OmegaMom

Visit NaBloPoMo
Eh.  I’ll give it a try this year.  Last year, I forgot all about it until it was a couple of days into November.  Oops!  The year before, I was doing great until the last two-thirds of the month, in which I tried a timed post which got posted too early because of time-zone differences.

Bah.

But–into the breach, dear readers!  Let us try, once more, to conquer November!  Woot!

That said, November started off badly, to wit:  OmegaDad left the garage door open all night long.  It got down to zero last night.  The water pipes froze.

BUT!

Luckily for OmegaDad, there is that “but”.

He caught it in time!  He closed the garage door, turned the garage heater on full blast, fiddled with a valve, and we sat around for hours waiting for a plumber, sans water, fearing the worst…

Only to be told by the plumber that OmegaDad had actually left the valve closed.  So the plumber opened the valve, and voila!  Water!  Gushing out of open faucets all over the house!  Woot!

The plumber says that, yes, the pipes had frozen.  Just barely.  And the garage heater had thawed things. 

Then the plumber suggested to me, as I was writing the check, that it might be a good idea to get a thermostat alarm thingummy (which he wasn’t sure where to get, but he kept meaning to find out, because he thought it would be a good idea to stock them, because of people like OmegaDad).  It just so happens that I had been suggesting the very same thing to OmegaDad!

So all is well that ends well.  OmegaDad is showering as I type.  Shortly I will be able to wash clothes, clean house, do my normal weekend-ly things.

And there is no husbandly body stashed under the front stairs.  This is a good thing, don’t you think?!

What does it spell?  Halloween!

The dotter decided she wanted to be a cheerleader this year.  (This was after first wanting to be a princess, then wanting to be a “really mean witch!”)  So I looked at cheerleader costumes online, and got more and more frustrated, because it was either cheesy cheap faux cheerleader costumes from High School Musical or another TV series, or trampy cheerleader costumes.  Nothing in-between.

So I went to a cheerleader supply store online, got her a purple cheerleader outfit and pom-pons, and we went with that.  She was delighted.  (Yes, it’s really purple, but the camera got blue, and the editing software made it slightly bluer.)

She’s actually wearing a shirt under the top, and leggings, ’cause it’s c-o-l-d here.  Like, “tenth coldest October on record” type cold.  Bah.

Let’s see a cheer jump, why don’t we:

We made our ghost tree, but never put it out. 

The plan–yes, we had A Plan–was that we would go to her school to do the Halloween Town trick-or-treating, then go swing by her buddy K’s neighborhood, then would go to Small Town, where OmegaDad’s office is, to do T-or-T-ing there.  Why not here?  Well, because we’re in a neighborhood of one- to two-acre lots, and it’s a pain in the butt to even think of T-or-T-ing here.

But when we got to K’s house, her mom invited OmegaDotter to go trick-or-treating with them.  So OmegaDad and I went out for dinner, and never got around to putting out the ghost tree or the jack-o-lantern.  Bad folks.

Anyway, goodness knows whether we had trick-or-treaters or not.  It’s not like our old neighborhood, which really wasn’t any great shakes for kids, but at least was better than this one.

I owe people emails; please don’t think worse of me for putting things off.  I’ve been feeling kind of punk lately, and just doing the minimum to get by for the past week.  Aside from a rant or two.

The rough geographic area where we live is shaped like a funnel.  There’s the Inlet, which is long and thin, and opens to the ocean to the west.  Then there are the mountains, to the east, south, and north of the inlet.

The inlet, being water, stays warm a lot longer than the ground inland.  (This is also why we’re a lot warmer here than, say, two hundred miles away in Little City.  We get -30F in January and February; they get -60F.  God bless the water, I say!)  The mountains, being high, are colder and covered with snow much earlier than lower elevations; there are also glaciers.

The topography ends up with some interesting–and massive–differences in temperature between the inlet and inland, which can stir up winds.  The funnel shape can take winds off the ocean or down from the mountains and intensify them; think of how a stream is slow and gentle when moving across a wide area, but becomes rapid and forceful when squeezed between narrower banks.

So we regularly have “high wind warnings” at “higher elevations” along the inlet.  The higher elevations can get 85 mph winds and the lowlands 50 to 60 mph winds.  We here at Chez OmegaMom are lucky in that we’re in a small depression, a cup in some rolling hills, so we rarely get the truly high winds.

Last night, the wind started whipping up early in the evening, and by the time we went to bed the trees, hidden in the darkness, were thrashing and tossing about.  Sometime in the night the power went out.  The wind was still blowing when we woke up in the morning, and it had completely stripped all the remaining golden and brown dead leaves off the trees in the intervening hours.  The extent of the damage in our area was extensive twig litter on the lawn, a piece of plywood flung from its original resting spot, and some errant tarps blown against trees here and there in the neighborhood.

But in Big City, this was a Big Wind, of up to (or higher than) 100 mph.  Trees were uprooted and flung against houses.  Power lines were pulled down.  People’s fences were gone.  Roofs were ripped off, lawn equipment migrated down the roads, and boats were tossed upside down.

I mentally moan and groan about being in the characterless suburbs where we are, and wish to be closet to Small Town Alaska, closer to the inlet and the mountains, but I must admit that I’m glad we don’t get subjected to the ferocious winds that other areas around here get.  I’ll take our 40 to 50 mph gusts and be glad we are spared the higher intensity stuff.

It snowed today.

Oh, we’ve already had “snow”, some quick flurries of big, fat flakes drifting down, but today was a real snow.

In the dim early morning light, the dotter and I went out to check the chickens.  It was foggy–or so I thought–hazy, gray draping the trees, the neighboring houses.  But as we were traipsing across the back yard to the coops, the dotter claimed it was snow.  I scoffed, and then heard–oh so faintly–tiny patters of microscopic snow flakes spitting onto the grass, onto my jacket.  Still, it was nothing like the four inches we had been promised, so I shrugged it off, and we went back inside.

Half an hour later, as we headed off to the dotter’s school bus stop, it was truly snowing.  The dotter happily trailed a bamboo twig from the porch behind her as we walked, leaving a line of boot prints and a black skein where the bamboo touched the ground.  We stopped at the mailbox and pulled out a small pile of mail (including–woot!–an envelope of hollyhock seeds from Kate at High Altitude Gardening, woohoo!), I tucked it into my arms, and we crossed the street to wait on the corner.

Almost immediately, the nooks and crannies in my elbow, and the layers of the small pile of mail, began being loaded with lacy, puffy flakes.  Flakes gathered on the dotter’s backpack, on my arms, on my hat.  The dotter, delighted, used a finger to collect snow and hold it to her mouth; I joined her by scraping small mounds onto my own fingers and feeding them to her.

When I returned to the house, it was still snowing.

An hour later, I stopped out onto the kitchen porch to take a break, and was struck by the silence.

We live in suburbia.  The national media calls it a “rural town”, but to those of us who live here, it’s suburbs.  Oh, we’re not right outside Big City, but we are a “bedroom community” for Big City, and it’s built like all those fancy-schmancy new suburbs in California or Arizona or Texas…it’s just older.  Lots of one-acre lots, lots of strip malls, no real town center (unlike Small Town, in between Suburban Alaska and Big City, which does have a town center).  Anyway, there’s almost always a hum of traffic as a background noise; not a lot, mind you, but it’s there.

This morning, though, it was utterly silent.  Muffled.  Quiet.  You could hear the snow falling on the leaves still remaining on the trees, pattering them gently, but the acoustics of the snow seemed to have put a lid on the traffic sounds.

It was hushed.  And beautiful.

Of course, even though it’s Alaska, we haven’t hit “winter” yet, so the temperature hovered around freezing all day and the snow, while accumulating, was also melting.  When the snowfall ended, the melting took over.  What was probably six inches of snow quickly melted down to three.

When the dotter returned home, I postponed doing homework for a chance to get out into the back yard to throw snowballs at each other and built a small snowman.

The first snowfall of winter is always magical.

We haz it.

I watched the debate (of course) (sigh) (when did I decide to become a politics junkie?).  I thought that Biden came across better, but that’s because I’m on his side.  Palin’s constant reiteration of “maverick”, as though it were a magic charm, made me roll my eyes; her misunderstanding of what an “Achilles heel” is makes me worry about my dotter’s education here in Alaska; her co-opting of a series of Reagan’s catchphrases, including “There you go again, Joe!” was noticeable; and the last I heard, it was the mess on Wall Street that is impacting Main Street.  But, in the end, she redeemed herself by not repeating her gaffes from various carefully prepped interviews.  She sounded, in general, nice.

But I’m not looking for “nice” in my presidential or vice-presidential candidates.

So I came away thinking Biden “won”–whatever that means.

Then we went to dinner at the local Indian restaurant.  Mixed grill–yum!  Tandoori chicken, shish kebab, lamb, curried chicken.  Mmmm.

There was another group at the restaurant, talking vivaciously about the debate, and about the current economic situation.  I first noticed them when they were talking about the debate; one guy shouted out, “She really nailed it when she said, ‘I’m not one of those Washington insiders who says I’m for this then says I’m not for it’!  BINGO!  I want someone who’ll say what they mean and mean what they say!”

So, there ya have it:  Confirmation bias.  I thought Biden came out better; these folks thought Palin came out better.

And then the older woman in the group–who seemed to be a real estate person–started talking about the economic situation and the bailout bill.

She said that a friend had offered on a house, had the mortgage all set up, everything was going swimmingly…and then, the day of closing, the loan offer was withdrawn.  She said that these people had great credit.  I’ve heard similar things online; this was the first I had heard it “first-hand”.  She said that credit was frozen, and she talked about a few businesses she knew that were running on credit and weren’t going to be able to meet their payrolls if it kept up.  She wanted the bailout, even though she thought it wasn’t very good, because it was the only thing going right now.  She mentioned 401k’s that had taken huge hits during the stock drop on Monday and how people who were close to retirement were getting hammered.

All of which is true (except I wasn’t for the bailout).

Then they talked about not living on credit.

Which seemed a bit of cognitive dissonance to me; the entire notion behind the bailout is, in essence, that we should go back to borrowing money like crazy and spending it like crazy and the economy will just go on chugging along, growing and blossoming, tra la, tra la.

So this afternoon the House of Representatives voted for the bailout–the expanded bailout, with $100 billion of pork tacked on to make it appetizing to a wider variety of senators and representatives.

And the stock market, which had been up some 200 points prior to the vote, dropped.  And kept dropping.  And ended the day below where it ended on Monday…the day the bailout vote failed.

Say what?!  Isn’t the bailout supposed to…oh…”save 401k’s and retirement accounts”?  Aren’t we all happy campers now?  Isn’t Great Depression II averted?  Wasn’t the stock market going to heave a great sigh of relief?  The bailout certainly hasn’t saved Wachovia Bank, which is currently being fought over by Citibank and Wells Fargo, like a pair of vultures over fresh road kill.

I’ve been saying it for a while, and I’ll say it again:  This mess is too entrenched, too intertwined, too highly leveraged, for this bailout to stop the unraveling.  Oh, it may end up slowing it down a bit.  But firms that are leveraged 30:1 or more aren’t going to become solvent with a wave of the magic Federal Reserve/Treasury/bailout wand.  And those firms are global in scope; just read a bit about what’s happening in Iceland.  Or see how the Greeks today passed a blanket deposit guarantee bill after runs on the banks, emulating Ireland, which did the same thing yesterday.  Or read about the Dutch government taking over Fortis NV, a portion of Fortis, which is one of the largest financial companies in Europe, today.

I’m gettin’ a heapin’ helpin’ of confirmation bias about the economy these days…

Oh, yeah, and it’s snowing here:  Great big fat flakes.  Holy moly.  Our first snow of the winter season.

A confluence of events:  Clear skies plus sunset at 7:39 p.m. meant that the late-afternoon weather forecast included the forecaster saying, “There’s a good chance for stars tonight!”

Lo & behold, yes, there were stars when I took the dawg out for his evening promenade in the yard.

It’s saying something when the weather forecast includes whether you’re actually going to see stars or not.  What it’s saying is that This Is A Rare Event So Take Advantage Of It While You Can.

Sigh.  I miss the Milky Way.

It has been raining for days.  Endless, ongoing, sometimes gentle, sometimes a downpour:  Rain.  This is what I remember from last September, as well.  Sure enough, when I google “average precipitation Suburban Alaska”, there it is:  September is the rainiest month of the year.

This afternoon when I drove OmegaDotter off to her gymnastics class, the clouds parted, and I saw Tamatuska Peak to the east.  There, on the peak and down the flanks, was snow.  Real snow, with a real snow line.  I remember this from last year, too.

We are smack in the middle of the extremely short autumn that we are graced with here.  The deciduous trees are turning gold, some of them orange; the houses in Suburban Alaska are peeping out again as their privacy drapes–the leaves–go cascading down.  Each rainfall strips yet another layer from the trees, scattering the leaves willy-nilly on the lawns and revealing, bit by bit, the structures that lie hidden in the summertime.

The Big City newspaper had a slide show that introduced me to a new term:  “Termination dust”.  Well, dayum, I thought, they’ve even got a name for the dust that comes down from the glaciers when it’s windy!  (In conjunction with the rain, we have had high wind warnings for areas of the valley.)  But reading further, I couldn’t figure out really what they were talking about, so I had to resort to Teh Google again on that one. 

Lo and behold, it’s a grim and somewhat poetic description of the first noticeable snowfalls on the mountains.  See, it’s a “dusting” of snow, and it marks the “termination” of summer, the entrance to our fleeting autumn, and a harbinger of Things To Come.

The sun is coming up at 7:30 a.m. and setting at 8:15 p.m.

The nights are getting colder, though with the rain the low end stays relatively high…we’re down into the low 40s at night, and up around 50 during the day.  When the cloud cover breaks, the nighttime temperature dips, so I expect our little veggie garden will soon be informing us that all the leafy greens are gone for the season.  We have been enjoying our sweet little carrots, experimenting with kohlrabi and rutabagas, handing out lettuce to neighbors and deliverymen and soon, probably, OmegaDad’s coworkers.  When the next-door neighbor kids play with the dotter, I send them over to the peas (our poor, measly crop this year was due to our late start in getting things planted), or pull out a carrot or two for them.

The cute stubby ones are either Parmex or Thumbelinas; the long orange and yellow ones are Kaleidoscope, and the red ones are Purple Haze.  The Purple Haze and the stubby ones are the best, sweet and crisp and flavorful.

We can expect our first measurable snowfall down here in the valley in mid-October.

(See?!  I can talk about something other than the financial mess.  I won’t mention Washington Mutual auctioning itself off, or Morgan Stanley suddenly talking to Citic, a Chinese company, about being purchased, or how the Dow Jones tanked again even after the Feds performed a miracle last-minute bailout, but I will link to an amusing hand-written sign (amusing in a gallows humor kind of way) found by a Calculated Risk reader at his local WaMu branch…)

Or something.

Today, I decided to do some squats while the microwave was zapping my popcorn.

Bad idea.  Bad, bad idea.

Because shortly thereafter, my lower back started hurting.

And it kept hurting, more and more.

And if I turn the wrong way, it shoots down through my butt.

Wah!

OmegaDad just informed me, after reading the subject line of this post, “You’re still a hot and sexy young thang to me!”  Which garnered him major brownie points.  Then he lost them, as he continued in the “llama voice”, “…As I push you in your wheelchair down the hallway…”

(Some day I will record him doing the “llama voice” and post it on the blog.)

Anyway.  I’m watching Hurricane Ike worriedly, as it vacillates every which way.  It’s supposed to landfall around Galveston.  At the same time, it’s pounding the coast around Louisiana.  OmegaBro and family are in Louisiana…

And politics goes on.  Apparently, the use of simile and metaphor is lost in the U.S. these days, except amongst certain people.  There’s a video where Obama essentially starts to say, “What the f…?!” about the whole “lipstick on a pig” hoorah that I thought about showing, but this one from David Letterman yesterday is better, and he avoids any pitfalls with the phrase “what the…”:

I hate to let Carosgram down , but I’m sure it’s no surprise to her that I am actually planning to vote for Barack Obama, and hope to heavens that the Republicans really don’t win.  I just feel frustrated that whoever wins the election is going to get stuck with the mess that has been the result of 8 years of Bush policies, and that whoever it is, no matter what kind of job he does, is going to end up being The Mean Mom of U.S. politics and thus voted out of office in the next election.

(First off, I think Fluff had, indeed, bonked her head while riding in the box; she’s been walking and clucking up a storm today.  Looks like Marek’s Disease was a false alarm.  Whew!  As for the crossed beak, the vet recommends a Dreml tool.  Yes.)

Shortly before my mom left Alaska to return to warmer and sunnier climes, we noticed a few yellow leaves in the birch trees beside the kitchen porch.  Remember, this was around August 15.

I scoffed at yellow leaves.  Hey!  It’s August, I said to myself.  OmegaDad sagely pointed out that the clumps of yellow leaves we were seeing on some trees here and there must be insect damage.

The thing was…the number of yellow leaves kept increasing, slowly but surely.

At the same time, we noticed it was becoming dark at night.  Like, actual, can’t-see-in-it darkness.  No more of the continual twilight gloaming.

This week, various blogs and parenting sites have been all about returning to school, and how this means fall is on the way!

I look outside and have to admit, somewhat sadly, that fall, in all it’s glory, has arrived in Alaska; in fact, it arrived a week or so ago.  That would be–in case you can’t recall–before September.  The temperature is hovering around the same levels it was while GrannyJ was here, but the winds have started coming down the mountains, so it feels very different.  The leaves on the trees–those yellowing leaves–have suddenly become crispy, and the sound of the wind in the trees is distinctly different.  There’s a rustling and a rattling that wasn’t there a month ago.  And with every small gust, leaves patter down, slipping this way and that through the air before they settle gently on the grass.

The path of the sun has shifted noticeably in the sky.  Of course, this vivid shift in the lighting shows up everywhere I’ve lived in the fall, and I always notice it suddenly one day as it proclaims, Yes!  Autumn is here!  But right now, the sun is at its zenith at 35 degrees at 1 p.m.; my subconscious, having grown up in Chicago, tells me that this kind of light is most often seen in mid-October.  So my body thinks it’s mid-October already.

The sun is coming up at 7 a.m. tomorrow.  It’s setting at 8:58 p.m. tonight.  We’re losing almost six minutes per day; in twenty days, come the equinox, the sun will be rising at 7:45 a.m. and setting at 7:57 p.m.

In a month, I will be walking the dotter off to the school bus stop in the dawn light at a quarter to nine.

It changes so very quickly up here. 

Score so far:

Gap curvy jeans, size 14:  too big.  Way too big.  Off to return them and ask for a smaller size.

Nordstrom’s Not Your Daughter’s Jeans, size 14:  Fit perfectly in upper thighs/hips, too big in waist.  Have washed, will see what happens; will probably end up going to a seamstress/tailor in town and getting them taken in.

Still waiting on the Land’s End made-to-fit jeans, but those are supposed to take about a month (a month?!).

Aside from that–we went to the State Fair yesterday, with tickets to the rodeo.  It rained.  The dotter was a pill.  After a few hours, I ended up telling OmegaDad and OmegaDotter that I would have more fun back in the car.  So there.  So I went back to the car.  OmegaDad Had Another Talk with the dotter (the “I would have more fun back in the car” was my result to a very grudging forced “I’m sorry” from the dotter as the result of the first Having A Talk).  Both OmegaDad and I said that if she didn’t shape up, we were going to forego going to the State Fair next year.

The rain was followed by fog this morning.  This is actually very rare in our neighborhood, but I remember it from last fall.

The birch trees’ leaves are already turning yellow and starting to fall off the trees.

Sunset is now at 9:30 p.m., sunrise at 6:35 a.m.; a great galloping loss of light.

The end result of this weekend is that I’m bummed.  Wah.

Sort of a this-n-that thing.

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

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

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

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

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

Yes!  It’s yet another “gripe about the weather” post!  Woohoo!

Let’s see:

Today’s high?  Was the normal low.  That would be 52F.  That means that tomorrow there will be another of those red bars in the image to the left, but this one will just barely touch the dark grey area.  The light grey shows record temps, the dark grey the average temps for the day.

The number of highs above 59F this year?  Thirty-five.  The normal average for a year?  Eighty-eight.

The number of highs above 64F this year?  Seven.  The norm?  Forty-four.

The number of highs above 70F this year? 

Are you ready?

TWO.

Two bloody days above 70 degrees.  It’s almost the end of July.  Normally, there are 15 in a year.

That’s why I’ve been complaining. 

The NOAA didn’t mention “number of sunny days”, but I found an average climate listing, which shows 43% sunshine in July.  That means almost every other day should have some sunshine.  The last day with sunshine?  We had a little bit on Saturday…We had a little bit the Saturday before that…We had a fair amount on the 4th and 5th of July.  That would be a sunshine rate of 17%.

Bah.  And humbug.