auntie hugs for Abe

Back To School Day! Sayonara Spring break!

Well, the disappearing snow is revealing about a hundred million dirty squashed drink-cups and even more raggedy plastic bags scattered across this beautiful state. I have an urge to make some artsy black and white photos of all the plastic tree-flags blowing in the wind alongside every street in town. A couple of days ago I found in our front yard a long, black extension cord similar in shape to a garden hose, with a double-plug box at the end of it. Somebody's got to be missing that.

Our nephew Abe is having a rough week getting over last week's chemo. It's hard to know about him suffering and not really be able to help in a big way. I would love to just give him a big giant hug. Kids LOVE big hugs from aunties. I think.

As for me, increasing fluids is turning out to be easier said than done. My 4am-brain is wondering if the higher iron content of our well water might be affecting me somehow. I'm ready to charge into the urologist's office because my 4am-brain is tired of being jarred awake by my 2am-, 3am-, and 4am-bladder. Something's gotta give.

K leaves today for a week of flying out of Philadelphia, I think. LittleK had a tearful bedtime last night, asking why daddy couldn't just get a job at a bank or something. I told her we do have to put up with him being gone sometimes but we're so lucky to have him home for two weeks straight, fixing everything and taking the kids camping and making yummy yogurt pancakes from scratch.

The kids got the bikes out today and had a good time. K found a kite, too... R luuuuuvs to be outside and is discovering new ways to get muddy clothes, cold hands and wet feet.

This is about it for my 5am-brain, off to placate the 5am-bladder.

Ski bunnies

The Big Ski happened Tuesday, at Alyeska Ski Resort in Girdwood. The original plan was for the girls to spend a couple of hours in group lessons while K took a few runs down the mountain. There weren't enough instructors, so K ended up skiing with the girls on the bunny hill until R and I got back from running errands in Anchorage. T was too tired to try taking the lift up & skiing down with her dad. It was a beautiful day, and the girls had fun, though LittleK reached near-maximum whine power by the time we left.
Maybe one day I'll actually get to ski.
It's Spring Break here in the Anchorage suburbs, and the weather has warmed up accordingly. There was enough warmth to melt the ice sheet in the driveway and create huge pools of runoff in the street. Today the snow fell slowly, and vertically, unlike Laramie snowfalls. It was so peaceful.
I've been feeling pretty healthy lately, because I've finally been able to sleep in a real bed (not the couch) with room-air that's smoke-free. I did have to go to the clinic today and left with orders to drink more fluids and down lots of cranberry juice... I have been given the official command to stop drinking Pepsi.
We shall see.

a visit

Advice to anyone still in high school or college: be sure to take Bowling 101, so that when you're forty-something and bowling with extended family, you will get more strikes than any of the other grown-ups and your score will even bypass what the under-10, bumper-using crowd manages to pull off. Then you can justify all the money your parents spent on tuition.

Today, Auntie Peggy, Uncle Pat and their girls cruised out here in their mamavan to visit us and get whooped at North Bowl by Strikemaster K. Uncle Pat even helped get the Massive Elk Head in place on the wall. As these visits often do, this one turned into a spontaneous cousin-sleepover. Apart from the requisite bickering, pouting and exclusionary tactics, it's all gone really well! The only thing I didn't like was R copying his cousins calling me by my first name, because in his dialect it comes out as "Ninny!"

Moose!

If you're looking for a new way to waste your time, you can go to roxik.com and make your own dancing stick-eskimo.

Today we slept in, then ate breakfast while watching a moose eat trees in the backyard. Our lot is actually quite the animal crossroads, since the owners of three dogs in the condos next door let their pets wander freely. Chenathedog loves it, after 6 months in apartment exile. The black cat that lives on the other side of our house comes over to stare into the patio door and just be creepy. We're not exactly cat people.

I'm dragging my feet as usual to get unpacked and organized. I spent much of the past three days fuming over the fact that (well, yes I could have done it) despite Grampy's big slip on the ice and more than one harrowing van spinout down the driveway, somebody didn't spread any sand on our front iceyard. In hindsight, all my fuming was a completely pointless waste of energy and time, kind of like the dancing eskimo...

Okay, time to hand the computer over to Miss Grumpy 2008. Moose pictures coming soon.

Moved!

We are 97% moved into the new house. Mom and John spent their entire day and night with us on Tuesday to help move the big stuff and also to hang out at the sports complex during soccer. They fed us pizza, too... many many thanks AGAIN to Gramma and Grampy.
The kids are loving the freedom of having a place with no people on the other side of the floor, ceiling, and walls. LittleK and R are sharing a room, so that their grumpy night-owl big sister can have total privacy and sleep-in mornings. We are already having problems, though, with the water heater, and will likely have to go WITHOUT hot water all weekend until the man who installed the heater can get back to town to fix it. The driveway is slicker than a hockey rink and the mamavan cannot go up it, even with a new transmission. Other than that, the house is a cozy little place of our own and we love it.
We're trying to get out of this apartment tonight and tomorrow, and now have just the annoying last bits of clutter to clean up.
I've got to hurry off to get LittleK from school so I can get back here and emotionally separate myself from yet another pile of useless junk.

wOOT wOOT

(click play)


... the mamavan is back

miscellaneous

Happy Birthday to Uncle Al! Happy Birthday to Uncle PAT!!!
I don't have much to say for today. Just:

• I'm obsessed with buying a refrigerator and a washer & dryer. If I'm online, I'm either checking the possibilities on craigslist, or clicking through Lowes.com, Homedepot.com, or Sears.com.
• It felt great to get rid of excess kitchen plastic, though I haven't obsessed over Bisphenol enough to reject plastic completely (see lifelessplastic.blogspot.com)
• The minivan could very well be hurtling through space on its way to Jupiter right now, for all we've heard from Kendall Ford's service department.
• T has an 'American Girl Mystery' birthday party to attend Friday night... she has to dress up like a Victorian-era orphan and act out a mystery play with 8 other dressed-up girls. So I'm obsessing over her costume.
• We close the house deal in four days.

Oh, and food has started tasting good again. Specifically, I'm liking curry rice, Ibarra hot chocolate, Earl Grey tea, sliced tomatoes, Odwalla bars, and orange juice. Tomorrow I may get out the tukaayuks...

Under the boardwalk...

When I was a kid in Nome, some organization put on a yearly competition to get people to bring in as many used aluminum cans as they possibly could. I remember picking up cans whenever and wherever I saw them, including underneath the old wooden boardwalks, and filling up garbage bag after garbage bag. I always scolded my Grandpa Al for throwing his beer cans out the truck window on the way to Council. wait, how did I survive 80-mile rides with no booster seat in a truck driven by my beer-guzzling grandpa? It didn't take long for my can-collecting motivation to change from whatever prize was being awarded to just simply getting all of those old Oly cans off of the streets...

When I worked at the hospital in Nome ten (!) years ago I helped start up their recycling program. In Laramie, we recycled what we could even though their center didn't accept mixed paper - which is a major source of waste in this household. I'm thinking of asking the girls' teachers to try recycling in their classrooms for a couple of weeks at least. The school system is one huge waste nightmare.

So yes, thirty years later, I remain one of 'those' people cringing when a plastic bottle, metal can, or pretty much any paper gets thrown in the garbage. Tomorrow we'll bring a giant load of recycling to Anchorage before we pick up K at the airport. Factoring in the six bags of plastic kitchen stuff I donated to a thrift store today, the bags of old clothes to be donated tomorrow, and the upcoming toy-purge, our mountain of junk to be moved next week could be downgraded to a medium-sized hill.
It's sort of hard {read: impossible} for K to support my recycling instinct because the stuff piles up so fast and we've always lived so far from any recycling center. In this hugely spread-out region including Palmer and Wasilla, there is only one place to drop off recyclables, it's way closer to Palmer than it is to Wasilla, they're open only three days a week, and they request a donation each time you go. Imagine what gets trashed in this city with the Biggest WalMart in Alaska!

"How to Green Your Recycling" has loads of information worth reading. Hug that tree.

Days...

without my spouse: 5
until spouse returns: 4 or 5
until we upgrade to 1100 square feet: 12
since my car broke down: 55
since my car was towed to the shop: 44


It's been the typical week of soccer, ballet, girl scouts, eat, sleep, repeat. Yesterday R and I had a little change in the routine with a quick trip into Anchorage for my Every 3 Months PH Checkup. I tipped the scales at 49 kg. The nurse asks a bunch of questions written for people with autoimmune arthritis problems (not me), I scribble a list of my current meds, the doctors come in and review the most recent CT/echo/lab results, listen to my lungs, let me ask questions, then it's over. They're so happy I have energy and seem like a normal person, and they have a hard time not teasing me about how exacting and over-informed I am. They poke fun at the notebook I usually carry with copies of all my test results... I didn't have it yesterday because I'm done stressing out about every last detail. It's time to coast for a bit.
I did ask about Bosentan, a newer PH drug which the hospital has finally added to their list of meds they'll pay for. The pulmonologist said that the path we're walking right now is one of immune-suppression with Cellcept, and not one of Bosentan-type drugs which have added side effects. I guess the focus is more on my 'functional class' or quality of life than it is on doing whatever it takes pharmacologically to decrease the pressure in my pulmonary artery.

Our mortgage loan was approved! We will close on February 25th.

The kids and I visited the minivan today. It's parked behind the dealership with the hood open and some big lock and chains fastened to the engine. I had to take some things out of the back of it and put something else in, since it's at least good for storage at this point. The guy who came to help me tried explaining how the ownership change at the dealership caused all of the parts in the service department to disappear (yes he actually said that), and I could only manage a shrug and an "I don't care anymore." I wonder if reducing myself to tears would have helped.

Thank you to Grandpa Jerry for the supply of wild rice ~ Happy Belated Birthday to Wilson ~ Happy First Birthday to Orson ~

And, of course, Happy Valentine's Day.

oh patience

We've signed many documents and are under contract to buy the house - but the seller keeps listing it on craigslist. Maybe that's normal but it just makes me uncomfortable. The only delay we've come across has to do with the appraisal, which should be completed next week. I'm weary of the process and ready to put some space between us, lenders, and sellers.

The Mamavan Saga rolls on and on... The mouthpiece of the service department, Ken, tells me (when I pester him every other day) that "the parts are not all here yet," and "I've ordered the parts, hopefully they'll get here next Monday, then your car will be done the next day," and "we found a new problem we didn't notice at first so we had to order another part..." Puh-leeez.

5 eskimos will fit into a Ford Ranger but you won't see a smile on any of their faces. Especially not after 37 days.

Dr. Kutryk

Here's an interview with the Canadian doctor who's attempting to reverse the disease process!

house news

We made an offer yesterday on a house that's about 5 miles down KGB road. The offer was accepted and now we're heading towards closing.

...from Little House on the Prairie to Little House in the Big Woods.

It's cute and brand new and by the end of February, it should be ours. Yay!

There are three bedrooms and two full baths. The house faces south and sits on an acre with verrry tall trees. The original buyer chose some nice upgrades before her financing fell through. Immediate needs are a refrigerator and a washer/dryer set. In the spring we'll do something about the yard, and next year we'll add a garage. For now, the crawlspace will probably fit 90% of our junk.

The girls will finish out this school year at Cottonwood, but transfer to KGB Elementary in the fall.

More good news: the van should be done tomorrow! So everything's falling into place.

houses viewed so far: 4

I need to find Dr. Phil's Guide to Home-Buying. He's written one by now, right?
"Stop measuring your self-worth as a function of..."
...what size house you can afford to buy
...what neighborhood you settle for
...whether or not you have a garage, landscaping, a backyard playset blah blah blah

This is stressful. Maybe if I look hard enough I can find my yoga DVD.

wide angle

There have been countless factors which brought our little family to where we are today. It's easy to see (and write) using this close-up, critical point of view... but I need to say that yes, I do see the big picture, no matter how much I luuuuv complaining about apartment life or finances.

K sacrificed a job and lifestyle he loved so that I can be healthier. LittleK and R don't suffer much from our big move, but T has an obvious, daily sadness about her because she left so many meaningful people and things behind. Not a week goes by without her reminding us that she will one day live in a house on the prairie again, with her own horses, next door to her best friend.

So, laugh with me about the neighbors, the van, the dog and all of my other microscopic problems... and understand the gratitude I have to just be alive, with the people who luuuuuv me so much.

things that roar in the night

Um, it's 1 a.m. on a Wednesday and there's someone outside driving a truck through the parking lot, running a sand-spreader over the huge expanse of ice. It's louder than a lawnmower. What is it with this place?

Yes, I'm awake and blogging at 1 a.m. on a Wednesday but that's not as bizarre or annoying as the Phantom Sandman.

Happily, I can say we're one step closer to buying a Wasilla home which I guarantee will be nowhere near any huge icy parking lot. I also hope to be living far from pot-dealers, late-night bongo dudes and anyone with a pack-a-day habit. The step which brought us closer is the AHFC HomeChoice seminar I attended tonight. It's eight hours of solid, basic information for homebuyers (four hours over two evenings). It also gives us $250 off of one of the closing fees. So, yay for us.

Sunday in Anchorage turned into two days of visiting with my "Golovin Gramma", as we used to call her thirty years ago. Cousins, aunts, uncles, most of whom we see maybe twice a year were all there for dinner on Sunday. We got to hear special stories from Nuz' childhood and learn Inupiaq and Yup'ik phrases like gussangnaghakmakut (ah, these half-breeds are no good) and one other one that means "feathers will grow out of your (behind)". The comment about half-breeds was something that her mom said long before her own family was indundated with 'half-breeds'. My grandma grew up speaking both Inupiaq and Yup'ik, so the words that filter down to my generation are a rich, if confusing, mixture of both.
The skiing day was postponed until weather conditions are better. It may not happen until late in the ski season, actually.
This week is another big one for soccer, ballet, and Girl Scouts, including a sleepover with T's troop on Friday. The girls' school is having a 'Family Dance' that same night, since the P.E. teacher has taught all the upper grades how to do the Macarena and the Electric Slide. Our daughter has already expressed her distaste for that whole prospect. We also have to chat with a mortgage lender on Thursday in Anchorage. I got so used to sitting on the couch reading that I'm finding it hard to be productive again. (wait, was I ever?)
Maybe I'll stay up a little longer to see the next float in the Parking Lot Parade.

pass the Tums

I admit it, I've been a lazy bum since K got back. He hasn't been called in for any flights, so we're getting some intensive Family Time this month. I hope it makes up a little for the No-Dad days on the girls' birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve.
I haven't felt very well and haven't been eating much lately. Nothing smells, looks, sounds or tastes good! I spent the worst three days of it just reading Eragon on the couch. I also finished East, a retelling of an old Norwegian folk tale about a girl, a polar bear and some trolls. They're young-adult books I checked out from the library to read at the same time T reads them. I'm not sure about letting her read the ugly war stories in Eragon, but she's been able to process (slightly) similar stuff in the HP series and in the LOTR movies. My girls also get into Star Wars and have their own rendition of "LUKE.... I AM YOUR FAH-THUH."
R is making the occasional three-word sentence. It started last week with "DON'T DOO DAT!" He's slowly picking up on some beginning-sounds as well.
LittleK is reading, reading, reading! We love it.
The Busy Schedule Season is here: we had Movie Night at the school last night, we leave in about half an hour for the Girl Scouts Gymnastics Night, tomorrow we head to Anchorage to visit my Gramma Nuz at Mom & John's house, K's taking the girls to Alyeska for a ski-day tomorrow or Monday, I have a homebuyers' seminar next week, doctor appointments, and another bookorder to process next Thursday. There are too many things actually to mention right now and my brain is full.
We've got some prospects in the house-search. The loan we were pre-approved for will provide us with a house about the size of most of our family's and friends' garages.
Get sick, and the dream changes a bit.

The Return of the Dad

K got back on Friday night, after being gone for 21 days. He'd flown to Detroit, Albuquerque, Bangor, Opa Locka, Bogota Columbia, and probably a few other places. He and the crew had a lot of down-time in and near Miami, where the beaches were filled with "topless women and gay men".

I can't even express how much more relaxed and happy we all are with K home.

On New Year's Eve, the kids and I met Auntie Peggy, Uncle Pat and their girls downtown. T skated, K mostly fell down, and we all had fun, especially during the fireworks show. It was very crowded and pretty cold, but nothing like last year. After fireworks, we ate with Peg and then we all crashed Gramma & Grampy's New Year's Eve fiddle dance. Those folks are there to dance and have fun but they're as serious as if they were having a church service... Uncle Pat won a door prize, we sang Auld Lang Syne, and the kids' heads finally hit the pillows at about 2am.
The van's transmission is mostly likely "toast", as described by the service guy. They can't get a computer diagnosis on it because the wiring has a problem too. It's going to be expensive. But a mama needs her van, so we'll get it fixed and have it back in about two weeks. No sense entertaining new-car fantasies. Just new-house ones.
Time to knit, since I'm not the fight referee today.

grumpy but grateful

Big THANKS to everyone for all the gifts, cards and calls. Gramma & Grampy deserve an extra big thank-you for letting us stay so many nights.
One special holiday gift was the time the kids got to be around their great-grandma Lena. Her Alzheimer's disease limits her experiences in so many ways now, but she still showers the little ones with love and attention.
The only drawback to holiday visits is that the cold germs and viruses are having big powwows too, smeared and coughed and sneezed between cousins, then passed on to the rest of us. I have to sneak-attack R to keep his nose (sort of) clean...
I have a feeling we may not see K until mid-January. The plans change on a daily basis. I don't know why the company bothers giving them estimated return dates! Spare the kids the disappointment please.
And give the wives some Paxil.
Happy New Year!

merry merry

Merry Christmas!
Quyana
Love
Hugs
Good health
and most of all, peace to everyone.

no mamavan

Today was the last day of school for the girls before Christmas Break.
The morning routine went well, right up to carseat buckles, until I put the car into gear and it didn't go. It's been below zero for a few days, I don't know if the brakes froze (I looked it up, it could happen) or if the transmission is shot. What it meant at 8:50 am was that the four of us were walking to school, just like people used to do about a hundred years ago. I think the distance is about 5 or 6 city blocks, but it's no fun with bad lungs and a 2-year-old at 5 below.
I'd volunteered to help set up Christmas-party stuff anyway, so R and I stayed at school all day, up and down stairs, back and forth between the girls' classrooms. Santa showed up, little gifts were exchanged, movies watched, and everybody loved having R around. He was waaaay too distracted to nap or poop - although when the food was set up at the buffet table, everyone thought he'd loaded his diaper... He hadn't, and the culprit turned out to be a whole bowl full of cauliflower. What parent sends in a bowl of cauliflower to their kid's school party?
So it was a fun day, really, just verrrrrry long and sugarloaded. T was mortified at the thought of her (nearly) whole family riding the bus home so we hoofed it back again at the end of the day. R passed out on my back so I felt like a real eskimo for about ten minutes, haaaha.
I am spoiled and so found myself feeling a little irritated that K's not here to just fix this problem for me. And to walk the dog.
The plan is for me to get the repair process going, and to lean on the parents tomorrow for a ride into Anchorage to get K's truck.
Aside from all of that, my INR this week is a high 3.3, so I'm back to weekly INR checks. blech.