OmegaMom

Thursday night, I was chit-chatting with OmegaDad downstairs, waiting for the dryer to finish up so I could fold some clothes and switch loads before heading off to bed.  Then I heard what I thought was the dotter raising a cry, scuttled upstairs, found all quiet and dark, and headed back downstairs.

At which point, OmegaDad, who had headed upstairs at the same time, yelled down that the dotter had just vomited and could I help clean up?

She had been trying to get to the bathroom, but didn’t make it.  She sat, half-asleep, befuddled and miserable, on one side of a huge puddle, while daddy and I were on the other side, paper towels and Windex in hand, cleaning.  She was just as miserable in the bathtub while we cleaned her off.  And afterwards, all wrapped snugly in her fluffy blue bathrobe, she marched into our bedroom, crawled into our bed, held out her hand to me soundlessly, and snuggled up beside me.

We spent the next day snuggled on the futon, watching videos.  I’d hold her hair back as she heaved.  I’d clean the bowl out.  I’d try this light meal and the next.  Nothing stayed down all day.

Hopefully, today is better.

OmegaDotter’s march into semi-maturity goes on.

After years of co-sleeping, or sleeping in our bedroom in her little nest, and six months of intensive propaganda about being a big girl when she turned six, she started sleeping in her bedroom in January.  She has slept there since.  Oh, she occasionally does an end run by slipping into bed with us in the wee hours of the night, when we’re both so sound asleep a marching band could wander through the room without waking us up…but, on the whole, she goes to sleep there and stays asleep there and wakes up around 5:30 a.m.

This is major, major news in the Omega household.  OmegaDad and I are still stunned.  I have kept quiet on the whole affair because I was afraid of jinxing it.  It’s blissful.

The other "when you’re six" issue, though…

Well, she sucks her thumb.  Intensely.  And she claimed, for months, that she would stop when she turned six.

The problem is that we have entered a seasonal period of skin chapping.  (Springtime…and the chappin’ is easy…)  I’ve broken out my stash of the addictive Carmex and have been slathering it on, and the dotter and I have been sharing hand lotion.  On the whole, it’s much less damaging here, where we have endless humidity, compared to back in Arizona, but nonetheless, it’s that time of year.

But the thumb.  Oh, OmegaDotter’s poor thumb.  We’re talking serious chapping here.  We’re talking a thumb with skin that splits and bleeds if you look at it cross-eyed.

We’re slathering the lotion on it.  I’m continually on her case about it, and when I call her on it, she surreptitiously slips her thumb into her fist and keeps loudly sucking, giggling slyly all the while.  She’s doing much better with it than she used to, but it’s oh-so-hard for her.  And it breaks my heart to see the white, cracked skin and calluses on her little thumb.  (I don’t worry about it causing her to need orthodontia any more, because her two adult teeth in the bottom have come in crooked from the get-go, so we’ll be purchasing braces when she’s 9 or 10 anyway.)

As a person who sucked my thumb until my teens, I sympathize.  It’s not easy to break a habit that ingrained.  I’ve suggested twirling her hair.  I’d suggest biting her fingernails instead, but I was doing both as a child and nibbling those nails down to nubbins on a regular basis, so I don’t want her to deal with inflamed, bleeding, infected nailbeds, either.

Any assvice?  Nice, gentle assvice, please?  I don’t want to do the hot-sauce on the thumb routine, though I have considered just slathering it with petroleum jelly to both protect and provide a disincentive…

Those were the numbers that caused the IRS to send us a notice that we owed them $3,051 and some cents in back taxes and penalties.

That was the notice that gave OmegaDad and I heart attacks yesterday when we received it.

The reason?  "For one or more of your dependents the last name doesn’t match our records or the records provided by the Social Security Administration.  As a result, we didn’t allow one or more of your exemptions.  This change may affect your taxable income, tax, or any of the following credits: Credit for Child & Dependent Care Expenses; Education Credits; Child Tax Credit; Additional Child Tax Credit."

Seriously.  My eyes bugged out.  OmegaDad was hyperventilating that we were about to encounter an International Adoption Horror Story, courtesy of the Social Security Administration.  What?  Don’t they believe that OmegaDotter is our dotter?!

I frantically fired up the ol’ laptop and pulled up our tax return.  I looked at the information I had put in for OmegaDotter.  And there it was, in all its glory:  I had put in for OmegaDotter’s social security number the easy placeholder of 123-45-6789, because I didn’t have her card nearby and I was going to look for the number later when I did more work on the return.  And then I forgot about it.  TurboTax didn’t flag the when I ran the tax return error check routine, just before I printed the thing out and mailed it.

So first thing this a.m., I called the number listed.  I waded through the menu.  I reached a human being remarkably quickly.  The human being, Davis, had a smooth and mellow voice and a calm manner.  The IRS, unlike other financial entities, doesn’t take your word for who you are right away; you have to give lots of information to reassure them that you’re really who you say you are.

Davis informed me that they get lots of returns with the SSN 123-45-6789.  So far as he knows, that SSN doesn’t exist.

Anyway, unlike most people, I found my interaction with the IRS pleasant, quick (relatively), and painless.  Aside from my repeated banging my head against the table for my idiocy in doing this in the first place.

So, a friendly warning–if you’d like to avoid such a notice in your mail, do yourself a favor: don’t put a placeholder in the place of a real live SSN.

(Note:  As suggested by commenters, I forwarded my info about the email to Snopes.)

Tangent:  I’ve written before how certain songs just yank me right back into an emotional state/gestalt memory of where I was and what I was feeling at a particular time.  "I can see clearly now" places me in freshman year in high school, eating lunch in the extra classroom that was used as a lunchroom in Small Private School, eating canned tuna salad.  BLAM.  I am there, immersed in a flash from the past.

At which point, I take a moment to turn to OmegaGranny and tell her, in all seriousness, "Ma.  Ma, I hated that canned tuna salad you sent for lunch for me.  Sorry!"  It was made with sweet pickles!  Ack!  I hate sweet pickles.  Sweet pickles are a blight upon the surface of human gastronomy.

I am also immediately a gawky, plump teen with pimples, shy and lonely and reading a book, both because I love to read and because I don’t want to have to interact with any of the other students.

Ahem.

This post is supposed to be about LASIK.  I meant to write it eons ago, just on general principles.  Then I meant to write it because Blog Antagonist was thinking about LASIK and wanted experiences.  Then I meant to write it when Mutha was also on the brink of LASIK.  So, now that SpaceMom is getting down & dirty with the idea of LASIK, and having proclaimed to all and sundry that it’s on my list of blog-posts-to-do, here it is.

Procrastination, thy name is OmegaMom.  I did manage to comment on everyone’s "I’m-thinking-about-it" post.  Does that count, in terms of procrastination-fighting karma?

Anyway.  In fourth or fifth grade, my teacher sent a note home with me for my parents.  The note essentially said, Kate is very good at arithmetic and answers all the math problems correctly, but there’s a slight problem:  Even though she sits in the front row in the class, the math problems she copies down from the blackboard are not the correct math problems.  Maybe you should get her eyes checked?  Mom promptly took me off to an optometrist, I emerged with eyeglasses very similar to these, though with thicker brown frames, and every year or two thereafter I would trek off to the optometrist again to get a new prescription, each time with thicker lenses.  Somewhere along the line, the lenses were so heavy that I switched to plastic lenses, and even those were heavy enough so that I had an ongoing blister/sore behind my left ear and red blotches on either side of my nose from the weight.

I got to the point where my eyesight was something on the order of 20-600; I could see at 20 feet what most people saw at 600 feet.  Take my glasses off and the world around me was like a soft-focus acid trip.  Especially on an interstate highway at night–whoa, that was really kewl.  I hasten to add that I never did that when I was driving, it was when someone else was driving.  All those semi-trucks lit up with fifty kazillion driving lights?  They would turn into whizzing shadows covered with pretty spherical blobs of sparkling colors.  It was neat.  What was not so neat was being unable to see the time on the clock when I woke up, being only able to "see" people if they were a foot away from me, and going in constant fear that my glasses would fall off my nose as I crossed the street, be crushed by a passing taxicab, and I would be, in essence, blind as a bat until I could replace them.

Somewhere along the line, Great Grandma said she’d pay for radial keratotomy if I wanted it.

I thought about it seriously.  But.  Um.  Someone sticking a scalpel into my eyes?  My one and only pair of eyes?  Making slashes like darts so my eyeballs would smush?  And…leaving those slashes open?  Um?  Just what would happen if someone was tossing a softball around, and my non-sporty-self somehow managed to get my slashed-eyebally-head in the right place to get a softball square on my eyebone?  Wouldn’t the innards of my eyeballs go splurt?  My response could be categorized as a shudder.  But the thought of not having to wear the Instruments of Torture was quite tantalizing, so I parlayed the offer into getting soft contacts instead.

Then LASIK appeared and was approved for use in the U.S. around 1990.  Now Great Grandma had two options to pester me about.  And since my soft contacts had suddenly stopped working quite as well and I was back to eyeglasses, which she thought were unattractive, pester me she did.

Sometime in late 1997, I decided to really investigate LASIK.  It had been around long enough for studies to have been performed, and long-term follow-up to show any real problems.  Being a geeky gal who already was used to researching things on the intertubes, I got onto PubMed and pulled up all the info I could find on LASIK.  The more I read, the better I felt about it.  And there were no squicky scalpels or incisions or eyeball-goo-squishing-out-of-the-eyes-when-whapped-by-a-softball worries.

So I called up Great Grandma and said, "Eep!  Yes!  I want to do it!"

Tomorrow:  In which I end up looking like something from The Fly.

The tooth is out.  I was in the kitchen with OmegaGranny and OmegaUnk, chit-chatting, and I heard the dotter calling out, "Mom!  MOM!"  Now, she tends to holler out in excitement for a variety of things, none of which I tend to think are important, and if we don’t HOP when she calls, she goes into conniptions, which irritates me no end.

So, mentally rolling my eyes, I was about to call out, "Girl, what’s wrong?  Why can’t you come here and tell me?!" when she darts into the kitchen and shouts, "It’s out!  It’s out!  My tooth!  Here it is!" and she held out a teeny tiny barely visible white thing.  And then we had to stuff her mouth with paper towel until the bleeding stopped, but for once she was so excited and interested that the Sight Of Blood didn’t bother her one little bit.

So the Tooth Fairy will have to visit Grandma Julie’s house.  Luckily, a hurried run to the bank on Saturday had resulted in one (1) Sacajawea dollar, carefully stashed in Grandma Julie’s purse for the big event.

We’ve told the dotter that the Tooth Fairy is quite shy, doesn’t like being seen, and may just not visit if she knows that the dotter is going to be sneakily trying to catch her in the act.

Oy.  My baby is growing up.  Wah!

If you look closely at the pic up above, you will see the new adult tooth already well on its way.  It’s much wider.  If the dotter actually does end up with the same number of adult teeth–I’m informed that this is normally the way that it works –it looks like we’ll have some orthodontial work ahead of us.

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Actually, she’s in love with the song “She’s In Love With The Boy” by Trisha Yearwood.  So OmegaDad bought her the CD, and we’ve been listening to it.  (Let me just say, I love the idea of anime mashup with country music accompaniment…)

In fifteen years, you will see a young Asian-American country singer, I swear.  Who dances like a dream.

Emotional whiplash:  I’m staring across the dinner table at the dotter, feeling all gooey and mushy.  She’s being charming and funny and fun to be with, and is singing this song.  I’m sitting there thinking just how very kewl she is and how smart and funny and sweet she is, and how elegant and beautiful she’ll be when she’s grown up, when she turns around on her chair, sticks her butt up in the air, and lets loose with a trio of juicy raspberries.

“Pbbbbt!  Pbbbbt!  Pbbbbt!”

Oh, yes, truly elegant.

Then there’s the discussion about “she signs her letters with x’s and o’s” (another song on the Trisha Yearwood CD), and OmegaDad admits to the dotter that he and I sign our emails to each other with x’s and o’s.  I inform her that the x’s stand for kisses and the o’s stand for hugs.

She immediately gets down, grabs a piece of paper, and says, “I’m writing a letter!”

One one side, it says, “To OmegaDotter, Love Isaac”.  (Isaac is her current flame.)  (Notice it does not say, “To Isaac, Love OmegaDotter”; she’s a little unclear on the concept of “to” and “from”.)  On the other side it has a very carefully constructed Tic-Tac-Toe board with x’s and o’s filled in.

Har!

Our new house has a laundry chute.

Did I tell you that?

It’s so cool.  I highly recommend that anyone who has two or more stories put in a laundry chute to the area where the laundry resides.  It is very nice to have no more laundry baskets (faux hampers) taking up real estate in the bedrooms and slopping over with mis-aimed dirty clothes (courtesy of the dotter and OmegaDad–I, of course, never miss.  Or if I do, I take the all-of-two-seconds it takes to pick the piece of clothing up off the floor and put it properly in the basket.  Not that this sticks in my craw or anything.  Honestly.  Why would the fact that I bring this up after having a laundry chute for two months make you think I have a complex about it?).

We also have a Wooly cat.

I think you already know that.

Our cat finds closed doors to be an affront to his existence.

You would think that big, heavy, solid wood cabinet doors–like we have here–would dissuade him from trying to open them, but that merely makes it more of a challenge.

The laundry chute, unlike all the other cabinet doors, hinges on the bottom.  You’d think that the cat, accustomed to normal cabinetry that hinges on the sides, would give up and slink off.

Oh, no, not him.

The other night, while doing something upstairs, I heard a horrendous “CLUNK!” from the upstairs bathroom.  Later on, as I passed the bathroom door and reached in to turn out the light (no-one else in this house has the “turning off the light” gene), I saw the maw of the laundry chute gaping wide open.

OmegaDad met me as I was coming down the stairs.

“What is your cat doing up there to make such a racket?!” he asked.

I informed him, and we went downstairs together, to find Wooly cat emerging from the laundry chute door, looking very pleased with himself.

He has also discovered how to open the front door and the kitchen door.  This is not as amazing as it sounds, as those two doors don’t fully latch until you lean on them, hard, and hear a “click…click”.  If you don’t lean on them hard, they look closed, but easily surrender to a determined cat who has discovered that being outside is the Most Amazing, Wondrous, Astonishing Thing In The Whole Wide World!  So he sits by the doors, just waiting for us to not-latch them, and then he paws and paws at them until he gets them open.

This perturbs me for two reasons:  1) Wooly cat has never been an outdoor cat, and doesn’t know a thing about big wild hungry animals; and 2) it’s October and it’s already in the low 20s at night, and a wide open door makes me see $$ on the gas bill.

(Our other cat, who hides under the futon in the family room downstairs and only comes out once in a blue moon, has been an inside cat for years, since about the fifth time we had to retrieve her from the tree next to our house or the roof of the house.)

Another post will be about the wiener dogs next door, who like to come visit.

(N.B.:  O, Mr. and Mrs. Johnny Verbeck
How could you be so mean?
We knew that you’d be sorry for
Inventing that machine.
Now all the neighborhood cats and dogs
Will nevermore be seen
‘Cause they’ve all been ground to sausage meat
In Johnny Verbeck’s machine!

OmegaGranny and OmegaUnk will be extremely familiar with that song.  I’m just curious if anyone else out there in Internet-land is…)

First Karyn suggested a page she found called “How to Make Coloring Pages Out of Your Photos”.  I’m not sure I found the one she found, but here’s one for PhotoShop and here’s one for Paint Shop Pro.  This is very handy, because, for instance, Krys found a picture of Princess Kasune Zulu which I could use for practicing with.

GrannyJ suggested looking for exotic models and tracing them.  I modified that into searching for various ethnic beauty pageants, and found Miss Kenya USA 2006 who is quite a pretty girl with a big smile and is wearing a few flowing dresses in the pictures.

Lizard suggested a really cool website, called It’s A Black Thang.  I spent quite a bit of time there, being sidetracked from the ethnic princess thing by lots of way cool art.  I really liked things by Bernard Hoyes in particular; but that’s because I like vivid strong colors, have some artwork in strong colors, and am thinking of doing our new living room colorfully (white walls, plain wood laminate floors, and lots of splashes of color, eh?).  But back to the princess thing–they have wallpaper borders with angels and ballerinas, and I’m sure I can figure something out from those.

Sara suggested taking a look at RainbowKids’ kids activities page.

Lisa said to put together a coloring page portfolio, put it online, and donate some of the proceeds to an African-American charity–nice idea!

SingingBird said she’d buy some.

(And wannallamanow said I was kewl.  Of course, he’s supposed to say that, seeing as how we’re married and all that.  I assure you, he can carry on an intelligent conversation, but I guess he was just overwhelmed by reading a week’s worth of my posts at once.  ;-)  Part of the problem is that he is required to carry a Blackberry at all times now…and he has discovered that he can surf the web with it.  I hesitate to mention it to him (but perhaps I should) but there may be problems with that when the monthly bill shows up.  Anyways, goodness knows why he reads my blog more now that he has the Blackberry, when there have always been perfectly good computers hooked up to the intertubes at home.  Ahem.)

Anyway, I played around with some pics using the Paint Shop Pro tutorial above, one pic of Miss Kenya USA and one of Princess Kasune.  Miss Kenya turned out better (though not very AA looking); I think there was far too much contrasty stuff with PK’s original picture to make the technique work well.  Printing out and tracing might do better.  Herewith samples:

Hm.  I’ll play with the picture idea some more and let you see the results.

Of course, the blog title isn’t original.  While googling the lyrics to find out when the song was written, I found that lots of folks (including Dave Barry!) used that line as a lead in to this story.

The song was about a couple who were bored with each other; one day, the female half of the couple went cruising the personals ads and found one that resonated with her.  So she made arrangements to meet with the guy (via ads), walked in, and found…

…the guy was her significant other.

So that was the song.

In this week’s news, there’s the tale above, of Sana and Adnan, a married couple who haven’t spoken much lately. 

Sana and Adnan met each other pseudonomously (sp?) in a chat room, one was “Sweetie”, the other was “Prince of Joy”.  They started talking.  And talking.  And kept meeting up with each other online.  And decided they had found their soul mates.  Then they decided to meet up.

In the song, it was a happy ending.  In real life, it wasn’t.  The couple is in the process of divorcing, each party claiming the other was cheating on the marriage.

Which begs the question:  Hey?  Yoohoo!  You said he was your “soul mate”!  You’ve decided this twice now!  Maybe, rather than getting a divorce, you should get marriage counseling, and figure out why you and your soul mate keep messing up?

Oh, well.

Onto other, less amusing things…

A lovely day.  OmegaDad left work early and puttered around the house.  I finished up working, took the dawg for a walk, and then we headed off to open a bank account locally (did you know there is ONE Bank of America ATM within hundreds–if not thousands–of miles of us?!  ONE!!).  Then we headed off to pick up the dotter from after-school care.

When we arrived, out in the play area there was A Scene Taking Place.

One of the participants was the dotter.

Another participant, D., was in tears.

I walked up to hear Miss Cassie explaining to the dotter that she had hurt D.’s feelings by sticking out her tongue and saying, “Go away!  I don’t like you!”  Miss Cassie was being excellent, and I actually wanted to take her home and keep her around to pull out at times like this, to explain in very compassionate tones and words just how the dotter has made someone else feel and to suggest ways to behave to resolve situations (for instance, she said it was okay to not like someone else, but not okay to be mean to that someone else).

When the dotter knows she is in the wrong, she behaves a very specific way.  She was behaving that very specific way.  But then she insisted to us, in the car later, that she hadn’t done it.  Then she flounced and sassed.

Um.

Three strikes, kiddo.

Sigh.

OmegaDotter serenaded us with the “I am Special” song while we were off on our day trip.  Since Mr. OmegaMom and I were busy chit-chatting, it just glided over my head at first.  But then, during a chit-chat break, I started listening.

Oy!

Let me give some context.  The move and its attendant upheavals have left all of us in a state of perpetual flux…and I think all the Omegas are security hounds in one form or another.  The dotter’s routines are furschimmelt.  Her friends are all back in Small Mountain University Town.  Her toys and books and clothes and (most sorely missed of all) horsies are in boxes in a van somewhere in Big City.  Her mommy and daddy are grumpy a lot, because every time we turn around, we’re stepping on a dawg or a cat or a kid or one another.

Anyway, she’s all shook up.

As a result, she has been acting up.  Big time.  Tantrums.  Snotty attitude (ugh).  Many renditions of “neener, neener, neener” tones applied to many different communications to mother or father or dawg.

Right now, we’re striving–very, very hard–to not come down on her too hard, but at the same time get it through to her that it’s just plain not nice to be mean and snotty and have an attitude.  That other people count, and that words and deeds can hurt.  That if she snatches things away from other people, or sneers that the crown that mommy drew on her Ariel at her express request isn’t good enough, or sing-songs neener, neener, neener too many times, people just plain won’t want to be around her.  That doing those things can make other people (like mommy, who has a fragile set of waterworks these days) cry.

Kindergarden and aftercare come in for a smidgen of blame here, too, because she’s being thrown in with older kids and Learning New Things (not all of which we approve of).

To me, self-esteem is something hard won.  It’s not something you get just for living.  It’s something that grows, something that you feel when you’ve accomplished a hard task, something that comes from doing nice things for other people.  It’s not a given.

So when I heard the dotter singing that wretched song…well, it appalled me.

Yeah, it’s nice that kids think that it’s okay to be themselves.  It is not nice to think that other kids are bad simply because they have, say, acne, or messy hair, or stutter, or just look different in some way or another.  And I know that some kids don’t get approval or love from the get-go and may need shoring up in the area of “self-esteem”.

But “it’s okay” is a long, long distance from “I am special”.  “I am special” is a license, in my opinion, for kids to internalize a very self-absorbed attitude.  It celebrates “me, me, me” and promotes ignoring others.

To me, “special” is a B&B owner/manager who goes out of her way to rearrange accommodations for other customers because you’ve got no place to go and you’re stuck in her Shoebox.  To me, “special” is a neighbor who shows up on your doorstep with a bottle of whiskey when you’re being a single mom for a month and have gotten some shocking news, and insists you have a drink while she sits and lets you cry on her shoulder for a couple of hours.  To me, “special” is a cousin who arranges a veritable cornucopia of kid entertainment to keep the dotter busy while on an airplane for 10 hours.

“Special” is also a little girl who was terrified of skating who is suddenly soaring across the ice on her own.  “Special” is a little girl who spends an evening catching herself singing an annoying little ditty (don’t remember what it was, just that it was annoying) and thinks and stops each time, after being told it was annoying.  “Special” is a girl who got a big thumbs up after sounding out and spelling her first word (”pony”).

All of these are either individual achievements or care for other people’s needs or emotions.

“I am Special” doesn’t address any of that.  It doesn’t address the need for children to learn that they can try, and fail, and try again, and maybe–with hard work–achieve their end goal.  It celebrates just “being”, and promotes an attitude that one needs only to exist to get a gold star.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am quite aware of what having low self-esteem can do to people.  But it seems to me that the “I am Special” song is a cosmetic approach that inculcates an attitude diametrically opposed to what “self-esteem” really should be.  What good is singing “I am Special” to oneself if it makes one feel entitled to the good opinion of others, without striving and achieving?

Donna, in a comment on yesterday’s post, recommended a book, “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young People Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before”, by Jean Twenge.  I suspect I’m going to be reading that one very soon.

OmegaDad had no idea what a “cootie catcher” was.

The dotter, on the other hand, has learned that valuable tidbit of information from either kindergarden or afterschool care.  She didn’t know the name, though.

So she asked me, “Do you know how to play a…a…” and went into a semi-coherent explanation of what it did, on the order of “You make it out of paper and you color it and you choose a color and there’s writing on it…”.  Amazingly enough, I knew what she was talking about.

And it’s like riding a bike:  once you know how to make a cootie catcher, you don’t forget it; it’s a kinetic memory buried in your body somehow.  Give the hands a piece of paper, and while you’re talking, you make one, though you’re not sure whether it’s right or not.  That’s when you consult Ye Olde Internets, googling “cootie catcher”, and find the “How to Make a Cootie Catcher” page, and find that–to your amazement–this divertissement that you haven’t created in some 30 years has emerged–correctly–from your fingertips sort of like Venus rising from the sea.

This is because little girls, once they know how to make cootie catchers, spend a few years making them at every opportunity.

Making a cootie catcher while you’re talking with your dotter is a quick and easy way to awe and impress her.

Then you have to make another.

And another.  And another.  And you have to make mini-cootie catchers out of the trimmings off the big ones.  And your dotter will squeal, “Oooooh!  Oh, they’re so cuuuute!”

And then you will be subjected to (a) having to come up with fortunes, and (b) playing cootie catchers for hours on end.  In the Shoebox’s living room.  In the car.  In the yard.  And when the dotter (inevitably) loses one, you will be required to make yet another.

And then you’ll discover the joys of competitively blowing mini-cootie catchers across restaurant tables at each other, a la Spit.  (You do remember Spit, don’t you?  No?  Well, it has to do with folding a piece of paper into a nice compact triangle, and then flicking it across the library table with an intent to get it past the goal of your buddy’s hands.  You did this during Study Hall.  Amazingly enough, the librarian never gave you and your buddies detention for all those spirited games of Spit.  Perhaps because detention would have to have been served in…the library?)

I am eagerly awaiting clapping games, to the tune of “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack”.  And OmegaGranny will be pleased to know that the dotter is learning Hopscotch, and will be dubious about the pre-taped Hopscotch layout, though happy it’s not painted in.

I wonder if Jacks are still a big thing with girls?  And Double-Dutch?

Wednesday, the dotter climbed into my lap again when I picked her up.  Thursday, however…no climbing into laps, and when she said, mournfully, “I had a bad day again today,” I could tell by the subtleties of the tone that it was not a serious mournfulness.  

I slanted the Hairy Eyeball at her in the mirror.  She busted up giggling.

So, still no buddies at after care, no buddies at school, but I think (maybe) she is settling in a bit, and beginning to recognize people, so is feeling a bit better.

The commentary about teachers and aftercare workers helping the kiddos get to know each other was good–and, lo and behold, the next day, when I went to pick up the dotter, Miss Mary at aftercare was going around the room with all the kids, having them call out their names loudly so that everyone could hear.  I’m feeling very hopeful about the aftercare place.  And each day a different kid gets chosen as Mrs. Shoetree’s helper of the day, and the dotter knows that child’s name, so it’s helping the kids get to know each other.

Playgroupy-ness must needs wait until we’re in the house. (Will we ever get in the house??  Must be optimistic.  Must be optimistic.)  One nice thing about the house is its close proximity to school, so I can scooch over there during my “lunch hour” to check with school secretaries, leave notes for Mrs. Footrace, maybe eat with the dotter, maybe volunteer some.

One thing I’ve noticed that may take some getting used to for me is that all the moms are much younger.  (You’re supposed to read that particular line in a mournful tone.)

We ran into a family with a daughter from China while we were at the State Fair; this family is in Big City.  Which reminded us that Big City has an FCC chapter.  Big City also has–not fair!–a Mandarin immersion program!  Whoa.  But, alas, Big City is 35 miles away.  Close enough for Friday night Mandarin classes (also offered), and monthly meetings and suchlike.

Of course, the social awkwardness of a new school is compounded, as y’all said, by being new in state, the upheaval of the move, and our (as Carosgram labeled it) “inappropriate guilt”.  And the smallness of the Shoebox.  We are all getting on each others’ nerves, and the dotter really really needs to be able to settle down, which will help with the confidence level…just having her own “stuff” around her when she’s home will help.

Thanks everyone for the good ideas and the sympathy.  It hit me out of the blue, that the dotter might have difficulties, and I was feeling sad for her and guilty that I hadn’t realized it beforehand–all the suggestions and commentary has helped a great deal!  Y’all are Good Eggs, y’know?

…then there is no mountain, then there is.

That Donovan song is stuck in my head today.

First there was the closing being pushed back (boo!).  Then there was early occupancy (yay!).  Now there isn’t early occupancy (boo!).  And the closing is either Sept. 5 or Sept. 10 (boo, hiss!).

Gaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

Okay, on to other things:

Freak foam surf in Wales looks way cool.  Some commentary about how it’s being caused by pollution–it would be interesting to do research to see if it’s been happening on and off for centuries, which would put the kibosh on that idea.  It definitely happened 30 years ago, so it’s not new, just rare.

OmegaMom reveals her disdain for her child’s safety:  I think the toy recalls are going a wee tad too far.  Toys “R” Us Recalls Wooden Coloring Cases.  Because the paint in the lettering on the case contains lead.  (Well, okay, some of the black paint inside contains lead, too.)  Look here, folks.  Kids aren’t really highly likely to lick the lettering on the box.  And if they do, they sure aren’t going to get enough lead from that lettering to cause anything–we’re talking a microscopic dose here.  In addition, the kit is marketed for 5 years old and up; any kid of that age who is still eating paint shouldn’t be getting paint sets to begin with. 

A not-so-random thought:  Adopting a child of a different race does not automatically bestow a “racism-free” merit badge upon the adopters.  Really.  And if you hear of some adult Asians reading a particular series of articles and being disgusted by the racism in those articles, maybe–just maybe–it might be a good idea to re-read the words and try to figure out why those Asians feel that way, rather than getting defensive and waving your internationally adopted child around as a banner of your pure motives and right thinking.  Just maybe.  Ya think?

People who think IVF will ever be a widespread replacement for good ol’ human sex as a method of reproduction are just nuts.  They haven’t done IVF.  Or they have lousy imaginations.  And, please–before you start commenting on how people are going to select for intelligence, blond hair, and blue eyes, please learn a little bit about genetics and how difficult it is to pinpoint most of our traits to one specific gene.

For all those mainstream media types who think blogging is so declasse and worthless, I’d just like to suggest that any media person who is surprised by the mortgage mess and the sagging real estate market should have been reading bubble blogs for a year or so; it’s pretty amazing how events this year have marched in lockstep with the predictions of the bubble bloggers.

I go away.  Who knows what joyous personal real estate news will appear on OmegaMom’s blog next?  I’m feeling like we will be in the Shoebox until we die of old age…

(Not to knock the Shoebox.  It’s really darling, and would be great for a single.  Or even a couple.  On vacation.  But two adults, one five-year-old, a dawg, two cats, and some turtles, for more than a day or two?…nope.)

So here we are, new state, new job for OmegaDad, a Shoebox to live in with a new house soon, new school for OmegaDotter and new kindergarden…

Just before we headed off to China to meet the dotter, I quizzed some friends in the IT department about who they were sending their kids to for daycare.  There had been a mini baby boom that started the year before, and there were four or five ladies who had children similar in age to the dotter.  They gave me a variety of recommendations, which were more or less conveniently located, and I trotted off to one to check it out.  It was warm, it was welcoming, it was well-organized, and it was staffed by a slew of nice young things in the education program at Small Mountain University, so it was cheap (student labor=slave labor, essentially).

Four years later, at the beginning of summer, OmegaDotter left that daycare/preschool to go off to summer camp for the first time. 

She had been at the same place for four and a half years.  She had grown up with many of the kids in her age group.  She knew them all–and they all knew her.

When we’d show up in the morning, it was like a scene from Cheers.  Remember how Norm would walk in, and everyone at the bar would call out, “Norm!” “Normie Boy!” “Ey, Norm, how’s things?” and he would make the circuit, gripping biceps and slapping backs and sharing jokes and what-no?  That was the dotter.  She’d walk in, and it would be, “OmegaDotter!”  “OmegaDotter’s here!  Yay!”  “OmegaDotter, come here!”

And we knew moms and their kids at summer camp; there were familiar faces during the day or at pick-up time.  And One and Only True Love was taking swimming lessons at the same place in the afternoons, so that was, of course, a major plus.

All of this adds up to…a clueless mom.

It never, ever occurred to me that OmegaDotter had no experience in “how to make friends”.  No experience in being “the new kid”.  No idea, really, how to do it.

Well, duh.  Picture OmegaMom slapping her forehead, a la a V8 commercial.

When I picked her up from after-school care this afternoon, she was sitting all alone by the side of the playground, carefully filling in holes in the dirt.  All by herself.  And I remembered–oh, how well I remembered–what it was like being shy and new and lonely.

Now, it’s usually quite difficult to get details from the dotter.  It is, in fact, like pulling teeth.  Impacted wisdom teeth, at that.  She chatters and dances, and sort of slides away from the questions.  Which she started doing as soon as I asked a little bit about her day, and who she played with, and how was it?

So, bound and determined, when we got into the car, I said, “OmegaDotter.  OmegaDotter, come up here,” and I patted my lap.  “Want to sit on my lap a bit?”  Pleased and surprised, she crawled up front, got into my lap, and began the chitter-chatter.  And I started the inquisition, with detailed, specific questions.

I got:  “Nobody wants to play with me.”

When I asked if she asked them, she said she did, and they didn’t want to.

I asked her how it felt; when she shrugged and said, “I dunno”, I asked her if it made her feel happy?  She shook her head.  Did it make her feel kind of sad?  There was a pause, and she nodded, looking out the window.

The details were this happened both at school and at after-care.

And I’m left feeling kind of helpless.  I am not the person to come to for advice in how to make friends and influence people; I am shy as hell and it’s taken me some 40 years to get to the point where I just barge right in at parties and start talking to people.  It doesn’t help that I don’t know anyone here and we’re all new and everything’s up in the air right now…

I’m signing her up for gymnastics, and ballet as soon as I can find a recommended ballet studio.  So those will help a bit.  And I told her that in a few weeks she’d get to know most of the kids and she’d start to make friends (she seemed very skeptical).

But right now we’re all adrift, at sea, and it makes me sad to see the dotter sitting all by herself.  (A couple of the older girls have taken her under their wings, but she needs/wants some kids her own age.)

Speaking of the sea:  My new theme is anchored by a pic I took of the inlet by Big City a few weeks ago. 

I took the dotter in to school today, her first day of kindergarden.  Since things have been up in the air lately, she didn’t have new shoes, a new backpack, a fancy new outfit, or anything like that.  But, of course, I took the requisite First Day Of School picture.  Equally of course, it’s blurry.

I met Miss Shoehorn, who seems like a lovely lady, and handed her the bag of supplies requested.  (Since this was the first time we had ever done this, I had no idea if I was supposed to fill the dotter’s backpack with all the stuff, or keep it at home and dole it out bit by bit, or what.  So I dumped it all in a bag, figuring I would ask when we got there.  I can see why they don’t spell it out–after all, most parents have been through it many times already, so why bother?  But for those of us clueless firsttimers, it would have been nice to be told, “All this stuff gets put into one big pile of each item, and is doled out to the kids during the year as needed”, rather than just leaving us to go “Bduh, bduh, bduh, whaddoIdo wit’ this stuff?”)

I liked the classroom–it’s fun and organized and busy and looks like the kids will be involved, entertained, and learn.

The dotter handled it well; she was very excited to be Going To School!  But then came the moment when mommy was getting up to go…

And the tears came.  Big fat tears, seeping out of her eyes, her lips trembling oh-so-slightly.  And the tears began to fall, more and more of them, but she didn’t cry or sob, oh no no.  She just wept quietly, and asked me, in a very trembly voice, “When will you pick me up?”

Oh, baby.  Oh, you’re such a big girl now.  In a few days, that moment of fear and trembling will be a wisp of memory; you’ll be making friends and learning things and having fun.  All I wanted to do was to cuddle you up and give you big hugs, but I knew if I did, the weeping would turn to sobs and my big brave girl wouldn’t be able to handle it.

I didn’t cry, myself, not until I just wrote that last paragraph.  But, yeah, there it is:  she’s growing up, getting bigger, and sooner than we expect, we’ll be schlepping her off to college and the house will be much emptier.

Public schools have a wide variety of ways to introduce themselves to new parents.

Julie, of the Ravin’ Picture Maven, has a new kindergardener entering school this year, and was treated to a scene of chaos when visiting the school’s open house this week.

Luckily, I seem to have missed that scene both in Small Mountain University Town–whose open houses for new students were at the end of last semester (wow)–and here in Small Town Alaska.

The teachers at the SMUT-ty kindergardens were warm and welcoming to hapless-looking parents with small children tagging along after them (that would be me and the dotter), answering questions, showing us around their rooms, and describing their teaching philosophies.

The schools here in Small Town Alaska have, for kindergardeners, something called “Kindergarden Roll-In”.  In a small bit of disorganization, this item was never defined on the school’s website, so we arrived here not knowing what the heck it was, though we knew it took place the first week of school.  But when the dotter and I wandered off to our school-to-be to register, All Was Made Clear.

What “Roll-In” is, is a week wherein each kindergarden teacher contacts the parents of each kindergardener (de facto new students) and sets up a one-on-one appointment with the parent, the child, the teacher, the teacher’s aide, and, furthermore, with a speech pathologist and an occupational therapist.

Whoa.  Color me impressed.

Of course, also color me frantic when I found out that this meant that kindergarden actually starts a week later than the remainder of school, and my previously scheduled work start date of 8/20 would have been better to be 8/27.  Eeek!  A little bit of information on the school district website would have been helpful in clarifying that for those of us who didn’t have a clue…

So the dotter’s Roll-In appointment happened to be Thursday morning at 9 a.m.

It just so happens that I was being ferried to the hospital in an ambulance at 2 a.m. Thursday morning, and by 9 a.m. was hooked up to a variety of monitoring machinery in my hospital room.  But, whilst being x-rayed and poked and prodded and hyperventilating, I bravely whispered to OmegaDad, “The child…the child…”, my voice trailing off as my leaden-colored hand slid slowly off his forearm and hung limply off the gurney.

Er.  Ahem.  Well, I did tell him that he must be there at school at 9 a.m., dotter in tow, that the teacher’s name was Miss Sara Shoehorn or some such thing, that the room number was #4 (I thought), and he had to comb the dotter’s hair before he went there.

OmegaDad reminds me that I combed her hair, because he brought her in to the hospital before trotting off to the school.  It seems I have the Magic Combing Touch (which surprises the heck out of me, because in the normal run of things, the dotter howls, squeals, yanks her head out from under my trying-to-be-gentle hands, and gives every impression that I am torturing her mercilessly).  OmegaDad informs me that the dotter told him, quite sternly, “You don’t know how to do it.”

Anyway, dad and dotter made it to meet Miss Footlocker, and dad reports that the dotter was quite well-behaved.

I find it interesting that there are such widely varied approaches to bringing new students into the fold.  Julie’s experience is one end of the spectrum; ours (so far) has been at the other end.

But I still have to meet Miss Footfetish.

OmegaDad tells me that after the EMT dudes loaded me onto the ambulance, he stood in the doorway of the Shoebox’s bedroom and thought to himself, “I have to figure out something to say to the dotter, and it has to be true enough…just in case.”

Just in case.

The whole episode was really scary.  Just scared the snot out of me.

OmegaDad will tell you that it takes a lot to make me say I’m going to go to the doctor, and having me wake him up in the middle of the night to say, “I need to go to the emergency room” was enough to wake him up right away.  Actually, I told him, “I’m going to drive myself to the emergency room”, an idea which he nixed immediately, and as he was taking more and more time to get ready to drive me, I finally gasped out, “Call an ambulance.”

He says he was truly worried that he was going to have to deal with me dying.  I am under strict orders to Never Do Anything Like That Again.

Trust me, I don’t plan to.

It’s a very odd feeling, to be sitting on the floor in wild excruciating pain, wondering, “Is this it?”  I spent the time in the hospital mostly snoozing.  OmegaDad brought in the laptop yesterday morning, and I would turn it on, sign on, start reading email and blogs and news and stuff, and then *poof* would be asleep again.

Sleep, as I may have mentioned before, is my ultimate response to stress.

I was…well, under a certain amount of stress.  Less so as time went on (particularly after my cardiologist–now that’s a weird phrase, “my cardiologist”–informed me that pericarditis is about as “significant as a sore throat”).  I got to see my heart a-throbbin’ and a-pumpin’ away during the echocardiogram, an ultrasound of the heart.  The dude doing the echocardiogram informed me that I had a “nice, shiny pericardium”; I don’t think anyone’s complimented me in quite that way before.  Watching the activity of the heart was fascinating; the mitral valve flutters like a mechanical flap, up, down, up, down, while the heart is quivering and pumping.  The ultrasound equipment also will show, in color-coded glory, the blood that is entering the heart versus the blood that is exiting the heart, in orange and blue flashes.

Way cool to a nerd like me.

But still.  There I was, having spent a few hours thinking I was dying.

That’s scary shit.

So I slept.  And slept and slept.  You’d think, after all that sleeping, that I’d be nice and rested, but right now all I want to do is…sleep.  Because I’m still all shook up, and sleep is the best way to escape being all shook up.

OmegaDad says that the dotter was very upset and really, really wanted me back at home.  I really, really wanted to be back at home, too, once the drugs knocked the inflammation on its butt and I could finally sleep on my side without feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest and kicking me every time I took a deep breath.

All of this is more than anyone needs to know, I’d guess.  But it’s kind of a way for me to work through it, to realize that (a) I thought I was dying, and (b) whew!  No, I wasn’t.  Both of them take some processing, some thinking about.

The good news is that Perry Who-itis is not a heart attack.

The bad news is that I found this out after thinking I was having a heart attack.  It was no fun having OmegaDad call the ambulance, being investigated soundly in the ER, dealing with being poked and prodded and CT’ed and ECG’d and X-rayed and and and.

So I have pericarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart.  According to all the tests I’ve had, my heart is in super duper shape (I’ll probably end up like my grandma, just tickin’ and tickin’ and tickin’ along).

OmegaDotter has been wonderful, no bouncing, no fussing, a great deal of pretend medical stuff, such as using my sports bra to stand in for a blood pressure cuff.  And when OmegaDad picked her up at preschool today, she had a slew of drawings with “I mama” all over them, which warms my pericarditic heart.

I’m bored.  I’m in pain.  I’m constantly nodding off.

Wah.

Frickin’ fracken’ rowrbazzlin’ appraiser.

We were scheduled to close on Monday.

The appraiser didn’t even schedule an appraisal until today.

Now the appraiser has rescheduled for tomorrow.

The appraiser thinks she won’t be done with the report until Monday.

The mortgage company needs the appraisal to hand us the dinero.

The sellers want to move the closing date to next Friday.

Our temporary housing $$ run out 30 days after they start…OmegaDad got here on the 31st of July.

Not only will we be stuck in the Shoebox for a few days longer than we expected, we’re going to have to pay for it, too.

GAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!

Remember the judge who sued the dry-cleaner for some $60 million because his pants were ruined?  Thankfully, the end result was that it was ruled in the defendant’s favor.  I had thought that Judge GimmeMoney had faded into the background (until he found a new victim), but it turns out he’s appealing the result.  Picture OmegaMom rolling her eyes hard enough that they might fall out of her head.

I follow a science blogger named Pharyngula (PZ Myers, a professor of developmental biology at the University of Minnesota in Morris).  Myers reminds me in many ways of my fuddy-duddy brother.  He’s cranky, funny, interesting, writes about developmental biology and evolution, and carries on a long-standing (rather heavy-handed) harangue against organized religion of any kind.

A while back, in 2004, he wrote a review of a book called Lifecode, whose author, Stuart Pivar, claims that all embryos begin their organization based on spherical topology, and it’s the same process for every critter alive. 

PZ wrote a review of the original book (reposted in July). 

This year, Pivar revised his book and a new edition was published.  PZ wrote a couple of new reviews which were pretty scathing.

Pivar is now suing PZ Myers and Seed Magazine for $15 million for libel for, among other things, calling him a “classic crackpot”.  Luckily, almost all the legal commenters on the various posts scattered around the blogosphere related to this case have said that the case has no grounds and will likely be tossed out of court.

O Brave New World, that has such creatures in it!

(I have been quite remiss about responding to comments lately; I blame both undue stress and lack of broadband.  And then I hang my head in shame.  I do, I do like comments, and I will [I will!] respond more!  Promise!)

I have previously bemoaned the gender-stereotype-reinforcing nature of the U.S.A.’s commercial giants, who ensure that all girls’ toys and clothes are varying shades of purple and pink, and boys’ toys are primary colors and their clothes are earth tones.

Today comes reportage of a study that proclaims that women just durn naturally prefer pink.  It’s inherent.  It’s in the genes, gals!  It’s an evolutionary advantage–female gatherers being able to hone in on ripe fruits, etc.

Boy howdy!  How’d they figger that one out?

Well, let’s see.  They flashed 1000 different colored rectangles on a screen and had the men and women being studied pick (quickly) the ones they preferred.

Does this strike anyone else as…um…well, not proving the idea that the preference is inherently gender-linked?

I mean…how’d they ensure that all the men and women studied haven’t been previously influenced by all the gender-specific coloring that they’re exposed to from day one for the past 30 or 40 years?  (It’s either Granny J or Great-Grandma who says that, in her day, the preferred “girly” color was powder blue.)

Really.  It’s a serious question.  The only way I can figure that they would be able to really determine this is if they grabbed men and women from the deepest, darkest, most isolated depths of the Amazon jungle for their experiment.  Any grown man or woman in the U.S. or England or other westernized country has been bombarded with culturally determined “right” colors for their sex from the day they were born, via TV ads, newspaper ads, clothing and toy selections in stores, etc.

You can, I guess, test babies’ preferences by that old standard, “which one does the baby pay more attention to?”, like they do with questions of whether babies prefer their parents’ faces to strangers’ faces, or the scents of familiar people versus strangers.

But to claim that testing adults who have been conditioned from birth to gravitate towards certain color schemes will prove that this tendency is inherent is just a bunch of hooey in OmegaMom’s well-considered and expert opinion.

One of the lovely advantages of having a good internet connection is the ability to look up things that interest you, quickly and easily.  And, say, read government PDF documents.  (Unhindered By Talent notes how having the internets at your fingertips is akin to former years’ having an encyclopedia handy in the house.)

So yesterday, we wandered down to Port MacArthur, as I mentioned in passing in my previous post.  To get there, we took the road down to Knok (for a piCNIC in KNOK, har har).  Then we drove down to Loon Bay, where the road ended up dead-ending at a grassy airstrip in the middle of some trees.

Loon Bay turning out a disappointment, we were driving back, and passed a sign to Port MacArthur.

Imagining a quaint, run-down old Alaska port, I pointed down the road and said, “Let’s go there!”

So we drove.  The paved road ended and the gravel road began.  But, dayum, that was a sweet gravel road–wide, spacious, flat, surrounded by the usual thickets of trees and underbrush.  And it kept going.  There were very very few other drivers.

Soon, I saw, in the sky, a jet.  And then another.  And then we saw the Inlet.  We drove a little further, to an intersection in the middle of nowhere, with stop signs.  ??  We turned.  We drove a bit more.

And there, at the end of this 14-mile drive, was the port.

Brand spanking new.

Deep-water dock (one).

Angled flume to bring unknown cargo down to the ships.

Quiet.  Deserted.  A sign about security, but easy enough for the dotter and the dawg to just skip around the sides of the gate.

And there, across the inlet, close enough to spit on (well, almost–it’s about 4 miles), was Big City, with all its port facilities and docks and 300,000 people and the international airport.

We returned back home curious and intrigued.  We did a search on Port MacArthur (not the real name).  And we found the most interesting stuff, including the aforementioned government PDF documents…

Let’s talk about the “Bridge To Nowhere” again.

There are actually two such bridges which were lumped together in Senator Stevens’ and Representative Don Young’s multi-billion dollar pork dealie.

One is a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island.  Gravina Island is where the airport for Ketchikan sits.  There’s a ferry that goes between the two every fifteen minutes.  For some reason, the Alaska Powers That Be want a bridge there instead.

The PTB also want a bridge between Big City and Port MacArthur.  Salon happily called the Port MacArthur area a place where 1 person resides, and sneered at Knok as a bustling megalopolis of 22, carefully ignoring the fact that there are 66,000+ people living within minutes of Knok in an area that is estimated to grow almost ten times the population within 20 to 30 years.  The general consensus is that Stevens Young et al. want the bridge to benefit the son-in-law (? some sort of relative, at least), who owns a whopping 80 acres of land right by the port, and it’s just to give big bucks to the bridge builders and let son-in-law sell his waterfront property to rich folks who want swanky homes on the Inlet.

But nosing around things in relation to the port, we discovered that it’s not a small plan at all.

Y’see, let’s look at transportation in Big City.

They’ve got an international airport.  The city is growing.  They need more flight capability.  But the airport is right in the middle of town, constrained by its neighbors.  They can’t build a new one inland, because there’s a whole slew of mountains tied up in a state park.  They can’t build to the east, because that state park comes right down to the Inlet to the south.  They can’t build to the west, because suburbia is already sprawling that way, plus there’s an inconvenient military base or two in the way as well.

But…but…a mere four miles away, right across the Inlet, there’s hundreds of thousands of acres of empty land, and a borough that has ambitions and (perhaps?) a desire for an influx of tax and federal money.

Also, any goods that are unloaded in the port at Big City that are due to go north have to detour east around the Inlet, and then west again, before they go north.  But…but…if there were a road at Port MacArthur…or a railroad…and more of a port…the ships could unload there, and land transportation would shave about one hour and sixty or so miles off the trip for each trailer coming off any container ship.  Ditto for any cargo going out, like, say, coal, or lumber, or oil.

We’re talking Big Bucks here.

Build that bridge.  Pave that road (scheduled to have been done this summer, but it looks like it’ll be another year or so).  Suddenly, shipping that comes into Big City can bypass that sixty miles/one hour detour, and head north right away.

And it just so happens that the Master Plan for 2020 includes a “preferred location” for the new international airport.

Just north of Port MacArthur.

So imagine you want to grow.  Imagine you have thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of folks who would like a less expensive place to live.  Imagine you want to move your airport.  Imagine you’d like to save millions–maybe billions–on shipping costs. 

If you only had an itty bitty 4-mile-long bridge…

(Currently there are also plans for a passenger ferry, which, of course, the Sierra Club and others infinitely prefer.  But if the long-term plans are truly what is outlined in those government documents, a ferry just won’t do, not at all.)

Anyway, it’s very interesting what you can find on the internet as the result of a tourist jaunt to a quaint, deserted port.

By the way, none of the journalists’ stories I’ve found so far on the “Bridge To Nowhere” seem to have any clue about all this ambitious expansion, this brand-new industrial complex that is envisioned.  They’re just too busy having fun poking at bridges to empty, unpopulated land, and yammering about pork.

Yeah, it’s pork, but lemme tell you, it’s pork with sweep and vision.  It’s not a “Bridge to Nowhere”…it’s a case of “If you build it, they will come.”

A one-month hookup with the local EV-DO wireless network.  Woohoo!  Now I can surf and talk to my heart’s delight.

AND, more importantly, I can work on Monday!

Woohoo!

I can already tell you it’s not as fast as my cable modem was back in Small Mountain University Town…so I think we’ll be going the cable route when we move into the new house.  But the EV-DO wireless network is fast enough, and we’re now able to do Bonnie & Matt’s sixth week routine from ITV’s Dancing On Ice once again.  The dotter will be happy.

When I muttered to OmegaDad that the daycare/after-school care place I had found wasn’t really my cup of tea, he decided to question some coworkers.  Cassiopiea (very nice lady) mentioned that our local gymnastics place does daycare too.  Since I had been planning to haul the kiddo off to gymnastics to get some of the Tigger-ishness out, I leaped upon the idea.

Thank goodness.  Much more my cup of tea.

So when Monday rolls around, the dotter will be in for a week of preschool and I’ll be a-workin’ again.  And then next Monday she starts kindergarten.  And then that Wednesday is closing (CLOSING!!!!).  (Countdown:  10 days.)  And we can start really settling in and not feeling like tourons any more.

Speaking of tourons, we have been friggin’ tourons from hell lately.  We’ve driven off to see The Big One (from a distance, but it was clear and lovely and they’re damned huge mountains).  We’ve checked out the tidal bore in the Inlet.  We’ve discovered the tiny little Port MacArthur, which is, apparently, a logging port and nothing more at the end of a 14-mile road; we’ve checked out Wacheetna, the quaint tourist town at the confluence of the Big Lady, the Wacheetna, and the Matsuna rivers; and the small town museum for Knok, which was the big port once upon a time, until the railroad came through and turned Big City into The Port.

It’s been fun.

There are many aspects of our modern life which are ubiquitous, so ubiquitous that we don’t even think of them.

Friends of ours were due to be married on Saturday, September 15, 2001 in California.  We had plane reservations and were getting excited about our mini-vacation in the Bay Area.

Then, of course, 9-11 happened.  Life everywhere came to a horrified standstill.

Planes, also, came to a standstill.  But word came through to us:  D. and C. were still planning to get married, come hell or high water.  They were driving straight through from North Carolina to California, not stopping at all, and they’d be there.  So, given that they were toughing it out with a cross-country drive the likes of which we hadn’t seen since we were in our late teens, we couldn’t be outdone…since no planes were running, we would do our more usual thing and drive out there.

The eerie thing about that drive–aside from constantly worrying that there was going to be another horrendous terrorist attack, and speculating what it would be–was that the skies were totally empty.

There were no contrails.

None.

It made us realize, at a gut level, just how many airplanes usually travel across the U.S., and how accustomed we were to seeing jets fly by, and seeing the residual contrails.  It left us feeling disjointed.

I realized this past week that one of the things that I’ve been subliminally missing here is jet contrails.

Not a one.

Oh, we have oodles of little airplanes scooting across the sky.  Small airplanes are an Alaskan fact of life; there are tiny little grassy airstrips everywhere, and floatplanes docked on all the lakes.

But jets?  No jets.  No contrails.  If you look at one of the data visualization maps of air traffic, you’ll see that most of Alaska is…off the beaten path, as it were.  The bottom parts of Alaska are hubs of trans-Pacific flights, but nothing more. 

In this case, however, it doesn’t leave me feeling disjointed.  The disjuncture felt before was because of the contrast with our long-term experience.  My realization this week was, rather, a sudden surprise:  Oh!  There are no jets traveling around here!  Which was not a disjuncture because I have no experience here–to me, this is just another facet of living in the Final Frontier.

A semblance of normalcy is something I’d dearly like.

The Shoebox has a little dormitory refrigerator.  It’s a very nice dormitory refrigerator, but as a place to store any amount of food, it kind of sucks.

So, this week’s menu, so far: 

• Fresh salmon, from our B&B manager’s freezer.  It seems that she regularly has guests who fill her freezer with fresh-caught salmon.  She asked me, somewhat desperately, if we were interested in some salmon.  Har.  This had the advantage of not using space in our mini-fridge.
• Salmon salad, using leftover salmon from the night before.  The salmon took up a small amount of space in a zippie.  The spinach for the salad is now eating up large chunks of free space.
• Grilled cheese sandwiches.  Cheese is small.  The bread goes in a drawer.
• Bar-B-Q from a tub.  The tub doesn’t take up too much space.
• Tuna Helper.

We are used to buying milk in gallon jugs.  The first gallon we stored on its side on the second shelf.  The second gallon, the second day, leaked–which we discovered upon seeing a small white river oozing out from underneath the Shoebox Fridge onto the nice pine flooring.

The end result of these dinners (and similar gourmet delicacies) is that:

• I am on the verge of a carnivorous hunt for vegetables.  Stalking, searing high-intensity focus on the prey, that kind of thing.  Lock your veggies up, because I will swoop down upon them and scarf them up with a red predatory glow in my eyes, my tongue lolling out.
• We are eating far too many carbohydrates.
• We are eating far too much cheese.
• We are spending far too much money.

That last one is a real issue; the others don’t bother me as much, except that my hunt for vegetables may cause problems with folks in Small Town Alaska as I swoop through their gardens wreaking havoc.

But, damn, it eats up your money to not be able to buy food and store it.  Given that food costs are a tad more in Alaska to begin with, I end up feeling like we’re hemorraghing money.  (For instance, the price of my little frappucinos?  Oy!  What had been $5.50 with a savings card in Small Mountain University Town is running $7.50 with a savings card here.  ::whimper!::  So I’m trying to be good with the fraps…)

It makes me realize just how difficult it could be for people who live in shoeboxes on a regular basis.  What if you can’t afford anything more than a room or two, and you have a family?  Setting aside the psychological effects of the crowding (and trust me, all those studies of rats in crowded conditions are highlighted in my memory these days!), the difficulties of creating a balanced healthy diet when you have limited storage space for raw ingredients and you can’t store leftovers.

So right now, we’re waiting.

Two rooms wears thin, very quickly.

Dial-up wears thin, very quickly.

I start up work again on Monday; I’ve located a daycare/after-school care provider but haven’t figured out how to access the DSL here at the Shoebox.

The biggest problem (aside from being On Top Of Each Other All The Time) is that everything is up in the air for another week or two.  Closing is on the 28th. 

Then there’s our buyout.  We’re waiting on that.  We get an advance to help with closing on the new house, but we’re just waiting and waiting and waiting for the official buyout notice.

Once closing goes through, we’ll have either DSL or cable.  Once closing goes through, we’ll have six rooms, two bathrooms, and a garage to wander through.  Once closing goes through, I’ll have an office.  Once our buyout goes through, we’ll have a second car.

Sorry for no exciting, scintillating discussion today.  I’m just frazzled and frustrated and hate being up in the air.

The advice from old-timers here is, if it’s clear and sunny out during August, take advantage of it.  This includes OmegaDad’s new boss outright saying that if it’s a nice day, he should consider taking it off.

Well, okay, then.  So Friday we went off to Margaret Pass in the sun.  The part I love–with the Little Lady River barreling madly down from the mountains–turns out to be only a portion of the whole drive.  You go further on, and you find alpine meadows with blueberry bushes.

The lady who manages the shoebox we’re living in told us, “Oh, you’ll know when you’ve hit the blueberries by all the bottoms sticking up”, and, sure enough, she was right.

First, we stopped for a picnic at Constitution Peak.  The dotter has somehow learned to skip like a mountain goat from rock to rock, and she was darting around the edge of the river.  She claimed it wasn’t cold; I don’t believe her.

Constitution Peak rears up from the road and river in an almost sheer stretch; its definitely the “angle of repose” all the way up.   This is avalanche country, and there are warnings alongside the road (along with the “Recreational Gold Mining Allowed” signs).  The mountain is covered with vivid green vegetation and looks emerald in the sunlight.

The river leaps and tumbles, and everywhere you look there are huge boulders and waterfall shelves.  I hope the color shows in these pictures; part of the river is your normal river color, but the rest is an icy aqua blue.

After the picnic, we headed on up the road.  And up the road.  And up the road.  Into the mountains.  Higher and higher.  (In reality, though the mountains are alpine mountains and we were above the treeline, we only got to 3,998 feet on this trip, which surprised me.  I was thinking alpine vegetation equals alpine height; in the Arizona area we were from, you need to be up at about 12,000 feet to hit the treeline.

We were peering about, wondering where the blueberries were, when we turned a corner and saw them:  people with their bottoms in the air as they leaned over picking blueberries.  So we stopped at a handy parking area, emerged from the car, and picked berries.

Then it was time to head on, up and up some more, to Peak Lake, where we encountered paragliders leaping off cliffs, some families hiking with their dogs, and more out-of-state plates than I’ve seen in a week.

So.  It’s God’s Country.  Listen to OmegaMom lecturing herself about how she needs to wait for an entire year before she makes any judgments.  We’ve got to do a winter here to know what it’s really like.  Word has it that this past week is extremely unusual weather for August, that August is generally rainy and chilly every day.  But so far…so far…well, it’s just glorious.

(BTW, excuse some of the lousy pictures.  For some reason, my PhotoDraw is behaving badly and some of my edited pics are pixelating badly.  Bah!)

So.  Moose are apparently somewhat unpredictable.  They can kill people.  The best thing to do is to never, EVER get between a mama moose and her calf.  If a moose lays back its ears, lowers its head, and the hair on its neck starts to rise up, you are in for an aggressive charge.

The idea is to (a) make sure you’re aware ahead of time, so you can angle away from any moose you encounter, taking an alternate route; or (b) take shelter behind a tree or rock or car if the moose is charging; or (c) curl up on the ground and protect your head and neck if the moose has charged and is now kicking you.

I am so happy to learn this.

Some further info and stories:

• June is the most dangerous time of year for moose encounters.
• Moose encounter tales from all over the northern U.S.
• An excerpt from “Don’t Get Eaten:  The Dangers of Animals That Attack”.  Note the cute yellow highlights that censor the word “moose”…
• “Moose more dangerous than bears??” topic on Alaska Outdoors forums

There you have it, from your intrepid Alaska correspondent.  If you’re ever trapped by a moose, you now have some information on what to do.

Thanks for all the congrats on the new house.  We are busy collecting documents and what-not, to get the mortgage locked in before the entire U.S. mortgage industry comes tumbling down.

For those who are thinking that they aren’t hardy enough for the winters, I will give blow-by-blow reports.  Some folks from Minnesota and one of the Dakotas have claimed to OmegaDad and me that the winters there were much worse than the winters here, for what it’s worth.  I’m thinking the adjustment I will face is the question of 19 hours of darkness, ugh.  Anyone with any knowledge of full-spectrum lamps, and willing to recommend one, feel free to do so in the comments!

We got the house!  We’re trying to arrange for early occupancy (i.e., renting for a week or two before official closing), because otherwise OmegaMom is likely to be arrested for murder, specifically, murder of OmegaDad, OmegaDotter, and OmegaDawg.  The OmegaCats are okay, because they don’t push.  Or get under foot.  Or bang into me.  Or any of those other things that Closeness, Extreme Closeness, brings to a family stuck in two rooms.

The house has an acre of land.  It looks like a two-car garage with an apartment on top, but it has been remodeled inside, and the living room/kitchen area is bright and airy, with wood laminate floors.  Downstairs is a smallish family room, a third bedroom, the laundry, and a second bathroom.

And there are closets.  I am in heaven.

Elementary school, it turns out, is just a few blocks away from the new house.  So today OmegaDotter and I trotted off to the new school to register.

Let’s see what’s truly different about school in Alaska:

• One of the hazards your child is to be warned about, if the child is going to walk or bike to school, is moose.  There is a line in the parents’ handbook that advises parents to tell their child what to do in case of a moose encounter.  Um.  I’m kind of clueless there, folks.  What does one do in case of a moose encounter???
• Recess every day, unless the wind chill is lower than -10F.  Yes, that’s minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Students may not bring sleds or skis to school.  The school will, however, provide roll-up sleds for recess…no skis, though.
• PE includes cross-country skiing.  Okay, maybe they do provide skis.
• Students bringing ice skates to school must have blade covers for the skates.  You will be interested to know that a paper bag is not considered a skate bag by this elementary school.  Who’d've thunk it.
• Unlike Arizona, where the alternate language is likely to be Spanish, here it’s Russian.  So, the letter for the English-as-a-second-language folks is written in Cyrillic.
• Students must bring snowpants to school.
• The emergency drills include earthquake preparedness.  The emergency procedures include a requirement for a local person to pick up your child, since so many Small Alaska Town residents actually work 40-50 miles away in Big City, and there are some bridges that could collapse in case of an earthquake.

Some Alaska observations:

• I didn’t realize just how accustomed I was to multiple state license plates until I got here.  I have seen one non-Alaska plate that isn’t on our car; it was from Florida.
• Someone in the know tells me that the reason for all the latte shacks is that 40-60% of the adults in Small Alaska Town work in Big City, and that the wintertime drive requires a jolt of java to wake one up going and keep one awake returning.
• I’ve found Small Alaska Town’s playground:  Margaret Pass.  Way up Margaret Pass, there’s a glacier that pumps lots of water into the Little Lady River, which rumbles and tumbles downhill over huge boulders next to the road up the pass.  This is a gorgeous river, with icy blue water.  It’s supposed to have lots of salmon.  (This is Good.)  The Margaret Pass road is perfect for a nap run for the dotter.
• If you’ve ever heard of the “Bridge to Nowhere”, a classic Alaska boondoggle, I am now here to tell you that the Bridge to Nowhere is not a boondoggle.  The lower 48 media portrays it as a bridge that connects two areas that don’t have anything–one side just empty land, the other side a tiny Eskimo village.  The lower 48 media needs to do its homework better…Small Alaska Town and its environs is a bedroom community for Big City, and to get to SAT from BC requires a drive up one side of a large ocean arm, crossing the river, and then driving back west along the other side of the ocean arm.  It turns out that the “tiny Eskimo village” is a whole slew of suburban subdivisions, and the Bridge to Nowhere would actually provide a shorter commute, save gas, and keep emissions down.

After a few days of chilly rain, we have had a few days of glorious 70s sunshine.  With the sunshine comes action similar to Arizona’s monsoon season:  the mountains to all sides develop thunderheads atop their peaks, classic cumuli towering up into the sky, with iron-grey undersides.  Small Alaska Town valley, though, is drenched in the sunshine.

Things are extremely green here.

And extremely small.

The dotter, who is bouncy like Tigger, is having problems adjusting to the cramped living quarters.  We have already had a glass of milk break all over the living area, which resulted in mommy and daddy being grumpy and the dotter being weepy.&nbs