OmegaMom

Adoption ranting alert!

Whoop!  Whoop!  WHOOP!  Brrrp…brrrp…brrrp…brrrp!

At this point in family life, I normally let the usual mainstream media faux pas (tell me how to pluralize that?  Please?!) about adoption pass me by.  At this point, life is less about Deep Musings About Adoption and more about how to survive the few weeks at the end of school year that are jam-packed with stuff like "Teacher Appreciation Week" (please bring a dish–Monday is breakfast, have it there by 8:30!, Tuesday is casseroles, Wednesday is sandwiches–but the staff are bringing the makings so don’t bother, Thursday is salads, and Friday is desserts) and "The Kindergarden Circus" (in which the dotter is being–natch–a "prancing horse"–and they really need volunteers to help sell popcorn before the circus) and ballet picture day (scheduled for the middle of the morning?  Oh, well, at least it’s not in the middle of school, since school ends two days before) and Ballet Recital Madness (update:  no, littlies don’t need to be there at oh-dark-thirty and stay for 24 hours straight, thank heavens!).

In other words, general adoption stuff has taken a back-burner to Real Life.

(Which is not to say "general adoption stuff" doesn’t happen, and isn’t important.  It does, and it is.  It’s just that what pops into the ol’ noggin to write about tends to be more on the panicky side than on the thinking deeply side.)

But when egregious mainstream media cluelessness attacks, I just have to sit up and take notice.

Brought to my attention by two adoption bloggers is this little lovely:  The category in the Mother’s Day TV special "America’s Favorite Mom" that is called–wait for it–"Non-Mom Moms".

I had a few "non-mom moms" in my life.  There was Aunt Lou, my mom’s best friend.  There was Mrs. Crysanthemum, who lived next door to my paternal grandparents, and who stunned me, absolutely stunned me, when she announced to me, at 16, that I should stop calling her "Mrs. Crysanthemum" and call her by her first name.  It took me years to be able to follow that request without feeling both awkward and disrespectful.  These were women who spent a lot of time with me, disciplined me, gave me hugs, fed me, let me have adventures with their kids, knew me from the time I was a wee chee-ild until I was a grown adult.

I never, ever though of Mrs. Libby, who lived on the other side of my grandparents and had an adopted kiddo, as a "non-mom mom".  Honest!  She was just Jarrett’s mom.

NBC and its minions, though, would place her (and me, and every other adoptive mommy on earth) smack dab into that category.

There it is, in all it’s glory, among the "semi-finalists" in the category "Non-Mom Moms":  "She was an adopted child who is now mom to her own daughter, plus six adopted children who started life as "meth babies"."

First off, even by their skewed standards, she’s a "mom mom":  she has "her own daughter".

OmegaDotter, of course, is not "my own daughter".  I’m just play-acting mommy for her.

Secondly, there’s that old cliche, the "crack baby", recycled as the "meth baby".

Thirdly, she’s not being a "mom" to those adopted children, oh no.  She’s being a "non-mom mom".

Sweet Kozmik All above.  Don’t these people think?  Don’t they have any concept of what "adoption" is?  Don’t they realize how they’ve dissed all the adoptive moms in their audience by that casual sweep of the semantic hand that dusts adoptive moms off into the "non-mom mom" dustbin?

Gah.  Get a grip, NBC.  My dotter has two moms, and they’re equally valid and important in my dotter’s life.  (Which I will talk about on Mother’s Day, I think.)

Frick-frackin’ rowrbazzlin’ dim-witted dismissive twits.

Nothing is going on with our lives.  Okay, yeah, the dotter ends her first year of Real School in a week and a half…it’s spring and I’ve seen one tree with all sorts of itty bitty pale green leaves bursting out, so that’s exciting.  And we have rhubarb growing.  And Mother’s Day is coming up.

But I?  Am in a rut.  Nothing seems interesting or exciting to me right now.

So, channeling my mom, I hear:  "Just join a club!  Go to a Mensa do!  Go take walks!" et cetera.  And I say it to myself, too, especially the "go take walks!" or the variation, "go get some exercise on a regular basis!", but it doesn’t help.

My life is boring.  My blog is boring.  Nothing is going on.  The most exciting thing that has happened to me recently is that I stabbed myself beneath my fingernail with a cactus spine opening the kitchen window.  And it hurts.

I even went off to The Daily Meme to see if any of the subjects might amuse me or incite me, and it was all…meh.

Here we are, it’s May 6, and the sun is rising at 5:30 a.m., setting at 10:20 p.m.

In most areas I’ve lived, "twilight" is pretty well-defined.  It lasts about 30 minutes, then *poof*, it’s nighttime.

Here in Alaska, though, I’ve learned some new terms:  "civil twilight", "nautical twilight", "astronomic twilight".  The one I’m used to is the "civil twilight"–the time when the sun is less than 6° below the horizon.  Then there’s "nautical twilight", the period when the sun is between 6° and 12° below the horizon.  "Astronomic twilight" is when it’s officially night, and you can do starwatching.

Last night, I was suffering from insomnia.  I kept waking up and still being able to see faint light around our windows, at the edges of the curtains.  Surely, I thought, I was mistaken.

So I fired up Teh Google and searched for a sunrise/sunset calculator.  I found one with civil twilight mentioned, and it didn’t seem to match my experience, so I tried another.  And there it was, in all its glory:

Civil twilight–4:35 a.m. to 5:30 a.m., 10:20 p.m. to 11:16 p.m.

Nautical twilight–2:25 a.m. to 4:35 a.m., 11:16 p.m. to 1:27 a.m.

Astronomic twilight:  "Light".

Eh?  Say what?!

Hey, by my calculations, we should have one hour of full dark right now!  Look right above–Nautical twilight begins at 2:25 a.m. in the morning, ends at 1:27 a.m. in the morning.  So there’s a full fifty-eight minutes being ignored by that calculator.

Harrumph.

Anyway, "nautical twilight" means that navigators can see bright stars and the horizon at the same time.  "General outlines of ground objects may be distinguishable, but detailed outdoor operations are not possible, and the horizon is indistinct" sayeth the write-up in Wikipedia.

What it means, in general, is that we have no Real Dark now.  Not to say that we have light all the time, but we are possessed of "glow".  And it’s enough to seep around the edges of our curtains, and enough light so that I can stumble through the house in the faint light and see humps where the chest at the foot of our bed is or the sofas are in the living room.

It’s quite disconcerting.  And we have a month and a half of increasing daylight to go!

In the meantime, we have been plagued by moose.  Meese?  More than one moose.  Lolling about in our backyard.  Nibbling on the nice, tender, tasty shoots coming out of our shrubbery, with their just-about-to-bust-open leaf buds.

Damn moose.

The dotter is losing teeth left and right.  The last one was one of the two top front teeth; this left the second one, also loose, all on its lonesome and able to stick out by itself when her lips were closed.  It was cute and adorable.  It also became quite wiggly.

At which point, it is my job to supervise the evening ablutions.  While both OmegaDad and I get the heebie-jeebies at really wiggly teeth, I have teeny-tiny heebie-jeebies; OmegaDad gets wigged out and has to leave the bathroom entirely.

Of course, it reached that particular point that parents the world over know:  it wiggled itself loose on one side and not on the other, and the dotter had reached the pinnacle of impatience.  I assured her it would come out over the next few days, but OmegaDad decided to promote the tie-a-string-around-the-tooth approach.

This resulted in severe dithering.  First it was "Oooh, yeah!"  Then it was "Ewwww, no!  Stop it!"  Then it was "Maybe I’ll try it."  Then it was tears and "I can’t do it!"  And all of this was before the string ever reached the tooth.

Like going zero to 60 and back to zero within a minute.  Whiplash!

So we abandoned the attempt and the dotter and I headed off to her bedroom for story time.

At which point, she decided she wanted to try it again.

This time, we avoided the bathroom, so she couldn’t see what was going on.  Apparently, it was seeing that was scaring her.  So we plopped her down on a dining chair conveniently scooched near the kitchen door, took the neat little lariat that OmegaDad had made out of cooking twine, and I slipped it over her tooth and cinched it down almost tight.

At which point, she decided she didn’t want to try it again.

Foreseeing an hour or two of this back-and-forthing, I reaching for the string, saying "Okay, okay, kiddo!  I’m taking the string off!" and surreptitiously yanked with one hand on the string while the other was making ineffectual forays at the string-encased tooth.

Pop!  Out came the tooth (of course).  (There was one moment of resistance, and I had a queasy fear that it wouldn’t work and the dotter would be both in pain and brokenhearted that Mommy was torturing her.)  The dotter had one moment of "Owww!" and then realized what had happened.  Much surprise and great swelled-headedness on her part:  "I did it!"  She totally thought that I had really been trying to untie the tooth…

Later on, in her bedroom, I whispered to her, "You know what?  I was sneaky.  I wasn’t trying to take the string off, I just yanked…"

She thinks it’s hilarious.  She has spent the last day giggling about it, and saying, "Ooooh, you’re so sneaky, Mommy!"  (Tee hee!)

She now has a two-tooth gap.  Another tooth is loose.  The Tooth Fairy is soon going to have to make another run to the bank for Sacajawea dollars.  I have it on good authority from the girls at gymnastics that at least one kid gets $20 per tooth, and another $8.  Whoa.  I got quarters.  The dotter gets the nice golden Sacajawea dollars.  And the Tooth Fairy is running out Real Soon Now.

You invited the dotter to your daughter’s birthday party.

The party was in Big City at the science museum.

WAY kewl!

Um.

But.

Um.

That’s a fifty mile drive.  One way.  It takes an hour to drive.  One way.

Sorry, we’re not going.

(Does it strike anyone else as a wee tad overboard to be having your six-year-old’s birthday party at a big science museum that is an hour’s drive away?)

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Elvis.

Of course.

And an island in a deep blue sea.  The island, I suspect, is related to Lilo and Stitch.

When we adopted OmegaDotter, we had A Plan.  That plan was to–as soon as possible, i.e., a year after signing on the dotted line for the dotter–apply for another adoption from China.

Well, that first year was…difficult.  Having a baby in the house is life-altering, tiring, exhilarating, fun, wearing.  And then I got laid off.  Oops.  So we decided to put it off another year.  But then that next year, OmegaDad had some health issues that required all our attention.  So we decided to put it off another year.  Then we learned that OmegaDad’s health issues put us off the list for China, including the special needs list.  So we sulked and dithered and dilly-dallied.  We thought about other programs.

One of the other countries we thought about–for a very, very short while–was Vietnam.  But it was never a real serious discussion.  For one thing, it was much, much more expensive than China.  And while our first year was chugging along, word was building that corruption was rife in Vietnam adoptions.  In 2003, the U.S. put a total freeze on adoptions from Vietnam until it could be demonstrated that the adoption system had been cleaned up to the point where the U.S. Embassy could feel relatively assured that the corruption had been rooted out.  In 2006, Vietnam and the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding re-opening international adoptions from Vietnam to the U.S.

Almost immediately, problems began resurfacing.  We’re talking mere months after that MOU was signed.

Things, IMO, went downhill from there.

Part of the problem was that the wait for adoptions from China had drastically slowed down.  And some of the thousands of potential adoptive parents who were desperate for a child began to turn to other countries for an "interim" adoption–figuring that any adoption from another country would be finalized long enough before China got around to them that they’d still fit the qualifications (a year–or was it six months?!  it’s never been quite clear–between adding any new child to the family).  Vietnam had a reputation for being quick, if you were willing to spend the money, so families started queuing up.

And then, in October and November 2007, families who were trying to adopt from Vietnam started getting Notices of Intent to Deny from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (or whatever its official title is these days).  The NOIDs were based on suspicions or indications that something was amiss with the proposed adoptions; that the children in question were not actually abandoned, not actually the children described by the documentation, maybe the result of baby-selling, maybe the result of kidnapping.  The potential parents, alas, were already in Vietnam expecting to be able to bring their babies home, and the NOIDs stopped them cold.  Many decided to simply stay in Vietnam with the babies until things cleared up.

Rumors began building in the Vietnam adoption community that the U.S. would not renew the MOU when it expired, in September of this year.

A week or two ago, the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi issued a "Summary of Irregularities in Adoptions in Vietnam", along with a "Warning Concerning Adoptions in Vietnam".  The warning specifically states "recent field investigations have revealed incidents of serious adoption irregularities, including forged or altered documentation, mothers paid, coerced or tricked into releasing their children, and children offered for adoption without the knowledge or consent of their birth parents."  The summary states that U.S. officials in Vietnam had investigated more than 300 cases over a six-month period; to give an idea of the percent of potential adoptions investigated, there were 828 adoptions from Vietnam by U.S. parents in 2007.

It seems pretty clear that this is not a witch hunt by U.S. officials.  The stories in the summary make it plain that corruption and bribery are rampant in the process. 

The problem is, of course, that potential adoptive parents are wildly emotionally involved.  It’s practically impossible to expect potential adoptive parents to say–when confronted with an official piece of paper that claims that the baby you have been holding and cuddling and thinking of as your "own" for two weeks and that the Vietnamese courts have declared is your "own"–"Oh.  You’re right.  We can’t adopt this child–the evidence is too overwhelming that her birthmother was scammed out of her baby.  Here.  Take her back."  So the adoptive families pull strings, and heartstrings, trying to get the NOIDs revoked, removed, the immigration visa approved, ogodogodletusgohomewithherplease.

I’d like to think (ahem.  See my halo here?  It’s nice and shiny!  And I got it cheap!) that in that situation, OmegaDad and I would do what we thought was the ethical thing.  It is, of course, easy for me to say; we are safe and sound and working on our dotter’s sixth year home with us, and even the rumblings of corruption in the Chinese adoption system seem to have cranked up after her adoption.  And I have already said, in the midst of another post, that at this point, if someone came forward with evidence that her birthfamily had not abandoned her, I would fight tooth and claw to keep her with us…though I would also like to think (halo, remember?) that we’d do whatever possible to make sure we could take her to China on a regular basis to visit her birthfamily.

So when a good internet bud of mine forwards a plea to call, email, write, fax senators, congresscritters, and the INS/USCIS on behalf of one of the families who has been stuck in Vietnam since last fall, facing a second NOID, I am left unsettled and disturbed.  My heart breaks for the adoptive parents.  My heart also breaks, though, for the birthfamily.  I feel I cannot, in good conscience, do any such thing without full knowledge of the particulars of the case (and I tend to suspect, given that the word is the INS/USCIS is going to issue a second NOID, that the particulars are pretty egregious).  What if it’s the case where the birthmother’s baby was withheld from her by a hospital so that she would pay the hospital bill for a premature birth?  Or the one where the birthfamily, fallen on hard times, was told by an orphanage official, "Hey–leave the baby with us for a while until you get back on your feet…We’ll take care of him, and you can take him back home when you’re better off and more able to deal with it…"?  Or the one where the birthmother was a young single woman who was being housed in a maternity home, and told, after the birth, "Oh, by the way, unless you can pay us back the year’s income that it cost us to house you, we’re going to have to take your baby away…"?

In the end, I am sorry to say, it still seems to come down to money.

(For a very worthwhile read, go to Voices For Vietnam Adoption Integrity.)

Small Mountain University Town is under a red flag warning.  The Big Ditch has a Big Fire going near the entrance town Tusayan.  A large fire on the outskirts of Los Angeles has come and gone on the national news scene.  The Valley of Death (Phoenix) had record low humidity readings the other day, of 2%.  It’s fire season in the southwest…which means it’s warm, dry, and windy.

Chez OmegaMom, it’s cool and moist.  I’m actually seeing some leaf buds on our trees, so expect a haze of green to be showing in a few days.  It’s about time.  We’re hoping that this weekend we’ll be able to put in the veggie garden beds.

When OmegaDad and I first met in Los Alamos, one of the things that charmed us about the highlands of northern New Mexico was the way that the moisture rising up from the Rio Grande would form into clouds that billowed up over the edge of the plateau we were on.  Here in Suburban Alaska, we have similar clouds forming over the Little Lady River, and over the Turnaround Arm of the ocean…and, of course, fog from the inlet.  We don’t often get the fog here, but as we drive down towards Suburban Downtown (hah), or towards Small Town Alaska, you can see the fog rolling up the inlet and rivers and coiling around the base of the snow-capped mountains.

So at least we don’t have to worry about fire season any more, not for ourselves.  But we have friends and family still in that area, and when the red flag warnings go up, so does our attention.

The newsies are agog at the notion that Miley Cyrus has (gasp!) revealed herself (gasp!) in a truly artsy pic by Annie Leibowitz, and by (gasp!) a picture of her lounging against her boyfriend that (gasp!) shows her midriff (o the shock, o the horror!).  Stories are written saying that she is setting foot on the primrose path to ruin that has been taken by other teen stars lately–specifically Britney and her ilk.

Our culture is totally schizophrenic.  On the one hand, we’re practically drowning in pictures and videos of scantily clad females doing all sorts of things that one might expect scantily clad–or unclad–females to be doing.  Licentiousness abounds.  On the other, a 15-year-old has a few pics taken and suddenly Moms Of Pop Culture Unite to prostrate themselves upon their chaises longues, hands to their foreheads, having the vapors that the Queen of Pre-Teen Clean is allowing herself to be defiled.  The hordes of teeny tweeny Hannah Montana fans are suddenly going to transform into an army of mini-Lolitas, and it’s All Miley’s Fault.  Prudery rears its ugly head.

OmegaMom is rolling her eyes here, big time.

OmegaMom is also rolling her eyes at an article about "When Young Teachers Go Wild On The Web".

Kozmik All help us:  22-year-old teachers have MySpace pages.  And they…and they…omigawd, how can my trembling fingers write this??  They have pictures on those pages!  Pictures of (gasp!) themselves holding (gasp!) bottles of tequila!  Or, even worse, paintings they have done showing women’s lingerie peeping out from under upflung skirts.  Or (shudder!) paintings of frontal nudes!

(One does wonder if those paintings were anything like these…)

And they say things!  Like "rocking out with some deaf kids.  It.  Is.  Awesome." 

Or talking about bl0w j0bs.

Or showing posters about cartoon sperm.

What is wrong with these teachers?!  Have they no decorum?!  No reserve?!  Aren’t they aware they are molding young children’s minds?!  How dare they have lives of their own!  How dare they have thoughts of their own!

Now, granted, each and every one of the things mentioned above could be taken too far.  Let’s not show pictures of orgies featuring oneself in the buff.  But in and of themselves, my opinion about the examples in the article is…well…um…hell, these are 20-something teachers.

I was party-hearty girl until I reached my early 30s.  Well, not as "hearty" as some, but I went out, I drank, I partied, I danced, I stayed up all weekend long, I had hangovers, I talked sex with all my buds, I toked joints, I had sex, I listened to rock-n-roll.  And if the web and blogs had been around then, I’d probably have blogged about all of the above.

It might have been drearily boring.  I have to admit that my overwhelming response to most blogs or MySpace pages put out by folks in their late teens and early 20s is that they are an appallingly vacuous, inane collection of stream of consciousness gossip, in conjunction with angsty poetry.  This is why, when I use the "next blog" button on Blogger, I go through about fifty blogs before I find something I would consider even vaguely interesting.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Shoetree, the dotter’s kindergarten teacher, having a webpage with a poster about cartoon sperm, or paintings of frontal nudes, or talking about "rocking out" with anyone; she is, after all, older than me, and more staid.  But if she did I wouldn’t care, because she’s a damn fine kindy teacher who my dotter adores.  Which is, after all this bloviating, my main point:  Folks, teachers have Real Lives.  Yes!  I know it’s a surprise, but, hey, there it is, and it’s my pleasure to pass this piece of arcane knowledge on to you.  Teachers are Real, Live Human Beings who, amazingly enough, have been known to go to parties, or fall in love, or be indiscreet.

In a refreshing departure from administrative powerhunger, some administrator actually said that webpages should be handled case by case.  (What, no standardized testing?!)  On the other hand, another administrator type had this to say:  "We all understand the importance of living a public life above reproach…"

Dear lord.  We are doomed; the only people who will go into teaching or politics twenty years from now are people who are upright, humorless prigs…

Many years ago, when I was growing up in Chicago, my mom and I would go to the Jewel on Clark Street to go grocery shopping on Saturdays.  We’d take a taxi off to the store, do our shopping, then I would hang out with the filled shopping cart while mom went into the drug store to buy cigarettes, and then we would call another taxi and head home.  (Keep in mind that this was many moons ago, when the taxi rate was something like 5 cents per one-sixth of a mile.)

Normally, mom’s foray into the drug store wouldn’t take too long, so I’d sit perched by the cart on the metal railings cleverly designed so that you couldn’t get the carts out into the parking lot, and daydream.  Cars would come and go, people would squeeze through the openings in the railings with their bags of groceries, the sun would dart in and out behind clouds.

Once in a while, though, she’d take "too long", as measured by my ten-year-old mind.  At which point, my daydreams would take a distinctly dark tone.

She’d been kidnapped.

There’d been a robbery, and she was shot, lying in the store by the cashier’s counter in a puddle of blood.

I knew I would sit there for hours before anyone would think to tell me that she was in the hospital on her death’s bed.

Something Dire (but unspecified) Had Happened.  My life was about to come crashing down.  Stuff like that.

And then she’d show up, purse and purchases in hand, and anticlimactically we’d await the taxi.  I was always very relieved, though I kept it to myself.

To this day, when someone precious to me takes "too long", as judged by my forty-mumble-year-old mind, I go off into that panic zone.  This is, of course, very silly.  "Too long" is extremely subjective.  But if, say, OmegaDad informs me that he and the dotter are going off to Home Debit to get some specific drill bits, my brain puts a fuzzy-logic time limit on that expedition.  Home Debit + "specific drill bits" = Not Too Long.  So, if the expedition expands to include, say, a stop at Greasy Fast Food Palace for burgers, fries, and sodas without my knowledge, a swirling mass of evil starts emerging around their heads (in my imagination).  It starts small, then grows.

When it reaches a crescendo, when I’m just about to start asking myself out loud, "Okay.  Is it time to start worrying for real yet?", this is, of course, when the garage door opens and the dotter comes barreling in, junk food in hand, with OmegaDad behind her.

"Precious" is one of those words that has been devalued and marginalized by pop culture.  "Oh, isn’t she just precious!" is the saccharine coo that the word conjures up these days.  Or–worse yet–gooey sweet big-eyed pastel figurines.  In our society, "precious" is something oh-just-so-darling-and-cute.  Oy.  Now, take Gollum–Gollum knew how to treat something precious: he obsessed over it for centuries.  That is "precious".  Something very important.  Very special.  Very loved.  Something you are protective about.  Something to be treasured and cherished.

For some reason, now that Great-Grandma is gone, the idea of my mom gallivanting around the U.S. on her own is much more disturbing than it was.  Before, mom was the "accompany-er", the travel companion for Great-Grandma.  As such, the focus of any worry, the need to care for and cherish, was Great-Grandma.  Now, however, mom is planning to travel off to visit OmegaBro and family, and OmegaCuzes and families, in one fell swoop.  The outer, more mature part of me is delighted, is glad that mom no longer has to stay in town to worry about her own mom and can be free to do such traveling.

But there she is–my one and only mamasan.  I have one aunt and uncle left alive, and mom.  None of the other forebears are alive.  She is doubly–triply–precious these days.  My safety net of elders has thinned, and I find my over-imaginative ten-year-old coming to the fore with Visions of Disaster.

Not too often, mind you.  But there it is.  Because she’s precious to me.

We have had days worth of sun and warm weather, up in the 60s even.  Woot!

But this morning it started to snow.  "Little to no accumulation" was what the Weather Service said then.

The snow kept coming down.

By the time I went to escort the child to gymnastics, we had four inches…plus.

And when we got home, there was still more.

And now the Weather Service is predicting 10 more inches, and up to 15 more inches in Big City.

Gah & bah.  Isn’t it almost May, fer cryin’ out loud?!

When the dotter had her "I don’t wanna do ballet" month and decided to stick to it to do the recital, I was thinking like the recital at the last ballet studio:  One day, at the local high school auditorium in the afternoon, lots of fun.  Okay, the week before was crowded with rehearsals, but they were after work/after school.  And, okay, looking back I realize that the older kids did two performances…

This recital, however, is a production, and not a small one.

This dance studio is attached to the Big City Ballet.

This recital will be at the Big City Performing Arts Center.

We have a full studio rehearsal the week before.

We have a tech rehearsal the kiddlies don’t have to go to (thank heavens!), at the BCPAC.

We have a dress rehearsal the kiddlies do have to go to, at the BCPAC.  We have to be there at 2:30 in the afternoon.  It goes to (wait for it!) 9 p.m.

We have two performances, one on a Saturday and one on that Sunday, and the kiddlies are in both.  The latest I have heard is that we need to be there for these, also, at 2:30 in the afternoon.  The performances are at 7 p.m.  Everything ends, once again, at 9 p.m.

I foolishly signed up as a den mother for the dress rehearsal.  I thought it would be a few hours.  The idea of wrassling kiddlies for seven hours, while they all get tired and bored and restless, makes my eyes bug out.

The idea of dealing with the dotter after three days of this…it makes my eyes bug out even more.

I am having palpitations.  My breath is panicky.  My mind is an utter and complete blank.

Oh, yeah, and the kiddlies?  The "pre-ballet class"?  When does their piece show up in the performance?  In the middle of the second act.  Oy!  Good way to drive parents of six-year-olds insane, ballet studio!

By the way–Big City is an hour’s drive from here.

Can I also mention the talent show tryout tomorrow afternoon at school?  Or the "Ultimate Obstacle Course" competition at the gymnastics place in early May?  What about various photo shoots?  Oh, yeah, and the school picnic in late May.  And the "parent appreciation picnic" at the ballet studio in early June?  They’d damned well better appreciate us after all of this!

I am soooo looking forward to June, July, and August.  All I have to do then is schlep the dotter to and from summer camp, which will completely wear her out every day.

Gratuitous kid pic…the dotter goofing off on a lake a few weeks ago:

"Make new friends,
But keep the old,
One is silver
And the other gold…"

Anyone who’s been to Girl Scout camp knows that song.  I remember singing it (among others much less uplifting) while we hiked from our area of platform tents to the main mess hall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  (I also remember that the much-sought-after reward for doing clean-up at mess hall was to get the "cows", the huge plastic bags that held milk for the milk dispensers, which made very nice inflatable pillows for the camp cots…)

Today I got a call from an old friend.

The sun is out, the day is warm, and I got a call from a good friend–what more can I ask?

Like many of my blogging buds, I am rather introverted.  It takes me a while to make friends, and I usually only have one or two "good" friends at a time.  Some were friends for long periods of time, some for shorter; I’ve lost touch with a bunch, which makes me sad.

I had lost touch with J–life being life, small kids occupying one’s mind and time–and hadn’t talked with her for about two years.

But last week, she called OmegaDad at work, having heard via the network that we moved to Alaska, and using her mad Internet research skillz to locate him.  He gave her our phone number and various email addresses, we coordinated times through email–me being out here in the Final Frontier, she being on the East Coast, and many hours of difference dividing the two.  And today, her being out and about on her own to go shopping and me being home after work hours coincided.

A good friend is the kind of friend who you can talk to for an hour on the phone after a lapse of two years and it’s like you haven’t been away from each other at all.  Sort of like my faux Ugg boots, or a good armchair–comfy and cozy and…well, friendly.

We have, of course, been making tentative social moves here, reaching out and getting to know people.  We’ve hung out with A’s mom and dad (A being adopted from the same area of China, one day older than OmegaDotter, and also in her gymnastics class), and it seems like there might be potential with S’s mom, too (another gymnastics bud).  It’s nice to start feeling less isolated.

But still.  Still, having an old friend call, and falling into the old, comfy conversational back-and-forth…ahhh.

(I can’t, for the life of me, remember the name of the camp, but it was in Virginia, we paddled canoes on the Potomac, learned to carve rudimentary artwork in redwood, hiked through forests, had sing-alongs around the campfire, and collected shark’s teeth.  All was good.)

The dotter is better.  It seems to have been a 24-hour bug; she was sick long enough for me to cancel a visit to a buddy on Saturday, but by the end of the day was able to eat regular food and keep it down, yay!

Yesterday was sunny, but we pretty much did nothing all day–the dotter, still recuperating, laid about and napped a few times, and I wasn’t feeling up to par myself.

But today–today was sunny and warm again.  Up in the 50s.  Oh, joy!

We now have slightly more than an acre.  About a fourth, I would say, is wooded.  The remainder is lawn.  One spot in the yard gets sun more often than any other, and it was free and clear of snow.  So I began raking it at 11 a.m.

By 4 p.m., that part of the yard was looking awesome.

I, on the other hand, now have been informed by both OmegaDotter and OmegaDad, on separate occasions, that my butt is quite dirty.  ("Hey!" says OmegaDad, "So sue me!  I like looking at my wife’s ass!")  I have a raw spot from where I was raking without gardening gloves.  Luckily, I realized it in time and grabbed the gloves, so it’s my only raw spot.

But my arms!  My legs!  My back!  Ack!

And it ends up I’ve only done about one-sixth of the yard.  I look out my office window into the back yard–the endless expanse of back yard, where the snow is rapidly shrinking, and say to myself, "Myself:  Look at that yard.  Maybe we want to let the woodlands come back."  Myself shakes her head and says, "No, no, me.  We need lawn so kids can run around and get tired out, and besides, we can’t let the woodlands grow over the septic tank or we will be sunk.  We can do this!  We’ll just do bits and pieces over the next few weekends, and then it will be time for OmegaDad to start mowing…"

By the way–underneath all the leaves?  The grass was green.  Not everywhere, just in spots.  But it was such a lovely, lovely color to see!

Thursday night, I was chit-chatting with OmegaDad downstairs, waiting for the dryer to finish up so I could fold some clothes and switch loads before heading off to bed.  Then I heard what I thought was the dotter raising a cry, scuttled upstairs, found all quiet and dark, and headed back downstairs.

At which point, OmegaDad, who had headed upstairs at the same time, yelled down that the dotter had just vomited and could I help clean up?

She had been trying to get to the bathroom, but didn’t make it.  She sat, half-asleep, befuddled and miserable, on one side of a huge puddle, while daddy and I were on the other side, paper towels and Windex in hand, cleaning.  She was just as miserable in the bathtub while we cleaned her off.  And afterwards, all wrapped snugly in her fluffy blue bathrobe, she marched into our bedroom, crawled into our bed, held out her hand to me soundlessly, and snuggled up beside me.

We spent the next day snuggled on the futon, watching videos.  I’d hold her hair back as she heaved.  I’d clean the bowl out.  I’d try this light meal and the next.  Nothing stayed down all day.

Hopefully, today is better.

When I was growing up, there was a saying:  "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

Of course, kids still called names, and it still hurt, but having that said often enough sort of conditioned one to think that being called names was an ephemeral thing.

Then there was the "turn the other cheek" philosophy, in which, if you were hurt, rather than hitting back, you offered a further target.  Sort of pre-Gandhi-ism.

So what’s changed?  What makes a nice middle-class mom decide to fake an online personality to gain friendship with a depressive teen, then yank the "friendship" away, all as a way of "teaching a lesson" or some such thing to a girl who had "hurt" her daughter–resulting in the teen’s suicide?  What makes fresh-faced cheerleader gals decide that a previous buddy’s namecalling on MySpace warrants a half-hour long smackdown to be posted on YouTube?  What makes the mother of one of the beaters go onto national television and say–in all seriousness–"This is all blown out of proportion"?

Of course, these incidents have caused folks to come out of the woodwork to blame the Internet.  It’s MySpace’s fault!  It’s YouTube’s fault!  My girl wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeeevul Internet wasn’t there!  Or, I wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeevul Internet hadn’t made me do it.

Seriously.  In these cases, the parents seem to have something missing.  Us old-fashioned folk would call it "conscience", I guess.  Or morals.  Or a sense of proportion.  Or something.  What happened to saying something like, "If that girl is trash-talking you, surely you don’t want to associate with her?"? 

Currently, the dotter is deep in the midst of the standard "If you don’t do x for me, I won’t be your friend anymore!" pronouncement phase.  I give her the hairy eyeball at such statements to me, until she breaks down into a grin and giggles.  She knows that saying those things doesn’t cut it with me.  And I’ve had to intervene once or twice at after-school care when one or another of the girls says something like that as well.

The idea being that it’s not what someone else thinks of you that’s important:  It’s what you think of yourself.  It’s knowing you’ve done the right thing.  It’s knowing when you’ve done the wrong thing.  It’s realizing that some of these great dramas won’t mean a damned thing when you’re forty years old.

These internalizations don’t spontaneously emerge, of course.  You have to work on them.  And it’s not faux self-esteem B.S. that we’re talking about here–the "I am Special" entitled attitude.  It’s the feeling that you’ve worked hard on something, tried your best, done the right thing, have stuff inside you that is worthwhile…

These girls–and their parents–seem to have missed the boat on all of this.  The jockeying for prestige and station becomes the be-all and end-all of their existence.  They’re judging their own worth by what other people say, in the heat of the moment, either to their friends or on MySpace.  Now, I realize that names hurt.  They sting.  You can, indeed, end up crying in the middle of the night over what one of your acquaintances said behind your back.  And it continues even when you’re forty-something.

But the thing to do is move on, concentrate on what’s good and going well in your life.  Not beat the shit out of your former best friend so you can toss it up on YouTube and get lots of comments.

I spent the late afternoon snuggled up in bed, suffering from a sinus headache.  Oh, joy. 

Once upon a time, I didn’t have sinuses.  Or, rather, I had them, but they didn’t bother me.  It’s similar to how the dotter never complains about things like headaches; she gets a rather cute, scrunched up "Hunh?" look on her face when you ask her if she’s got one.  This went on for many years.  And then, one day…

One day…I got the Mother Of All Sinus Infections.  It came on fast and sudden.  I don’t remember very much about it except for the fact that my eye swelled shut and I was hauled off to either the doctor or the ER, and forthwith tossed into the hospital for a few days while they Did Things.  One of those things involved a bubous transparent plastic doo-dad attached to a big transparent plastic tank.  The nurses would come by every few hours, jam the end of the bulbous doo-dad into my nose, and vacuum me out.

Ewwwww.

I just want you to think about that.

My response?  Ewwwwww.

I think I was around eleven years old at the time.

After that–having primed the pump, as it were–my sinuses were in full-time infectious mode.  If the weather turned, if there was a high pressure system, if there was a low-pressure system, so long as there was a fluctuation in the humidity, I’d get sinus headaches.  Never to the extent of that first big blow out, but I could feel the fluid building up, then the skin on the right side of my nose near my eyebrow would start to puff out a bit, and the pounding would begin.

Then I moved to the great American Southwest.

Woohoo!

Freedom from sinus headaches!

Yay!  There was dancing in the streets!  (Except for the fact that my other headache bete noir, migraines, decided to take up the slack…)

Then we moved to Alaska.  Land of soaring mountains!  The Final Frontier!  Land of the Midnight Sun!  Yadda, yadda, yadda…

Also, land of unending humidity.

Guess what?  They’re baaaaack.

Oh, joy.

Gasp!  We have some itty bitty flowers!  It’s been snowing on and off, and we still have flowers!  Woot!

Not much as yet; these are at the tippy top of some of the trees around the house.  But if we have some sunlight for a few days straight, we should end up with a pleasant little display.

No pics yet.  It’s gray and drizzly and chilly, and I’ve already been pulled by the dawg to the point of sliding onto my butt on the slush.  But, still, it’s a heartening thing to see.

Ahhh.

Flowers.

An important question, brought to my attention by Whatever:

Created by OnePlusYou

The utterly hilarious "An Engineer’s Guide to Cats", copped from Miss C Recommends:

We were discussing nicknames over dinner the other night.  I mentioned that my mother calls me "Katya" and that my dad called me "Puddin’".  The dotter said:  "Awwwww.  That’s sweet."  Then she thought for a moment.  Then she said, "He’s dead, y’know."  Cause–>effect.  Or something like that.

One of the things that Alaska is famous for is cabbage.  World-class cabbage.  HUGE cabbage.  At the State Fair, one of the biggest competitions is who gets to take home the award for the biggest cabbage of the year.

OmegaDad decided he, too, wanted to try his hand at Big Cabbages.

This required researching Big Cabbage seeds.  And buying same.  A number of different varieties.

Which, of course, required planting a number of each of a number of different varieties.

He set up his indoor "greenhouse"–a set of metal and wood shelves with grow-lights and heat and a plastic covering sealed with velcro–and set up some flats.  They were not all cabbages.  Thank heavens.

However.  We now have…oh…fifty? cabbage plants just about ready to be transplanted outdoors.  (It would help if we had (a) the vegetable beds set up and (b) no snow.  We’re getting there on both aspects.)

This evening at dinner, OmegaDad served a concoction of sauteed sliced cabbage, crisp bacon bits, and red onion.  It was better than his last cabbage concoction, and actually somewhat tasty.

He eyeballed me over dinner and said, portentously, "You know…we need to come up with cabbage recipes."

‘Tis true.  If all goes well, we are going to be swamped with cabbage.

Now.  I like cabbage, in moderation.  A nice small cabbage head, cut into quarters and boiled until just tender-crisp, and slathered with butter–yum.

Once in a while.

I much prefer our yearly bounty of beans and sugar-snap peas and snow peas.  And little bitty tender lettuce leaves, which make a splendid salad.

Cabbage, on the other hand…hmmm.

Anyone have any good cabbage recipes??  We’re really going to need them.

There are days in my job where the constant nibbling to death by ducks routine leaves my ability to focus shredded to tatters.  First it’s push this thing out onto the website, then it’s figure out why the accountant is having that problem, then it’s chit-chatting with the boss about how to set up a virtual server for testing, then–whammo!–it’s adding someone to our maintenance management system, then it’s yet another thing…

Other days, however, fly by because I am so deeply focused on one thing that everything else fades away.  Those are invariably satisfying days, because at the end, there’s a feeling of accomplishment.  Things Get Done when you are that intent.

The dotter, being six years old, has the attention span of a six-year-old.  Which is another way of saying, "the attention span of a gnat".  She flits from this thing to that thing to the other, spinning around and chit-chatting as she goes.  It makes sitting down with her to ensure her once-a-week homework is done a rather interesting experience.  She skews the papers she is reading off to one side in a cockeyed manner that makes my I-like-straight-lines-intersecting-with-other-straight-lines soul cringe.  She fidgets and squirms.  She bounces on one foot, then swings around the chair holding one hand on the back, then crouches up on the seat, then slithers off, then squirms some more.  She gets distracted by:  the cat, the dawg, OmegaDad, a ribbon on the sofa across the room, a bird sitting on the bird feeder, a piece of her artwork sitting on the other side of the table, her snack, her toes, a song, the idea of K. coming over on Saturday, what book we’re going to read at bedtime, notes that are up on the refrigerator…You name it, she is distracted by it.

There are times when it’s very wearing.

We are trying to teach her the idea of "focus".

Hah.

The Karate Kid and Star Wars (the original), plus other movies, have been enlisted in this scheme.  "See how Mr. Miyagi is having Daniel breathe in and breathe out?  See how he’s doing only one thing at a time?  That’s ‘focus’."  "See how Luke is fighting with his lightsaber while his eyes are closed?  He’s trying to do it by listening, and by using his mind.  That’s ‘focus’."  "See how Lexi is doing the same figure skating moves over and over again?  She’s practicing hard, isn’t she?  That takes ‘focus’."

There I am, being a suburban mommy, taking the dotter off to gymnastics class.  Lately, I’ve been thinking, "Um…she seems kind of good at this stuff…(when she focuses)…"  Then there’s A.’s mom (A. is a day older than the dotter, and was adopted from the same city in China), who has been saying to me, "My, OmegaDotter is certainly very graceful!"  And S.’s mom, who has said to me, "She’s pretty good, isn’t she?  How long has she been doing gymnastics?  Really?!  My, she’s quite a natural at it…"

I tend to dismiss all this, though, as the maunderings of an overly invested mommy of a late-in-life dotter.

At the same time, this is the dotter we all know and love.  To wit:  the girls are lining up at the white line to start a crabwalk across the gymnasium, and the dotter, rather than listening for the coach to tell them to go, has crabwalked out a few feet and stopped dead to watch the cheerleading team practice in the opposite corner of the gymnasium.  Or there she is, on the balance beam, supposed to be traversing it backwards on tiptoes, making it halfway before getting distracted by me (oh!  The guilt!) and crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue at me and giggling, and then losing her balance and falling off.

But when she focuses…oh, my.  It really has struck me, like I say, that she seems pretty good at this stuff.

This week I had validation of that feeling.  Her coach swung by after class to chat with me, highly recommended that she move up to the intermediate level for summer or fall classes, said she’s "doing fabulously", and–oh, by the way–gee, she focused so much better since her buddy A. wasn’t there this week.

Practice.  She’ll get better at focusing with practice.  Right?  Because when she focuses, she does amazing things.

The husband frosted it, and the dotter decorated it.  It says "Happy Barth Day I ♥ you"…:

There were some very pretty roses and truffles:

A hand-made card from the dotter, featuring a "pop-out" present, and, inside, a B@rnes and N0ble card:

And then we ate cake, as Marie Antoinette recommended:

All in all, it was a good birthday.  Many thanks for all the birthday wishes!  My mamasan needn’t feel G.U.I.L.T. as she proclaimed in last post’s comments, since it was her guidance that produced the nostalgic birthday cake, via a flurry of emails between her and OmegaDad.

I will have you know that all the pictures were taken at about 8 p.m. (except for the roses, which were this morning) to give you an idea of how light it is at that time…

Today, we have had more snow, and more is expected tonight.  Have I mentioned that I am sick and tired of snow?  Gah.

When I listen to Santana and Chad Kroeger rocking out on "Into the Night", or listen to Lorena McKennitt or other singers with passionate rhythm sections behind them, I imagine myself dancing in the living room in dim light, with a long, swingy skirt, swaying to the rhythms and putting the world away.

I also imagine myself as a 25-year-old with long hair.

That self-image is resilient.  It sticks to me like chewing gum to a hot sidewalk.  I look at myself in the mirror and say, "Kate.  You’re forty-mumble years old.  Your hair is going grey."  But when it comes to "seeing myself" mentally, there I am, skinny, sexy, young, dancing.

Not plumpish, lazy, and arthritic.

Sigh.

So today I am forty-mumble-plus-one years old.  "Late" forties, to be honest.  Very.

My darling geeky husband sent me a birthday email with .kmz file to pull up in Google Earth, pinpointing the spot in Los Alamos, NM, where he remembers us having our first kiss.  He and the dotter have made an orange cake and will layer it with either apricot pie filling (preferred) or lemon curd, frost it with lemon frosting, and sing "Happy Birthday" to me this evening.

Like many people, I read the news from Eldorado, Texas, with a pre-emptive fear.  I feared another Waco.  They feared another Waco, sending a horde of ambulances and fire equipment out with with police.  Thankfully, Waco II never materialized, and, as of this writing, 534 women and children have been "removed" from the compound.

As many of my readers know, I’m not religious.  I’m vaguely spiritual in a woo-esque manner.  I find organized religion to be, on the whole, suspect; in general I think that it’s yet another way for humans to exert control on one another, using their "privileged" interpretation of written texts about mysterious omniscient beings to exhort their followers to do This Thing or That Thing, and collect money at the same time.

Certainly, this particular offshoot of Mormonism (not mainstream Mormonism, by any means) has its fair share of that entire outlook on religion.  Young teenage girls are married off to older men with nary a yea or nay allowed.  Those older man–pillars of the church, all–get a bevy of lithe, untouched girls of their very own.  The younger men…well, they’re SOL.  Gotta pay their dues, work their way up through the church ranks, become one of the Chosen, before they, too, can partake of the youthful bounty.

And yet.

And yet.

"Imminent danger" says the warrant.  How many were in "imminent danger"?  For how long?  Why was it suddenly necessary to do this?

In the pictures, I see women and children who are weeping and confused.  Being ripped from their family lives, thrust into the national spotlight, children sent off to foster families, women off to (I suppose) shelters. 

"They have no concept of mainstream society, and their mothers were born into and have no concept of mainstream culture. Their grandmothers were born into it."  These are the words of one woman who left the compound with her children years ago.

What will these people do?

What will happen to these children?

How can a judge claim that all of them are in "imminent danger", when a week ago they were just living their lives and only one girl called in seeking help?

I am so torn.  I despise a culture that keeps women barefoot, pregnant, and strictly limited in their life’s choices.  I cannot condone girls being thrust into sexual relationships at the ordering of some church elder.  At the same time, I think of, say, my dotter being suddenly ripped from our household and stuck in a foster family, with absolutely no idea why, no concept of it. 

If the authorities had reason to think that specific girls or children were in "imminent danger", then those girls/children should have been removed.  Not the wholesale splitting of families that this raid has engendered.

In addition, a similar raid back in the ’50s led to the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints withdrawing even further from the world, isolating themselves and producing a societal situation where it was "us against them".  This raid will no doubt cement that feeling within this group…making it more difficult to effect change or move in when there is obvious and substantial evidence of abuse.

Every once in a while, I haul the dotter off to Veronica’s, the local manicure-in-a-mall, for an hour of frou-frou girly-girl stuff.  The last time we were there, Veronica carefully painted an itty-bitty snowman on one fingernail, and an itty-bitty Christmas tree on one of the fingernails on the other hand.  The dotter gets pink or purple, usually with glitter, while I get clear nail polish.

It’s a pleasant little interlude.  Veronica does a much better job with fingernails than I do, the dotter gets her glittery pink or purple, I get my jagged edges filed smooth, and then the dotter begs a quarter off me so she can ride the horsie in the mall lobby.

All pretty laid-back.

I am obviously far behind the times, though.

I should be getting her a bikini wax.  Or her eyebrows plucked.  Or, if I were really thinking ahead, a botox job.

What’s that you say?  She’s only six?

No, no, no!  You don’t understand!  These days, it’s the "in" thing to do!  Mommy-daughter bonding time at the spa and salon!  Mommy goes in one door to get a bikini wax and daughter goes into the other to get her eyebrows shaped.

Now normally I’d pooh-pooh such a story, putting it down to a reporter who sees something twice and then turns it into a "trend".  But in this case, the author asked a whole slew of salon owners, and got a quote from a pediatrician; besides that, there was a remarkably similar story in the New York Times just a few days ago.

I recall a slightly bewildering Christmas visit to the in-laws, when our niece L., who the previous year had been quite happy hiking and scrambling over rocks with us, a lovely, natural beauty at 15, spent an hour and a half in the bathroom before emerging as a sleek, made-up model-type to go to the mall with her boyfriend.

I also recall a time when I had to chase three girls out of my great-aunt’s bathroom as they had monopolized it for far too long in preparation for a family gathering at the local buffet restaurant.  They emerged with Big Hair (this was, after all, the mid- to late-’80s), a cloud of perfume puffing out of the bathroom door, with big blue racoon eyes.

Somewhere between my own total lack of primping and grooming, and these ladies hauling their children off for buffing and plucking and botoxing, there’s a happy medium.

What happened to that happy medium?

On the one hand, I seriously consider taking the dotter, at age 13 or 14, to the local Clinique counter a few times to have instruction on how to do make-up without looking "made up".  I think of doing a nail-painting party for a bunch of ten-year-olds (thank heavens that’s a few years off!).  I personally indulge in massages now and then.  But all of these are "treats" in my mind, not something that gets done on a regular basis.

I dunno.  Mainly, I’m an old fart with a semi-hippy outlook and a worry that the dotter will be sucked into a pop-culture outlook that places emphasis on the outer wrappings, rather than the inner character.

Makronee

Ol it tac for makronee is nootls and sos

Spgedeey

Ol it tac for spgedeey is nootls and meetdls and sos

(Translation:

Macaroni - All it takes for macaroni is noodles and sauce.

Spaghetti - All it takes for spaghetti is noodles and meatballs and sauce.)

Bon appetit!

We have had lovely weather, up in the 50s.  (Not sunny, but, hey, that’s okay.)  The snow was almost all gone from the yard.

OmegaDad, inveterate veggie farmer that he is, has been planning a raised vegetable bed to be placed by the shed out back.  He ordered the lumber yesterday for it to be delivered today.

Guess what happened?

Snow.

Arrrggghhhh!

So far, not much.  But predicted?  Up to nine inches.

Sigh.

I, too, had made plans:  I wanted to rake the soggy old leaves.  I wanted to pick up the garbage that had slowly been revealed as the snow and ice retreated.  I didn’t want, but needed to, pick up all the (ewww, yucky) dawg poop that had also accreted under all that snow.

But now?

Nope.

Wah.

(As I wrote this, the flakes were getting fatter and coming down faster.  This time, I think, the weather predictors are spot-on.)

Anyway, I blame it all–all!–on OmegaDad.

From birth to death, one is ever-learning, ever-growing. The collection of serendipity we call "the Internet" and "blogs" helps with this process–sometimes in a way that is, frankly, shallow, silly, a bit of mental fluff and floss, and sometimes in a way that makes you stop and go, "Whoa. I didn’t know that."

While OmegaDad was out of town, I indulged myself with a few-hour binge on YouTube watching ’80s music videos. I did Tom Petty. Queensryche. Bon Jovi. Joe Satriani. Dire Straits. Van Halen. Pat Benetar. The Clash. John (Cougar) Mellencamp. Midnight Oil. U2. I did a whole slew of U2, including a live performance of Sunday, Bloody Sunday from "Rattle and Hum", which I’m sure most of my older readers have seen, but I haven’t:

Then, today, I wandered over to Whatever, and encountered this version of U2’s Pride (In the Name of Love):

And I thought to myself, "Wow! What a great way to use U2’s song!"

And then I did a little googling, and discovered I must be the oldest person on earth to finally realize that U2 wrote that song as a tribute to Martin Luther King. Um. Yes, somehow I managed to get through the ’80s rockin’ out to U2 and never really listened to the words or learned that little fact.

So: Ever-learning, ever-changing, ever-growing. That is OmegaMom.

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of MLK. I was old enough that I should remember it, but don’t. We didn’t watch much news, and I spent my time with the TV watching Star Trek and Twilight Zone and Dark Shadows, with a hand grasping the antenna (because that was the only way we really got a good signal).

Children who are growing up these days simply won’t have any concept of what it was like back then. (Actually, I don’t really have any concept, either, because I was so young and still focused on the family, not the outer world.)

Oh, yes, there’s still prejudice. There’s still racism. But it wasn’t that long ago that "separate but equal" was codified in U.S. laws, that whites marrying blacks was illegal in many states, that desegregating busing led to the need to call out the National Guard to escort little children to school doors in the face of adult hatred. It was only 40 years ago that James Earl Ray shot the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. out of fear and hatred, fear of a man who said, "I dream that my children will be judged by the content of their characters and not the color of their skin."

But today…today we have a black man running for President of the United States, with polls showing him ahead of a white male Republican opponent.

In the name of love, let us all move forward.

(Gah.  My apologies to those who see this in their RSS feeds multiple times–I’m trying to center the videos, and it keeps messing up.  So I give up.)

So Scribbit nails it here, about how it feels right now in Alaska, in the season that is known elsewhere as "Spring".  Yes, you read it correctly when you hit the line "The sun isn’t going down until nearly nine o’clock now".

OmegaDad returns from a field trip this evening after two days away.  On the home front, the dotter and I have been cooking and hanging out.  She is now quite handy in the kitchen and I have even started allowing her to cut ingredients up with The Knife.  Let me tell you how hard it is to act nonchalant while your daughter is very carefully cutting up green peppers and Italian sausage with The Knife, which is Sharp.  Very.  I kept having visions of her slicing one of her fingers through, but she managed in spite of my parental and discreet hyperventilating behind her.

A side effect of the Food Network is that she is determined to be a chef someday, and has taken to actually eating weird combinations of foods.  "Weird", that is, in a six-year-old’s world view.  We had kung pao chicken on Tuesday night–full of "weird" ingredients.  She ate it all.  She liked it!  She called it "yummy"!  And she asked if I could make it again next week!

Whoa.

This was followed by the next night’s homemade spaghetti sauce (thus the green peppers and Italian sausage), which, unfortunately, was not as great a hit.  Even though she had specifically asked for it two nights running.

My mommy satisfaction quotient was quite high after these mother-dotter bonding experiences.  In fact, my head was swelled.  But then, at the dinner table last night, she informed me that "It’s just not as fun without daddy here."  *Pop* went my MSQ, deflating to nothing.

Then, when talking with OmegaDad on the phone afterwards, he reminded me that she had missed me terribly while I was down in Arizona, and went on to say that he was fun, but I was comfort.

Heh.  Which I proceeded to illustrate yesterday night by convincing the dotter that saying "I will have good dreams tonight" ten times in a row would make sure she didn’t have a nightmare, like she had had the night before.  (A real doozy, that involved crying.)

Anyway, since the man has been away, and I have been devoting time to the dotter, the blog has suffered. 

And it shows!  Sheesh, guys.  I don’t post for a day and my hits plummet.  Bah!  I say, BAH!  Nowadays I don’t like looking at my site meter some days, because it makes me feel antsy and like someone is going to tell me to clean up my room.

In the meantime, I am trying (very hard) to put up an itty bitty video of her cartwheeling.  Well, it’s up on my website, but how to get it to display is another thing.  Some research is in order.

We’ve all encountered those questions.  They’re in the pseudo-IQ-tests you can find online; they’re definitely in my dotter’s homework now and then.  You’re supposed to look at a group of items and find the one that "doesn’t fit".

So, with that in mind, here are real headlines from MSNBC’s Business section today.  That’s one day.  I’m not going to link them all, just send you to the Business main page:

"Automakers see sales fall during March" - GM sales down 19% year-over-year, Ford down 14%, Toyota down 10%, Nissan and Honda sales down, too.

"Truckers protest high fuel prices" - Remember the song "Convoy"?  (Yes, I’m dating myself here, that’s a big 10-4!)  NJ truckers formed a convoy to protest high diesel prices.  Diesel is going for $3.99 per gallon at our local gas stations.

"European banks see $23 billion subprime hit" - UBS Bank (Switzerland) expects $19 billion in write-downs, Deutsche Bank to write-down an additional $4 billion.  Since January 2007, banks have seen write-downs or credit losses off $232 billion; that’s a lot!

"Construction spending falls again in Feb." - Residential construction spending has dropped for 24 months straight.  Recent news indicates that commercial construction spending is starting to turn down, too.

"Manufacturing activity contracted in March" - An index of manufacturer economic activity was at 46.5 for March (above 50 means growth, below 50 means no growth).

"Just how bad can the economy get?" - Worried readers ask questions of the business desk folk at MSNBC.  The response?  "First off, we have yet to see confirmation that the economy has entered even a mild recession, let alone a severe downturn."

"Auto industry workers face hard choices" - Chrysler, GM, and Ford have recently announced cutbacks and closures.  How is this affecting auto industry workers?

"Food price hikes changing eating habits" - The average price of a loaf of bread has increased 32% over the past three years.  Eggs have gone up 50% over the past year.  People are making fewer trips to the stores, eating out less, cutting coupons more.

"New home sales fall to a 13-year low in Feb." - Sales dropped to an annual rate of 590,000 units, with inventory of new houses at the highest level in 26 years.

"Some homes worth less than their pipes" - People are breaking into empty foreclosed houses to rip out the copper plumbing and electric wiring.  The headline, of course, is a bit off; they’re talking houses in some really really rundown areas of rundown cities.

"Analysts see 200,000 banking industry layoffs" - More layoffs are inevitable, say banking industry pundits.

"Wall Street soars amid economic optimism" - "Wall Street began the second quarter with a big rally Tuesday as investors rushed back into stocks, optimistic that the worst of the credit crisis has passed and that the economy is faring better than expected. The Dow Jones industrials surged nearly 400 points, and all the major indexes were up more than 3 percent."  Another news source calls it the best first-quarter end for the DJIA since 1938.