (a) my eye-hand coordination has been shot to hell, and (b) I haven’t been running back and forth like that for a while?  Aside from that, though, it was grand fun.

I do have a couple of what could be considered “controversial” topics noodling around in my head, based on incidents on other blogs, but am trying to figure out if I’m too wussy to tackle them, or just too tired from all this cleaning.  I also have a few pics, which I will toss onto another post.

Nothing major going on, no great thoughts shakin’, just hanging out in the sun…ahhhhhhh.

The chickens are loving the new coop.  The babies are loving their new digs in the "temporary" coop.

Our new tractor mower finally got put to use…then we promptly bent a blade on one of the (thousands of) rocks in the yard, which we discovered as OmegaDad cut a lovely swathe through the front yard where one side of the mower cut the grass 3 inches high, and the other side scalped the grass down to the ground.  Oops.

The wild roses are blooming, with lovely big pink five-petaled flowers peeping out of the greenery.  The roadsides hereabouts now have lupine blooming, too, and it’s a totally different lupine than I’m used to.  The lupines here are deep violet, with white tops; the lupines in Small Mountain University Town were blue all the way through.

In the news…

California started offering gay marriage licenses this week, and the state is looking forward to a boom as gay couples from across the country fly out there to get married…because California’s law states that these marriages are valid in other states.  (I’m not sure how it works, but that’s what I’ve heard.)  Coming this fall:  California constitutional amendment vote on a "protect" marriage amendment.  Which, as John Scalzi points out, would invalidate all those marriages being made.  Ahhh, the warm embrace of Christian fundamentalist love.

Fox News, trying to be hip, became tragically hip by accident when referring to Michelle Obama as "Obama’s Baby Mama", not realizing that "baby mama" is for unmarried moms.  Or did they?  After all, this is the network that has regularly let slip "Osama" in place of Obama, had an onscreen person seem to advocate assassinating Obama, and called the loving fist-bump that Michelle and Obama exchanged when he locked up the nomination a "terrorist fist jab" (first suggested in .  Oy!  Every time, of course, they backpedal.  I’m sure they mean well.  Really!  But for another point of view, let’s go back to Scalzi for an excellent rant.

The AP decided to start sending cease-and-desist letters to bloggers for quoting from articles and providing links.  A "quote" to them is five words.  Eh?  Whatever happened to "fair use"?  Bloggers, needless to say, are up in arms and talking boycotting AP news, using other news aggregators instead.  There was a meeting wherein AP, "backing down", offered to let bloggers use quotes at a per-word price.  A five- to 25-word quote would cost $12.50.  Oy!

The Phoenix Mars lander, at the Martian pole, scooped a hole in the ground and found "white stuff".  I look at the pictures and am taken back to Lubbock, TX, and environs, where half the places you dig, you’ll find satin spar gypsum.  In layers.  Alternating with red dirt.  Like the picture.  Alas, I can’t find any really decent pics online, though I know we have plenty in our boxes.  We also have some lovely specimens that you have to handle extremely carefully, or it will break into pieces.  Really interesting stuff.

Ah!  Forgot two items:  Boomerific has lost her home to flooding in Iowa; as a result of a "flood" of offers for help, they have set up a Target registry for replacing items lost in the flood.  And Karen (of the Nekkid Ovary) has had her lovely daughter Chloe Ellen.

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.

(Because Kris asked!)

And the poop is now returning to its normal look and texture.

I love living in a time and place where we have such things as antibiotics.  They’ve saved my sanity (numerous sinus infections) (numerous child-with-a-need-for-antibiotics occasions) (numerous husbandly illnesses of one sort or another).  And now they’ve pulled the dawg out of bloody hell and back to his normal self.

In other words, when the plumber arrived to fix the water heater (I still say "hot water heater", so sue me), the dawg had to be confined to the bedroom, where he yelped and barked and generally carried on.

You will be interested to know, no doubt, that Whirlpool Corporation performed a recall on the thermocouple assembly for our particular model of water heater after being hit by a lawsuit.  The lawsuit was not because of a possibility of explosions in the middle of the night.  It was not because of a possibility of gas leaking through the household in the middle of the night.  It was not because of the possibility of phalanges breaking and sending gouts of water through the basement/garage in the middle of the night.

No.  It was because people were sick and tired of finding out, after the hot water disappeared due to a bad thermocouple, that Whirlpool had deliberately designed this model (and others) so it required a specific, left-threaded thermocouple.  Unlike all the other water heater manufacturers had happily gone to "universal" modules.  In other words, "easily replaceable" modules.

Unlike our water heater’s thermocouple module.  Which had apparently angered a multitude of homeowners and plumbers to the point where they sued, because the homeowners and plumbers wouldn’t be able to get the right piece, and the homeowners and plumbers would fiddle, twiddle, and twist the incorrect piece until it fit.  Which was kinda dangerous, in the long run.

In short:  No hot water since Sunday morning.  One phone call to plumbers this a.m.  Plumber dude with eyebrow stud arrives.  Plumber dude removes thermocouple only to discover it’s this weird left-threaded dingus.  Plumber dude goes to Lowe’s to get one-and-only-remaining-left-threaded thermocouple in 60 mile radius (which Lowe’s gave to him gratis as it was a demo model).  Plumber dude returns.  OAORLTT turns out to be defective.  Plumber dude consults with dad.  Dad arrives.  Dude and dad spend time peering at various parts and cussing out Whirlpool.  Dad calls his Sekrit Source.  Sekrit Source says to call Lowe’s, as it’s the only source.  Lowe’s, when given model number, informs plumber dad that it’s our lucky day and they have the replacement unit waiting for our particular model and serial number, and it has been waiting since the recall.  Dad and dude go to Lowe’s.  Dad and dude return.  New thermocouple unit goes into water heater.  Hey presto:  hot water.  AND!  Dad and dude charge us for only one plumber, one hour, because that’s all it should have taken to begin with.

Woot.

No doubt when the moose returns to eat more of our Nice Green Grass in the middle of the "night", when we are doing our best to sleep through the gloaming, the dawg will bark his head off and keep us awake.

Such are the modern miracles of medicine.  At least we’ll be able to shower in the morning.

Last night, while cleaning up bookcases to go into the family room, it occurred to me to wonder–when did the first person decide that smearing smushed up dried honeycombs on wood was a Good Idea?

I mean, really–what on earth prompted someone to do that in the first place?

It’s similar to something else I’ve wondered:  Who was the first person who decided that horseradish might be actually good to eat if it were ground up and mixed in with other foodstuffs?  What possessed this person?  One of my most memorable experiences was when my mom handed me a chunk of what we both thought was celeriac root–carefully cleaned and peeled–and I took a great big honkin’ bite.  It wasn’t celeriac.  It was horseradish.  Let me tell you:  horseradish, in its natural state, is not, repeat not, edible.  I chewed for about five seconds.  At which point, my brain told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was being poisoned.  It was ghastly.  Surely I’m not alone in that?  So what prompted some genius, in the long long ago, to decide that it might be okay if it were used sparingly?

Why is it that I suddenly have nothing I want to say?

I’ve been encountering some good discussions around the blogosphere.  They pique my interest.  I want to discuss them when I read them.  But then, a few hours later, I open up the ol’ bloggin’ software and am confronted with a blank page…at which point my brain goes blank, too.

Part of it is that we’re being very homey right now.  The house is slowly, slowly falling into place; more and more boxes are unpacked, curtains are up, bookcases are out and books soon to be placed in them.  It’s feeling like our home suddenly.  I still feel sad about leaving the old house, but am happy about having more space, and more closets (closets!!!  OMG!  I could just swoon with the joy!).  We have also–somehow–managed to stay on top of the creeping mess here, so things have their places and get put back/away, rather than accreting like a giant midden heap in various spots around the house.

We have light.  In fact, so much light that it is making me feel very odd and out-of-focus.  Twilight at nine p.m. should mean that the weather is almost hot and the flowers are blooming and the grass is green.  But right now, we still have snow in the backyard and ice in the driveway (and in the afternoons, a lovely thin layer of melting ice on top of the slick ice, which resulted in one of our cars slooooowy sliding backwards down the driveway…luckily I noticed this in time to move it back up to a non-icy spot!).  We have birds congregating around the bird feeder, but no greenery.  We have sunshine all day, but no buds on the trees.  My body keeps saying, "Sun!  Woot!  But…but…dude!  Where’s the ’spring’?!"

Then there are the various "just living" things.  Taking the dotter off to gymnastics class.  Doing teleconferences during the day.  Taking the dawg out to do his thing.  Planning a vegetable garden.  Putting up artwork.  Doing the laundry.

Anyway, right now, I open the blog, want to post something pithy and pungent, and find the P&P quotient in my brain has plummeted.

Give me some ideas!

I love cauliflower.  Tender, delicate, tightly woven off-white buds covered with butter or shredded cheddar cheese…yum.  However, we don’t eat it very often.  Mostly, we just don’t think of it.

OmegaDad got a hankering for tempura recently.  So he purchased mushrooms and broccoli and zucchini and cauliflower, hauled out the boneless skinless chicken breasts, did some research on Teh Google, and prepared a luscious tempura meal last night.  The batter, alas, was somewhat starchy, so only the zucchini (being full of H2O) came out with the perfect tempura crust; everything else was slightly chewy rather than crispy.  But add some sweet-and-hot sauce, some teriyaki or char sui sauce, and we were dipping fiends.

Then tonight we had steak and noodles and plain ol’ cauliflower with butter.

An hour later I came to the realization of just why we don’t eat cauliflower very often.

Actually, if I had been thinking, that realization would have struck me last night, when I was wandering around the house wondering just what was causing my unusual bloatiness, with disturbing thoughts of how the maternal side of the family has a tendency towards uterine cancer (one symptom of which is sudden onset of bloatiness).  Yes, I do have a slight leaning towards mental hypochondria–why do you ask??

But tonight, when my abdomen distended outward like a taut balloon within an hour after dinner, my brain finally acknowledged the two-by-four that was thwacking against my head.  I knew the eternal truth:  I love cauliflower, but cauliflower does not love me in return.

Believe me when I say "distended outward like a taut balloon", I am not exaggerating.  OmegaDotter, when presented with the evidence (see photo), gasped and said, "Omigod!  Mom!  You look like you’re pregnant!"  Then she poked at my tummy and watched with interest as her fingertip bounced off.  OmegaDad made a smart-alecky remark about how he wanted to know who the parents were if I were pregnant.  I merely marveled at how quickly those lovely, tender florets of the veggie had transformed themselves into a veritable explosion of gas in my gut.

As the dotter and I did our normal bedtime routine, first she asked her "one question" (why did the cauliflower make me look like I was pregnant? entailing a quick discussion of food, digestion and gas), and then she kept bouncing up from her pillow to look at me and ask me if I was going to fart or burp now.  When I did, she’d bounce up again to ask if all the gas was gone yet.

She thought it was hilariously funny.  It took her a while to go to sleep.  She kept snickering.

As I sit here hours later, still producing copious amounts of gas, I don’t think it’s funny at all.

Which is, of course, why I decided to share my intestinal distress with the myriad of intimate strangers who will arrive here guided by Teh Google when they search on "cauliflower gas" or "cauliflower farts" or "cauliflower burps" or some such combination.

I’m sure they (and you) will be happy to know that someone has done a scholarly mathematics paper all about the fractal factor of cauliflower and broccoli.  What the hell is a "fractal factor"?  I’m not quite sure (I think it has to do with how many times the patterns repeat themselves, and I leave my readers to dig through the various references to figure it out), but this delightful piece of information is a mighty testament to the wonders of the intertubes and the weirdness that can be scholarly mathematics…

We got the prescriptions Friday night.  I took the first batch on Saturday morning.

Three hours later, I was getting quite…woozy. 

Sunday, I took another batch.

I had found information on a "Holiday On Ice" show at the ice skating rink attached to the Big Mall in Big City.  So we were driving in to Big City to see the show.  I was woozy again.  I closed my eyes.

Y’know how, when you close your eyes tight, you get flashes of light and patterns and sparkles?  But normally you have to close the eyes quite tightly for a while to get that…

There, relaxing in the car, with my eyes lightly closed, I was getting quite interesting versions of the flashes. 

There were also visions.

Yes, really.  Visions.

The best one was a highly detailed little Santa who appeared in the middle of my vision, then spun backwards, shrinking, until he vanished with a little flash of stars.

Then there were the neon-like straight lines that marched upwards from the bottom of my eyes on up.

Lemme tell you, it was quite interesting.  I never fell asleep, but listened to OmegaDad and dotter chattering, and watched the light show.  But when it came time to "wake up" in the Big City, my eyes felt glued shut.  The eyelids were heavy.  It was a chore to open them.

The "Holiday on Ice" show turned out to be a recital by ice skating students.  But, oh, it was too cute for words.  I could easily turn out to be a recital junkie.

On the other hand, I don’t want to become a medication junkie.  The worst part?  The part that scares me the most?  Was that by the time we got home, I wanted another dose.

Um.

Nuh-uh, thanks very much.

So I tossed the Lyrica into the garbage can and got online to research the stuff.

Apparently, a "drunk feeling"/"inability to concentrate" was a side effect felt by about 12% of the research guinea pigs.  There was, hidden away in the fine print, a little blurb about how a particular group thought it gave a "good high" and that it would probably have a market on the street.  There was also a warning that it might be addictive.

Eeep!

Apparently, Lyrica is one of the very few medications out there that helps with nerve pain; regular painkillers like aspirin or Ibuprofen don’t work.  If my nerve pain were constant, I could see wanting to take the stuff.  But, as it is, the nerve pain is highly intermittent, and I’d much rather try back exercises and stretches and yoga to control it as opposed to getting addicted to this medication.  This is the first time I’ve tried something and actually been scared by my instant reaction, the desire to take more.  It’s a pretty creepy feeling.

So, like I said, into the garbage with that prescription.  I think I’ll have a little talk with the doc and tell him to warn people when he’s prescribing this medication.

A few years back, OmegaDad rented a car while on a business trip (”The boys and I were playing poker in Nebraska City…”) (inside family joke).  During this trip, he apparently scraped the bumper while parking.  Our insurance covered it, but it was a small hassle, entailing various faxes back and forth and a letter or two from the rental company.

So this trip, when OD rented the car for the week, he signed on for the various insurance charges, hoping to avoid any further hassles.

Y’see, in his innocence, he thought the charge was a flat, one-time fee.

He mentioned that he had signed up for them with his one-day rental to get back to Phoenix on Tuesday, but didn’t say anything about the one-week-and-one-day rental…

Picture OmegaMom in the large super-rental facility in Phoenix.

First, take a moment to picture OmegaMom trying desperately to locate the car keys which had been in her hands mere moments previously…luckily, I discovered them buried in the dotter’s backpack, where I had hurriedly been tossing various dotterly accoutrements from the back seat.  Har.

Then, picture OmegaMom glancing at the printout from the nifty hand-held car-rental gizmo from the patient and helpful rental car dude.

Picture OmegaMom’s jaw dropping and eyes popping when she reached the bottom line.

$737.18?!?!

Dear God in heaven.  Surely there was a mistake?!

We sashayed up to the little “Customer Service” kiosk in the dark underground cavern.

The nice lady there said, “Well, this line is for this, and that line is for that, and this line here and that line there and that third line in this other place is for the insurance.”

I sat down this a.m. with the receipt and did some kackle-ating.

Note that some of these charges are taxable!

I was expecting to pay somewhere around $300…and, sure enough, after my kackle-ating, it turns out that, without the insurance damages (har!), the car would have cost $330.67.  Or thereabouts.

In other words, more than $400 went to those “helpful” insurance coverages.

Gasp!

Rest assured that this will not happen again.  I know that our insurance covers this stuff.  The hassle of dealing with it ourselves, through our insurance company, is more than worth $400.

Holy moly.  I am so glad that we have $$ in the bank and it’s not the disaster it would be if we had, say, been gallivanting to the southwest on a budget.

(Thanks to Scott for pointing out that it was Dylan Thomas, not John Donne, who penned “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”.  I whapped myself on the forehead for that one.)

Jess asked about the T-shirt the dotter was wearing in the previous post.  The T-shirt does, indeed, say, “I’m the BIG sister”.  The T-shirt has no meaning in our family, alas, though we’d really like it to.  Someone at summer camp had the T-shirt.  The dotter liked it.  That someone handed it over to the dotter, because that someone’s mom had spilled bleach on it and the bleach had eaten holes in it and who cared, right?

When birthmother sensitivity goes bad–OmegaDotter to OmegaDad in the car last night, conversing about her birthmother:  “Oh, yeah?  Well, I’ve got her in my heart, dork!”  Okay, to really grok that last item, say it with a typical kids “neener-neener” tone to it, then top it with the emphatic “dork!”  OmegaDad and I busted up laughing in the darkness.  Then I informed the dotter that we don’t call people “dorks”.  Like that’ll stop her (”He did it first!”).

The “ACK!  Run away!  Run away!” department:  OmegaDotter has taken to decorating her “i”s with flowers when she writes.  She’s learned this perfidious practice from some older kids at after-school care.  She is very careful and detailed.  This is too, too cliché.  I will try to get a picture.

Tomorrow we head off to Arizona!  Yes!  For sunshine!  And my grandmother’s 104th birthday!  Yes!  And I’m excited!  Yes!

A lot of the cool kids are doing bullet-style posts recently.  Since most of them are doing NaBloPoMo, they get a pass from me because the daily posting drains the creative well dry very quickly.

I, on the other hand, am doing a bullet-style post because I’m just plain lazy.  No NaBloPoMo excuse from me, as I’m not participating.

• It’s 4:00.  The sun is setting in a few minutes.  The sun rose today at 9:10 or thereabouts.  According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we’re supposed to have 7 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight today.  Well, yeah, I suppose we did.  There were no clouds, so we saw the sun today.  That was nice.  But the maximum altitude of the sun hereabouts was 10 degrees.  Ten.  Sort of like having sunset all day.
• I don’t care that Hilary Clinton had someone planted in her audience lob her a planted question meant to point out some of her stands on certain issues.
• I equally don’t care that FEMA had a plant in their audience at a press conference to ask questions guaranteeing that a few things got mentioned.
• I further don’t care that John McCain didn’t lambast one of his supporters when she asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” when talking about Hilary Clinton.  I thought “Can someone translate that for me?” was a perfectly good way of saying, “Yo!  That’s not nice!”
• I’m afraid to open our gas bill.  I don’t want to know what a month’s worth of heating costs, especially given that it will be much higher in the next few months.
• Context is important to me.  If a person writes an article in which she makes a comment to her adopted daughter that could indicate she has a savior complex and thinks China is a land of indentured orphans, I’d like to know what kind of relationship she has with her daughter.  If it’s one kind of relationship, it’s an in-joke about what some people say about adoption; if it’s a different kind of relationship, it’s snide and insensitive and denigrating.  Given the remainder of the article, I lean towards the former…but a helluva lot of folks in the blog world are leaning towards the latter and a kerfuffle has ensued.
• On the other hand, if angry comments on the article coming from adult adoptees were censored, that sucks.  In my read of the article yesterday, though, it looked like many of the originally censored comments were in.  ?  I don’t know.
• Thanksgiving is next week.  How the hell did that happen?!  It’s far too soon.
• And that means Christmas isn’t far behind.
• My carefully crafted code to dive into the “raw data” from a downloaded web report was foiled–foiled!–when the people who created the report went and changed the column names on the raw data tab of that report.  Grrr.  Now I have to do some figuring on how to check those column names beforehand, and have to stash them in a table so that the next time they decide to get fancy with column names, we’ll be able to catch it right away, instead of wondering for a few weeks why no new data was being imported.  Let me just say:  Duh, OmegaMom.  On the other hand, why the hell did the folks change those column names?  Raw data=stuff that gets used somewhere.  Not raw data=stuff that you can fiddle with all you want.  Or at least let people know with a popup the next time they cruise your web reports.
• Boots, snowpants, and snowgloves arrived yesterday from LandsEnd.  OmegaDotter is happy.  Winter parka is back-ordered.
• Will discuss way-kewl interfaces tomorrow.  And way-kewl prosthetic devices the day after.  Or maybe combine the two.

When we moved in, we signed up for the local cable company’s Super Duper Way-Kewl Ultra Deluxe Combo Package with SCREAMING INTERNET (INTERNET…Internet…internet…internet!) (that’s meant to be read in the way that the “SCREAMING U.S. 30 DRAGSTRIP!” echoes sound on those radio ads).

The SDWKUDC package included local phone service.

But local phone service wasn’t available here yet.  (Though it was coming!  Soon!)

So I signed us up for local phone service with the local phone cooperative.

Then, in late October, after weeks of intermittent droppage of internet connections while the cable company upgraded all the cable lines between here and Big City, I got a call from the cable company.  To wit:  local phone service was now available, and did we want to start it up?

Well, yeah, considering that the local phone cooperative is incredibly expensive.  Incredibly.

So the nice gal set up a day and time to do the switchover, and I had to confirm it with her supervisor, repeating everything I had just said to gal #1, and then had to confirm it with an outside contracting company, repeating yet again the stuff I had said to gal #1.  I do understand why it’s necessary.  Really, I do.  I had friends and family who were automagically switched from one phone company to another without their knowledge during the era of those aggressive telecomm company tactics, and it’s a scummy thing to do.  But do we really need the customer to repeat the same information three times?  How about recording the conversation, playing it back to Joe Customer, and asking Joe Customer, “Did you say this of your own free will and are you sure you want to switch?”  Much simpler.  I was forcibly reminded, in any case, of the tendency of computer programs to repeatedly ask, “Are you really, really sure you want to do this??”

The day of the switch comes and goes, and even though I’m totally devoid of phone networking savvy and still wonder how it got switched over from phone company cabling to cable company cabling without some nice hunky young technician coming to the door and having to switch cabling doodads, it seems to have worked.

I just got a phone call.

“Hello?  Mrs. OmegaMom?  This is Polly from ABC Cable?”

“Hi, Polly…”

“I’m just calling to be sure everything is okay with your phone service since we switched you over?”

Now.  Just let that particular sentence stew around in your head for a moment.

She just called me on the phone to see if everything is working okay…with my phone.

Hello?!

Does this strike anyone else as just a bit non-functional?

Like, how are they going to know if I didn’t answer the phone because I was in the bathroom or out of the house or–gasp!–the phone isn’t working?!

Gah.

But I got a whole bunch of my Dianne Wynne Jones books and have been reading.  When I’ve not been glooming about the greyness and the snow and the chill and the dark.  And the length of time it’s taking to get the *#@! relocation company to get off its ass and getting frantic about the offer expiring and blah de blah de blah…

I’ll try to pull together a halfway decent post soon enough.

The weather forecast calls for cold and snow.

And cold and snow.

And cold and snow.

Not too cold yet, though.  Twenties and thirties.  We have had two snows so far, last night’s giving us about four inches at the house.

The dawg loves the snow.  He barrels about in the snow, shoveling it with his nose and flipping it into the air.  Then he bounces around, pees, poops, shovels some more snow, and bounces some more.

The sun is coming up at about 9:10 a.m. and setting at 6:15.  At Small Mountain University Town, the sun is rising at 6:42 a.m. and setting at 5:38…we’re now off by an hour of daylight, and rapidly decreasing.

We had our first parent-teacher conference today.  Mrs. Shoefetish and Mrs. Brian assured me that the dotter was doing quite amazingly well academically.  We actually got a “report card”.  Goodness.

In terms of the kindergarden curriculum question, the report card specifically looked at kids being able to name colors, shapes, count to five, know their first and last name.  They’ve gone through six letters of the alphabet.

The dotter was praised for her creativity; she likes to make “books” during free time, and apparently the other kids at her table are so taken with the books that they’re starting to make them too.

MIL called this evening; in an attempt to keep the dotter quiet while OmegaDad spoke on the phone, I pulled the dotter aside to do some drawing.

Somehow this morphed into us doing clapping games.

You remember clapping games?

I learned one new one; we raced through Pattycake; we did “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea”, though neither of us remembers the specific clapping pattern; and we ended up laughing uproariously at each other.

That was fun.

Lest you think that all is fun and games with the dotter, let me say both OmegaDad and I were amazed that the dotter got exemplary marks for “following directions” and “behaving appropriately”, and just nodded our heads and rolled our eyes at the “still learning” “score” on “respecting the rights and property of others” category.  I am now beginning to suspect that the dotter is Miss Sweetness and Light at school and saves up all her snarkiness for us at home.  Man, oh, man, can she whiiiiiiine!

But this evening was quite fun.

We are still waiting on the finishing touches of the relocation company buying our house.

Grrr.

As soon as that check hits our bank account, we are out buying OmegaDad a car of his own.  Or OmegaMom a car of her own.  Or whatever.  This one car dealio is driving both of us nuts.

Also as soon as that check hits, I am picking up the phone to call the local blind installation company so we can get some insulated cell blinds put in.  And drapes.

OmegaMom has a blank brain today, so it’s time for a bunch of quickies.

• Surely there’s more to this story than reported?  Can one be charged as a terrorist for having a copy of a book?  I shudder to think of the things in my parents’ library; dad was both into chemistry and into things that go boom as a young lad.  Dad’s pictures that alternate from a Rasputin-lookalike to an excellent facsimile of a skinhead would just make the HSA agents quiver like bloodhounds…
• An excellent description of a newly adopted child with attachment issues and how the parents coped and broke through to the child.  (Warning:  requires registration, but a very moving and well-worth-it listen.)
• A recent MSNBC front page featured two stories closely juxtaposed:  “Is Your Child Ready For a Credit Card?” and “Feeling the Middle Class Economic Crunch?”  Hm.  You don’t happen to think those two things just might possibly be related, do you??
• The dotter is being Gloria The Firehouse Dog quite often lately.  She sits and barks at the kitchen door.  OmegaDad put his foot down when she carefully brought him one of my Tevas in her mouth.
• Figlet asks “What did we do pre-Google??”  ProjectNiHao says, quite plainly, that it was a nightmare finding things pre-Google.  PNH and Theresa both have dealt with similar sock issues (Theresa had an ingenious approach of turning the socks inside out, though that would only work with non-patterned socks), and Courtney says that Laura at 11D is having the same issues with her son.  But, back to pre-Google–or, more properly, pre-Internet–times:  I read an awful lot more books then.  And went shopping.  Outside.
• We are having real homework now.  It’s no big whoop, just copying zeroes, ones, and twos, and answering questions about what to do if there’s a fire (it’s Fire Safety week).

Over at ScienceBlogs, they’re doing a blog challenge with DonorsChoose.  The Questionable Authority has an especially impassioned plea.

DonorsChoose is an organization where teachers across the country can submit a project with a wishlist for funding.  Donors can shop the projects, select one that resonates, and then provide funds–any portion of the requested amount.

DonorsChoose is doing a blog challenge for the month of October, and yours truly, OmegaMom, has decided to toss her hat into the ring to see if I can get my readers to pony up some funding for some very simple requests.

I’ve selected three projects.  One is a teacher who would like to have a heavy-duty electric pencil sharpener for her classroom.  Another is a teacher who needs staplers.  A third is a teacher who needs dry-erasers for her whiteboards.

Now.  Just sit there and think about this for a little while.  Pencil sharpeners.  Staplers.  Dry erasers.

We’re not talking particle accelerators here.  Nothing fancy.  Nothing that requires large amounts of money.  Pretty basic supplies.

In fact, the amounts needed for these projects are so small that it makes me sad.  My stapler teacher needs $134 for a bunch of heavy-duty staplers to use in the classroom.  The teacher who wants the pencil sharpener has used manual sharpeners and has previously snagged one from a closing school (!!), and they keep breaking.  The dry-eraser person made his/her own white boards for the students a few years ago, but needs a constant supply of markers and erasers.

Help OmegaMom buy staplers, pencil sharpeners, and dry erasers at DonorsChoose.  I’m going to stick my donation thermometer over in the sidebar.  OmegaMom gets an average of about 100 readers per day; if each of my readers dropped $5.20 into the donation bin, these three teachers would get their projects funded.

Don’t get me started, though, on the sad commentary this makes on the amount of money spent on, say, NCLB versus plain teaching supplies…grrr.

(Ahem.  Just realized that this could be construed as an attempt to guilt my readers into dropping $$.  Naw, please don’t feel pressured, it’s an experiment.  Whatever we collect will be more than $0 [I'm dropping a few dollars myself], so that’s all too the good.)

(Also, I’d like to clarify #34 in my last post–it reads as if I were saying that bloggers who are similar in thought/tone as yourself [me] aren’t interesting.  Ahem.  Not at all what I meant–I meant to include the second group as “interesting bloggers who are not similar in tone or style or thought as yourself”.  Now I’ll go somewhere and write 100 times on a blackboard, “I will try to write more clearly.”)

Hey, sounds like a fun topic on a grey, rainy, chilly morning, eh?

Okay, okay, it’s better than, say, “global thermonuclear warfare” (about which I have nightmares on a twice-a-year-basis, just like tornadoes) (the Wizard of Oz turned tornadoes into nightmare material for more kids than me, I am sure).

Way back when, in the mists of time, I took a Geology 101 class in college.  It was great.  I loved it.  There is an alternate universe where OmegaMom decided to pursue geology as a career instead of sort of floating about for years before deciding on computers.

One of the really neat things about this Geo101 class was that the professor discussed, in great depth and detail, the controversy about the Great Extinction Event of the dinosaurs.  It was interesting because the professor had been there while the controversy started, played out, and the paradigm shifted to the new, improved version of what happened.  Previously, it had been thought that a period of extremely active volcanism was what did the dinos in (remember that scene of the animated dinosaurs taking the big trek in Fantasia to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?).  But right around the time OmegaMom was born, a geologist named Luis Alvarez and his son Walter proposed a new theory:  that a meteor or comet impact was what had caused the extinction.  They cited, as evidence, the KT boundary layer, a layer of soil found worldwide, which was chock-full of interesting elements such as iridium and (I believe) osmium and particular particle shapes that are only produced under huge heat and impact stresses (tektites).

OmegaMom was taking this intro class at the end of the paradigm shift period (it took quite a while for the geology types to actually accept such a radically different view of looking at things).  It was fascinating, especially realizing that scientists could just toss every bit of “accepted” knowledge away, when presented with enough evidence, and move in a totally different direction.

The geology folk have been looking for evidence of other such things all over the place since then, and have found quite a few that seemed tied into other extinction events.  This has also led to a certain amount of interest in space agencies tracking near-earth objects (and to a few grand disaster movies), Just In Case.  After all, if it’s happened once, it can happen again.  And what will We do (we being the human race) if it does?

Then, this week, Small Mountain University issued a press release in conjunction with a bunch of other universities.

For years, the “accepted” knowledge about the extinction of the mammoths and other large mammals that roamed the Americas and northern Europe and Asia has been that they were hunted to extinction by human beings.

But lo & behold–according to this group of geologists, there is evidence that a large something–a comet or low density meteor–whapped the Earth about 12,900 years ago, causing firestorms, devastation, and a 1,000-year mini ice age.

First off, it’s a radically different approach to the idea of the mammoth etc. die-off–so that’s interesting.  Then there’s the question of how it will play out in the scientific community.

Then there’s li’l ole OmegaMom sitting here and reading that press release and accompanying news articles and realizing–with a weird gut-level oomph–that, hey, yeah, these things can happen, and it isn’t necessarily millions of years in the past or millions of years in the future.  Dudes, this event, if the evidence pans out, was a mere 13,000 years ago.  That’s a blink in the geologic record.  It’s like yesterday!

So every once in a while, OmegaMom catches herself casting the hairy eyeball up to the sky, wondering…when?  What if…?

(Like, “what if the Tunguska object had been bigger??”)

Hey, as disaster theories go, it’s got more sweep and grandeur than, say, Y2K or Peak Oil or even gl0bal warm1ng.

Living in a shoebox has some side effects.  One of those is, since we are sans washer and dryer, we must visit the laundromat.

OmegaDad did the honors the first time.

Now…I hate crowds.  I hate noisy situations.  Too many people making too much noise around me makes my back start twisting up, my adrenaline level rise, and my teeth grind.  Figlet recently asked “What’s Your Krazy”–this is one of my very biggest crazies.

OmegaDad has it much, much worse than I do.

So he returned from his excursion to the world of coin-operated washers and dryers frazzled to a fare-thee-well, his teeth set, and his psychic aura emitting “KEEP AWAY FROM ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!!” on a continuous loop.  He gritted his teeth at me and hissed, “YOU are doing the laundry from now on!” and then went on a tirade about the quality of people at the laundromat, the level of noise, the problems he had simply moving about, on and on, for half an hour.

I nodded my head, rolled my eyes, and said, “Yessir!”

I’ve been visiting the laundromat once per week ever since.  OmegaDad gave me the hairy eyeball last week and asked me, “How come when you go to the laundromat, it’s empty and nice and quiet, but when I go to the laundromat, it’s a seething mob scene?”

I dunno.  I’d guess it’s my laundromat karma.

You see, I love doing laundry.  It’s soothing.  It’s calming.  I go into a Happy Place mentally.  I zone out.  I plunge my hands into heaps of warm, fresh-out-of-the-dryer clothes and could just get wiggly like a small puppy.

And the laundromat doesn’t seem noisy to me, because all the things making “noise” are making white noise.  There are washers washing (schloop schloop schloop) and dryers drying (rumble rumble rumble thunka rumble rumble rumble thunka) and video games going bleep bloop and various people chattering to each other, which, with the white noise as a background, blends right in.

Okay, so I’ve been lucky:  No great huge fights have broken out, no whacked out druggies have suddenly started seeing spiders crawling down the walls, no fundamentalist nutcase has started preaching The Word at the top of his (or her) lungs.

Given the current close quarters at the Shoebox, going to the laundromat has an added plus:  I am gloriously alone.  OmegaDad drops me off with the clothes and accoutrements, and then hauls the dotter off to do shopping.  I get myself a frappucino, read a book or the Sunday paper, and just relax.

Part of this being-in-the-moment and zoning out to the white noise is related to having grown up and living as an adult in the big city.  Chicago (and any other big city) is filled with noise.  There’s the sound of traffic.  There’s the sound of people’s boomboxes and TVs.  There’s the sound of the couple two floors down having yet another fight.  There’s the El rumbling by a block away.  There’s the distant rumble from the expressway.  There’s the kssshhhh-SCREECH of buses stopping.  There’s the sound of jets taking off and landing and circling around waiting for a chance to land.

The city is an ocean of noise.  And to survive, people who live in cities learn to let the noise mash into a generic background wash, like the sound of ocean surf.  Because if you paid attention to all those different noises while living in a city, you would go utterly insane.

The only time I wasn’t able to put city noise into the general white noise mishmosh was when visiting my buddy Suz when she lived in Wicker Park in a walk-up that was directly behind the El tracks.  That noise was impossible to mesh with the rest of the ocean surf.  (However, as I recall, Suz herself said that after a few weeks, it started to blend in with the rest.)

Today was our last wash day at the laundromat.  I get to do laundry in the peace and privacy of our own home Real Soon Now.  I’ll be able to do the weekly laundry without spending $20.  I’ll be able to nosh in the kitchen, piddle in the office, wear my jammies, and sort my damned clothes into as many different color piles as I want starting tomorrow.  Yeehaw!

But I’m going to–in a weird way–miss the laundromat zen.  A bit.

 One of the things about living in Small Mountain University Town was that we were surrounded mostly by evergreens (Ponderosa pines) and there were fewer deciduous trees (oaks and aspens).  The aspens would put on a golden show in the autumn, but you had to drive to where there were lots of aspens to see the best show.  The oaks–eh.  The leaves would turn kind of muddy brown and drop off, and that was it.

So autumn wasn’t a visual stunner, like those of us who grew up in the midwest or east are accustomed to.  The stunning you would get was the vibrant blue sky and the vivid white sun, which was, admittedly, a jazzy combination.

Now here we are in the Final Frontier, and encountering an entire new ecosystem.  The majority of the trees, shrubs, bushes, and weeds here are decidedly deciduous.  And they’re showy.  Oh, oh, oh-so showy.  Reds.  Golds.  Oranges.  Greens with red spots.  Burgundies.  Yum.  And we still have some yellows, but they are put to shame by all the rest.

We aren’t having a grand blast of everything turning at once–yet.  But so far, we have lots of individual plants and trees turning color and dropping their leaves.

Many years ago, a cousin of mine took her 3-year-old daughter out one autumn to collect leaves.  They took clear plastic contact paper, laid the leaves out on it, and then put another layer of clear plastic contact paper on top.  GrannyJ still has the resultant banner hanging on the back of her office door.

Taking a tip from cuz J., I decided the dotter and I should collect some leaves and maybe make some placemats out of them.

So here are some autumn leaves:

Pixelating out, again, bah.  But, nonetheless, maybe giving you an idea of just how varied and colorful things are getting.  When we make the placemats, I will present a pic of one of them, too…

Thanks for joining me in a world-wide WOOT on word of our closing!  As GrannyJ suggested, we are visiting the furniture and boxes now & then and petting things and crooning happily.

A few years after I moved away from the Bay Area to join Not-Yet-Mr.-OmegaMom, we traveled back there to visit some relatives.  I took him in to the city to do the usual touron things.  As we were walking through downtown San Francisco, we encountered a quartet singing opera, a violinist, and some people playing folk music.

It reminded me of one of the things I absolutely loved about living in/near a city:  the nonchalant expectation that one would run across buskers almost every day during one’s normal, everyday routine.  Climbing out of the BART station, I was greeted by the sounds of the saxophone; walking down the streets, I would hear a trio of guitarists who I could see if I peered down the sidestreet; there would be multiple groups of musicians jamming in the various parks.  It wasn’t a bonus of being in San Francisco–the same delightful musical free-for-all existed in Chicago, as well.

I miss it.  Oh, we have music here in Small Mountain University Town, but it’s not the same.  The type of musical encounter one has in the city is serendipitous–there’s no schedule to it, no need to put it into one’s calendar and remember it.

My mom remembers an instance, during a visit to Vienna, when she climbed out of a subway station into the midst of a large group of people singing the Carmina Burana.

The Washington Post, prompted by–curiosity?–ennui?–sheer deviltry?–enlisted the famed violinist Joshua Bell in a busking experiment, seeking to determine if “beauty can transcend”.  Bell was assigned a DC Metro station to settle in and play his violin during the morning rush hour.  Hidden cameras took video; reporters cornered commuters outside the station to take names and contact info for a “commuter study”.  Bell made $32 in the 45 minutes he was playing; tickets to Bell’s performances on stage regularly command $100 and up.

The Post claims that most of the commuters didn’t even look, yet when I watch the videos, it seems to me that a majority of people actually glanced over at Bell.

In Chicago and San Francisco, when I encountered these serendipitous musical moments, I was often in transit–on my way to work (and usually about to be late), on my way to a date with friends, or on my way home and just dog-tired.  I preferred my buskers lurking on station platforms during the evening rush hour, rather than the upper levels or the connecting passageways or by the exit doors; though the music was constantly interrupted by trains arriving and departing, I could enjoy it in a more relaxed manner without a constant underlying nagging feeling that I Should Be Somewhere Else!

A few of the commuters knew that they were listening to an excellent violinist; one of them knew who he was.  But the majority hustled on by, some flinging some money into his violin case in passing.

Perhaps if the Post had positioned him elsewhere…perhaps if it had been the evening crowd, rather than the morning crowd…there would have been a different response.  I’d like to think that I’d recognize the quality of the instrument and the playing if I had been there–but, even so, the pressure of modern life, of needing to “be there on time”, would have intruded and had an impact on my response.

But, no matter what the response was in reality, the tale makes me wistful for those days of serendipitous music providing a sound track for my city life.

(FYI:  “Brainwashing my child” is featured at the Carnival of Family Life at Lil’ Duck Duck, along with many other fun and touching blog posts.  Wander on over and check them out!)

Technorati: Joshua Bell, busking, music, city life

Miss Cellania asked about “weird people” I have known.  Alas, my mind immediately went blank.  All I could think about, rather than people, were the various odd living spaces I’ve either considered or lived in.

Shortly before I moved out of Chicago, I was wisting for the country life.  I was also wisting for a cheaper rental (though, looking back, I could slap myself upside the haid, because I had a lovely one-bedroom rental with built-in bookcases flanking a defunct fireplace, a balcony, hardwood floors, and lots of closet space for the amazing price of $365 per month, all in a place that was walking distance from the beach and lots of nice restaurants).

Anyway, yearning for a different place to live, I scoured the classifieds in the Chicago Reader week in and week out.  Most were retreads of what I was in–three flats, small brick apartment buildings, some swanky stuff on or near the Magnificent Mile.

But one day, I read an ad that piqued my curiosity.

They were renting a silo.  A real live, honest-to-goodness, grain silo.  Four floors, one room per floor, hardwood floors.

They also had a refurbished barn for rent.

It was way the hell and gone north of the city, but it sounded just too cool for words, so I called the owner up and set up an appointment to view the silo.

It looked great from the outside, but once you were in it, it was quite the letdown.  I had had visions of a spiraling staircase on the inside of the walls, circling up the interior, with each room using the most of the space (like this).  Alas, the guy who had done the work was…um…lacking in imagination.  Or dumb.  Or just plain weird.  Y’see, he had built this weird boxlike structure down the middle of the silo with the stairs there.  It ate up all the space.  What was left was, oh, four feet of space surrounding the stairwell.  And the stairwell was no great shakes, either; it was rickety and poorly built and looked like the slightest bit of wind coming through the cracks in the silo would have it all come tumbling down.

My heart was broken and I abandoned my silo dreams.

Years later, when I went back to college for the final time in the Bay Area, I knew I needed an inexpensive place to live.  So, once again, I found myself scouring the rental ads.  Interestingly enough, in the East Bay, there were lots of little cottages to rent–inexpensively, too.  But each time I called, the ad had been out for a day already, and the place was rented (no doubt to other penniless, hungry students).

One day, I found an ad the day it was posted.  I called the guy up.  I went to take a look.

And ohmigosh, it was just darling.  It was a tiny little 10×20 cottage in the back of a house at the bottom of the San Leandro hills.  It had a wall full of French windows, a teeny-tiny galley kitchen, an itty bitty bathroom with a shower stall, and exposed rafters painted white.  I was sunk.

The most interesting thing?  It started life as a chicken coop.  Yes.  I lived for two years in a former chicken coop–and I loved it.  There was an avocado tree right outside those French windows…there was a boxed flower bed at the foot of the itty bitty porch, which I filled with California poppies…there was a bottle-brush tree beside the porch…It was wonderful.  Best of all, I could pop into my car, drive up the hill five minutes, and be able to hike around the San Leandro Reservoir.

These days, of course, we live in a log cabin in the piney forest–a dream for many folks.  We almost bought an octagonal house, instead (apparently, they were all the rage for vacation homes in this area for a while).  But I still yearn for a yurt, or an earthship, or something equally offbeat, miss my darling cottage, and daydream about what that silo could really have been like, if the owners had just tried a bit harder.

Technorati: Silo, yurts, earthships, non-standard housing