Has turned into this OMG-how-did-this-happen tween (oh-so-ironic picture taken at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History):

It happens while you’re not looking.

I have been incredibly busy today, zipping to and fro, getting my boobs squished, telling the car mechanic I have to bring the car in on Wednesday, not today, ferrying a boatload of fudgsicles to school, wrapping gifts, dragging the girl off to gymnastics, buying cupcakes for the kids at gymnastics, running home, writing this blog post, then it’s off to pick up the girl and all of us head out to dinner at her current favorite Chinese restaurant.

Oh, yes:  this year, her putative birthday happens to fall on the Chinese New Year.  Happy year of the Dragon to y’all!

I have more to say, but no time to say it in.  Ack!  More later, gotta run!

In excellent “greet the New Year” fashion, I am sick and regretting not hauling my butt off to the local doc-in-the-box today. OmegaDad has, in the past month, ripped 90% of the cornea off his right eye by gouging it with his thumb while in the throes of a nightmare (it’s all healed now, thank the Kozmik All), gotten sick (I think I got the thing I’m suffering from from him), and almost broke his finger yesterday slipping on the ice.

OmegaDotter, at least, is neither ill nor injured. She has her first gymnastics meet with her new gym next Friday (we will be there cheering her on), has made friends at her new school (one of the top ten elementary schools in the state, a pure fluke of good luck), and is settling in.

I leave you for a day or two–really! Just a day or two this time, I promise!–with the best of wishes for the New Year, from our house to yours!

(Hopefully, you will be able to see a video of OmegaDotter doing her newly accomplished back walkover on the high beam after this.)

Sigh.

Maybe next year, eh?

So. We are now ensconced at a lovely little B&B in Ranchos de Big City (not to be confused with River Rancho, a suburb of Big City filled with McMansions crammed together cheek by jowl). As a result of this stay, we have become enamored of Ranchos de Big City, an area on the banks of Big River that is filled with huge old cottonwood trees, old ranchos of sprawling adobe structures sitting next to outrageously large new construction.

The streets are tiny. The properties are put together in huge blocks, so you might have a series of one-acre properties lining the street, with a series of one-acre properties behind them, reached by a common lane/driveway leading off the main street.

Interspersed here and there are irrigation ditches, which the local residents have used as hiking paths for years and years, to the point that the village of Ranchos de Big City finally gave way and made the ditches into official village hiking easements.

Following the irrigation ditch right next to the B&B, one finds: behind the house, horses in a corral; next, a pair of friendly llamas; then a newer adobe barn with yet more horses. On the far side of the ditch, you have: behind a lovely stick-and-wire privacy fence, a huge pond with a waterfall gurgling into it, filled with migrating geese; a field with more horses which is a destination for the migrating sandhill cranes; then some outbuildings which are home to some happy dogs with hoarse barks…

And on and on…

We love it. We would love to live here. Unfortunately, it’s outrageously expensive. But we would never have known of this area without the B&B, which caught OmegaDad’s attention by it’s name, which is quintessentially New Mexican.

Aside from that…

OmegaDad has started his new job. He has a corner office with big windows. He was greeted by seven neat stacks of files that his assistant said were items that needed his immediate attention. He also has an administrative assistant, which he finds somewhat befuddling; he is so used to doing everything for himself that she has to remind him that she’s there to help him, and she can actually do things for him…so he can wrangle those stacks of files into shape while letting her handle the day-to-day stuff.

The dotter and I have been exploring. We drop OmegaDad off at work, return to the B&B for (scrumptious) breakfast, head out for a hike somewhere we can let the dawg off his leash for a while, then drive around to scope out various properties OmegaDad and I have decided we might be interested in. Then we take a swim at the B&B’s indoor pool, schmooze with the utterly charming elderly proprietor for a while, then go pick up OmegaDad from work. (It will be nice when one of our cars arrives here, so the to-and-from-work schlepping ends.)

We now have a handle on a temporary, month-to-month furnished rental, so we can take some time looking at properties.

When we left Big City, Alaska, it was snowing. It took half an hour for the airplane to be de-iced before we took off. Our old Alaska town has has -5 temperatures already.

Here in Big City, New Mexico, it has been sunny and–at worst–down in the upper 30s at night. Everyone here complained the first few days we were here about how cold it was…we just sort of gave them old-fashioned looks and reminded them just where we had just come from. (And for the record, the huge storm that was all over the news? The OMG-it’s-the-end-of-the-world storm? Was on the north and west coast of Alaska, about 600 miles from Big City, Alaska. So, not only did we miss the storm by flying out of Alaska two days before it hit, we would have been just fine anyway, because it was like living in the Panhandle of Texas when a hurricane hits the Texas-Louisiana border. )

So I’ll just say that I drove in to Big City to drop my car off to be shipped to New Mexico, OmegaDotter had her last day at school and gymnastics, our inflatable mattress deflated overnight, OmegaDad took turtles in to get a health certificate, and now we’re all exhausted.

OmegaDad is setting up turtle carriers.  OmegaDotter is snoring on another inflatable mattress beside me.

The cats were quite traumatized today.  Piggy, our 17-year-old half-Siamese, half-calico dainty scaredy cat, spent most of the past four days carefully hidden in the box spring of our bed.  When the movers finally came to take our bed away, we cornered her, then I deposited her in our empty closet.  Newman, our Siamese mutt cat I inherited from my mom, spent the day hidden on a high shelf in the dotter’s bedroom.  Wooly, our laid-back cat, I confined to the upstairs bathroom.  By the time the movers left, Piggy and Newman had gone AWOL.  Luckily, a few hours later, they both timidly emerged again.

The dawg spent another happy day at doggie daycare.

Tomorrow I clean.  And I drive my car to the port to get it shipped.  Then a day of finalization of various stuff, a night at a hotel, and we fly out Sunday.

More tomorrow.

Above is the container truck being backed into our driveway.  Yes, it is really happening.  Yes, the movers have packed some stuff into the container.  Yes, we have sent OmegaDad’s car off to the shippers (my car goes on Friday). 

We spent two hours this evening sorting everything that we’re either taking with us on the plane or shipping via UPS so we’ll have it right away when we get to Big City.

Things are moving along!

Yes, I know that Bella requested it more than a week ago.

That is how the move is going.

::frenzied rictus in place of a grin::

The movers are here.  The house is like a hurricane has hit us.  Almost everything is packed, and we have four nights left.  No standard foods—though the refrigerator is full of scrids and scrads.  No plates.  No cutlery.

The beds are still here, but it sounds like they’re departing tomorrow.  Ah, well, we have inflatable mattresses.

I’ve been hauling the poor dawg off to doggie day care every day, so the movers (and I) don’t get literally “hounded” by the constant territorial barking.

I’ve been shutting the poor cats into the master bedroom, where there are heaps and piles of Things We Want To Ship Directly Or Take With Us scattered about.

The furniture in the living room has been carefully covered with wraps.  The moving guys assured me we could still sit on them.  Oh, goodie.

I’m frantically pulling together documents for our mortgage application for whatever house we decide on in Big City, NM.  (Actually, outside Big City, NM.  Preferably in more mountainous, tree-ish areas.)

OmegaDad and I are sniping at each other.  We are both sniping at OmegaDotter.  She is sniping back.  It is great fun.  Not.  I have taken to reminding myself “just a few more days, and we will be done with the omigod we are taking an airplane with three cats a dog three turtles a man a woman an almost-10-year-old and associated luggage I can’t breathe help me God whole affair.”

(The chickens and bunny rabbit have gone off to A Good Home.  Story to come.)

Then, of course, we get to settle in to a few days at a casita in a bed and breakfast in Big City, then find a local month-to-month rental, while we’re looking for a house to buy.

BUT.  Here?  It is gray.  The wind is howling off the glaciers.  The sun is rising at about 9:30 and going down at about 5:45.  It is currently in the 20s and there is snow on the ground that is being whipped into crusty small drifts by the 60 mph gusts.  In Big City, NM?  Sunny (or just clear at night).  In the 50s and 60s during the day.  It will be windy later in the week, but…the sun is rising at 7:30 and setting at 6:15.

I will be so glad when this is all over with!

(Oh, yeah, and I’m attempting [bahahaha!] NaBloPoMo, yet again.)

It weighed 23.5 pounds.  The screen was five inches wide, green on white letters and ASCII graphics.  It came with SuperCalc (a spreadsheet program) and WordStar (a word processing program), plus a version or two of BASIC so you could do programming if need be.  It had two 5-1/2 inch floppy drives, one which would hold the program, the other of which would hold your documents.

We thought it was amazing, though I do remember absolutely hating to carry the damned thing any further than, say, from one room to the next.

When Mom bought the Osborne Executive a few years later, she gave me the old machine, and I used it for a while while I did free-lance typing from home.

The kind of “portable computer” I want to buy now:

It’s about the size of a sheet of paper.  It weighs 1.33 pounds.  With it, you can access the world.  And, dayum, it’s pretty, not like the ugly, utilitarian clunkiness of the Osborne.

What a difference thirty years makes.

What a difference one person makes.

A few years after the Osborne I/II showed up in our house, the magazine I worked for bought computers for all the editors.  I—the in-house computer whiz–was the one who discovered that CP/M, the operating system we used, had a glitch where you could accidentally save your article with no file name, but that it showed up in the directory, so you could retrieve it and save it with a new name.  Many a young editor who had their articles disappear after many hours of working on them paid for lunches for me for saving their files.

I vividly remember the day that the magazine bought a hard drive—with all of 10MB of space.  Since I had already demonstrated my ease with computers, it was assigned to me.  I remember all my buddies gathering around to “Oooh!” and “Ahhh!” at it.  It was about 10 inches tall, 10 inches deep, five or six inches across.  They were astonished at how many articles we could store on it.

The editor-in-chief’s secretary bragged about buying a real IBM PC at home.

At the same time, one of my best friends got an Apple II.  Thereafter, every time I talked to her, when she wasn’t lamenting the latest married man in her life or other equally DRAMATIC situations she maneuvered herself into, she was talking up Apple products.

And nowadays, due to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and—in another corner, Bill Gates—and their ferocious technical and marketing genius, our entire worlds are different.

We carry iPods with music.  We carry smart phones.  We buy almost anything via the Internet.  Grandparents get pictures of grandkids via email or Facebook.  I shopped for our first house on the Internet in 1998, back when Realtor.com was new; nowadays, internet service is practically considered an everyday, necessary utility for folks who aren’t computer whizzes.

The world has changed so very much in that way.

My grandmother lived through a transition from horse-drawn carriages to jet airplanes and landing on the moon.  I, and my age cohorts, have lived through a similar startling transition, from carbon paper and typewriters to streaming media and phones that answer spoken questions.

Steve Jobs died today.  It was his vision, his driving need for clean lines, ease of use, and fusing technology with the personal, that has led us into this world of “the Revolution will be texted!”, sexting, online banking, music wherever we go.  He died after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer.  He was 56.  He and Wozniak started Apple in 1976, thirty-five years ago.

Where will we be in another thirty-five years?

RIP Steve Jobs.

Some good blog posts on the subject: 

Will Wheaton, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”

John Scalzi, “Steve Jobs and Me”

Chez Pazienza (Deus Ex Malcontent), “iSad”

OmegaDad accepted a position in Big City, NM, yesterday.  The job starts in about 8 weeks.  We took OmegaDotter out to dinner after her team gymnastics for the day and told her…

She cried.

Sigh.  I remember what it was like for her when we moved here to Suburban Alaska, those first few weeks when she didn’t know anyone at all, and I spent time cuddling her every day after school for a week while she processed being away from her One And Only True Love and her friends from Arizona.

Now she has to go through that again.

Oh, I know quite well that within a year, she’ll have new buddies galore, and thanks to the Miracles Of Modern Technology she will be able to keep in touch with her old buddies.  But for a few months, it will be very difficult for her.

In the meantime, I have been struck—quite unexpectedly!—by sadness at leaving Alaska.  While I will never, EVER miss the long, cold, dark dark dark winters, which leave me dull and depressed and miserable, I will miss the mountains, the long summer days, the fun of having daylight change so rapidly from short to long to short again.  I will miss the chance to see the northern lights.  (Alas, last night, when the latest wowza geomagnetic storm hit, it was overcast here and the almost-full-moon was shining behind the overcast.  So we got a lovely pearlescent sky, but none of it was the northern lights, wah!).  I will miss having actual seasons.  I will miss the thick, sweet, peaty smell of the wet boreal woods, which is so different from the light, dusty, vanilla scent of dry ponderosa forests.

I will also miss that odd plus to living in Alaska, the yearly PFD check.  While we should have banked it, we used it for such things as flying down to…the Southwest!…right around Christmas, or, last year, out to the Southeast.  Those trips were something that kept me sane during the darkest days near winter solstice.

I don’t have many friends here, myself; we managed to deposit ourselves squarely into the Bible Belt of Alaska, filled with conservatives.  I remember during the last presidential campaign arriving at the dotter’s gymnastics facility to be greeted with a bleacher full of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” pins.  On the other hand, our next door neighbor is a lovely liberal lady with her equally liberal female partner (who has had to deal with some really ugly experiences as a result); I will miss her and her family dearly.  Also, the family of OmegaDotter’s dearest friend are liberal and laidback; I’ll miss them too.

But it’s a new adventure!  Onwards!

OmegaDotter has grown from a little girl going off to kindergarten in a strange place, with tears after school for the first week, to being a 9.5 year old mini-diva who is deep into discussions of (ACK!) periods, breasts, and boys with her buddies.  Luckily, these are things I have talked with her about long since, so she comes back to me and talks about her buddy discussions with me.

I’ve discovered that pop music is an excellent “in” to some more tricky topics about sex and drinking and “being pretty” versus “being yourself”.  (“Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack”, for instance, was a good conversation starter…)  There are times when my eyes bug when I’m listening to the songs, and I swear things are Just Too Racy!, but then I think back to the songs my friends and I listened to, in the Dark Ages, and I realize a lot of it was the same stuff, with more drugs in the songs back then and more alcohol in the songs now.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll.  The perils of being the mother to an almost-tween.

She is now almost up to my chin in height.  When we moved here, she was still below my breasts.

Speaking of breasts…things are beginning to move in that direction for her, too.  Oy.

Part of me wants her to just stay my little girl for a lot longer.  Another part of me is finding these discussions interesting, and finding her becoming a bit (just a wee tad) more mature and interested in some more almost-adult topics that don’t revolve around sex and puberty.  Alas, she still hasn’t become enchanted by reading, so I am considering a strict bribery-for-reading regime this school year.  A dollar a chapter?  Something like that, to push her past her “Ewww, reading is boring!” stage.  At least, I hope it’s a stage.

She and I went to Arizona for five days in mid-July and had a wonderful time hanging out with my brother and 18-year-old niece.  Niece and dotter adore each other, and almost all the pics I have of the dotter from that trip include pics of K. as well…but here is one where I cropped out K. so you can get a grasp of how leggy my girl has become:

In other news, our puppy is now 50+ pounds and six months old.  Everywhere we go, we get comments like, “Oh! What a pretty dog!”  What they don’t know is that our dog is like one of the brontosaurs of old, the kind that needed an extra almost-brain in the end of their tail.  I call him our lummox, because he is so cute and friendly and goofy and just plain…well…dumb.  I actually think he will turn out not so intellectually challenged as he grows older, but right now he’s got the “I’m a goofy dawg and need to chew things and get tangled up in my leash and whap things with my tail (as HARD as I CAN!) and Bounce Like A Tigger!” stage down pat.  It is trying.  Especially when the shoes get chewed up.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on right now.  More later.