OmegaMom

OmegaDad tells me I need to write down memories while I’m indulging in them.

My mom–when I was a child–was into hooking rugs out of a variety of cloth that she scrounged from old clothes at the second hand store.

One of the rugs she created was of the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg.  A classic mathematics problem, it was the start of Graph Theory.  So:  In Konigsberg, there was an island in the middle of a river, and there were seven bridges that led to that island.  Somewhere along the line, someone realized that there was no way to traverse those seven bridges without crossing one of the bridges twice.

My mom, being an odd duck, used the Seven Bridges problem as one of her hooked rug subjects.  I grew up with that rug, with the knowledge–imparted to me by my parents–that you simply couldn’t cross all the bridges once without crossing one twice.  I spent many hours on my tummy on that rug, trying first one route, then another, sure that I could figure out a way to cross those seven bridges without doubling back.

I never could.

Many years later, while in the midst of my final attempt at getting a bachelor’s degree, wherein I discovered that it might be fun to get a minor in mathematics, I took a class in graph theory.  It was the hardest damned class I ever took.  It was made less hard by the fact that I spent so many hours trailing a finger across one bridge, then another, trying to figure out a classic mathematics problem in the form of a hooked rug.

That was mom.  Another of her hooked rug masterpieces was a rug inspired by a flight over Midwestern farms divided by a small river.  The fields of crops were staggered–based on the soils they were on, different crops were in different positions, and it so happened that the river was following the course of an old fault.  So a crop of corn, say, on one side of the river turned into a crop of corn on the other side of the river, but shifted by two crop fields down the river.

Somewhere, I have a picture of Mom and my two aunts, sisters to my father.  It’s from before I was born.  My aunts are dressed in lovely, picture-perfect ’50s cocktail dresses, the full skirts swirling around them.  Mom, on the other hand, is dressed in a black pencil skirt, a dark turtleneck, her hair severely pulled back, a cigarette in her hand.  She looks the utmost urban sophisticate, my aunts look like debutantes.

I remember when my first True Love had to leave, and I was left bereft and heartbroken.  My brother’s graduation from An Illinois University was happening, so we all piled into his mom’s Volkswagen van for the long drive to exurban Illinois for the ceremony.  I was dazed and sobbing from the ending of the dramatic love affair.  I spent the few hours to the ceremony sitting on the floor of the van, with my head in mom’s lap, sobbing my heart out.  She spent those hours stroking my hair and letting me vent my angst.

Mom was born in California, but spent many adolescent and childhood summers in Arizona, trekking to the various mountainous areas in Central and Northern Arizona.  When she grew up, she always remembered those times in the pines of Flagstaff, Prescott, and small town Yarnell.  So when she and Dad were thinking about retiring, she began agitating for retirement to Yarnell, Arizona.  She and Dad subscribed to a realtor’s magazine for northern Arizona, and began daydreaming.  Much to the family’s surprise, one day we were told by Mom that Dad (who hadn’t left Chicago since he returned from the Japanese occupation after WWII) had (OMGWTFBBQ!!!) purchased a ticket to Arizona to view a property they had seen in this realtor’s listing.  Three months later, they were packing all their worldly goods to move to nowhere, Arizona (aka “Wilhoit”).

After they moved, I would visit them there, in this tiny not-town in the middle of nowhere, Arizona.  I would sit at the kitchen table hanging out with them, watching through the sliding glass doors as the sun and the clouds would create ever-changing patterns across the valley between their house and Yarnell, highlighting the small canyon that was a feature of that valley, limning the small hills with light and shadow.

I would return to Chicago, to my city life, with my city friends, and find myself, at times, standing on the beach of Lake Michigan, seeing the sun set on the clouds building up across the lake, looking like the mountains of Arizona, and my heart would break with “home” sickness.

So when Dad needed to have back surgery, I chucked everything to move out to Arizona to be with them, to help out with the driving, the groceries, etc.  They had long since moved into Prescott, once-upon-a-time-state-capitol…So I sojourned in their house in Wilhoit, a town of maybe 250 people, and drove up the twisty-turny White Spar Road to the town of Prescott to hang out with them.

They introduced me to strange, secretive gold miners.  They showed me ancient rock art that few people had ever seen.  I would hang my head back against the back seat of cars at night and watch Cassiopeia and the Scorpion rise (at different times during the year) against the backdrop of the Milky Way, which I could never have seen so brightly and clearly even fifty miles from the city.

Mom would spend the evenings poring over the old USGS topo maps of the area, quick to leap upon any small marking that said “ruins” or “spring” or any other interesting feature.  In the morning, Dad would ask her what was on the agenda, and she would pull out the latest map, point to the feature, and say, “We’re going there…”  And go there they would.

Mom was always looking forward.  Her childhood during the Depression, her father’s search for work, his working for the government as an IRS agent, all made her willing to look Forward, rather than Back.  She was an explorer, always.

There is more.  But now I am drunk, and tired, and sad.  My very best friend in the whole wide world died this afternoon.  I can’t ask her, now, “Ma, am I remembering this right?”  I can’t ask her where they were planning to go on that particular day.  I can’t ask her where the photo is, the one of her with her new sisters-in-law-to-be.  All I can do is be thankful that I was there for her, and that she was there for me.  She was my very best friend in the whole wide world.

I miss her already.

RIP GrannyJ–1927-2010.

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.

I am sitting in GrannyJ’s office, watching it snow.  Nothing is sticking here, but up the hill in Small Mountain University Town they have actually closed Small Mountain University due to “severe weather”.  Everyone–from the desk personnel at Budget Rent-a- place to the family friend we had dinner with last night–has made jokes about how “cold” it is here.  I just goggle at them, thinking, “You keep saying that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

(By the way, GrannyJ says that I needed to precede the previous post with the all-important words “After I got off the plane in Phoenix”, so that folks know where I am.  I am here [at GrannyJ's], and OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are back home.)

Even with the “winter”, though, and its associated cloudy skies, I am getting twice as much light here as at home.  Here, the sun rose today at 7:2 a.m. and will set at 5:22 p.m.; back home, the it came up at 10:13 a.m. and will go down at 3:34.  In essence, I get double the daylight.  Woot!  It makes an amazing difference.

In all, it’s just quiet and pleasant and relaxing, which is what I have been needing.

Back home, the first disaster was the Gingerbread Toast.  We had a lovely gingerbread house.  It was still being decorated, bit by bit.  It was awaiting the final touches at the hands of my husband and dotter, snugly stashed away in the oven.

You can see where this is going, right?

OmegaDad decided to make “hot dogs on a stick” for the dotter Sunday night.  This requires the broiler.  Alas, he had forgotten that the gingerbread house was in the oven.  The end result:  toasted gingerbread house, with charred decorations.  He has promised me that he took photographic evidence, so when I return home, I will post before and after pictures.

Tomorrow, I write about homework again…

Today’s saddest Google hit on my blog:

How can I refinance when my house has lost so much value?

That one simple question has so much backstory, and that story is being repeated over and over and over again across the country.

Anyway, son, my answer is:  Don’t ask me.  Don’t ask blogs.  Don’t ask Google.  Ask a mortgage company.  Ask a consumer credit repair organization (and make sure it’s an organization, not a scam).

The housing market has well and truly tanked.  Housing sales are off by 50% year-over-year in parts of California, a drop that hasn’t been seen since they started keeping track of such things.  Foreclosures are skyrocketing.  In areas where people are stubbornly keeping to their original house price, sales are totally stagnant.  The Fed is rumored to be looking at dropping the interest rate.  A consortium of (scared witless) banks has gotten together to create a fund to save “structured inventment vehicles”, which are being hammered by the sub-prime mortgage mess.

And the DJIA, after dipping a toe into record territory, has slid backwards this week.

So, no, son, don’t ask me how to refinance now that housing prices are beginning to drop.  I’m sorry.  I have sympathy, I really do, but at the same time, I really don’t–if you’re in a mortgage mess, you need to take a lesson from this:  read your damned mortgage terms before you sign the paper.  And think looooong and hard before you agree to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars at some un-predetermined interest rate, gambling on your house’s value to keep rising.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Sorry.

Those of us who have been involved in infertility treatments realize that it’s not a perfect science, but rather an imperfect ART (pun intended).

The docs can eyeball embryos and think they look good, transfer them, and the end result is a big fat negative on the pregnancy test.  They can toss in an “ugly” embryo or two, and voila, a plus sign.  They can transfer two embryos and the end result can be a triplet or quadruplet pregnancy.  They can transfer six embryos to an older potential mom who has tried multiple times, and end up with a singleton, or a negative.

The clients are presented with a multitude of forms to fill out.  What do you want to do with leftover sperm?  Leftover embryos?  How many embryos do you want to transfer?  Hold harmless agreements.  Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis?  And more.

Lots of those forms you fill out are to ensure that the procedure goes the way you want it.  Typically, you’re not supposed to change your mind at the last minute; while it seems simple, there are many people involved, and it’s a good idea to have the details spelled out first.

Which is why I’m not at all sympathetic to the lesbian couple in Australia who had IVF done, had signed a document saying they wanted one to two embryos transferred, and at the last minute, just prior to going under anesthetic for the transfer, said, “Hey!  We want only one embryo!” who are now suing because the end result was…gasp!…twins.

They want $400,000 to cover the expenses of raising the second child, including tuition for private school.  The lady who got preggers suffered from (gasp!) nausea…she needed to use a walking stick to walk in the later months of her pregnancy…she was perturbed because they had to buy a two-kid stroller…their love life was ruined because she has focused so much attention on two kids…

Oy.

I am rolling my eyes here.

Would this couple be suing if one embryo had been transferred and implanted, then split into identical twins?  Would the pregnant lady have been so utterly devasted by that result?

If the couple had wanted only one embryo transferred, they should have specified so from the get-go, in the forms.  A form was signed that said one to two embryos.  They had every opportunity to–at that time–specify the one-embryo transfer.  Why didn’t they?

Bah.

As someone on a board I frequent said, thank heavens the girls who resulted from this IVF aren’t identified, nor are the plaintiffs.  Imagine finding out at 16, googling your own name, that your parents sued for wrongful birth.

This whole thing seems like an attempt to milk some rich reproductive endocrinologist for some extra dollars, frankly.

Jack and Diane bought an acre of land and a house in Alaska in 1987.  They paid about $67,000.  Time went on, their kids grew up, the US went into a housing tizzy, and Jack and Diane looked at their house and realized they could now refinance and get at the equity…maybe fix things up, pay off some debt, buy a nice plasma TV, send the kids to college.

So in 2005 they refinanced using Lending Vine.  They paid off the first mortgage and had money to spend–they had borrowed $135,000, a fairly conservative amount, merely twice what they had bought for, and probably quite a bit less than what their house was worth (on paper) at the time.

Home values were skyrocketing.  People were getting 20% equity increase per year.  All was good.

They got themselves an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage.  Maybe they really looked at the details and decided that the way the housing market was, it was a sure thing that they could sell the house for way more than the mortgage or refinance for way more than the current mortgage when things got problematic.  Maybe they didn’t see the small print until they were signing, and figured it was going to be okay.

They fixed up the house.  They did some other things.

The interest rate on their mortgage changed in 2006 and their payments went up.  The interest rates went up again in 2007, and were probably going to go up again in 2008.

They sat down early in 2007 and looked at the bottom line.

The bottom line was that their mortgage, which was for $135,000 in 2005, was now for $145,000. 

Houses which were selling like hotcakes only a year ago were now sitting stagnant on the market.  Newly built homes in fancy subdivisions were sitting empty, and developers were slashing prices to reduce inventory.

Jack wanted to leave Alaska; he was tired of the winters and wanted to move to the Southwest.  And, no doubt, the increasing mortgage and the increasing mortgage payments weren’t helping.

So Jack and Diane decided to move.  After talking to some friends in the real estate business, and looking at the way the housing market was framing up to be for the year, they sadly decided to put their house of 20 years for sale for less than the going rate, and much less than it could have sold for two years ago.

Go while the going is good, eh?  Pay off that scary mortgage with the numbers increasing every time you turn around…

Names have been changed, some details are made up (such as motivation and when the interest rates went up–but the document indicated that the interest rate could go up the month after the mortgage was signed).  The IO/ARM and the increase in the mortgage balance are not made up–we saw them in the closing documents.

Folks, don’t do it.  Just Do.  Not.  Do.  It.  Jack and Diane lost $10,000, and they were some of the lucky ones–they didn’t lose their house, they ended up with some equity after all, they got out in time.  The Feds are busy changing their tune every week, it seems; first the housing downturn was no big deal, then it was going to be over with in a few months, one week it’s not going to impact the economy, the next week it’s going to cause a recession…

There are states where 60% of the mortgages written up in the last two years are zero-down IO/ARMs.  There are states where the foreclosure rate is doubling.  It’s a scary scenario. 

Our house in Small Mountain University Town has lost 24% of its value in the past year and a half, according to Zillow, and SMUT is an area where housing is still going fairly strongly.  What if we had refinanced then for what our house was (supposedly) valued at?

Things to think about.

There haven’t been any earthquakes or volcano eruptions.

The dotter is in school.

OmegaDad likes his job.

I’ve got a job.

My ticker, though still giving me twinges now & then, is essentially healthy.

“This, too, shall pass…”

I’m not going to think about the moving van that we tried to head off at the pass this morning, because the sellers are still moving out and we can’t move our stuff in.  We’ll deal with the “missed delivery” charges later.  Surely they can’t be too huge, right?

I’m not going to think about the Great Huge Storm that hit Small Mountain University Town last weekend that swamped Small Mountain University and, incidentally, leaked through the roof in our house back in SMUT, damages unknown but requiring repair, thus eating away at our equity.  All of which we found out about this morning.

I’m not going to think about a closing date that has been moved to the 10th, and the associated pay-through-the-nose costs for staying in the Shoebox for another week.

Not any more, at least.  You aren’t hearing me sobbing or screaming, “AAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!“, nope.  (GrannyJ did, however.)

So, instead, I’ll think about “self-esteem” and teaching kids to sing, “I am special, I am special, yes, I am!  Yes, I am!  There is no-one like me, there is no-one like me, hmm, hmm, hmm” to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star Frére Jacques.  (I can’t remember the concluding phrase, and don’t feel like asking the dotter to sing it yet again.)  And then I’ll write about my problems with that particular approach to self-esteem tomorrow.

Lizard noted that the words didn’t scan at all with Twinkle, Twinkle.  I was puzzled, singing them over and over again–the words fit just fine!  Then I realized that I had the wrong song entirely.  Dur.

…to direct all my readers to this post by Journeywoman.  If you read nothing else all weekend, read this.

“While we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her.”

A couple is suing a fertility clinic for using the wrong sperm in their successful IVF treatment.

The “terrible mistake” is obvious because the child is…well…”darker” than her parents.

I can understand being upset at getting the “wrong sperm”.  Usually, when you’re deep in the throes of IF treatment, you’re stuck on that unique-and-beautiful-mix of you and your spouse.

But…dayum…”terrible mistake”?

They look at their daughter and think “terrible mistake”?

Or, more likely, they let their lawyer put those words down on paper to make it a better case, rather than actually thinking it each time they look at her.  I hope.

Let’s hope they win enough money to pay for Jessica’s therapy when she’s an angst-filled teen who knows that everyone in the world knows that her parents thought she was the result of a “terrible mistake”.

Maybe fertility clinics should just start putting a “you git what you git and you don’t throw a fit” clause into their service contracts…

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