I have some ideas for posts, but nothing is gelling.  Right now, it’s just amorphous ideas drifting through my head; a paragraph or two plus an idea of where it will go, but nothing that is coalescing into anything worthwhile putting down on paper (or putting down on the screen).

Ugh.

Anyone want a Christmas card & letter from me?  Email me. 

Today was supposed to be our annual trek to the Nutcracker.  We were going to take the dotter’s friend K. with us, as well.  But yesterday the weather gods decided it was time to dump a big ol’ load of snow on the area, around 12 inches.

Now, in Small Mountain University Town, where they regularly get 26-plus inch snows, they have clearing the highways and byways down to a science.  Yes, readers from SMUT, they really do, though you may not think so.  Anyway, a 9- to 12-incher wouldn’t phase the county crews from SMUT; they’d have the snowplows parked by each highway exit, engines running, when the snow reached one inch…and then those plows would be cruising the highways over and over and over again, scraping things down, so that the afternoon after the snow began to fall, it would be fairly clear.

Hereabouts…well, it doesn’t seem very intuitive:  Here in Alaska, Land Of Ice And Snow And Bitter Cold, they’re not quite as good about it.  Oh, in a few days, the highways will be clear, but in the meantime, driving on the highways would be an iffy proposition.

So at 11 a.m. this morning, I wimped out.  OmegaDad is still sick, hacking and coughing and not being very happy, so it would have been just me with the two girls.  And I had foolishly gotten tickets for the 5 p.m. show, which would mean driving both ways in the dark.  In the cold dark.  In the snowy cold dark.  In the snowy cold dark on snow-packed and icy roads.

In a word:  Yuck.

The dotter, when informed that we were wimping out, climbed into my lap and let the tears roll.  But a promise of hauling her and K. off to the bouncy haus for a few hours of good clean bouncin’ fun, plus a chance to dress up in her fancy new holiday finery for a few minutes so mom could take a picture, made up for it.

So there she is.  That girl is only six years old.  I swear!  Really!  But doesn’t she look…um…mighty damn fine?  And like she’s on the verge of teen-hood?  Dayum.  It’s scary.  I swear it was only yesterday that she was shorter than the dining room table, and we could keep things safe from her by pushing them towards the middle of that same table.

It breaks my heart.

Something else that breaks my heart:  When doing the Right Thing is all wrong for a child.  The picture at the head of the story says it all to me.  I read about Anna Mae and my heart sinks.  Oh, she’ll adjust in a few years, and she’ll be a fine young lady when all is said and done, but I think of my dotter having to leave our family at the age of 8–only another year–and it just makes me miserable.  The whole story was so horrid, in every way, and I wish that both sets of parents had found some way, very early on, to resolve things.

Damn.  Now I have to find some way to cheer myself up…

I French-braided the dotter’s hair.

The dotter and I went off to the Bounce Haus and bounced our heads off.  In other words, the dotter wore me out.

I also discovered that my bladder control is dreadful.  There is nothing more quietly embarrassing than realizing that if you jump up and down in a bouncy castle–like you should–that each time you hit the bounce floor, you leak.  This is not a realization I shared with the dotter.

The dotter and I went off to the St0ne C0ld Creamery and chowed down on ice cream.

The dotter and I then went to El Cheapo Hair Salon.  The dotter who a day ago insisted she didn’t want any kind of haircut now insisted she have a “very tiny” trim.

After months of not having a hair cut–and my hair growing down to my shoulders and flattening out as it always does–I relented and returned to the same ol’ same ol’ haircut I have been getting now for about 20 years.  I read bloggers who are going off to hair salons and getting new hairdos all the time.  This makes me envious.  My hair is thin, wispy, fine, flat.  If it’s longer than a few inches, my face starts looking horse-y.  If I get a perm to solve the flatness issue, one side will be perfect and the other side will be frizzy.  Or else I will end up looking like a poodle.

But hope springs eternal:  every few years, I find myself growing my hair out in the hopes that this time, it will morph into a glorious mane, full of body and wave, bouncing enticingly off my shoulders.  And every time, without fail, I reach a point where I look into the mirror, heave a heavy sigh, and say, “Oh, dammit, let’s just chop the whole lot off.”

Now my head feels light and airy, and the slightest breeze makes the short hairs stir about in interesting ways.  It will take a few days at least before I become accustomed to it.

We will not discuss the ongoing alien effect, wherein what used to be deep mahogany brown locks floating down to bedeck the plastic salon cape are now wildly speckled and striped with white.  That’s not related to being forty-mumble years old; it is, obviously, some creature from light years away who is now living in symbiosis with my scalp and sucking the vital juices from my hair follicles for sustenance.

Since I am at the moment dying ten thousand deaths from a virus that my dotter very generously shared with me, and sporting a fever and eyeballs that feel like eggs fried on a summertime Phoenix sidewalk, “giving thanks” is not what I want to do.  Frankly, if it didn’t take way too much energy, I’d like to throw the Mother Of All Tantrums.  Or just grump.

But, hey, “thankfulness” is the meme of the day, so here goes:

OmegaDad:  What can I say?  I am sooo thankful I ran into this scrawny, geeky Oklahoman with an accent lo these fifteen years ago in Los Alamos.  He is kind, thoughtful, sweet, loving, intelligent, introspective, silly.  He makes me laugh.  Regularly.  He is an unending font of deliberate malapropisms that leave me in awe:  How can anyone just spout off these gems of silliness, one after another, so fluently?  There are times when my love and awe overflows, and I seriously consider doing an autopsy on him when he’s dead to see if there’s an area of his brain that is clearly labeled, outlined with purple neurons, that says “Here lies whimsy”.  On the other hand, he spoils the dotter dreadfully.  Hmm.  Oh, well, he spoils me, too, so I guess it all evens out in the end.

Seriously.  This man is way kewl.  He may not be what my Dream Fella looked like oh-so-many-years-ago, but he’s damn fine.  And he makes me–in all my late-40s mommy spread, frumpy and plump–feel sexy and hot.  Man.

OmegaDotter:  She is amazing.  She’s smart and funny, too.  She’s learning to read by leaps and bounds, and is at that stage where she’s trying to read anything that passes into (and out of) her sight.  She regularly illustrates her math homework with grand drawings, which drives me nuts on the one hand and pleases me outrageously on the other.  (The nuttiness is because these drawings make one problem in math homework stretch out to ten minutes.  Homework that could be done in the course of twenty minutes thus ends up taking an hour.)  She is tall and muscular, and is learning to do backflips and bridgeovers in gymnastics.  She can take a few pieces of paper and tape, and build a house for her dolls.  She can turn two Kleenex boxes into a poodle.  She can fill an entire piece of college-lined paper with hearts, flowers, and “Drake!  Josh!”  (Oops.  Okay, I’m not thankful for that, but definitely very amused.)

GrannyJ:  My mom is amazing.  She’s now 81, but is still trekking about Prescott with her camera, finding interesting aspects of the most mundane of things, illustrating the ins and outs of life in a small mountain town.  She is a friend, as well as my mom, and most of you can understand what a wonderful thing that is; many people love their family members, but don’t necessarily like all of them–my mom is someone who is just plain interesting, loving, and fun.

I’ve got more:  Even though I feel at Death’s Door right now, in general we’re all healthy and hearty.  We have a house, we have jobs, we have transportation, we have this opportunity to explore The Great North…

Here’s wishing all my readers a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.  Enjoy.

Of course, you can’t really tell how itty-bitty and cute they are; it’s the two light ones up top, and they are about half (or less) the size of the others.  We’re getting about one Silkie egg a day, and still four of the other girls’ eggs daily.

This actually has something to do with my title.  We are, it seems, right on the cutting edge of popular culture.  Once again, we have dipped into the Ur, the Jungian gestalt of the United States, by having chickens.

There is a “Chicken Underground” in Madison, Wisconsin.  There are urban coop-ists in New York City.  The website BackyardChickens.com logs 6 million page views per month and has more than 18,000 members in its forums.

Whocoodanode?

Of course, this is not cheap.  One thinks of chickens as cheap and easy, but, alas, they are not.  One can compare our coops and the dotter’s egg money similarly to, say, the U.S. agriculture system.  The government subsidizes the infrastructure (OmegaMom and OmegaDad purchase and build the coop).  The government subsidizes the ongoing process (OmegaDad visits the local feed store once every month to buy chicken feed and fluff).  In return, the farmer (that would be OmegaDotter) takes care of the livestock (with help from the gummint–a constant reminder to go out and check the chickens twice daily), cleans the coops (with intense help from the gummint), sells the eggs to neighbors, the government (Chez OmegaMom) and government-sponsored entities (that would be people like OmegaDad’s coworkers, who trade frozen fresh-caught halibut or salmon for a few dozen eggs).  In the end, everyone is happy and well-fed.

Right?

Anyway, to get a glimpse of this new underworld of chicken lovers, read up on “The Craze for Urban Chickens“.  I’m sure that it will be spreading even further, as people decide that keeping chickens and growing gardens helps in this dismal economy.

In the meantime, OmegaMom and OmegaDad can rest assured that, once again, they have their fingers firmly on the pulse of America.

(ETA:  This is just too cool.  You click and drag the big box of bars over the stripes to the left.  Do it slowly.  What do you see?  I just had to share it as quickly as possible!)

Susie suggests that the very act of blogging lends itself to the “ES” type, and Becca suggests the same, then goes on to suggest that the Typealyzer is actually just throwing random results.

I don’t think it’s random, because when I go off to ScienceBlogs and check out the science bloggers who ran the Typealyzer, there were an overwhelming number of “IN” or “IS” blog types.

Which leads me to think that the Typealyzer actually is looking at two things:  vocabulary (splitting it into “thinking” versus “feeling” words, “extroverted” versus “introverted” vocabularies, and length of words) and verb tense (active tense=more ES, passive tense=more IN/IS).  I’d be very interested to actually see their algorithm.

It seems that the people who responded to me are typically using their blogs to talk about family things, “emotional” things, living life, whereas the folks who do science blogging are typically using their blogs to talk about science or politics.

One thing I personally do in my blog that may have an influence is regularly use active verb tense, and use short, choppy words.

All in all, a very interesting experiment.  Here are the results from my commenters:

So on the way home from swimming the other day, I broached the subject.

It was not taken with Emotional Distress, oh no.

“Yay!  Daddy and I can do whatever we want while you’re gone!”

I winced inwardly, imagining returning to a home more like a tornado has gone through it than normal.

“And we can have a party!  A disco party!”

I do not know where that came from.  Har.

Let’s just gloss over the question of whether a piece of writing can have a Myers-Briggs type.  Ahem.

Anyway, here’s what The Typealyzer had to say about Omegamom.com:

ESTP - The Doers

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.
The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

My response?  Bahahahaha!  OMG.  I must use a totally different area of my brain when writing than when, say, living my life.  Every single time I take a Myers-Briggs assessment, I end up being typed as an INTP.  Every once in a while, since the dotter has entered my life, I type as an INFP.  (Oh, well, at least I got the TP out of it…)  This is so far off from my own personality type that it’s like night and day, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

If you have a blog, you must run it through this little black box, and come back to tell me what “type” your blog is, and whether it is as far off from your “type” as this one is for me.  I’ve just gotta know!

Or, as my husband related when I told him of my anxiety dream, the one where you know you have to take a final for your class, but suddenly realize you have no idea where the class is being held, or what the class was about.

These are classics.

Mine was a bit different:

I was at work in the cubicle farm (the physical venue was from waaaay back when, when I worked on the magazine in the suburbs of Chicago), tap, tap, tapping away at my keyboard, when I heard a ruckus from neighboring cubicles.  Someone was complaining about “the bug in the program!” and how it needed to be fixed.

I knew that this was a program I had written for J, in the Campus Supply department.  J had left, and someone else was taking over her work.  This meant taking over the program.  But, as someone else explained (loudly), “the bug in the program!” had been there all along.

So they called in this guy from the IT department, and he was getting the info from these other folks.  They were discussing it quite loudly, so I overheard.  I was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of guilt–how on earth could I have not fixed that bug yet?  But I had been putting it off forever, and now…now it was coming home to roost.  So I rushed out to intercept them, telling the IT guy that I knew exactly where the bug was, and it was easily fixable, and why didn’t we just grab a computer and I’d show him where it was and how to fix it.

We appropriated an empty cubicle, that just happened to have a computer in it.  I sat down at the computer with him sitting at my side.  He was wearing a contemptuous, sneering look.  This was a Very Important person from IT, who everyone knew had gotten his degree from A Very Prestigious University.  I started up the computer, and realized I couldn’t find the program.

I couldn’t even get the mouse working right.  The mouse had a heavy-duty industrial electric cable that attached it to the computer, there were heaps of junk around it on the desk, and the cable kept getting tangled in the junk.  Worse yet, the cable was short, so I had to yank it and yank it to try to get enough cable to get the mouse moving properly.

All this while, he was just sitting there, sneering.  Finally he muttered something about “you must be a CIS major” in a dismissive tone, and I found myself babbling about how I knew he had gone to Very Prestigious University and was very smart, but I had a degree, too, from Cal State, and it was a CS degree, not a CIS degree…

But I couldn’t find the program, and I couldn’t get the mouse to work, and I had never fixed the bug, and he was just sneering…

And I woke up from that nap in a very, very anxious mood.  Depressed.  Miserable, actually.  It was just as bad as the time I had (foolishly) decided to play Fur Elise–which I had just started learning–at a piano master class with a visiting master pianist, instead of the piece I had been practicing forever, which I knew backwards and forwards.  I had that exact same sinking feeling, the absolute and total desire to just sink down into the ground and vanish and Not Be There, a feeling of utter humiliation, the worse because it was self-inflicted.

Ugh.

Mist wreaths the peaks as the fog rises, and the half-moon glimmers overhead.

A wind collects the top dusting of snow and scatters it joyously in the air, where it sparkles and shimmers, then falls to the ground.

This…this is the morning ritual.

The harbinger of change is heard in the distance, chains rattling and brakes squealing.

Join us as we watch…The Running of the Moms.

The small fry circle around the nest.  The mother patiently watches for the signal that it is time, time for the migration.

The swift, the brave, the leaders:  they will catch the signal early, and their young will be waiting.

The slow, the sloth-like, the sleepy:  Their young will be left behind, to struggle to their destination and arrive late.

This leaves the ones in between, neither swift, nor sloth-like.

They are the ones who watch for the signal, ready to run, but not quite realizing that the signal they are paying attention to is delayed, or that the gathering, the preparation for the migration, will take too long.

They wait.  They see the signal.  They gather their young.  They prepare the small ones.  They dart here and there, collecting necessary items.  They chatter their warning cries, and their young, being young, dawdle and delay.

Finally, they are ready.  They emerge from the warm, safe nest, where they have bedded down for the night, and peer out into the slowly lifting darkness, eyes blinking, breath frosting the air.

The entrance to the nest is barricaded again.  The mother and the offspring swiftly move to the gathering place.

Or, at least, the mother swiftly moves to the gathering place; the young, in this case, dawdles some more.

The messenger, the leader of the group, is heard approaching, like the thunder of a herd of buffalo.

The adult picks up speed, protected feet crunching rapidly through the days-old snow.  The young follows behind, distracted by the glittering snow, by the ice-covered branches, by…who knows what.

The time is coming, fast, and they must make it to the gathering place in time, or be left behind.  The adult, hearing the leader, breaks into a run, feet sparkling, breath huffing, galloping up the hill to the meeting place.

The young one drifts behind.

The adult calls out, an urgent noise, beckoning forward.

The young one dawdles.

The monstrous beast comes to a halt at the top of the hill, and–miracle of miracles–waits!  The soft rosy pink of the dawn gleams through the windows and silhouettes the driver of the bus.

The adult, worn and tired by its journey, staggers to a halt by the lumbering messenger, and waves a limb in greeting.

“Hah.  It’s always the moms who run; the kids, they take their time,” says Carmina, who is used to this.

And the dotter, suddenly realizing that, oh, maybe she should be moving her feet a little bit faster, breaks into a run at the very last possible minute, and climbs onto the bus.

I sometimes wonder if salmon are the same way.  If mother salmon are darting to and fro around their young, off to spawn in the streams, urging, “Do you have your eggs?  No?!  Where are they?  I told you to get your eggs ready!”  And then swimming before their offspring saying, “Are you sure you have everything?  C’mon!  We need to get going!  It’s time!  No, you don’t have time to poop, dammit!  We’re late as it is!”

Har.