OmegaMom

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.

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.