OmegaMom

My maternal grandfather was a ham radio operator.  They had a huge antenna attached to the back of the house, and his ham setup was in his den, just off the kitchen.  My cousins and I would hang out on the daybed in his den, listening to him call out to the world and get responses from all over.  Mostly it was just chat, but he had some regular buddies with whom he’d play long-distance chess.

The code for "hey, there, is anyone out there and wanting to talk?" was "CQ, CQ, come in, CQ.  This is W4HWA, calling CQ.  Come in, CQ."

The CQ code is, supposedly (according to Wikipedia), related to the French word sécurité; the idea is that the sound of the letters CQ are like the first two syllables, and, since it originated in telegraphy, the shorter, the better.

So I’ve been under radio silence for a week now.  Mostly, it was a case of the blahs, a serious case of the blahs.  I’d wake up in the morning, and it would be grey.  I’d end work for the day, and it would be grey.  I’d go to bed, and it would be grey.  So I ended up feeling grey and gloomy, dull, dismal, uninteresting, and not wanting to inflict my "wah, wah, wah" on the world.

The blahs are such a sad excuse for depression.  My blogroll is full of people who have serious reason for complaint:  There’s Clueless in Carolina, who is dealing with a mom descending into Alzheimers.  There’s Boomerific, whose home was lost in the Iowa floods.  There’s BrooklynMama, who is dealing with a husband with cancer, and a new baby, and a four-year-old who wants to know where daddy is.  There’s Mrs. Figby, whose mom is having serious problems.  

And there I am, just stewing, for no good reason.  Hell, me, myself, just a few years ago, had a much better reason to be miserable…and, at the time, I was, and it was much worse, more agonizing.  This is just…blah.  Poor OmegaDad is at a loss, wishing I were happier.  So do I, of course.  I figure it’s a function of being in a new place, with a totally different outlook and climate, and being away from my mom and my friends, and that in a year or two, things will be much better.

Which is, of course, not much consolation right now.

So, instead of nattering on about that any more, I will merely post this lovely video, which made me smile and feel happy and warm and connected in a global way (okay, everyone, let’s start singing "Kumbayah", eh?):

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I called the borough.  I talked to Jane, a nice lady who informed me "it happens all the time, don’t worry."

Look, okay, when I get something that has in big red letters "TAX DELINQUINCY NOTICE" and the word "foreclosure" on it, I get kind of hot and bothered.

But Jane said not to worry and to talk to my mortgage company.

Which was, of course, my next step.

I will not go off on a rant about outsourcing to India.  I will not.

Ahem.

Jarmesh was very polite.  Once we had communicated all the particulars, he said that everything would be taken care of.

So…Now that I know where the info is, I will be watching the escrow balance like a hawk.

In the end, I am left feeling very anticlimactic.  I hyperventilate and panic–the borough and the mortgage company act like it’s no big deal.  It damned well better be no big deal, is all I can say!

In the meantime, I leave you with the physics behind why peeling old wallpaper is a bitch (someone went to the trouble of a study to point out that peeling things slooooowly really helps a lot?!), and with Big Dog Beta, humanity’s answer to the Big Dog robot.

A simple question:  Who is responsible for 2007 taxes on a property purchased in September, 2007?

Ahem.

More on this on Monday, when I can call the borough and the mortgage company!

Answer:  We are responsible.  For the last third.  The sellers were responsible for the first two thirds.  That money went into our escrow account upon signing the mortgage.  Further $$ were put into the escrow account each month.

But nothing has come out of our escrow account up to now.

Perhaps I am naive.  Our first mortgage experience was smooth as silk; we purchased at the same time of year, but never received a delinquent tax notice!  Because our first mortgage company, lo these many years ago, actually paid the $#@*ing taxes out of escrow without us having to do diddley.  So we fully expected the same thing to happen with this mortgage company.

But perhaps they’re up to their eyeballs in alligators, what with everyone and his sister trying to re-fi or get out of higher interest rates or walking away from mortgages that are for more than the property is worth any more or something…

I am left wondering what’s up with our house insurance policy, as well…

Grrrr.

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!

Whenever I listen to doomsagers and get nervous, things turn out all right.  K2 and Gh1f, those practitioners of the “Dismal Profession”, told me to calm down, and things did, after all, turn out all right.

(So far…)

So I’ve been struggling with TurboTax and my file of goodies from the year.  I really wanted to have a video of Robert Cray singing the 1040 Blues.  But, alas, I can’t find it.  Let me just say “job move”, “house sale”, “one spouse working for an employer in an income tax state” and a variety of other things.  It’s getting quite complex.  Oh, we don’t owe; in fact, we’ll get lots back.  Of course, we’ll have to refund a major portion of that “lots back” back to OmegaDad’s employer, because it gave us a “withholding allowance” to cover extra taxes.

In the meantime, while I’m still waiting for the bottom to drop out of the various markets (what can I say–a doomsaging addict I am), I wanted to pass on these three items:

Texas Instruments has demonstrated a way kewl proof-of-concept neckband that will transmit unspoken words over a phone line.  They are busy working on a commercial version for use by folks with MLS; having had a coworker whose husband has had a rapid decline over the past two years in his ability to speak due to MLS, I know this one would have proven a godsend to her family.  Right now the process is veeeeery slow, but give them a few more years.

Then we have the video of BigDog, a robot designed by Boston Dynamics on a DARPA grant.  This has to be seen to be believed–it can climb rock piles, regain its balance after being bashed by a person or after slipping on ice, and is generally rather uncanny.  Though at one point, it looks like something from Mummenschanz (that’s when it looks like two men carrying a mattress and walking downhill).

Another DARPA grant was to DEKA, the company run by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway.  The grant was to develop a modern, superior prosthetic arm.  I’ve seen the clips from last year, when it was early days; the IEEE came out with a video about it from a month or two ago.  They hope to have this commercially available within the year.

I love living in a time when such amazing things are happening, and when it’s easy to find news about them.

Oh, yes, and if you see a “If you love this blogger, take this survey” popping up to your left, please do take the survey…

The seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on a carousel of time.
We can’t return
We can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Painted pony number one:  Five years ago Saturday, we met our dotter for the first time.  It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been so long already.  We’ve gone from a tiny little baby coming home for the first time:

To an almost six-year-old full of creativity and vitality:

Her first tooth to come out is just about out–it’s at that stage where it can lie almost flat.  We almost thought it was out tonight, but it looks like at least one more day, after all.

Our trip to Arizona has blindsided us with some Issues.  The dotter decided–unbeknownst to us–that it meant we were moving again.  Um.  Oops.  Then, since OmegaDad’s job is still fairly new, we had decided early on that he would stay only a few days, while the dotter and I would stay longer.  So I spent this evening in the bathroom with her in full-blown brokenhearted weeping mode–Daddy was gone, she missed him, I would be gone on Wednesday (a trip to the office) and would leave her all alone, and she first refused to believe we were actually going home on Sunday, and then declared in tears that she wanted to go home now, and then told me that Sunday would never come.

Some kid point-of-view things just blindside you, y’know?

Painted pony number two:  A person who I have posted with for years on various debate boards died of colon cancer this week.  She was in her early 40s.

Painted pony number three:  Marguerite, coming up on her 104th birthday, had a bad infection that required her to be on antibiotics.  The infection and antibiotic combo, along with heparin, had her hallucinating and sleepless for three days and nights, unsteadily wandering the halls of her assisted living center and falling often.  No broken bones, but they finally hospitalized her, got the infection under control, figured out the right antibiotic, and got her to sleep.

But the assisted living center said they couldn’t handle her anymore, and she needed a nursing home.

Sigh.

So Great Grandma (my own grandmother) is now in a nursing home, and sad and confused.  Nothing tastes good.  She can’t hear well.  Her eyesight is going, with black spots in her vision that make her think there are black bugs wandering all over her food and her clothes.  And she, like OmegaDotter, wants to go home.  Imagine going to sleep in one place and waking up in another–with the intervening days and nights just vanished from your memory–and being told, "This is your new home."

I’m so glad that we had planned a party for Great Grandma, so that there were lots of folks in town to help my mom out during this extremely stressful time.  But it’s so sad for us all–we have been spoiled…Marguerite was still bowling up until 1999, she was still out playing bridge at the assisted living center two years ago, she has always been sharp as a tack and filled with tart commentary and memories.  Having her in this state is…heartbreaking.

This evening, at bedtime, the dotter quizzed me:  "Why is Great Grandma like that?"  And I had to explain to her that Great Grandma is 104 years old, that most people don’t live that long, that she’s wanting to go home and is having a hard time realizing that she has a new home, and that she’s just tired tired tired.  So in the midst of all the upheaval, all the worries about moving again, the dotter is learning some other things that are very difficult to process.

Parenting is hard sometimes.

Life is hard sometimes.

But I’m so glad we have the dotter with us.  I’m so glad my family can pull together like this.  I’m so glad we all have each other.  Because it makes the hard stuff more bearable.

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My PalPal change-of-address rant garnered many similar complaints.  The one that really caught my eye, though, was Del’s link to a similar complaint by someone who is using PayPal to accept registration fees for a conference.  Ack!

Since I had everyone in my corner, I was feeling righteous.

Since everyone had said that they had similar problems and finally gave up, I was not feeling hopeful.

But I had sent out a plaintive missive to PayPal help, via their website form:

Surely this isn’t an unusual question!

We’ve moved.  I want to update my address and phone number.  But in order to update my address and phone number–you have to contact me at my old (NO LONGER VALID!!!) phone number or address!!!

I call the customer service phone number as suggested.  I go to
“update/change account information”…then it tells me to go to the website!

Sorry for all the exclamation points, but I am getting EXTREMELY
FRUSTRATED.

My husband has had the same problem with his PayPal account.
Please help.  PLEASE.

And you know what?

I got a response.

From a real, live human being!

And she was nice and understanding!

And she “reset” my account!

And I was able to remove the old address, *poof!*

And I was able to remove the old telephone number, *poof!*

And I was able to even change the primary email address, so I no longer have to log in using the old address (which will be defuncticated while I am off visiting OmegaGranny)!

So, I have to give PayPal a halfhearted pat on the back.  The pat on the back is because they did help.  The halfhearted part is that they shouldn’t have needed to help.  This is not an unusual request, I am sure; there must be thousands of people registered with PayPal who move every month.  They need to fix their system, because it should not require me getting frustrated and having to contact their help desk to get this fixed.

When you move 4,000 miles away from your old abode, your address changes in lots of far-flung places.

So, in this age of the wonder that is the intertubes, you sit down at your computer once you have sorted out all the details (like, say, where you’re going to live, and what your phone number is going to be), crack your fingers in a semi-macho display, poise the hands over the keyboard like Leonard Bernstein, lift a hand…

…and type http://www.bofa.com…

…and Hey Presto! you’re there, you answer a few security questions that no-one else is ever going to know (your father-in-law’s middle name is not exactly common, nor is it exactly common knowledge outside your spouse’s circle), and voila, you have happily changed your primary address and phone number and your bank statements are now delivered to your bank-o-mailboxes at your new address by the postal person and you’re happy.  Well, kinda.

You do the same with a variety of services.

All on the web.

All nice and easy.

All using Sekrit Kwestshuns with Sekrit Ansers that only you know.

And you go along with your life, merrily having a grand ol’ time trying to adjust to life in your new abode.

Then one day you discover Etsy.  Some wicked woman lists some artists in her “gifts for less than $50″ blog post, and you foolishly click on the links, and you are in love and you MUST.  HAVE.  THESE.  THINGS.  NOW.  (Especially since you are trying to decorate a new house, and counteract the continually shrinking amount of sunlight by scattering Bright Things around the house.)

Now, Etsy allows you to use PayPal.

You have a nice small amount in your PayPal account, due to your previous go-round with blog ads (and you wistfully hope that your new go-round with blog ads will prove as pleasantly pseudo-lucrative).  So you decide to purchase your new treasures using PayPal.

There’s a little note at Etsy when you select PayPal to pay; it says to be sure your shipping address in PayPal is the correct one.  So you schlep over to PayPal’s website, knowing you haven’t changed your address, so maybe it’s time to change it.

And you think you’ve done it, and order your Glittering Things, and the shipping address that shows up is not your new address.

So you scratch your head.  “Say what?!  Dayum.  I know I changed that address.  Hunh.  Maybe I need to change the address that’s marked as the main address.” 

You are in a maze of twisty, turny passages that all look alike.

You are in a maze of turning, twisty passages, all looking alike.

You are in a maze of twisting, turning passages that all look alike.

First you add an address.  That works.  Then you add a phone number and an email address.  That works.

Then you try to make the new address your primary address and delete the old one.  You get a page that says they will contact you with a Sekrit Code so you can confirm the changes.

They will contact you at your primary phone number, which is not the new phone number you just added.

OR…

They will contact you at your mailing address.  Which just happens to be the old mailing address.

OR…

You can select “Other”, which brings you to a page where they say to contact Customer Service at this particular phone number.

So after trying a few go-rounds (surely there’s a way to get your new address and/or new phone number to appear in the drop-down??), you grit your teeth in frustration and call the phone number (which is not toll-free).

You get a nice pleasant-sounding computerized voice.  You follow its instructions.  You select the “change customer address and/or phone number” option.  You get a voice message that says…

“Did you know you can change your address and phone number on our website?  We’ll be sending you instructions on how to do this to your email.”

See OmegaMom.

See OmegaMom’s eyes bug out.

See OmegaMom turning red.

See OmegaMom start howling.

See OmegaMom jump up and down in frustration, just like her five-year-old daughter does.

See OmegaMom go wash dishes to get away from her frustration.

See OmegaMom sit down at the computer once again to try to figure out how to contact a real, live human being who might be able to help her do something that LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF PAYPAL CUSTOMERS MUST WANT TO DO, JUST LIKE HER!!!

Now, really.  Banks do it.  Utilities do it.  Lots of places that are just as needful of security measures as PayPal do it OVER THE INTERNET.  Without all this rigamarole.  Why the fuck can’t PayPal?!?!

I just want to be able to use my “OmegaMom fund” to be able to buy myself some kewl artwork.  Is this too much to ask?

Grrrr.

So I’ve sent an email to their help desk.  Now I have to wait until Monday to be contacted.  The Kozmik All is no doubt arranging, right now, for the person at PayPal to ignore my offered new phone number and new email addresses, and try to call my old phone number.  ARRGGGHHHHHHH!!!

(Isn’t that a great word?  Whinge.  Love it.  For those who don’t know, it’s the British version of whining.)

Leah has given me permission to whine.  So here goes with confession time.

I’m homesick.

There.  I said it.

I live in Alaska, land of wilderness and mountains and oceans, a place so many people dream about coming to, and I’m homesick.

I miss the sun, oh so much.  Right now, we’ve got 6 hours and 53 minutes of sunlight per day.  That’s if you call it “sunlight”.  First, we get “sunlight” maybe once every four days.  Second, the angle of the sun is so low that while the sky gets light, we don’t get the sun for about an hour after “sunrise” (it hides out behind the mountains), and similarly it hides before sunset.  Third, that low angle of sun means that the sunlight we do get is watery late afternoon sunlight all day.  But most of the days are gray with clouds.

I miss the stars, oh so much.  When we were moving here, I just assumed that, being in the northern wilderness, we’d have glorious stars.  Not so.  We’re near enough to the coast to have high humidity, which washes out the stars…when it’s not totally overcast (those gray days extend to gray nights, too).  I miss seeing the Milky Way almost every night, arching across the sky.  And so far we haven’t had any northern lights to take the place of my glorious, shimmering, take-your-breath-away stars.

I miss the smell of pine trees in the sunshine.

I miss the openness of the piney woods.

I miss our ratty old log home, smelly and poorly designed and cold and drafty as it was.  It had character.  Our new house is nice enough, but it’s a basic box and lacks character.

I miss my buddies back in Arizona.  I miss having the Society of Geeky Gals meeting up for dinner and a play on a regular basis.  I miss my Northern Arizona FCC buds.

I miss my mom and my grandma.  Oh, lordy, do I miss them.  I miss being able to say to myself on a lazy Sunday, “Hunh!  Wonder what Mom’s up to…I think I’ll drive down and hang out for a while!”

I miss our old neighbors.  We had some cool neighbors back there.

I feel so guilty to be feeling so homesick.  Here I am, on the adventure of a lifetime.  For cryin’ out loud, the feds paid for us to come here. 

I know that I need to give it all some time, that I will make new friends, that in about six weeks’ time the days will start getting longer, that we’ll find new places to hang out, that I’ll be able to visit my old hangouts every now and then to get a jolt of piney woods and stark desert and stars and vivid sunlight.

I know all that.

But right now, I’m homesick and I just want to cry.

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.

Okay.  We have a new house.  I need to decorate.  I have some very specific ideas.

Apparently, my very specific ideas are out of step with the home improvement fashion industry–or perhaps the fashion industry in general.

After all, I think baby-doll tops are too, too ’70s for words.  And they make every woman who wears them look pregnant or fat.  Have you looked at any apparel stores lately?  Tell me what you see.  (Blog reader, blog reader, what do you see?  I see baby dolls surrounding me…)  Let’s put it this way:  last year, there were no baby doll tops.  This year, it seems there is nothing else.

No, I’m not planning to decorate the house in baby doll tops.  But the proliferation of BDTs is a symptom of what I’m about to complain about.

Each of those BDTs is brown.  Or muddy green.  Or a kind of putrid pumpkin orange.  Or a dim blue.  Or a combination of any or all of the above.

It’s well-known that at the beginning of the fashion year, planning a year out, an elite group of sorcerers psychics gurus madmen fashion color consultants meets to decide what are going to be the in and trendy colors next year.

I read an article about this meeting, and these consultants claim (apparently with a straight face) that they are not dictating the colors to be used, they are predicting, based on current trends, what colors will be popular.

You will not be surprised to find that OmegaMom finds this a truly hilarious concept.  OmegaMom is firmly in the camp of conspiratorial thinkers who despise the color psychotics fashion color consultants because she thinks they are a portion of the Illuminati Conspiracy To Rule The World And Crush Free Thinking.

Anyway, there I am, wanting to decorate, with some very specific ideas and colors in mind.  Are any of the colors I am interested in available?  Or the designs?  Hah.  No, what is available is the 2007 version of the ubiquitous avocado and mustard.  Dim, murky colors.  Gloomy.  Dark.  Bah.

I was able to find some lovely bright colors for our bedroom.  We’re going to paint it light sage and splash all this color around.

We found the (ugh) pale pink for the dotter’s bedroom, but trying to find, say, pink curtains is an exercise in futility…well, okay, I can find pink sheer curtains.  Whoop-de-damned-do.  I’m not going to put sheers on these windows, if you please; come next July, that kind of insanity would dump us all into the nuthouse ASAP.

But.  Bright colors for towels?  Nope.  And, having decided to indulge my girly-girl side with a little frill and frippery, my search for lavender and pink towels, plus a fabric shower curtain with flowers that are lavender and pink, has come to naught.

I went looking at sofas today.  Every damned piece of furniture at the store was dark.  Dark wood.  Dark sheets.  Dark sofa upholstery.  Dark brown and gold and green rugs.

Bah.  Picture OmegaMom muttering dire curses and shaking her fist at the cabal of fashion color consultants (servants of the Illuminati).

I’m sure this clarion call is something that will soon vanish from the annals of the U.S. very soon, if it hasn’t already.  Maybe I’m showing my age…do you remember “newsstands”?  In my experience, wooden sheds with an older guy who wears an apron with lots of pockets jingling with change; all three city newspapers arrayed in metal paper holders; a fine selection of news magazines and Analog and Ellery Queen and a few crossword puzzle books.  My memory has these wooden sheds tucked under the El tracks at corners, and it’s usually twilight or dark and raining.

That aside.  Paper.  Here’s a pic with lots of paper:

With the help of the most modern of technologies, the 5-year-old child, the above paper can be compacted to fit into a large-ish packing box.

We’ve found the plates and cups and silverware.  Mixing bowls are still AWOL.

OmegaDad has spent the day gallivanting off to Home Debit to get manly-man stuff to replace switchplates and fix a poorly installed phone jack and paint…the dotter’s room.  We promised.  Pink.  Sigh.  But we picked a pale shade of pink, so maybe it won’t be too bad.  There’s a light fixture in that room that the dotter has said, “Ooooh!  I like it!  I want to keep it!” about.  Mrs. Figby would be much more appalled by this light fixture than she is with the deco-esque lavender tulip fixture she is saddled with in her new house in NJ.  This thing is fugly.  But it’s pink(ish) and has pink flowers and purple flowers.  What more does any girl need?

Anyway, the majority of the day after the visit to the money pit has been spent by himself taping trim, replacing fixtures, putting down plastic…sooner or later, paint will actually be applied.

I, striving to be helpful, took the dotter out of his hair by hauling her off to purchase some clothes that fit, as she seems to have grown.

SheOfLittleBrain tagged me with a meme, which reminds me I have a few other memes to complete, and you may be inundated with memes so I can avoid any substance for a while. 

Remember back when, when I said we were swimming in a sea of boxes?  Well, the tide has returned.  We have boxes everywhere.  Labeled things like “pappers” and “stuff from hutch/living room” and “pillows” (I think there was one pillow in that box).  That’s if there’s any labeling at all.

Somewhere in the garage is a box with all the parts.  The parts to the futon.  The parts to put the dotter’s bed back together.  The parts that hold the shelves up in the bookcases.  Those parts.

I had a whole bunch of boxes that I packed at first and carefully labeled on all sides–the room, what was in the box…

Those boxes are somewhere in the garage.

We have a printer somewhere in the garage.

And lamp shades.

And some desk lamps.

Oh, well.  At least we have a garage!  Woohoo!  And, once we unpack, it will be an empty garage, that we can park, say, automobiles in.  This is a kewl concept to yours truly.

In the meantime, to all moving company packers everywhere:  I am truly, abjectly sorry.  I sincerely apologize.  I grovel.  I will never make you do this again.  If we move again, I will be sure that everything is nice and clean.  (I leave it up to the imagination of the reader to consider things that were stored above the stove for years without anyone even bothering to look at them until the movers came along…)

This will be a long, slow process. 

So we slept in our own bed last night.  (Well, OmegaDad and I did.  The dotter slept on a pallet beside the bed.)  It felt very strange, like when you run into someone you went to high school with, and used to hang with every day, but who now sports a comb-over and talks about “How ’bout them Eagles, eh?”.

…birds are singing, angels are flying around, and a chorus of hosannahs is ringing out.

We closed on the house.

We are in the process of abandoning the Shoebox.

More later.

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.

Official closing:  Monday, 10 a.m.

WOOT!!

I realize that you have been working in your business field for many years.  I know that, when one has been doing the same work for a long time, the details of that work are ingrained in the brain, to the point where one begins to speak a kind of shorthand or jargon and knows the procedures by heart.

But please do remember that some of us are not in your profession.  We have professions of our own, and have learned the shorthand and jargon of our own profession.  Our procedures are totally different than yours.  We do not possess amazing telepathic powers that enable us to grok your procedures and know, intuitively, that you need specific documents at specific times.  We sort of trust you to let us know.

Therefore, for instance, some of us do not realize that when you say, “Please have so-and-so email me an estimate of the down payment and closing costs”, you mean the very same Good Faith Estimate that has been sitting in the Shoebox’s living room for two weeks now.  Some of us think that people in other professions have arcane knowledge and procedures of their very own, and that the Good Faith Estimate gracing our files is not what you are looking for, but that you are looking for something like an “Official Relocation Down Payment Estimate” or some other impressively titled form.  We would have been more than happy to fax that very same document to you two weeks ago if we had known that was what you wanted.

(We won’t get into the question of why, when you’ve got so-and-so’s email address, you can’t just–amazing concept–email him yourself, requesting that information.  Or, if that’s illegal, unethical, immoral, or Just Not Done, explaining that in a nice paragraph that says, “I would email him myself, but we are not allowed to by Subsection C Paragraph 3 Subparagraph a of state regulations/federal regulations/relocation company association’s code of ethics.”  Of course, so-and-so is doing the exact same thing from his end.)

(We also won’t get into the question of why it takes six weeks for two completed house appraisals to wend their way through the bowels of your company to the point that someone finally produces an official offer which required maybe one minute of calculation, on letterhead and in contract form.  I was able to ascertain that the two appraisals were within 5% of each other just by looking at the numbers, and was also able to get the average of the two appraisals within seconds, so it’s not like it was Real Hard Work.  If it had taken less time, perhaps we wouldn’t now be needing to deal with the insurance company to get estimates and repairs for the water damage from the Great Huge Storm, but you would.)

Sincerely,  A customer who is just snarking in general

The Good News:  Our stuff is out of the moving van and in the house.  We will be able to visit our stuff now and then, and maybe sit on the floor for a while and look around and realize that there’s SPACE that will soon be ours.  YAYAYAYAY!!!!

We can’t, however, “move in”, because we have to wait until the day after closing for the sale to be recorded.  Apparently, unlike other states we’ve been in where closing day is the day you take official possession, here in the Final Frontier you can’t take official possession until it’s recorded.  I am going to ask our realtor here if, since our insurance takes effect on the 10th and potential insurance claims was the argument against early occupancy, maybe we could sneak in on the 10th, rather than the 11th.

Anyway, I think (think) everything is a Go for closing on the 10th.  Cross your fingers.

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.

When we first moved to Arizona, we lived in the area of Former State Capital.  OmegaDad would drive up to Small Mountain University Town on Monday mornings, and return on Friday evenings or when his field trip was over (at first, this was ten days out in the field, six days off).  I would drive down to the Valley of Death on Monday mornings, stay with Great-Grandma in Sun City, and then drive back on Friday evenings.

Then OmegaDad’s job switched from term-temp (a two-year stint) to permanent.  This is a Big Thing in fed work, and a Good Thing.

We knew that we could now depend on being in SMUT for quite a while, so it was time to look for a home.

The bankers we contacted pre-approved us for what was, to us, an ungodly amount of money.  We shook our heads at each other and decided we’d look for something more in our range–which was, alas, quite cheap for SMUT.  (Even then, housing prices in SMUT were outrageous.)

One place our realtor suggested we look when we gave her our price range was Mountainaire.  We wanted Kachina Village.  Or Munds Park.  Anyplace away from the train noise.  (I can live with train noise; I grew up in Chicago and almost always lived near the El.  OmegaDad, however, thought that train noise would always intrude–he didn’t realize that the noise fades into the background when you live with it.)

Mountainaire was a small enclave in the forest, with about five hundred houses, half of which were used only in the summertime weekends by vacationing families.  Once upon a time, it had been a logging camp.  Then it became a vacation home area.  At the time we were looking, it was becoming a place for first-time homebuyers, young couples just starting out.

As we drove through there, our immediate reaction was:  “We can’t live here.  It’s way too hippy-dippy for us.  We could have lived here ten years ago, when we were young, but not now.”

The roads were dirt roads.  The houses were mostly teeny tiny.  There was a plethora of trailers-in-blankets–small trailers and mobile homes that had been covered over and expanded upon. 

There were oodles of cute little A-frames that were (maybe) one bedroom. 

There were a slew of houses that had simply accreted over the years, as owners had added on and added on as they got more money. 

And scattered throughout, there were newer homes, especially at the back, up on the hill. 

Rumor had it that one house, somewhere in Mountainaire, had a septic tank that was made of an old Volkswagen bus that had been set into a hole in the ground…

But we simply couldn’t live there.  No way.  We wanted Kachina Village, a slightly more upscale enclave across the highway.  They had paved roads!  And natural gas!  Woot!  Up-town style, dudes!

But I found this house on the internet.  It was a log home (we had always wanted to live in a log home–we had spent a few evenings rhapsodizing about log homes when we first met).  It was cute.  It was up on the hill, so it wasn’t as dusty (the houses at the bottom of the hill, where the one road entering the enclave came in, were subjected to large amounts of traffic and dust).  So I sent OmegaDad off to look at it.

He says he walked in the front doors, and said, “This is it.”

So we ended up living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods after all, for nine years.  And we loved it.  We loved our neighbors.  We loved the little store at the foot of the hill, owned by J and S and S’s parents.  We loved the feeling of community.  We loved that we could walk a few minutes and be out in the middle of the forest.  We loved that, on snowy days, we could pop on our cross-country skis and ski down the street into the forest.  We loved the pizzas and steaks from the Mountainaire Tavern.  We loved that we knew the guy who walked his ancient old dawg every day, making sure he went slowly enough so that his arthritic companion could keep up.  We loved that, by the time we left, we knew almost everyone who lived there, and most of the vacationers who returned year after year.  Scruffy and down-at-the-heels as it looks, it has character and community.

OmegaDad has been sending pictures from the Al-Can highway.  Right now, I’m using a chintzy, cheesy “easy” picture editor from Microsoft, so the end result for the pictures is ell-oh-you-ess-why, lousy.

But I thought I’d share them with you anyway, and when I have access to my own laptop again, I’ll re-do the pics and re-upload them.

Firstly, we have road signs. 

Welcome to the Northern Rockies:

Moose crossing:

Sasquatch crossing:

Caution!  Buffalo on the road!

Then we have the real things:

A Sasquatch (alas, wooden):

Another piece of high human artistry, the Big Beaver:

A couple of “awwww”-worthy babies:

(a fox baby, then a baby moose…note the car window at the bottom of the picture.  OmegaDad says that he could have swatted the baby moose on the bottom, he was that close…)

The buffalo, apparently, is much bigger than the Plains buffalo OmegaDad is accustomed to; he estimated about a third bigger?

A trio of bighorn sheep.

And, in closing, some just plain drop-dead gorgeous scenery…Muncho Lake:

An unnamed river:

My cousin, also visiting GrannyJ, when viewing these pictures told me, in a dire, warning voice:  “You’re going to be there a loooong, loooong time!”

OmegaDad wants me roadtripping with him.  I want to roadtrip with him.  Looks like a lot of fun!

(Coming–The Long Goodbye:  Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods; Interlude:  A Surprise; a report on the experiment with the cats and how to ship turtles via FedEx, and more!)

OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump moved to Arizona in 1981.  I was 22.  Everyone in the family was amazed.

OmegaGranny had lived in Arizona, on and off, as a child, and remembered the Arizona mountains fondly.  Her mother lived in Sun City, near Phoenix.  She had aunts and uncles who lived there, also.  So as she and Uncle Grump were nearing “retirement age”, she kept propagandizing Arizona as a place to move.  She and Uncle Grump subscribed to a real estate catalog for Arizona, and began daydreaming.

One day, out of the blue, the family got the word:  Uncle Grump, who had hardly ever left Chicago since he returned from Japan after World War II, had not only gotten on an airplane to fly to Arizona–spur of the moment!–but had signed for a piece of property in the central Arizona mountains in a nowhere spot on the map called “Wilhoit”.  OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump were moving!

After they moved, I spent all my vacations out there with them.  I’d fly out, drive up to the spot on the highway called Wilhoit (miles away from anything resembling a real town), and we would spend a week or two driving the backroads of central Arizona, exploring canyons and forests and Indian ruins.  They were in the (lower) mountains, and the view from their house went on forever–rolling foothills, dark canyon slashes across the hills, mountains in the distance.  As the days progressed, the light from the sun would shift angles, and every moment, the old view would morph into something new and beautiful.

Now, if you speak to people about “Arizona”, the immediate stereotypical image they get is of saguaro cacti, deserts, coyotes, and the Grand Canyon.  (In the typical tourist’s mind, the Grand Canyon is somehow smack in the middle of the desert.)  And Phoenix and Scottsdale.  So the generic view is that Arizona is all desert, all flat, all dry, and always 110+F in the summer.  It was my view, too, as all I had to really define the state was my visits to grandma in Sun City–which is definitely not the way to experience Arizona.

This wasn’t the Arizona my parents introduced me to.  The one my parents showed me was, in my mind, heart-rendingly beautiful.

So after a few years of visiting them on my vacations, and realizing that I was crying on the way back to Chicago, missing the mountains and the wide open spaces and (of course) my mom and dad, prompted by my dad having back surgery, I decided to move out there.

It was great.  There was only one problem:  money.  Where mom and dad lived (they had moved into the city that was 18 miles away from their spot on the road, because they were spending all their time there anyway) was a cute town, and very pretty and piney, but there was a distinct lack of good jobs.

So I moved out to the Bay Area, got a good job, paid off a whole slew of debt, decided to go back to college and finish off that damned degree, met Mr. OmegaMom-to-Be, and moved to (ugh) Lubbock to be with him (trust me, this is a sign of True Love).

As Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be finished off his Master’s degree in soil science, he started looking for jobs.

At the same time, he was currying favor with the in-laws by sucking up to OmegaGranny.  To do this, he regularly shared gardening tips, cool info he could come up with related to his degree subject, and anything more.  He knew that there was a government agency that had–free for anyone who wanted the information–surveys of various areas.  He called up the state soil scientist of Arizona so that he could get the survey for OmegaGranny’s area.

They started talking.

It turned out that there was going to be a survey of the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead starting that summer.

It just so happened that Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be was due to graduate with his master’s degree that summer.

State soil scientist told Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be to keep in touch.  MOMTB did.  And that summer, as mentioned, the surveys were opening up and being staffed.  MOMTB applied, was accepted, and there we were…

…moving to Arizona.

But not the Arizona of the stereotypes–the Arizona of my experience.

Once, when OmegaGranny and I took the shuttle down from Former State Capital to the Valley of Death to visit elderly relatives, we were stuck with a young man from the East Coast.  Philadelphia?  Baltimore?  Boston?  I can’t remember.  But what I do remember is that he spent the entire trip complaining about how BROWN and DRY and UGLY and HORRIBLE Arizona was, and how he couldn’t wait to get somewhere where it was green again.

OmegaGranny and I just raised our eyebrows at each other…because, to us, Arizona is beautiful.  We see the high chaparral, with its junipers and pinyon pines dotting the scrubby grasslands, as glorious.  We love the stark beauty of the geology that is revealed by highway roadcuts.  We love the way the dun and brown grasslands turn vivid emerald green when the rainy season starts.  Walking in the piney woods when the sun has been baking the bark of the trees so that the vanilla scent makes your head spin…or smelling the sharp, metallic aroma of rain hitting the rocks somewhere within a 30-mile radius…clambering through the riparian tangles that line creekbeds as we look for a particularly good area of petroglyphs…The shshhhh of snow falling in the wintertime (yes.  You can hear the snow fall.) or the shshhhh of snow melting in the sunlight…the constant yammer of the ravens and the jays…the vivid flash of mountain bluebirds flying by…the splash of color from pink penstemon or vivid red Indian paintbrush or the crumped-kleenex look of prickly poppy flowers…

There’s no way to describe just how much I love the real Arizona, the one that so many people will never encounter.  I will miss it.  I hope to return “home” someday.

Sunday afternoon, we were tired, it was raining, I just wanted to get things done, and the dotter was saying, “I’m hungry.  I’m thirsty.”  Multiple times.  So I thought about it, and said to her, “Okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to load up the car, drive down to Grandma Julie’s, and then I’m going to turn right around, come back, and finish cleaning up.”

Um.

That went over like a lead balloon.

Her eyes welled up.  She started sobbing quietly.  Then she started howling.  She leaned against me and begged me, “Don’t leave me alone!  Don’t go!  I’ll be quiet!”

Multiple times.  Louder and louder.  More and more.  Until she had worked herself up into hysterics.

So, we ended up packing the rental car, leaving a bunch of stuff undone, and heading down the hill.

Monday, I felt like someone had run over me with one of those pavement rollers…but by late afternoon, I mentioned to the dotter, once again, that I was going to have to go up the hill to finish cleaning the house.

Her eyes welled up.  She started weeping.  Then she started sobbing.  She leaned against me and begged me (again), “Don’t leave me alone!  Please!  Don’t go!  I won’t say I’m hungry!  I won’t say I’m thirsty!  I can help clean!  Please don’t go!”

And worked herself up into another set of hysterics.  This one so bad that she ended up finally falling asleep in the midst of the hysterics, catching her breath in a tired sob in the middle of her sleep every few minutes.

Tuesday, I had to do it.  By the time I got out the door, she was screaming, and trying to break away from Grandma Julie.

Let me put it bluntly:  She’s absolutely freaked by the entire move.  She’s terrified of being abandoned.

So I drove up the hill, more concerned with the dotter than I was with myself, which is a good thing.  Because when I finally finished cleaning out every last little thing, and took one last look at the house we’ve lived in for nine years, I didn’t cry.

I cried on Saturday.  At lunch with OmegaDad, I suddenly started weeping out of the blue, tears leaking out of my eyes.  At dinner with OD and the dotter, once again, I just started weeping.

But when I turned around and took this last picture of the empty house, I didn’t cry.  I took the picture, closed the door, locked it (yes!  We found the house keys!  After 8.5 years of not needing keys due to the dawg, it was a miracle we found those damned things!), walked out to the rental car, and drove away…I didn’t cry.