OmegaMom

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.  We are trying to instill in the dotter the idea of “think first before you do things”.  Hmmm.  We’ll see how this works.

In the meantime, I’m going to give you an idea of our living space.

Here we have the house in which we are residing.  Nice house! 

But we only have two rooms of it, the ones that this cute little porch leads to.

This is the park-like lawn which we see from the porch.

This is the lake with all the little seaplanes.

This…this is our “living room”.  I figure it’s about 8×10.  We are a Loving Family, and find the closeness calming and intimate.  (Har.  If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I am quite willing to sell to you for a small pittance.)

This is the bedroom.  I think it’s about 11×11.  The black lounge that OmegaDad is sitting on is a massage chair!  And, oooh, it’s nice!  We fight over who gets to use it (when we remember it’s there).

There’s also a bathroom, but I didn’t feel like angling myself to show it to you.  The bathroom, for some odd reason, doesn’t have a door.  If you want privacy while taking a leak, you need to chase everyone out of the bedroom into the spacious living room, and close the bedroom door.

We went looking at houses today.  It was a loooong day.  But.  But…

We put an offer on a house.  It’s cute.  It’s bigger than our previous house.  It has an acre of land.  It has a nice kitchen, lots of closet space (closets!!!), and lots of laminated wood flooring, which appeases OmegaDad, whose ambition after we emptied out the old house is to Never Have Carpeting Again.

I’ll let you know how the offer goes; we should know Monday or Tuesday.

It was a long plane ride.  A long two plane rides.  We got to Small Town, Alaska, at about 10 p.m. Arizona time.  We went to bed an hour later, and it was still bright outside (though overcast).

Our temporary quarters are cute.  If I were living by myself, it would be perfect.  There’s a tiny living area/kitchenette, plus a bedroom with a bathroom.  The bathroom doesn’t have a door… 

The main problem–aside from the teeny tininess–is that the only internet access is via dialup.

This is the in-law apartment in L’s house.  L’s husband is a retired airline pilot; he and a bunch of friends purchased land around the edge of a lake, and all of them have private airplanes that they can either land on the grassy airstrip or on the lake.  So you turn off the main road onto the driveway, and there’s this huge STOP sign that informs any driver that airplanes may land on the grassy airstrip crossing the driveway unexpectedly.  L’s son works for Alaska Airlines, and is quite cute and very interesting.  L herself was baking bread today, and brought us a loaf of bread.

Today I saw fifty kazillion craggy mountains, a glacier or two, rushing rivers (especially glacial rivers, which are an interesting iron grey color due to all the loess, silt from the glacier–they actually look like rushing rivers of cement).  We went to the farmer’s market, which featured a singer singing all of OmegaDad’s favorite songs by his favorite singers; we ran into a lady with a child adopted from China (alas, she lives in Seattle, and was merely visiting her folks).  The people and the community feeling was very similar to the feeling from Small Mountain University Town!

We went to a reindeer farm and fed caribou.

We went to Don’s Trout House for dinner; Don’s Trout House doesn’t serve trout, but does serve steak.  OmegaDad claims that we need to go to Nick’s Steak House to get trout.

Oh, yeah, and the sun sort of came out for a while, which was nice.

So, yeah, it’s kind of pretty here.

But the really interesting thing is that Alaskans must have serious caffeine dependencies.  On the 15-minute drive from the teeny-tiny apartment into downtown Small Town, there were at least 15 latte shacks.

Just how can a pair of towns with maybe a total of 20,000 people support that many latte shacks?  Color me puzzled.

More later.  Somewhere along the line, I’ll post pics and respond to comments, and maybe read other people’s posts.  But this dial-up access is for the birds.  Not only is it slow, it blocks the phone line…

Tomorrow we start looking at houses.  Believe me when I say we’re highly motivated.

OmegaDad has arrived in Small Town, Alaska, and he and dawg are ensconced in the temporary little apartment that the relocation bennies cover.

So, since he’s there, it was now time to pack up turtles and ship them to him.  Carefully following instructions garnered from TurtleHomes, I had three little boxes for the turtles, and proceeded to pack them…

First, we have Frankie, our smallest, freshly cleaned…Frankie, somewhat timid, retreated to his shell and cowered…

We have Frankie placed upon a bed of moistened paper towels…

We then cover him with crumpled newspaper, so he won’t get excited and tip himself over (a tipped-over turtle will smother if he stays in that position too long).

Then we carefully taped the box, with one of the hinge flaps tucked inside, so that there was a ventilation opening.

We did all three like this, resulting in a Tower O’ Turtles:

At this point, I stopped and did what all turtle-handlers should do:  scrubbed my hands and then used a wee tad of bleach with water.  Turtles carry salmonella, even nice, long-lived friends of the family like Yurtle, Halley, and Frankie.

Then we put crumpled newspaper into a cardboard box (complete with air/ventilation holes) and laid the taped plastic boxes in their nest.

All nice and snug.  Then we labeled the hell out of the outside of the box, lots of “THIS END UP” messages, and “LIVE ANIMALS”, and a carefully drawn and cut-out turtle from the dotter.

At which point, it was time to run errands.  The bank…deposit a check from Great-Grandma.  Oops, there will be a hold put on it until Friday.  Hmmm.  Oh, yeah, and we won’t take the dotter’s piggy bank; you will have to sort and wrap the coins before we will accept them.

Harrumph.  Back out to the car to our next stop, the UPS store.

Oops.  The UPSStore won’t take the turtles.  But they suggest going to the UPS depot in the next town over; perhaps they’ll take the turtles.

Onto the UPS depot.  At the depot, the lady at the counter informed us that they wouldn’t take the package.  There are, it seems, schools with courses on “how to properly package live turtles for shipment”.  No privately packed and privately shipped turtles allowed.  What you see next is OmegaMom making a moue of frustration:

We next went to Pet Smart to see if they had turtle shipping available, or any great ideas.  The nice girl at Pet Smart said, alas, that they didn’t do private shipping.  Maybe Fedex?  Or the local pet store, a more “mom-and-pop” type of operation?

We returned to OmegaGranny’s house, defeated.  A phone call to Fedex resulted in no go, as well.  The local pet store owners (friends of OmegaGranny’s next-door neighbors) weren’t in.  We were stymied.

But, as luck would have it, Alaska Airlines will let you ship turtles in the baggage compartment.  Woohoo!  A nice young lass from AA helped me make the confirmation that we would be taking turtles with us, and it was on to the next errand.

In a call to the Former State Capital Cheap Rent-a-Car franchise, I asked, “How late are you open for car returns?”  They said 5:30.  We eyeballed the clock, and I headed out.  (First, we tried to contact Cuz E., who in the midst of all the phone calls had kidnapped my laundry bag of dirty clothes and taken them hostage to the local laundromat.  See, I would need a ride home from the Cheap Rent-A-Car franchise…But we couldn’t contact Cuz E.  So I headed out anyway, planning to hang out, read my book, and wait for rescue/a ride.

I drove out.  I got there.  Immediately I was suspicious:  It said “Cheap Rentals–Truck Rentals”.  Hmm.  Lo & behold, it turns out that, while they used to do the car rentals, they no longer did so.  (Why didn’t they say something when I called earlier?)  And the nearest Cheap Rent-A-Car where I could return the car?  Well, it was either…

Small Mountain University Town (!!!) or Valley of Death (!!!).  Since the whole plan had been for me to ditch the rental here and us all to be ferried down to the airport in Cuz E’s car, this seemed to put the kibosh on OmegaMom and dotter having a cushy ride to the airport.

But all is well.  We are caravanning to the airport, me in the rental car to the car rental return, and OmegaDotter, OmegaGranny, Cuz E, E’s daughter C, the cats, the turtles, and the luggage in Cuz E’s car.  Meet up at the ticket counter, make sure all is well with cats and turtles (with a back-up of taking them back up the hill with E, OmegaGranny, and C if the airline changes its mind), and then…

…on to Alaska.

We arrive in Alaska around 7 p.m. Pacific Time.

We are here. I am tired and I have a cold.

The dotter wants daddy. Daddy is en route between Beaver, UT, and Great Falls, MT, so he’s not available.

The house is not quite empty; I need to trek back up the mountain to finish cleaning and collect houseplants.

Damn, I’m tired!

It’s very odd how echo-y a house gets without its stuff. 

It’s also very depressing (and distressing) to realize how many dustbunnies have been living in this house with us for all these years.  Ugh.  Of course, an ordinary fairly decent housekeeper wouldn’t have them.  Or only a few.  But a bad housekeeper (aka “Me”) has an amazing ability to collect dust, grunge, dustbunnies, and other schmutz.

The end result is that I’m dreadfully embarassed.  And glad that it’s only the movers (who seem to be really nice guys) who are seeing it and dealing with it.

The Alaska Thru Van is parked out front.  The furniture and the sea of boxes is out of the house.  There’s still a buncha junk in the garage, which the guys will arrive at 7:30 a.m. to pack and load.

Spacemom asked what The Plan is for the next few weeks.

First–tomorrow.  The bank, for us to get a Power of Attorney notarized, and to deposit the dotter’s money.  A last cleaning.  Some painting.  I hope to ferry the dotter off to OAOTL’s house for a while, and to K’s house, and maybe to R’s house.  I take houseplants to the vet’s, and offer some to the neighbors.  OmegaDad outfits the automobile.

Sunday–OmegaDad and the dawg set out bright and early in the morning.  I go around taking pictures of places for mementoes, load up tomatoes and Christmas cactus, and head down the hill to OmegaGranny’s.

Monday–Veg.

Tuesday–A visit with Singing Bird, I’m hoping!

Wednesday through August 2–Veg.  Swim with the dotter.  Take mamasan and the dotter off to various lakes and fun stuff.

August 2–the dotter, the cats and I drive down to the Valley of Death and get on an airplane to Alaska.  OmegaDad (hopefully!) meets us there and we drive off to Small Town, Alaska, and our itty bitty in-law apartment on the lake with a bazillion retired airline pilots.

Thereafter–The Alaska Adventure, including househunting.

Oh, yeah–I am now an official 3/4th time telecommuter taking 4 weeks’ vacation and then starting work again when the dotter starts school!

Our house is mired in boxes.  Boxes flood the living room.  Boxes make the office a (dusty and sneezy) maze.  Boxes sit proudly in the middle of the kitchen.

The cupboards are bare.

The dotter’s room features an ungodly number of boxes labeled “toys”.  I foresee a severe pruning once we get into another house.  Yes, it could have been done beforehand.  If we hadn’t had folks visiting the first weekend after we learned…if we hadn’t needed to fix up and paint the bathrooms and the kitchen and the hallway…if we had only had some more time.

The cats are upset.  The dawg is upset.

Last night, we asked the dotter to pick out two stuffed animals to take with us, at which point it became apparent that there was either an inability to understand the concept of “six weeks without our stuff” or a determined reluctance to believe it.  OmegaDad and I sat on our bed with a dotter snuggled with her head pushed into my chest and explained–again–the whole concept of “moving”.  Oh, she gets it, but she doesn’t want to get it.

OmegaDad’s crew threw him a goodbye lunch yesterday.  My crew threw me a goodbye lunch today.  I have yet another goodbye lunch at the local sushi joint with my supervisor tomorrow.  My supervisor has been joking about “the tundra” and igloos and Northern Exposure.

We located my passport and OmegaDad’s, but not the dotter’s.  However, I did find a fairly official looking Adoption Agreement with English translation, and have known (all along) where our official red-bound document with pics and seals is.  These documents go with me (except, of course, OmegaDad’s passport).

The big moving truck with “Alaska Thru Traffic” or some such specialized ad slogan on it will be loaded tomorrow.

We’re really moving.

Really.

OMG.

Once again, we didn’t have much rain.  But we did have an awesome rainbow stretching across the sky as the dotter and I drove home.  If you look really closely at the picture, you’ll see the second rainbow above the first.

It’s not as spectacular as the one OmegaDad and I saw one day which was so vivid, so vibrant, that it was as if there were a fancy neon sign in the sky…that one had multiple people pulling off the highway to stop and take pictures, it was so amazing.

But this one was pretty bright, showed the entire arc, and had a flitting second arc that faded in and out of sight.

The dotter informed me that she knew a song about rainbows.  I was thinking of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, but then she started singing “The Rainbow Connection”.

I’ll take this lovely rainbow as a Sign.

OmegaDad and I spent an hour at the bank, signing things and having them notarized.  OmegaDad had taken guppies off to the aquarium store, and apparently our wildly mutated guppies wowed the employees there.  They asked him if he was a breeder…hah.  Many of the guppies were purchased in a futile attempt to feed them to some turtles.

Tomorrow the packers arrive.  We’re trying to get last-minute stuff sorted out.  I’ll try to update tomorrow night!

The bathroom.  For most people, but not for me.  As I’ve mentioned before, when I go in to take my morning shower, the dotter invariably soon comes in needing to use the toilet.

Furthermore, if she is pooping, she demands company.  Hey, everyone’s got their quirks; I’m hoping that this one vanishes into the mists as she gets older.

To top it all off, this is where she tosses deep subjects at me.  Not the car; the car is where she gets words defined.

This morning, she asked what a nanny does.

In the Chinese adoption world, a “nanny” is what everyone calls the workers in the orphanages.  So I said that a nanny is someone who takes care of the children in the orphanage.

I have a story that I usually tell, but this time, it was time to sit down on the bathroom carpet while she did her stuff (”Ewww!  Don’t look, Mommy!”) and talk to her somewhat more seriously–at a more advanced level–about the whole story.

She wanted to know whether they took care of her forever before we “picked her”.

I told her that she was found at the gates of a factory/power plant, and that her mommy in China took care of her for a week before that.

She wanted to know why she was left there.  Oy.  So I had to talk–very superficially–about how people in China were only allowed to have one child.  She asked if that was why she was left there; I had to answer that I didn’t know, that there might be some other reason.

I also had to say that we didn’t “pick” her, but that she was chosen for us.

She asked if her first mommy was dead or sick; I said that I didn’t know, but I figured she was still alive and thought about her fairly often.

These conversations take place at odd moments.  I just grab them when they come, and do my best.  Just a few snippets, and then we move on to “Look, kiddo, aren’t you done yet?!” and dashing off to get hair combed and shoes on.

We’ve been trying to see lots of her buddies this past week and this week; when we were leaving to get together with K. at the park on Sunday, she exclaimed in a world-weary way, “Another playdate?!”  ::sigh::  “I’m having all these playdates because we’re moving to Alaska.”

Yah, sweetie.  Trying to cram them in.  OAOTL on Saturday, K. on Sunday, a gymnastics class with S. on Monday…Lets her see her buds, and me have an hour or two of down time.

I have some memes to do, but even memes take too much thinking right now.  So I will get to them when I get to them–I think I have been tagged for three memes, by Carol Ann, by GrannyJ, and by PreTzel.

So there’s one list.

Then there’s the list of cancellations:  Water, electricity, gas, garbage, newspaper, insurance on the Trusty Justy.

Then there’s the packing list:  OmegaDad needs stuff for 10-11 days on the road, with dawg.  OmegaDotter and I need a set of clothes for warm (down the hill with OmegaGranny) and cool and damp (Alaska).  I am to schlep a mighty collection of Christmas cactus down the hill with us to mom’s house; she, in turn, is to mail us cuttings so we can start our collection all over again.

Then there are the Things That Need To Be Done.

I have boxes of books to take to the local second-hand bookseller; word has it that they will actually pay money.  Not a lot.  But I had been under the impression that they would only do credit for other books, which wouldn’t work very well for us.

Aside from the Christmas cactus, we have a whole herd of houseplants to Do Something With.

Then there are the guppies and guppies and guppies and guppies.  And two growing plecostomi.  And a newt.  They are to be delivered to the local fish store on Wednesday.

Then there’s fifty kazillion goodbye lunches and a dinner or two.

And packing–carefully!–the dotter’s horse collection.  And a decision on which two stuffed animals can come with us to GrannyJ’s house…if any.  After all, there are animals there that will probably do in a pinch, though Calhoun or Bubby may be required.

The house is looking amazingly big.  One of the appraisers called OmegaDad the day after she visited, and she said, “Did you know that if you include the office (n.b.:  converted from one-half of the garage), your house is actually almost 1500 square feet, not 1248, like the county says?”  Suddenly, it looks like it.  Which makes the 1500 sq. ft. houses we’ve been looking at on the internet more dicey, in my opinion.  Though, of course, those houses have closets (CLOSETS!!!!), and two-car or three-car garages that aren’t sliced down the middle for the office-cum-junk-room.

We still have our eyes on one particular house, which is still available.  When asked why it was still available (it’s spectacular, or at least to us it is), the realtor opined that it was “too far out of town”.

We shall see.

Kris asked how long I plan to be offline.  Amazingly enough, if I can get my hands on a computer on a regular basis, no time at all.  Assuming, of course, that our temporary quarters have some type of internet connection.  (OMG.  What if there isn’t?  ACK!)  GrannyJ has a fine Mac, so I’ll be posting from there, and, while OmegaDad is taking the laptop, once we hook up, I’ll have my hot little hands on it once again, and will be able to cruise by an internet cafe or something if the temp quarters don’t have internet.  (ACK!)

The dotter has been singing “Happy Together” with the Turtles CD in the car, but she doesn’t have all the words down quite right yet.  I thought the post title was especially fun.

One and Only True Love stopped by with his mom and dad to present an oh-so-sweet piece of artwork, full of hearts and and flowers and “best friends”, to the dotter.  So OAOTL’s mom and I sat around chatting, while dad went off to look at yard sales, and then, when he returned, he asked what we were going to do with the Trusty Justy.  Sold!

Then they hauled the dotter and her bike off with them for an afternoon with OAOTL.  Ah, joy!  Another few hours of being able to pack and paint and clean (even more) without the dotter underfoot!

OmegaDad and I have a yin and yang thing going on.  Remember how totally freaked out I was?  Well, now that we have less than a week (the packers are coming on Thursday, the loaders on Friday), and we’ve painted and fixed up bathrooms and hallways and had Merry Maids in to scrub cabinets in the kitchen, and removed many boxes from various spots of the house and tossed a large quantity of stuff, I am feeling much more relaxed.

OmegaDad, however, was all laid back and nonchalant when I was uptight, and is now frantic.  “We have only four days left!  How are we going to get everything done in time!”

Hah.

Well, it doesn’t help that the paperwork that the residential property handling company sent us had both our names misspelled.  I noticed that mine was wrong right away, so called up to have them FedEx us a new packet.  Then OmegaDad read it and noticed right away that his name was incorrect, too.  So they have to send us yet another copy of the packet.

But things will get done.  And I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It’s amazing what things you find when you’re cleaning and packing and scraping and painting in a house you’ve lived in for nine years.

There are, for instance, the three boxes of toddler 18-month-size clothes.  I could barely bear to look through them, because it was a trip down memory lane.  The cute little grey footed pajamas that the dotter wore in the pictures we took of our first Christmas home with her…alas, those pictures are on the other computer, or I would post one of them.

We had received our referral in early November, and our agency said that we would probably be traveling in six to eight weeks.  The previous three months we had been working (very slowly) on the living room, pulling out the old early-’80s splotchy brown carpeting, scraping and painting the walls, and, most importantly, sanding the logs.

Hand-sanding the logs.

Which is what we had done in the utility room and both bedrooms…hand-sanded, slowly and carefully, sanded the “rustic” woodwork around the windows, and polyurethaned the logs and painted the window trim.

But when we hit the living room, what had worked in the much smaller rooms suddenly seemed to be taking forever–just like our wait for referral.  The 24-foot expanse of log on one wall was just overwhelming to us.

When we got the call, and the notice that we’d be traveling to China soon, we renewed our attack.  Sort of.  After all, we had six weeks to eight weeks to get it done, right?

Wrong.

Two weeks later, we got the call that we’d be traveling in…two more weeks!

Were we done with the logs?  Gawd, no.  Did we have carpet even ordered?  Nope.  Had we painted the sanded window trim and beams?  Nope.

Thanksgiving was coming up, which would automatically eat up two or three days in itself.

The 24-foot expanse just seemed more and more dire, as did the 24-by-24 expanse of flooring to remove nails from and screw down (screwed flooring squeaks a lot less).  OmegaDad and I were grim and determined, but it seemed a Sisyphean task.  The years of grime on the unfinished logs just weren’t coming off, and we were, by this time, sick and tired of hand-sanding.

Finally, the weekend before Thanksgiving, in an epic fight, I convinced OmegaDad that we should just rent ourselves a sandblaster and give it a try.  It would have been better to have a corn-blaster, as that’s the preferred way to go on refinishing logs; sand-blasting is too strong and shreds the surface of the logs, whereas corn-blasting is much gentler.  But corn-blasters for rent are few and far between, and expensive as hell…whereas you can find a sandblaster for rent at your handy-dandy local U-Rent-It place.

By the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, we had shoveled 600 pounds of sand into the sandblaster and out of the living room (post-sanding).  The grime was gone!  Of course, the surface of the logs was shredded, just as advertised.  But that shredded stuff was easily removed by our hand-sander, and suddenly we were making progress.  The blasted and sanded logs were smooth.  Sexy.  Alluring.  Easily polyurethaned.  A marathon two-day stint of coat after coat of polyurethane, and we were smitten by our newly gleaming and light logs.

We had also found that the local Home Debit had a relatively inexpensive Berber carpet that they would install within the week.  (It looked grey in the Home Debit store.  Really.  It did.  It didn’t look cream-colored.  No way!  Ahem.  It was cream-colored.  Let OmegaMom pass on some heartfelt advice:  Never.  Never, ever.  Do not EVER buy cream-colored Berber carpet in a house that has two cats, a large dawg, a husband who works with soils, and dirt roads.  Just do NOT do it.  Trust me.)

And we had buddies who descended upon us to prime the walls (24 feet with a cathedral ceiling).

We also had plane tickets to China, no living room furniture, and no more time.

We trekked off to China, leaving behind the newly refinished living room, with arrival back in the States circa December 22.

We celebrated our first Christmas with the dotter in a sparkling, light-filled living room with no furniture.  We were exhausted.  (Another piece of advice from OmegaMom–don’t start remodeling your home three months before you expect an adoption referral.)  But we had our darling dotter, dressed in her cute little grey bear-print footed jammies, and Christmas presents wrapped in colorful paper, and each other–and that’s what counted.

One of the many splendors of monsoon season is that bugs appear.  Poof!  Like they were freeze-dried, and the rains reconstitute them.  Even just a hint of the summer rains brings them out.

Some of the bugs are icky.  I hate, hate, hate the June Bugs; they are a kind of slimy tan color, they sit on screens and buzz, and they give me the heebie-jeebies.  I don’t know why I have such a visceral reaction, but they give me the creeps almost as much as earwigs do.

Some of the bugs are pretty ordinary, but interesting–we get hummingbird moths at this time of year as well, big, fat suckers that hover over flowers with humming wings, just like the hummingbirds (hence the name…what a surprise).

Then there are the scarab beetles.

Oh, I love the scarabs. 

The ones we have up here are brown with tan and light green stripes, about an inch-and-a-half long, officially called ten-lined june beetles.  The most interesting thing about them, in my opinion, is their lovely antennae, which are normally club-like brown things at the end of a stalk, but when they’re interested in something, the clubs spread out into a delicate fan.

They’re quite pretty and intriguing, but actually kind of dumb.

So the rains start up–even the slightest hint of rains–and the scarabs appear.  We can go out on the back deck by the door, and scoop up a scarab, admire it, and make it fan out its antennae.  They have tenacious little feet, so once you’ve got one on your hand, trying to shake it off is somewhat difficult…you have to shake hard enough to make it angry, at which point, it will hiss in irritation.

When I left Chicago, I soon found that the “night hawks” which were the sound of summer to me were nowhere to be found in the southwest.  I suspect that I will be saying farewell to my favorite scarabs, to be exchanged for (ugh) mosquitoes and black flies.  Hopefully, though, there will be other interesting small critters to discover in Alaska; I have read already that my favorite hummingbirds, the rufous hummers, actually do get as far north as Anchorage sometimes.  So we’ll try for the rufous hummers and see what kind of beautiful beetles we can find up there.

(Figlet–Yes, the rains do make our plants spring into bloom, just like the bugs–but I fear that our rains so far haven’t been enough to make things bloom.  If it does before we move, I’ll post some pics.)

I’m sure you guys can deal… from Passive-Aggressive Notes.

If you’re an IT person, or married to an IT person, or the child or parent or sibling of an IT person, you just have to check it out.

Friday night, I drove down the hill to OmegaGranny’s, the dotter sacked out in the back seat.  We got there, we dined with OG, returned to her house, and I immediately said, “Welp, kiddo, time for me to go!”

Then she dissolved into weeping.

Serious weeping.

Oh, dear.

Did I waver?

Nosirree, Bob.  Not a bit, not a whit.  I felt like a kitten killer as I drove off, but we had Things To Do, and a five-year-old underfoot, wanting entertainment, is not conducive to Doing Things.

I drove back up the hill in blissful quiet (the dotter thinks the CD changer in the car is just wonderful, and we’ve had a steady diet of the Turtles and the Beach Boys whenever she’s in the car).  I got home, and it was just me and OmegaDad.

Whoa!

I remember him!  He’s the guy I married!  I like him!  I enjoy being around him!

We spent from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. on Saturday scrubbing and packing and painting and other things.

And y’know what?  It was fun.  We Got Things Done.  We were able to take a breath after completing one project, then dive right into the next one, without worrying about feeding a child, or helping her with her horsies, or putting a new movie into the video or DVD player.  We heard no strains of Barbie.  There were no Sesame Street characters intruding on our concentration.  Nary a hair of a princess crossed our paths–or our minds.

We loved it.

And then…then…

We went out to dinner.  Just the two of us.  Together.  And had adult conversation–not x-rated adult conversation, just “what’s next on the agenda”, “omigosh, we’re moving to Alaska!”, “man, that fiddler is good!”, “I wonder what the artwork will be like up there” (after surveying the very modern southwest art in the restaurant), “We need to do x, y, and z by Tuesday”, and other mundane things.

We were able to sleep in the dark for two nights in a row.  We were able to wake up by ourselves two mornings in a row.  Both of us sank deep into weary repose immediately our heads hit the pillows, and the dawg snoring and the husband snoring didn’t wake me up (the dotter squeaking or snoring or rustling wakes me up–I’m still in that hyper-aware mode, bleah).

When we called OmegaGranny Saturday night, before heading out for dinner, the dotter, upon hearing daddy’s voice, began sobbing.  Then she asked for mommy.  Then she just wept incoherently on the phone.

I felt like a kitten killer again.  But, according to granny, she had been doing perfectly fine until we called.  (Granny already sounded a bit weary herself.)

So, despite feeling guilty as hell, and being tired as hell from the aforementioned scrubbing and packing and painting, I loved our weekend to ourselves, and plan to figure out how to do it as soon as we get to know people up in Alaska.  (”Excuse me?  Ma’am?  I see you have a five-year-old, too.  Here.  This one’s mine.  I’m sure she won’t be a bother to you tonight.  We’ll pick her up again tomorrow around five…”…pause…”Oh!  And what’s your name?  And your phone number?  Five o’clock!  Remember!  Bye!”)

Oops.  Forgot to add that she actually had a fine time at granny’s and was not a woeful weepy child when we arrived Sunday afternoon.

Okay, so as Singing Bird says, we southwesterners are rather monotonous at this time of year, yapping on and on about the weather, waiting for the rain, yearning for the monsoon season, wondering when it will start, and how long it will run, and how much rain we’ll get.

People in Texas right now must be bug-eyed at the thought of an entire region of the country wanting rain.  I’m sorry, folks.  I know you’ve been drowned to within an inch of your life, that you’re sick and tired of water.

But…being a southwestern gal, I have to dance and sing and spin about with my head arched back, just like a little kid.

It starts with tiny, wispy puffs of cloud.  As you watch, the puffs grow.  They expand.  They get fat.  They tumble over each other.  Go away for half an hour, and when you return, the little white wisps have turned into huge, towering thunderheads with leaden grey bottoms.

Usually, we have a week or two of those leaden grey bottoms producing only skeins of rain, thin veils that never reach the ground.

And then…then the miracle occurs.

Water!  Falling from the sky!

Being a born and bred Chicagah girl, there are times when my gut response to the first storms of monsoon season is just…totally incomprehensible.  After all, Chicago has one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world.  You dig a hole in the ground, and if you’re too close to the lake, you only have to dig about five feet before water starts showing up.  And, of course, it rains–wonderful, fierce midwestern storms, where you can feel the cold front passing through as the deciduous trees bend down before the wind.  The idea of just getting incoherently excited by water!  Falling from the sky! is bewildering to the Chicagah girl in me.

But there it is.

And there it was, today.  Rain.  Blessing of moisture, falling down on upturned faces in the office parking lot.  Sharp scent of hot rock and sun-warmed pines being touched by H2O.  Electrical excitement of watching the lightning sizzle between cloud and ground, and between cloud A and cloud B.

Alas, it wasn’t really much rain.  I think we managed a total of about .2 inches.  Enough to cause the aforementioned excitement, but not enough to really do diddley in the tinder-dry forest.

Last year, in June, there was a large fire in Way Cool Creek Canyon, to the west of Mills Park, the less hippy-dippy forest enclave to the south of us.  Fifteen miles away as the crow flies, but separated from us by the canyon, and by a highway.

Today’s storms brought our usual dozen or so fires started by lightning, the majority of them extinguished by hyper-vigilant firemen and women who are strung to the edge by the constant worry–”Is this the killer fire of the year?”  One of those fires, however, took hold.  Between, oh, 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., it had grown to (at least) 350 acres.  This fire is to the east of Mills Park, on our side of the highway.  It certainly didn’t look to be a mere 350 acres to me as I drove down the highway to deposit the dotter with OmegaGranny.  And driving back through the darkness, at one or two exits on the highway, it looked like the fire was right there, the red glow silhouetting ponderosas, highlighted by yellower spots here and there, and drifts of smoke.

So, a message to the karma gods:  I don’t really want the house to burn down.  I was just saying it.  ‘Kay?

Have I mentioned recently how much I love my mommy?

Honest to goodness.

I called her up this morning to beg/cajole a weekend of watching the dotter.

Practically the first words out of her mouth were, “I have an off-the-wall idea–you two need to just have the movers in there tomorrow, get everything packed and away, and just camp out in sleeping bags and eat off paper plates for the next two weeks!”

I allowed as how it was a splendid idea, but that the movers weren’t even showing up until Monday, and then it was only to put together an estimate.

Then my mom said, “I was worried about you when I read that post.  You sounded so sad.  I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it.”

Which, of course, made me start weeping.  Hell, it makes me start weeping again, writing about it.

Moms are pretty special people.

Anyway, I love my mom.  She’s special.  She always has been, and always will be.  She’s smart and funny and calming and down-to-earth.  And she writes a kick-ass blog.

Life is better today.  We whacked away at one of the bathrooms, and it looks vaguely civilized now (much better than it did before).  Bathroom #2 gets civilized this weekend.  The living room–aside from the dreadful carpeting–is actually looking empty (to me, at least), so we may be halfway to the proper “declutter” mark there.

I figured out what happened with a bunch of FY end stuff, and fixed it.

The upper-air wisps of clouds turned into Real Live Grey Thunderheads today, complete with gusts of wind and lightning, and severe thunderstorm warnings from NOAA.  Still, alas, no rain hitting the ground, though lots was drifting off the bottoms of the clouds (called “virga“).  It’s a promising start.

And, of course, I had a bunch of loyal and helpful blogging buds who virtually patted me on the head and said It Will Be All Right.  It’s astonishing just how helpful that can be!  (I promise, I am packing left & right and tossing stuff, as suggested, it’s just that we have 12 years’ worth of stuff to deal with, and sort into “stuff to be kept” and “What is this stuff?!  And why did we keep it?!”…)

So tonight I don’t feel as much like crying as I did last night.  Bit by bit, step by step, things will get better.

Then I get to spend two weeks with mamasan, the bestest mom in the world, and it seems like we might actually have monsoon-y weather by that time and we won’t be roasted.

What a difference a day makes!

I am not feeling happy.

After a humiliating piece of feedback about the house, we spent all day cleaning, painting, decluttering.  So, of course, the house looks even worse.

There’s something about a good dose of humiliation.  It makes you work like a dog.  I suppose this is good, in the generic philosophical sense, but right now it doesn’t feel good.  In reality, it makes me want to kick things, pout, and say “SCREW YOU!” to the feedback-giver.  Real mature.

In the meantime, I screwed up FY end because my brain has vacated the premises.  Anyone have an extra brain I can borrow?

Happy fourth.  I hope there were fireworks where you were; ours were cancelled on Monday.

In two weeks and one day, the movers come to pack.  They can’t come soon enough for me right now.

There were little puffs of clouds in the sky today, forming and reforming, with little veils of virga here and there.  This is promising; it means there’s moisture up aloft.  On the other hand, there’s absolutely no moisture down on the ground–our high relative humidity has hit 18% once today and once yesterday; yesterday’s low relative humidity was 2%, today’s was 3%.  Yesterday’s high was 93F; today’s was 96F.  It’s hot, it’s dry as a bone, and the beginning of monsoon season means we’re going to have a bunch of dry thunderstorms as that moisture aloft starts building up.  Let’s put 96F, 3% humidity, and dry thunderstorms together, why don’t we?

Maybe the house will just burn up and we’ll be able to get the insurance money…

Aren’t I just a little ray of sunshine?

Some person named Natalie Goldman has this to say about stress:  “Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”

Har.  This woman knows me, I’m sure.  I found her by googling “stress quotes”.

Some people’s response to stress is to eat like crazy.  Other people drink.  Many people get angry.  Some just cry a lot, or go into exercise overdrive, or go into an emotional deep-freeze.

Me?  I sleep.

In the middle of the day, my eyelids start drooping and all I want to do is find a place to curl up, close my eyes, and sleep.

It’s almost a narcoleptic style compulsion.

Y’see, when you sleep, The Real World goes away.  You don’t have to worry about how the dawg is going to handle 10 days in a car.  You don’t have to peer out the front doors at the people walking down the street who have stopped to grab a real estate flyer.  You don’t have to contemplate looking for a new abode.  You don’t find yourself sitting in the office, looking around you at the books and the heaps and the piles and the boxes, and flipping open the computer to go blog-surfing instead.

It’s an escape.  It has always been my body’s preferred mode of escape.  There is probably a well-known biological basis, something to do with constant glurts of adrenaline rushing through your body, and then having the post-adrenaline letdown.

I am well into the stress-sleep cycle by now.

There are other manifestations of stress:  I do bite my fingernails, I do have this impressive back knot that just *poof* appeared on Saturday, and I’ve been a bitch on wheels for the past few days.  But it’s the desire to sleep that’s an underlying, constant companion.

So if I’m talking to you, and start zoning out, or typing a comment that ends up sounding somewhat incoherent, it’s that sleeping thing.

Really.  I swea…rrr…it….izzzzzz….zzzzz….znork!

“We live on the edge!” exclaimed OmegaDad last night.  “We need a new car, so what do we do?  We go out and buy exactly the same car we already have!”

Say goodbye to the Little Green Car.

Say hello to the Little Red Car. 

A brand-new 2007 Outback Sport.  The new car will get a fantastic breaking-in period as OmegaDad tools it across country, dawg in the passenger seat.

OmegaDotter and I will be staying with OmegaGranny for a couple of weeks (with cats) while OmegaDad drives the long way.  Then she and I and cats will board the plane and fly out to Alaska to meet daddy.

I’m kind of sad about it–I really wanted to do the cross-country trip.  But a lack of paperwork has made it imperative that we not take OmegaDotter into Canada.  We just can’t afford to cross paths with an uber-officious border patrolman (or woman) wanting to follow the letter of the law.  I have nightmares of the dotter and I being stranded at the border into Canada and having to figure out how to get from there to Alaska…or, worse yet, stranded at the border into Alaska with the same situation.  At least at the border into Canada, we’d be close to airports…

So a request:  please pray, send good vibes, or otherwise attempt to influence the universe so that the monsoon rains start before the dotter and I stay with OmegaGranny; right now, it’s pretty toasty down the hill.

We’ve had the house shown twice so far.  Grandma Sharon and I spent a frantic two hours yesterday scuttling around the house and cleaning/straightening up to prepare for the second set of folks.

Things are slowly beginning to fall into place.

Yesterday was OmegaBro, SIL, niece (with a newly fractured ankle) and nephew.

And…

Step-SIL and her hubby.  We got the call shortly after I posted my last post.

So we had six adults and three children and a dawg and our two cats and a guest cat.

Did I get any packing or cleaning done?  No.

Was I uptight?  Yes.

Today was end of fiscal year at work.  That was fun, too.

And a lunch for a good buddy whose last day was today.

And a conference call with the relocation company representative that lasted an hour.  By the end of the call, my mind was a total blank, and all I could say was, “Okay…okay…okay…”  I’m hoping she didn’t ask us to hand over any pound of flesh or eldest child or anything like that; I suspect I’d just have nodded with x’s in my eyes and said, “Okay…”

Oh, yeah, and OmegaDad had to get home early to remove the dawg because someone wanted to see the house (already!  Yay!).

Y’all gave me lots of good suggestions about staging, and that’s on the list for this weekend, in and around FIL and Step-MIL’s visit.  All those helpful comments!  Rather than my normal omnibus response in the comments section, I will respond here…

Julie–I should remove all books??  That makes me gasp and makes my heart break.  A house doesn’t look like a home without books!

D.–The storage place rental is on my agenda tomorrow.  I’d like to thank you for the suggestion, but it was already seeming like a Good Idea to us!  ;) 

AtomicMama–Dayum…the timing was just a few weeks off!  It would have been cool to see you!  Have I mentioned that I never considered the acronym for Small Mountain University Town until you started calling it S.M.U.T.?

SBird–You do realize that two years ago, while I was returning from a visit to OmegaDad in Taos, we had four inches of rain in one day which flooded the road into Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods??  We have something called Pumphouse Wash, which turns into Big Creek, which is what goes tumbling down Really Cool Canyon to Swanky Southwest Tourist Town?  There were RVs that got swept away in that flood.

Mamasan (and everyone else)–I could have sworn I told everyone just how quickly we were going, but looking back over my posts there’s not a word.  Har.  Yes, we were given about 5 weeks to get all this in gear and done with.

Noreen–Hah!  I love the empty good whiskey bottle idea!  I have been contemplating all the lovely wildflowers as a source of nice floral foci in the living room.

Elaine–Hi!  I hope you get a buyer, too.  Indonesia, eh?  Wow.  That’s even more impressive than Alaska!  As for the USCIS, I think you should call your senator in.  Having the passport app denied because of a lack of a U.S. birth certificate is ludicrous.  You may actually need that passport to go to Indonesia!

Sara–We have the appliances up on top of the kitchen cupboards.  What we have on the counters is bunches of spice jars and jars of pastas and rice.  Hm.  The new bath towel sets is something I was considering; thanks for the advice!

Theresa–10 days?!  Wow!  That’s impressive!  The problem with having friends over is that (a) everyone’s out of town and (b) I’d rather have them watching the dotter so she wasn’t underfoot!  The amphetamines might be a good idea. 

Thanks again, everyone!

We have a “For Sale” sign out front.  I am now on call for house showing at an hour’s notice.  This is because we have a Bad Dawg, and have to clear him out of the house before strangers can come in.

Our listing is up.  The house is going for about $14,000 more than twice what we paid for it, which is okay.  The listing is incorrect; it says we’re on propane, but we’re actually on natural gas.

My bro, SIL, niece and nephew are showing up tomorrow night for a night’s stay.

The day after that, FIL and Step-MIL are arriving, and they are staying through Sunday a.m.

In the midst of all this, we are trying to keep the house somewhat (for us) clean.  Our realtor told us we had to de-clutter; OmegaDad and I looked at each other with deer-in-the-headlights looks, because, to us, it already was de-cluttered.  So I’m going through and removing things left and right, trying to figure out whether we should keep whatever it is, or just toss it.  I’m doing a lot of tossing.

The dotter is coming home dead tired every night, which, in the normal run of things would be a Good Thing.  However, whenever she’s dead tired, she turns into a cranky, whiny pill.

To top it all off, like Jess, we have managed to lose the important part of the dotter’s adoption records.  Like, the copies of her estimated birth certificate, her abandonment certificate, the translation of our adoption certificate, and her Chinese passport with the all-important IR3 visa.  We do, however, have the Chinese version of her adoption certificate, in all its red-leather-clad and red-chop-stamped glory.  The missing documents pose some problems when it comes to, say, driving across the border into Canada, and then across the border into Alaska.  We don’t need a passport (I think; it’s difficult to really tell), but we do need proof of application for a passport.

There’s this absolutely gorgeous house in our future area of AK that we’d love to buy, but we have no idea just how much money we’re going to have, because we haven’t heard who our relocation company is, or who the “approved” appraisers are, so we can’t get our two appraisals so we know the absolute price we’re going to get out of the reloco.  (Not to mention that there were horrendous floods in that area last year, and this gorgeous house is real close to the banks of one of the rivers that flooded, so I’m wondering about flood plains and stuff like that…)

I am a wreck.  I am likely to become even more of a wreck as the days go on.  You all are my whiny outlet.  If you don’t want to hear rants, whines, screeches, and vicariously watch me (read me?) pulling my hair out by the roots, I advise you to stay clear of OmegaMom’s blog for, oh, four more weeks.

Did I mention we’re clearing out of here on July 21?  Which just happens to be all of three-and-a-half weeks from now?!

ACK!

EEK!

For fuck’s sake!