OmegaMom

Well.

When I wrote that last post, it was going to be followed up by the “And she’s all better now, whew!” post.  But I had things to do that weekend, and places to go, so didn’t write.

But I did notice that mom hadn’t blogged for a few days, and she hadn’t sent me any email.  So I picked up the phone to call her (I previously had been calling her every day, but then thought she was better, so stopped).

At which point, she asked me to come out to Arizona again, saying that things were worse.

So here I am in Arizona, with mom.  I managed to sneak in during a break between the storms that have hit Arizona (and California before that).  The airplane was delayed two hours on the tarmac in Big City due to a malfunction that turned out to be a Ghost In The Machine, and missed my connecting flight in Salt Lake City…but Delta showed how absolutely wonderful it is by automagically rebooking all the people who had missed their flights onto the next available flight.  This was very cool–all we had to do was take our existing boarding pass, run it beneath a scanner, and a brand spanking new boarding pass for the rebooked flight was printed out.

But when I got to Phoenix and got to the car rental place, a snag occurred.  It seems that we didn’t have enough money in our account to cover any car rental (if I had had a credit card, that would have worked, but they automatically block out more money for debit cards, no matter how little an amount of time you want to rent)…paychecks being deposited on Saturday didn’t help.  I was tired.  I just wanted to get up to mom.  So I parked myself on one of the chairs in the middle of the huge car rental complex and proceeded to sob my heart out.

Then I called OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love OmegaDad?  Well, okay, just thought I’d mention it again.

Anyway, he arranged for the inter-city shuttle to pick me up and get me up to Prescott.  Yay, OmegaDad!

Driving up was an adventure–but the good kind.  See, since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have to worry about all the water crossing the road, or the high winds, and was perched up nice and high so I could peer out the windows and see over concrete barriers on bridges and wash crossings.  All of which were flooded with rushing water.  Waves.  Crests on the waves.  Waterfalls coming down the rocky roadcuts that we were traveling between.  Snow mixing with the heavy rain when we got to Prescott.

(Up in Small Mountain University Town, they have had something like four feet of snow.  Roofs are collapsing on businesses–the ice rink, the big, comfy used bookstore, the fabric store, more–and the city mayor has declared that all businesses must clear their roofs or face a fine.  The powers that be also closed the main highways around SMUT for 24 hours.)

Anyway, I am here with GrannyJ.  We are working on getting her into a nursing home for a few weeks, to see if they can do anything.  We’re talking about her maybe moving to live with my brother.  Lots of things to talk about.  She is not doing well, but she is–as ever–my sharp-witted, fun, sweet mom.

In the meantime, consider me a poster child for the Sandwich Generation:  OmegaDotter’s birthday is tomorrow, and she is in her first “real” gymnastics meet tomorrow, too, with judges and not every participant getting a trophy.  We had a little birthday dinner Wednesday, and gave her the family presents, but I wasn’t able to arrange her party in time…that’s up to OmegaDad.

I know a lot of bloggers who are having issues with their moms these days.  Kat Kaz (damn, should proofread when I’m posting at midnight!), Laurie, Lorrie, V…I’ve kept so quiet with them about their problems because…well, it’s kind of a “La, la, la, I’m ignoring things!” approach.  But we’re past the ignoring problems part here, and I want to apologize and shout out to all of you to say, “Hang in there, kiddos.”

I will keep all & sundry posted; I wasn’t planning to post tonight, but saw Anon in AV’s comment, and thought I should update.

Our snow on top of melting snow and ice produced a phalanx of icicles hanging down from the roof beside the kitchen.  I liked the repeating vertical lines behind and in front of the fluffy snow-draped firs.

For your viewing pleasure:  The Big Picture once again does a Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar for December; go enjoy the purty pictures and remember to check back each day!

For more viewing pleasure:  absolutely incredible renderings of a 3-D Mandelbrot set.  Think of a 3-D fractal…Mathematics made beautiful!  I particularly like this one, which the creator has described as “shell life“.

I am enjoying the new C-Pop singers–thank you very much for your suggestions!  Since the dotter is mostly into bouncy dance-type music, I will wander through them picking and choosing (no Deserts Chang, alas!  But I think she’s groovy!).  Fantasia is also a great idea.

To finish things up, here is the world’s very best Poker Face parody, called “NeutraFace”, starring bearded designer geeks having fun.  Enjoy.  (I now want to have bearded nerds emerge from my bathtub):

The sun rose at 9:49 in the morning, and will set at 3:51 p.m., just a few more minutes.  We had a visit from the Pineapple Express yesterday; it is Alaska’s answer to the Polar Express.  Where the Polar Express is a blast of frigid Arctic air that swirls down into the Midwest following a huge dip in the jet stream, the Pineapple Express is a blast of warm air direct from Hawaii that barrels into South Central Alaska, melting the snow and ice and producing precipitation of one form or another.

First we got the melt.  You’d think this would be great, wouldn’t you?  But, alas, what it does is denude the forests of the one thing that keeps it bright in the wintertime, and leaves the skies gray.

Then we got the storm.  Where the Omegas live, it came as a day of rain–we were up to 40F.  But to the west, only about 30 miles away, the temperature was low enough that it came as snow, a huge snowstorm on the Lady River that dumped 30+ inches of snow in the hinterlands and in Small Alaskan Tourist Town That Prompted Northern Exposure.  A substitute school secretary in SATTTPNE said they had enough snow that the littlies, kindergartners and first-graders, were disappearing into the snowdrifts.

And then the weather turned cooler here, and our rain turned to snow.  So:  we had wet streets, car, trees, that iced up, then got snowed on.  Then the skies turned clear.

When I drove the dotter in to school, the full moon was hovering over the trees in the west side of the school parking lot.  The sun was just barely beginning to light up the skies to the east.  I dropped her off, ran to the convenience store, and drove home…but that lovely picture of the moon looming over the trees called to me.  At home, I ran into the office, grabbed the camera and drove back to the school, determined to get that picture.

Alas, it didn’t quite work out the way I wanted–I wanted that moon in the trees to be as crisp and clear as it was to my vision.  Since I haven’t worked out the ins and outs of the camera workings, I couldn’t figure out how to make everything in focus and not too bright.  So what you see above is what you get:  Moonlit trees slightly lighted by the first, faint blush of daylight.

It was beautiful.

That is what I live for, up here in Alaska during the winter.  Moments like that.  Because there is so much darkness at this time of year, and my annual bitchfest about the ever-encroaching darkness is revving up.  I talk to people on the phone…they say, “How d’you like the cold winters in Alaska?” with a bit of laughter in their voices.  And I talk to them about The Darkness.

It’s just a month or two that it’s bad, mind you.  I know that the winter solstice is fast approaching, and that three weeks after that, we will settle into the long cold bright time of year, where the days get longer but the chill of winter settles in deeper.  The cold is okay, really.  Because the sun comes out more and more each day, and sparkles off the snow and the mountains and the ice covering the inlet and the rivers and the waterfalls, so it is beautiful.  And behind it all is the knowledge that The Dark is Dying, the sun is coming back, spring will be here soon, and we will be into the Season of The Gloaming.

But that month and a half to two months where it just gets darker and darker?  It gets to me.  The sun was 6.8 degrees above the horizon today at its height.  That’s low.  That’s like “late afternoon just before sunset” low.

(The solstice is coming.  It’ll get here.  The dark will go away.)

It snowed last night, a heavy, wet snow, unlike our normal dry powder.  This was the kind of snow that lingered on branches and made the area look very Currier and Ives-like.

We had small branches draped with the stuff:

We had the pea cables and posts topped off with white confection:

(The pea cables are a particularly proud piece of work from the hands of OmegaDad.  They don’t quite work the way we had planned, but they do provide a scaffolding for the pea plants to climb up–so long as we remember to get out there and start lacing pea runners properly early and often.  Otherwise our peas end up turning into viny clumps.)

This little lovely–a snow-covered rosehip–was in a very awkward spot.  I tried shooting it without the flash, but the light was dim enough that it needed to have a slow shutter, and the awkward spot made it so that every time I tried without the flash, my hands shook just enough so it was completely out of focus.  But the flash shot makes it pop, and it was so pretty, I thought I’d include it anyway:

The rosebushes here in Alaska have great big fat rosehips, the size of the last joint of my thumb.  We tried making jams from rosehips this summer; alas, the rosehips themselves have a pretty blah taste.  One would expect them to be zappy and zingy in flavor, but, no, they’re just very bland.

Our back yard:

The pictures were shot at about 3:30 p.m.  It was cloudy and still snowing, and the sun is setting at 3:58, so everything is rather dim.  Rumor has it we got six inches of snow; this is enough of a snowfall to warrant its own listing of snowfall totals from around the area on the National Weather Service forecast page.  We are still about 11 inches short on normal snowfall–we got plenty of precipitation in the form of rain earlier in the fall/winter, when the weather was still unseasonally warm.

It’s very pretty.  The kids (the dotter has her best friend A. over to spend the night) got cold and soaked from an hour of playing in it.

…Goes one of our chickens.  She’s been coughing and pretty languid for a couple of days; when we checked the chickens this evening, she had a bloody nose.

Dr. Google didn’t help.  But after some digging, the only things I could find that produce a bloody nostril discharge in chickens were avian influenza (ack!) and a piece by the USDA that said “serious avian disease”.

I was meaning to respond to some comments made by new readers to my post Dear Diary, but that will have to wait.  (Thanks to TonguMom for the link!)  Time to go out into the 17 below zero Fahrenheit weather and haul a sick chicken back into the garage…

In 2008, our first real snow was October 7.

In 2007, our first real snow was sometime in early October.

This year has been warm.  The lakes froze over only a week or two ago.  What precipitation we’ve had has been rain.  But mostly, it’s been grey and chill, but neither cold nor snowy.

Tonight, after putting the dotter to bed, I peered out a window, and noticed…was it?  Could it be?

Yes!  It’s snowing!

In a comment to yesterday’s post, Meri asked:

Since you are originally from the SW, how hard was it to adjust to the dark winters? and driving in snow!

The dark winters have been a real problem for me.  The past two years, I have made sure to visit my mom, GrannyJ, in mid-December so that I can get a dose of sunshine right around the winter solstice, when the days are shortest.  Our first winter here, I was utterly miserable.  GrannyJ sent me a variety of sculpted suns to cheer me up.  Bless her!  I had allowed my prescription for little blue happy pills (Zoloft) to expire, which made everything worse.

So, in January 2008 I trekked off to the local Doc-in-a-Box and got a new prescription.  That, plus the rapidly lengthening days, helped pull me back into a more sanguine state of mind.

Last year, OmegaDad bought me a Magic Light for Christmas, and it seemed to help some, too.  But I may be simply adjusting to the (horrible, awful, miserable) darkness, where the noonday sun is about as high as a late spring afternoon back in the Lower 48.

As for driving in the snow.  Girl.  I may have been in the southwest, but it was the mountains of the southwest.  We regularly got more snow in Small Mountain University Town each winter than we have gotten here.  The main difference is that in Small Mountain University Town, the snow came down in Great Huge Heaps, all at once, then melt.  We would end up with 24 to 36 inches per storm.  Here, a ten-incher is a big snow–however, once it starts snowing, the snow doesn’t melt until, oh, April.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that I grew up in Chicago.  Even though I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was about 23 or 24, I had plenty of experience driving in snow after that before I moved west.

In sum, the snow and driving in the snow is no problem, but the lack of light is a killer.

OmegaDad has become quite proficient with building edifices out of gingerbread over the years.  And his dexterity with piping royal icing has become quite deft.  And, frankly, anyone who can figure out how to color icing dead black and bright orange deserves an A+ for ingenuity.

(Actually, it turns out that the way to do it is to buy the expensive food coloring at the local gourmet kitchen store.  Alas for my shattered illusions!)

He found out how to make ghosts out of fondant on the internet.  He came up with a way to make tombstones out of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies and white chocolate chips.  He is a dab hand at outlining windows and creating spiderwebs out of icing.

The piece de resistance was the roof, a square slab of homemade sugar candy, colored orange.

Behold!

We have ghosts.  We have tombstones.  We have little pumpkins on the steps.  We have spiderwebs.  We have gables.  Also, notice the way the side looks like a face…

I am most satisfied.  This one came out way cool.

A close-up of the path (made of rock candy) and front door (made of chocolate wafers):

Tombstones and a ghost:

The “ground” is Cocoa Crispies.

The “tree” is some twigs blown down by the incredible winds we have been having yesterday and today, anchored in a squished up caramel.  (We’re supposed to have gusts up to 75 mph tonight; when I took the dotter off to school this afternoon for “Trick or Treat Town” the mountains across the inlet, over by Big City, were obscured by what could have been fog, except that it was coming down through the passes, rather than up from the inlet.  The pseudo-fog was, in fact, dust being scoured from the various glaciers by the winds.  Big City was under an air quality advisory as a result.)

Some fun Halloween links:  The very best Mrs. Incredible costume…jelly jar candle jack-o-lanterns…a real-life Transformer costume (watch the video!)…an incredibly punny Halloween tale from Miss Cellania.

Enjoy your spooky day!

So, after two surgeries and many days recuperating, the dawg is back home again.  We had all been missing him something fierce–even the dotter, who the dawg doesn’t get along with, and who, therefore, doesn’t get along with the dawg.  So he’s back, he’s ensconced downstairs (no stair climbing for a while!), he smells extremely doggy (no doggy baths for a while!), and we have managed to get him to eat and keep down a tablespoon or two of freshly baked chicken and some rice.  Given that he’s hardly eaten in a week, this is monumental.

In the meantime, as soon as the autumnal equinox passed, our area of Alaska plunged directly from late fall into almost-winter.  Typically, the early winter snows creep downward on the mountainsides, first dusting the tops (”termination dust”), then moving on down bit by bit. 

Last week was vintage autumn:  clear, vibrant blue skies, the kind that you can lose yourself in forever, with the sun glittering in etched yellow along the edges of leaves.  We had some winds, and they loosened the fall leaves, which would shower down to the ground like a handful of golden coins tossed into the air.

Then came gray days and rain.

Then came the cold snap, along with more rain.  We had no snow hereabouts, but you could tell the mountains were getting it.  This morning, when the dotter went off to check her chickens, the back stairs were icy.  This afternoon, when we motored off to the vet’s to get the dawg, the sun was out and sparkling from every damp spot on the trees and the houses and the underbrush.

And surrounding the valley, the mountains were covered with snow, two-thirds of the way down.  Yesterday evening, I had caught a peek or two that showed that the snow came almost down to our level, but the sunshine today must have warmed things up enough to melt that snow back.

The mountains seem suddenly more immediate, more immense, more looming, when they are covered with snow; I don’t know why.

Right now, it’s a beautiful sight.  I actually can’t wait until our first snowfall down here.  Remind me of that in January and February, when I am bitching endlessly about the never-ending wintertime, eh?

So.  I have taken the dotter hiking Saturday.  And Sunday.  And today.

Ahem.

Well, look.  We live in an area where when it starts to rain, it rains and rains and rains and rains.  Not hard, mind you, just a continuous dingy gray drizzle that makes everything soggy and the moss grow and mushrooms thrive and my mood sink.  So when we get Nice Weather™, I feel duty bound to actually get out and do something.

Yesterday’s hike was on a trail alongside the Mamahuska River, starting out in Small Town Alaska.  Looked easy, looked interesting, so I printed out the file from the borough recreation site.  Then things started going wrong.  Firstly, I confused north with east on the map (no comments from the peanut gallery, please), so thought that taking Large Raptor Street to the end of the road was what I was supposed to do.  We did that, parked, got out, started walking towards the river beside the high school, only to discover that the path we were on just died out at the top of a very steep bluff.

Um.

Okay, so we head back to the car.  I get out the map.  I read the directions.  It says “the intersection of Large Raptor Street with The Big One Street”.  I drive back towards the highway on Large Raptor Street.  We find The Big One Street intersection.  There is no path leading off; there is, instead, a large 2.5 acre vacant lot that is for sale.  Riiiiight.  We continue on a block, and behold, a path leading off north.  We park.  We head off that path.  It leads up and into a beautiful meadow filled with tall grass covered with sun-ripened seedheads and fireweed fluff.  But the river–our destination–is far off to our right.  Surely this is not correct?  So I march us to our right…And we find ourselves at the top of a steep hill overlooking the aforementioned 2.5-acre lot, through which a faint track wended its way.  So we slid and tiptoed and bounded down the hill to the faint track and started following it.

It led us right back up the bluff to the other side of the track which we had just been on.

Luckily, as I was standing there wondering what we were going to do, and why the #@!$*% the borough recreation department hadn’t marked the damned trail, our dawg and another dog started getting close & personal, and I was able to ask the owner of the other dog where the heck the trail was.  Once we got our trails sorted out, he pointed us in the right direction, which turned out to be on the other side of the wide meadow down where we had been.

I loved the trail.  The dotter didn’t.  We thought it would be down by the river banks and sunny; instead, it was up on the bluff and deep in the shady trees.  It was mysterious and dark and smelled damp and rich and filled with greenery and vegetation that was mouldering away, and there were oodles of mushrooms and fungus.  We could see glimpses of the river between the trees, with the sun sparkling and dancing off the lacy braids of water zigzagging across the riverbed.  The excitement of the trail was when some horseback riders came along–I pulled the dotter and the dog off to the side of the trail, to avoid the dog getting over-excited by the horses, and this turned out to be a mistake:  the horses, thinking the dawg was a bear, went into a panic.  Luckily, all we had to do was step out into the trail so the horses could see that we were not carnivorous monsters.

The end result:  dotter wanted to be down there, not up here.  Sigh.  And, since she really, really wanted to be able to play in the water–any water!–I drove us down to the Kmik River for a bit of wading around in ice-cold water.

The view from the darkness:

Some bright white berries that caught my eye:

Some beautiful bright white mushrooms popping in the darkness (they were huge!):

A clump of mushrooms displaying their undersides and looking voluptuous:

The dotter playing in the water:

Today’s hike was to Eklutna Lake.  The lake is utterly gorgeous, and this hike was bright and sunny, and easy, and fun.  There were certainly a lot more people on this hike than our other two, because it’s so near Big City.  But I think I’ve overloaded the girl with hiking.  Maybe I’ve overloaded myself with hiking?!  Anyway, I think it’s time to do other things for a while!

The lake:

Some sunny autumn color:

And some more sunny autumn color:

Playing at the water’s edge at the lake:

Many thanks for all the compliments on my weight loss pics.  I must admit, I chose the least flattering pic of me from our summer trip, so that may have helped make the difference more noticeable.  And, as Blog Antagonist asked, I am petite–5′2.5″–so a small weight loss looks bigger on me.  (The converse is also true:  a small weight gain looks bigger, as well.)  I will keep plugging away at it, but will only update once in a while on the ol’ bloggeroo.  The goal is another ten pounds, I think.

• Bah.  Our thunderstorm fizzled–we ended up with a little bit of drizzle, and the thunder and lightning disappeared.  Today, to demonstrate the amount of moisture we had that resulted in our monsoons, we have had gray skies all day, and rain.  We need the rain, but…oh, well.  I really wanted that thunderstorm to be a biggie.
• I tried–unsuccessfully–to avoid the homemade Rice Krispie Treats we have on the kitchen counter.  Some people are made of strong stuff, and can Resist; I cannot.
• The dotter is now in summer camp.  Woohoo!
• Which means she is encountering new people again.  Woohoo!
• Which means, in our rednecky area, another encounter with a kid who says “I don’t like Chinese people.”  This was apparently announced to the dotter and to R. and her brother H., who are also adopted from China.  That’s the bad part.  The good part is that the dotter found her favorite counselor, Mr. Zane (who is incredibly cute and sweet) and told him.  Mr. Zane then pulled the youngster aside and told him, “Hey, man.  That is so uncool.”  And no doubt a bit more.  The other good part is that the dotter told us at the dinner table and was suitably scornful, and talked about it easily.  Damn.  I hate this stuff.  I really wish there were a way to protect the dotter–and her friends–from such idiocy.  Anyone have any thoughts on a low-key camp-style diversity curriculum that I can pass on to the counselors?
• What possesses people/kids to say things like that, anyway?  Goddamn.

I grew up in Chicago.  It’s in the Midwest, for those of you who don’t know (har!).  The Midwest is blessed (or cursed, depending upon whom you ask) with magnificent thunderstorms.  Huge anvil-shaped cumulonimbus monsters build up, with accompanied by a build-up of oppressive humidity, until the air falls still and heavy and weighted and you feel almost like you’re swimming through it.  Typically, there’s a period of fitful breezes gusting one way and the other, before they die down, and you know IT is going to come through at any moment.  And then IT hits:  A wild burst of sustained wind coming from one direction, bending all the trees’ branches before it, tossing and turning the (ever-present) trash on the city streets.  With the wind comes an abrupt change in temperature–it can drop 20 or 30 degrees in a few minutes–and then the lightning starts, and the cracks of thunder, and the torrents of rain, and the wind always dashing it this way and that.  That’s the time to sit in your house near a window, so you can hear and see all the drama, and watch the water crashing against the windowpanes, and be happy that you’re safe and warm.

Rather than, say, walking to the El station without an umbrella, as it dumps water at the rate of an inch an hour.  Or driving, when you realize your windshield wipers aren’t up to the job, even at the top speed.

You also got tornado weather.  You knew it was tornado weather because the bottoms of the clouds, and the light filtering through, all turned an eerie greenish-gray color.  This was when you’d turn on the radio to be sure you heard of any tornado warnings–though it was extremely rare that you’d get one in the Big City; cities, it seems, tend to produce heat islands that cause updrafts that disrupt the beginnings of tornado formation.

Then I lived in the mountains of Arizona, which was blessed with monsoon season, a time when the storms would build up over the mountaintops and valleys over rivers, spreading outward, producing small thunderheads with powerful punch.  The storms wouldn’t sprawl over the countryside the way they do in the Midwest, but would produce–just like the weathermen say–”widely scattered thunderstorms”.  You can drive between them, and see the thunder, lightning, and rain being produced by one off in the distance, while being dry where you are.  But even though they’re small, compared to the storms in the Midwest, they’re intense, and filled with drama.

Then I moved to the Bay Area.  This is a place that has never seen a thunderstorm, so far as I know.  My need for weather drama went totally unquenched for years.

Then I moved to Lubbock, Texas, a benighted place where people think a row of tulips planted arrow-straight in front of their yellow-brick boxes is a “garden”, and where there’s no topography to speak of for hundreds of miles in any one direction.  BUT!  But Lubbock had three things going for it:  the spring and fall goose migration, wherein you would see, and hear, thousands of geese flying overhead, going north in the spring and south in the fall; incredible sunsets because of the dust and the aforementioned lack of topography–you could see the sunsets for an hour, a vivid array of golds and pinks and magentas and reds; and Wrath of God thunderstorms.  These were storms to conjure with, preceded by a wall of dust that would sweep through the neighborhood, covering everything with reddish loam, and then, when the storm hit, turned to instant mud spots.  Lubbock is in Tornado Alley, so not only did I get the drama of the storms, but lots of tornado weather.

Another stint in the mountains of Arizona lasted for ten years.

But here in Alaska, where we live, the rains are mostly long, slow, and dreary–no thunderstorms to speak of, normally.

This May, however…ah, it’s been glorious:  warm (almost hot), dry, clear, sunny.  And today?  Today, we are going to get rain.  Because the sky over the mountains to the north of us has been brewing monsoon clouds, like we got in Arizona, and now it is dark, threatening, lowering silver-gray and the thunder has been rumbling for an hour, getting closer and louder as the clouds build down to the valley where we live.  An hour ago, the clouds were still to the north, and I was sitting in the yard in the beating sunlight, listening to the sturm und drang behind me…now, the clouds have grown overhead and to the south.

Last year, we didn’t have any thunderstorms at all.  The first summer we were here, we had two or three; they are very rare.  In fact, the various write-ups of weather for these areas specifically mention that “even though you may have heard there are no thunderstorms in Alaska, it does happen…”

I was so excited, I called OmegaDad at work to breathlessly exclaim, “We have thunder!  And a huge anvil cloud!  And it’s coming our way!”  He laughed at me, and said, “I was just talking with M about thunderstorms, and telling him you would be so happy that we’re having one!”  Apparently, in one of those cosmic coincidences that make life interesting, I called him just after he announced that…Then, of course, he went on to claim that I was only happy when disaster was brewing, which made me pout, which made him laugh…

Anyway, I’m happy.  Thunderstorms do this Midwestern girl’s heart good.

I have come to a momentous conclusion:

When telling people when to visit Alaska, I should say, “Come in May.”

Rain?  What’s that?  Sunshine?  Oooh, lots.  Greenery?  Yup.  A few flowers–not as many as later on, but at least there’s no drizzly, chilly, rainy days.  It has just been glorious, and I highly recommend it to non-Alaskans as a good way to get to know Alaska.

The dotter tried to do her homework in the hammock this afternoon.  First there was the flat-on-her-back approach:

Then there was the sitting-up approach:

It ended up not working.  Too many distractions, too much sunshine, the breeze kept blowing her papers around, and then there was the problem that her pencil’s eraser was worn down.  Which, of course, meant she couldn’t do her work.  Oh, well; it was a fun afternoon anyway.

I might note that this is my hammock, now dangling from my new Pawley Island hammock frame, a Mother’s Day gift from the hubby and the dotter.  The hammock was my gift many years ago, and was hung between two trees in the back yard of our house in Small Mountain University Town.  Here, however, I was adamant that I needed a frame, rather than putting the hammock between trees; I wanted to be able to grab the sunshine, and anywhere we had two trees properly spaced, we didn’t have sunshine, or else it was right next to the next-door neighbor’s driveway. 

The lilac buds are proceeding apace.  The one bush is loaded with buds on every branch:

The other two bushes are just beginning to get their leaf buds, but I fully expect them to do just as nicely.

The pasque flower that was a bud last week is now fully open:

My other Mother’s Day gifts were a cake, decorated by the dotter:

And, of course, the obligatory hand-made Mother’s Day card:

Note the nascent cursive writing.  She’s not supposed to be doing cursive at school, but is busily producing her own version.  This will probably cause problems next year, or whenever they introduce cursive (if they do at all?)…

I would do Deep Thoughts about Mother’s Day, but will just give you the gist:  Mom’s day is one of the hardest holidays an infertile woman can cope with.  To all my readers who are still struggling with infertility, all I can say is that I hope you, too, will one day be getting the hand-made cards and the gifties made at school.  Another Mom’s day thought is that I found myself thinking of OmegaDotter’s birthmother a lot; the girl is so damned amazing and fun (and irritating and whiny) and smart (and capable of doing incredibly silly stuff), and I wonder what her mother is like, and feel sorrowful that she’s missing out on such a cool kid. 

Follow-up:  Not only did the New York Times quote OmegaMom, but Inside Edition emailed me, wanting to know about flu parties.  Since I don’t know diddly about flu parties, I passed the query on to one of my Tweets, who was interested in doing one.

The blog has suffered intensely because we’ve had spectacular, wonderful, gorgeous weather.  Yesterday our local Mesonet station hit 82F; today it hit 78F; on Friday, it was in the low 70s.  These have been record-breaking temperatures.  The sun has been shining, the birds have been singing, and I have been raking.

And raking, and raking, and raking.

I am, as a result, achingly sore in my shoulder, arm, and hip muscles.  I also have a fantastic sunburn.  Wah, wah, wah.  Pity me:  We’ve had weather to die for, and I’ve been outside for three days straight, playing in the yard, and discovering that, yes, Virginia, Alaska sunlight can give you sunburns.

A week ago, the snow was all the way down the mountainsides; now, it’s melted up two-thirds of the way.  A week ago, the trees were brown and bare; now, leaves are exploding everywhere you look and our neighbors’ houses are fading away behind the greenery (as is our kitty-corner, catty-wompus sliver of a view of the smaller mountains to the north of the valley).

This time of year is called “break-up”, because the ice encasing the rivers finally breaks into chunks and is swept downhill, down to lakes and the ocean.  There are bets and lotteries based on when various rivers will break clear.  There is also the problem of ice dams–where the chunks of ice manage to get snagged on something, then snag more chunks of ice, which capture still more, until you have a jumble of ice damming up the river.  Wayfarer Scientista has a lovely description of break-up in her area; Bill Hess was up in Wainwright, helping some native Alaskan whalers prepare an ice ramp for their whaling ship; AKMuckraker, over at Mudflats, took a walk along a creek today, along with some great pics; and Hig, at Ground Truth Trekking, has been using the (lovely, wonderful, long-awaited!) sunlight to play around with Fresnel lenses.

Our lilac bushes are putting out leaf buds and what looks, to me, like the beginnings of lilac blossoms (?):

Some fresh new trees leaves catching the sunlight:

And our pasque flower survived the winter, too, and is about to bloom:

So, essentially, everyone in Alaska is making up for six months of winter weather by soaking up as much sunlight as possible.  It’s amazing just how much being able to be outside and just bask can change one’s disposition–I am practically manic with delight at the joy of springtime.  Anyway, something has to give when one is obsessively enjoying the weather and the yard and the leaves and flowers and and and…and in my case, what gave is the blog.

Ah, spring!  When the pussywillows start popping, when the temperature hits 60 degrees, when yours truly spends days upon days upon days raking the yard to remove last fall’s dump of dead leaves and a winter’s worth of dawg poop.  What?  Surprised about us not picking up the poop during the winter?  Hey!  YOU try spending the extra few minutes to pick up dawg poop when it’s 20 below zero, there’s snow on the ground, and the dawg poop sinks into the snow because it’s so warm in comparison and it suddenly becomes a major excavation project to pick up the poop.

Just sayin’.

Anyway, I have been raking and soaking in the sunlight and warmth (we almost broke into the top ten highest temps for April today!), and loving it.  Oooh, yeah, gimme that Vitamin D, bay-bee!

OmegaDad, on the other hand, has rediscovered the one bad side to spring/summer in Alaska.

The Gloaming.

Last night, the dotter needed to snuggle with me in bed because she had watched something ER-esque on the TV at the neighbor’s house.  Apparently, there was lots of surgery, requiring lots of blood, lots of shouting, and generally unnerving stuff for her.  So I settled into bed with her and a book, and then fell asleep.

This left poor OmegaDad seeking another place to sleep.  (The dotter is too big now for all three of us to sleep well if she sneaks or is invited into bed with us.)

So he trotted out to the living room, blankie and pillow in hand, and snuggled up on the sofa.

Only to get all of about four hours’ of sleep last night, because of The Gloaming.

Yes, we have entered the time of year when we have lost all deep darkness at night; the time when the sunrise/sunset calculators that display twilight times now show “light” for astronomical twilight.  In two weeks, the calendar suddenly displays “light” instead of twilight times for nautical twilight.  Then, in the first weeks of June, civil twilight suddenly disappears and the calendars display “light” for that interval.

So The Gloaming is just beginning.  (Ooooh, a cute little itty-bitty baby Gloaming!)  It doesn’t bother me one bit; I can sleep through just about anything.  But any hints of light around OmegaDad make him sleep poorly; it’s just the way he’s built.  Our bedroom curtains block a certain amount of light, so it won’t bother him there for another month, but in the living room/kitchen area, we have three windows that have no coverings at all, and The Gloaming creeps in on crepuscular feet.

(Isn’t that a great word?  “Crepuscular”.  It, and “gloaming”, are actual real live words that are actually applied to this exact situation.  One thing I have loved about living in Alaska is that I get to use these words to refer to Real Live Environmental Conditions!  Woot!)

Git yer minds outta the gutter, dudes!

I’m not talking about sex here, dammit!  I’m talking about…

Spring!

Frost heave!

A yard that due to 3 days of more-than-50-degree weather (yes!) has been freed from a layer of snow, only to reveal…

Hummocks.

Lumps.

Hollows.

Mud.

Seriously–I think we didn’t notice last year, because we weren’t out in the yard this early.  This year, we have chickens in the coop in the backyard, so we need to be trudging across at least twice per day.  And so, this year, we have noticed that the yard on either side of the septic tank is at least a foot-and-a-half higher than the area right over the septic tank.  OmegaDad is in dire fear that this means we have a Problem with the septic tank; I am convinced that after a week or so more of 50-degree-plus weather it will subside.

When you step on certain spots on the lawn–spots that look nice and dry and solid, unlike the spots that are pools of mud–they crunch beneath you, plunging your foot four inches downward in a single instant.  WHAM!  So you’ve got these unnatural spots where you innocently stepped…and you’ve got the natural spots where the ground just sank because the ice has already melted from that one six-inch-square area, unlike the surrounds.

It is very interesting.  It has the Omega Grownups thinking seriously of purchasing a roller drum for the tractor, so that we can smooth things out once the ground has thawed more evenly.

Today we had monsoon style clouds up over the mountains, and, once again, I cursed the fate that had me out and about without my camera.  (”The fate”, aka foolish forgetful OmegaMom.)  OmegaDad and I were driving to Home Debit, enjoying quality time together because the dotter is off having a Hannah Montana-filled overnight with best bud K.  As we swept up into the parking lot, one of the clouds over one of the mountains simply…dropped.  People who live in the southwest are familiar with this activity in the summer time thunderstorms; the precipitation beneath this one, however, was bright white rather than dark grey.  It was a thundersnow dropping onto the side of the mountain, highlit by the sun, and it would have been a stunning, awesome picture.  But I didn’t have my camera with me.

Damn.

Anyway, expect to hear more about SPRING! from me as the days go on.  I am practically dancing with excitement!

This morning, OmegaDad and I girded up our loins (figuratively speaking), and hauled Angie back out to the chicken coop after weeks in the garage recuperating from her last experience of being returned to the coop, whereupon Some Unknown Monstrous Chicken took it upon herself to beat Angie into bloody bits of ground beef.  Fearing a reoccurrence of the same, OmegaDad and I spent an hour leaning on the walls of the chicken coop and snatching up Some Unknown Monstrous Chicken, who turned out to be Comet (the bitch).

I have decided that chickens are visible evidence of evolution, obviously having evolved from dinosaurs.  Carnivorous dinosaurs.  Velociraptor type dinosaurs.  Lean, mean, fighting machines.  That like blood.

(Cue zombie sound:  ::Blooooood::)

What was happening was a disruption of avian psychodynamics.  New hen in the coop (okay, okay, so she’s not “new”, but it’s been weeks, and she seemed new) means establishing a new pecking order.

In general, establishing the pecking order means that dominant bird pecks at lower-status bird, lower-status bird squawks, lowers herself in a submissive posture, and then runs like hell away from the pecking bird.  A quick flurry, and all is over and done with, no harm, no foul, especially no blood.

But Comet’s a chicken bitch.  And Angie’s stubborn. 

Within minutes of Angie being reintroduced to the coop, Comet had drawn blood on Angie’s feet.

Then comes the creepy part:  Comet and Winnie spent the next hour wandering around very carefully hunting down and eating every single speck of blood they could find.  With sinuous and sinister darting heads with beady eyes looking sidelong at Angie, calculating when she was looking away, so that more pecking could be done.

Okay, it was mostly Comet doing this action.  Winnie was alternately pecking at chicken feed, hunting down a few bloody spots of chicken fluff, and running away from Angie’s desultory I-have-more-status-then-you pecks.

Comet was out for blood.  Literally.  Comet was looking for a violent confrontation.  Comet was trying to provoke a violent confrontation.

And Angie wasn’t backing down.  She wasn’t fighting back, but she wasn’t backing down.  Comet would dart in and peck at her then fluff up and posture and threaten, and Angie would put her head down, but she wouldn’t assume the submissive pose (crouching down parallel to floor); her body and tail were still up.  This kind of reminded me of a kid stubbornly refusing to do chores and being sullen:  You can’t make me! read her body language.  Which, of course, drove Comet even more into a frenzy.

So we finally gave in and removed Comet from the coop.

Lo and behold, hours later, no bloody Angie, no bloody Winnie, two eggs laid. 

We will attempt reintroducing Comet to the coop in a few days.  If that doesn’t work, we’ll farm Comet out; we like Angie better (Comet is a bitch).

Other than that…The volcano blew big time on Saturday, dumping lots of ash on Homer (check out some of the pics!), southwards.  Saturday was a glorious, sunny day, and everything was melting, with lots of rivulets and streams of water pouring out from under slabs of packed snow.  I took the dawg for a walk and had a lovely time; I meant to do it today, as well, but then I got struck with either pleurisy or costochondroitis or (crossing my fingers and knocking on wood that it isn’t this one) pericarditis and spent the afternoon dreading every deep breath I took.  Bleah. 

In a few more days, I hit a birthday, a big one.

Spring.

Rumor has it that spring is arriving in various parts of the U.S.

While we still have snow and cold, there are hints of spring peeping up here and there in our area.  Specifically, snow is melting.  The sun is rising at 8 a.m., and setting at 8:20 p.m. (yes!), and we now have twilight until a little after 9.

And!  And!

I drove off Friday to Big City, to provide some supporting documentation for our first PFD (Permanent Fund Dividend) (which this year could be anything from a little over a grand per person to a whopping $68 per person, due to the economic mess).  It was sunny, it was warm, there were people outside with no coats on!  And shorts!  Woot!

But the thing that really gave me a foretaste of spring, that made me optimistic that endless winter is on its way out…

Certain stands of trees were showing the very faintest, tiniest, almost not noticeable, tinge of greenishness, mostly on the trunks.

And other trees, here and there, as I drove through Small Alaskan Suburb, had fluffy white flowers at the very topmost branches.

So, in honor of Friday’s equinox, I pronounce it SPRING!  Woohoo!

I have been in a truly bitchy mood all day, and one of the reasons is that it’s snowing yet again.  Another nine inches.  Sigh.

The other day, we passed a bank sign that excitedly proclaimed, “The pussywillows are here!”  I don’t believe them.  Oh, I guess it’s true; moose have been congregating by the roadsides, nibbling on the branchlets with the rising sap, and I swear I saw some leaf buds on the trees lining our streets.

But now they’re covered with snow.

OmegaDad claims that in a month, it will all be gone.  Please mark your calendars:  April 5.  No snow.

Right?

Springtime is coming.

Right?

After all, this weekend is Daylight Savings Time weekend.

And in a few weeks, we hit the Spring Equinox.

So even here in the frozen north, spring must be coming.

Right?

Please tell me it is so…

The reason we were unable to see the moon-and-Venus show last night is that we had cloud cover moving in.  I thought my post was too late, but apparently I was able to get at least two people out to view the conjunction, so My Work Here On Earth Is Done.  Or something.

Anyway, the cloud cover moving in proceeded to dump snow.  And dump snow.  And dump snow.  And it is still snowing.

OmegaDad (who posted a fine rant last night) decided that now that it is almost March, and springtime is a glimmer of light in the dark tunnel of winter, he should create an ice rink in our back yard.

Ahem.

Well, okay, a mini ice rink.  A teeny tiny ice rink.  While I am dubious, at best, I admit that when it freezes up I will partake of the 12×12 icy goodness for a few turns around the ice.  So here is the mini rink filling up:

Here is OmegaDad doing more work on the mini rink:

The dotter actually helped shovel snow off the area  to be the base of the rink.  Then she played.  First, she stands straight, falls flat on her back, emerges from the snow, and looks adorable.  Note how the pinkness reflects off her PINK snow gear onto the snow…:

And then she marched on the play structure/thing we have, that was covered with snow, and did her favorite activity, creating an avalanche.  First, before:

Then in avalanche-y action:

All grand fun.

It was a sunny day today, so I had to sneak out to get some pictures around the yard.  Yesterday was actually much more interesting; it was sunny and there were clouds and snippets of fog, but, alas, every time I decided I was going to ditch work for 15 minutes for some pics, a cloud or fog would filter in front of the sun, and things stopped being pretty and started being dingy gray.

But today was nice.  First up, we have bird tracks in the snow.  OmegaDad has been feeding the birds; it’s not quite time for us to be worrying about bears, and it’s far enough into the winter season that the birds are voracious when they find a feeder.  They frolic around, dive-bombing each other and bashing into the feeder, knocking seed into the snow, and then the ones who are being fought off discover the seeds in the snow and gorge themselves down there.

We circle into the back yard now to take pics of other things, such as a snow-bedecked seed head of the cow parsnip which infests our back and side yards:

A twig in the snow:

A snowy stump in the very back, up against the woodsy area:

The sun peeping through the trees on the southeast side of the yard:

All very pretty.  Alas, the coming of the sun has made me antsy for spring; as you can see, spring is still far away.  But it’s getting light before 8 a.m. and dark after 6:00 p.m., so we are making progress.  Various of my blog feeds are featuring pictures of buds, and all I can do is offer a heartfelt, mental “Pppbbbbtttt!” at them, and cling to the knowledge that in a few months we, too, will be seeing buds.

Here:  Have some big oogy squishy kisses.  Mwah.  And a hug.  And a noogie, just to keep things from getting too mushy.

Many thanks for the responses.  And while I am trying to come up with 101 uses for dryer lint (har!), as suggested by Miss Vinegar Martinis, I will take a whack at AmFam’s series of questions.  She asks:

I want to hear more about living in Alaska. Do you think you will stay there forever? Is milk $7 a gallon? How can you get your car to start in -25 degree weather? Is it even warm there in the summer? Are you glad you moved there? Do you go crazy when it is light out 22 hours a day? I want to know more!

Do I think we’ll stay here forever?!  Ack!  No!  OmegaDad has Plans, y’see.  Long-term plans, that include finding a way to get posted to China for a few years, which requires a certain level in the federal bureaucracy.  He’s thinking Maine.  Or New Hampshire.  Or one of those other New England-y states.  I, of course, yearn for the southwest.  But, hey.  He’s my One And Only True Love, and the main thing is that he enjoy his job.  He hated his job in Arizona after a while, and it really impacted his health, physically, mentally, and emotionally.  He truly likes his job here in Alaska.  My job is much more portable; I can find a techie-type job anywhere (so far).  So there we have it.  “Whither thou goest” and all that rot.

Milk is not $7 a gallon.  At least not where we live.  This doesn’t mean it’s cheap:  $5 per gallon.  But if you shop around, you can find deals.  When I go visit mom, I find myself just standing in the grocery stores drooling at the prices.  And the fruit and vegetable variety.  Then, when I come back here, I find myself just standing in the grocery stores bug-eyed in price shock.  And missing good veggies.

You get your car to start in -25F weather in three ways:  Either you’ve got a nice new battery, or you’ve got a plug-in engine block heater, or you’ve got both.  And even that doesn’t work for some folks.  So far, there has been only one day when my car sounded like it might be having difficulty getting started, on about the tenth day of meteorological brutality.  Otherwise, the Big Honkin’ Heap o’Iron just keeps going, as does Little Red, OmegaDad’s car.

Is it warm in the summer?  Well, it was in 2007; it got up into the 80s.  It wasn’t in 2008; it barely got above 70 twice, officially.  Goodness knows for 2009.  The U.S. Weather Service is promising “above-average” temperatures for the summer.  We shall see.

Am I glad we moved here?

Um.

Um.

Well, it’s an adventure.  You betcha.  I always wanted to visit Alaska.  It’s beautiful.  It’s wild.  It’s different.

Do I want to stay here?

Not much more than a couple more years, frankly.  It’s a nice place to visit, though!

Do I go crazy when it’s light out 24 hours a day?  Because, really, it is light out all the livelong day.  Or, more to the point, it’s never dark in the summer.  Just like it’s barely light on December 20th, shortest day of the year, when the sun gets about 5 degrees above the horizon, and it’s like anemic late afternoon sunlight for the entire five hours…

So:  the summertime.  I was blessed, genetically, by an ability to sleep through just about any type of environment, given that I am sleepy.  This comes from my mom, who would fall asleep if you got her out of the vertical long enough.  My husband joked that I would sleep through 76 trombones (and associated trombonists) marching through our bedroom.  Menopause has put an end to that, but I can maintain a nice sleepy haze when I am wakened, and then fall right back to sleep as soon as the disruption disappears, so the end result is about the same.

OmegaDad, however, has serious difficulties with the all-daylight-all-the-time environment.  It leaves him in a perpetual state of semi-sleep, not good.  I am considering blackout shades and one of those eye-patch thingies for him this year.

My difficulty lies with the winter lack of light; it makes me seriously gloomy, depressed, and sleepy.  My distant ursine ancestors raise their shaggy heads in my DNA under those circumstances, and tell me it’s time to EAT and SLEEP.  So I gain weight, get depressed, and sleep a lot.  And I have yet to see the Northern Lights, which seriously bums me out.

I’m sure all of you are just delighted that us Alaskans managed to send our cold snap down your way, and grabbed your nice warm weather for ourselves.  Today it was 45 degrees.  This evening’s march out to the chicken coop was…warm.  It was weird.  And our foot and a half of snow has managed to melt down to about six inches of very very soggy stuff.  I find myself wondering where all this water is going to go; we have a few more days of this kind of warmth scheduled, and while the snow is melting, the ground beneath is still frozen solid, so there’s nowhere for the water to sink in.

Anyway, we just thought we’d share.  We’re just nice and friendly that way.  No reason for us to hog all the double-digit below-zero temperatures; y’all need some, too.

Broody hen lays eggs.
Alas, the concrete floor is hard
And cracked eggs result.

Sick, whiny dotter
Rejects medicine with pouts.
Mom is now grumpy.

After frigid weeks
The temp goes to plus fifteen.
O joy!  Spring is here!

Boots, chaps, hat, blue jeans:
The dotter rushes to dress.
Saddle Club is on!

Safeway Select food
Is quick and easy to cook.
But does it taste good??

Moans and groans and moans.
OmegaDad is still sick.
Mom is still grumpy.

Motrin is Da Bomb.
One quick dose calms many fevers.
Oh no!  We are out!

Cold moonlit dawg walk.
Two moose pose in yard next door.
Quick, dawg!  Back inside!

We are going on day 12 of two-digit temperatures below zero.  While it is a cause of intense cabin fever, there is beauty in the cold.

When the breeze stirs the trees, the frozen trunks clack against each other with a hollow sound that reminds me of the sound of elk antlers crashing in the dark in mid-September during the season of rut.  Clack-clack-clackity-clack…quiet…clack…creak…quiet…clack-clack-clack…

The crystalline structure of snow changes as it gets colder; when a snowfall is new, everything is hushed, including footfalls.  When it’s this cold, the snow squeaks and crunches as you walk on it; there is no hush.  Scrunch-squeak-crunch, scrunch-squeak-crunch, scrunch-squeak-crunch.

There are times when I wish we had OmegaDad’s favorite non-existent invention, the retina-cam.  Driving the dotter to her gymnastics class on Monday–the only day this week that she’s been out–I saw the late afternoon sunlight backlight the clouds of steam coming off the fire station’s heating system on the roof, and it was beautiful.  Walking out to check on the (voracious, rabid, grape-hunting) chickens in the late night, I was crunching through a cold snowy landscape flooded with the light from the waxing gibbous moon and wished there was a way to capture that picture.  (By the way, this weekend’s full moon is the biggest of the year.)

Each of these times, of course, I have had neither recorder nor camera handy.

Vignettes of the cold:

• The thermometer broke at -80 in Tok.  The Weather Service pooh-poohs it, claiming it was only -65.  Tok is nowhere near us, thank heavens; we’ve only hit -29.
• The good thing about the deep freeze is that when it’s up around zero, it feels warm.
• When it’s this cold, it’s a Bad Idea to unthinkingly grab the handle of a grocery cart in the parking lot with your bare hands.  The cold, it burns.  Fast.
• The plumbers in this area are so backed up it’s frightening; the cold has lasted long enough that normally well-insulated houses have frozen pipes.
• The U.S. Cross-Country Skiing Championships were delayed multiple times; in protest, a group of skiers from California decided to ski in the buff, wearing only briefs, bras, gloves and hats.  “It’s not so bad!” exclaims one insane young man.
• The cold seems to draw any moisture in the house air straight to the windows, where it freezes.  I envision molecules of water doing slo-mo race sequences, a la Steve Austin (The Six Million Dollar Man?  Oh, go away, kiddies, those of us oldsters know what I’m describing), or to the theme from Rocky. 

OmegaDad and I are finally out of the woods in terms of the Illness Of Doom.  Hurray!  The dotter, however, is still sick, still running fevers, and I’m close to the “it’s time for the doctor” stage for her.

TeenDoc, at Welcome To the Dollhouse, posted an interesting challenge:  Write your life in 100 words, no more, no less.

I thought I’d take it on.  Now, having re-read TeenDoc’s paragraph, I feel mine doesn’t have “flavor” or “depth” or something (in other words, I liked her approach much better).  But, nonetheless, here goes:

Born in Chicago to Beatnik parents.  Father intense, musical, mathematical, gifted.  Mother calm, artsy, pragmatic writer.  Lonely, awkward geek through my teens.  In college, ignored programming in favor of writing historical romances. Dropped out to work on magazine; returned to college and dropped out again two more times. Moved to Arizona, then California. Returned to college and decided programming was okay after all. Applied to national labs internship for the hell of it. Met OmegaDad there. Moved to Lubbock. Started trying for a baby. Moved to Arizona. Endured infertility and failed IVFs, then healed emotionally and adopted OmegaDotter. What’s next?

So, it’s your turn.  Do your version in the comments here, or post on your blog and link back here.

In the meantime, some notes:

In the “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth” department, OmegaUnk commented on our record-breaking string of below zero days by mentioning it was 95F in his neck of the woods that day.  My response:  Ppbbbbttttttt!

In the “Gee, thanks, that really helped a lot!” department, Kate of High Altitude Gardening commiserated with me on my recent hidden-object games addiction, asked me to start a support group, and then told me to download Madame Fate.  Which I promptly did.  Ahem.

In the “I know it doesn’t make sense, just trust me” department, Pretzel told me where to find humidifiers.  So:  Yes, it doesn’t make sense, because all my life I’ve needed humidifiers during the icy cold months just like you suggested, but in this house, we need a dehumidifier.  Currently what’s happening is that any time we bathe or run the dishwasher or boil water, more moisture enters the air, and the house is so well sealed that it congeals on the windows and around the doorjambs, and it’s cold enough outside so that what congeals on the windows and doorjambs freezes.  This is Not Good for the house.  And frustrating for us.  In fact, it’s mighty damned embarrassing to have to thump and whack on the door from the inside when there’s a cold Pizza Hut employee with (supposedly) hot pizzas waiting on the outside, just because the door is iced shut and it’s the only way to shake loose the ice and open the door…

In the “Mem’ries” department (from two respects–first off, I should have answered this weeks ago, and secondly, it’s about our trip to China to adopt the dotter):  Yes, Elaine, I did, indeed, belong to the September 2001 DTC email list, and I do think it was me and OmegaDad you met on the bridge on Shamian Island!

In the “oh, just go check her out!” department:  I’ve been meaning to write up something about women in science, sexism, and displays of femininity, prompted by a series of posts by Dr. Isis, with associated incredibly thoughtful commentary.  But finally, my brain still frozen, I’ve decided to just point you to her blog to say “Go Forth And Read!”  She’s snarky, funny, and a rollicking good read who enjoys being a scientist and a fashionista.  Enjoy.

Our plumber, who we had to call in again because, while we had heat, it was very anemic, was afraid that our pipes had frozen somewhere.  Eeek!  But, no–whew!–it was the pump on the heating system.  Still quite pricy, but a hella lot less pricy than the alternative.  The plumber reported that they had been working endless days thawing out people’s heating systems because it’s been so cold, for so long, that normally well-insulated systems have given up the ghost.

The water in the chicken coop was frozen yesterday night.

Our kitchen door is freezing shut; we have to aim a heater at the door for a few minutes to loosen things up to the point where a few good whacks against the wood will jar things loose.

All our windows have chunks of ice at the bottom.  (We are trying to find a dehumidifier, but every store is sold out, hah!)

The poor dawg is having serious problems when he goes outside to do his thang.  It’s funny, but sad, to watch him try to poop while holding first one paw, then the next, up in the air.  By the time he’s done and we’re at the bottom of the stairs to go back to the kitchen (having thumped the ice free to open the door to let him out to…), he’s a miserable puppy limping along.  Time to go buy doggie boots and hope like hell he’ll wear them.

We’re in the fifth day of the cold snap; it’s been below zero here in Suburban Alaska all five of those days, while Big City still reached above zero on the first day.  The cold weather is forecast to continue until Friday, with “highs” of 5 below zero.

Suburban Alaska has postponed its Alaska Statehood Celebration, which was scheduled for today.  The commentary on the story was full of Rough Tough Alaskans sneering at the weeny wusses who “can’t handle a little cold!”  OmegaMom raises her hand:  that’s me!

Right now, it’s 26 below zero here.  It was 30 below zero in the middle of the night.

The end result is that my brain is frozen.  I have ideas for posts floating around in my head, but nothing coalesces.  Bear with me:  the brain will defrost sometime soon.

It’s 25 below zero here.

Our furnace isn’t working.

The temperature in the house is ever-so-slowly dropping.  Downstairs, it is 60F, upstairs it is a bit warmer.  I figure we’re dropping a degree or two an hour.

Bahahaha!  “Happy New Year!” indeed.

Luckily, at least one plumber is at work on New Year’s Day.  (The others, even though they advertise 24-hour emergency service in the phone book, are apparently sleeping off hangovers.)  He’s getting his truck warmed up and will be on his way soon.

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

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

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

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

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

You can see where this is going, right?

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

Tomorrow, I write about homework again…

My other potential title for this post was “As cold as ice”.

I’ve mentioned the horrendous winds we get here on a regular basis.  This morning I was woken by one, bright and early (okay, dark and early), a half-hour earlier than I normally get up.

The wind continued throughout the day; currently we have sustained 17 mph winds with gusts up to 37 mph, but it topped out some time this afternoon with sustained winds at about 30 mph and gusts up to 44.  The forecast says gusts up to 70 mph tonight.  Usually with a wind like this, the Big City forecast will have a wind warning.  Today, none.  Why is that?  Why, because the winds were nowhere near Big City this time, just on our side of the inlet.  So there we are, with 60 mph winds where OmegaDad works, and no wind warning.  Elitist snobs.  The weather folk, that is.

The wind was strong enough that while I was home the lights were flickering and dipping in and out at various times during the day.

The wind was strong enough that while I was out, it was blowing my big honkin’ piece of iron also known as a Ford Freestyle.  This is quite rare.  The Big Honkin’ Piece of Iron is, at its heart, stable.  Sedate.  A soccer-mom’s type of car.  It takes a goodly bit of moving air to rock this car on its axles.

One of the problem was that when the wind blew while the car was on the icy side streets, the car would fishtail.

Such fun.

See, we had boatloads of snow earlier.  We’ve had snow piling up since early October.  The last big snow, after Thanksgiving, was icing on the cake.  Or coals to Newcastle.  Or ice to an igloo.  Or something like that.  So the side streets were solidly packed snow, which is generally good driving.

Until you get about five days in a row where the temperature hovers around 33 or 34F, complete with misty rain, during the day, and goes down to 28F at night.  The top layer of packed snow melts then freezes.  The misty rain puts a slight layer of water on top of the ice that results.  Then you have what I consider “a lovely mess”.

Getting out of the cul-de-sac today–or getting back into it–was a nightmare.  It was solid ice from our garage door, down the driveway, up the cul-de-sac, down the intersecting street in both directions, and on the intersecting streets with that street.  Once you got to the more major roads, you finally hit bare concrete and asphalt, and suddenly got traction.  But until you reached that point…

…and if you had the Winds of Hell blowing…

…even in a great Big Honkin’ Piece of Iron…

Well, let’s just say it was A Grand Adventure.  There.  That’s the optimistic point of view.  We’ll just gloss over the moments of sheer heart-pounding terror as BHPOI was buffeted by the howlin’ winds while on the side streets and slid (slooowly, because I was driving like a 75-year-old) this way, and then slid that way as I corrected, and finally (finally!) settled down again roughly pointed in the right direction…

…only to be buffeted once again.

Ugh.

By the way–the day was completed by having to sit around the tire dealership for a couple of hours (there were a lot of folks who needed tire work today), only to be told that letting Fix-A-Flat sit around in a tire for more than a day was A Very Bad Thing and that Fix-A-Flat rots the insides of tires so that patches won’t stick well and “compromises the integrity of the tire” and, say, lady, did you know you need a new tire?  To the tune of $168.  Harrumph.

I am still questioning whether I was taken or not.

It doesn’t help that yours truly, who has been quite mellow lately, unlike last year, bouyed by lots of nice bright snow and relatively clear days and a truly stupid private daydream, has suddenly had the daydream yanked away (reality bites sometimes), the clear days disappear, and the mellow abruptly morphing into the galloping blues, just like last year’s blues.  Except much shorter, hopefully, as the solstice approaches quickly, as does my one week in (gloriously sunny) Arizona.

Wah wah wah.  I promise to have a more spritely post tomorrow, filled with Christmas-tree and gingerbread-cookie goodness.

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.