It's snowing here on the Front Range, and I can actually be glad both because Denver needs it so desperately and (on a more selfish note) we had some really nice days since I got back last week. We keep getting funky little power flickers, though... reminds me of the good ol' days of rolling blackouts back in California, '00-'01, when Enron and friends decided it would be great sport (and money) to manipulate power supplies. So we poor schmucks, chastened to not be so profligate, had to turn off Christmas lights and wait till nighttime to do laundry and inch our hazardous way through darkened traffic lights, and Ken Lay's money-meter spinned faster than ever.

ANYhoo, just before the snow came today, we spent the day with Keri's sister and family out in the beautiful rolling hills. Laz (who at this moment refuses to nap and is trying to cajole me into playing who-can-blow-the-messiest-spit-bubbles with him) got to watch two beautiful horses gallop around a ring, and the sight amused him mightily:



Then he got his first taste of the cowboy's way:

Oh, ma, I want one of these... So do I, lil' guy. Soon, baby, soon, somehow.

Love the pearl necklace with bare feet. That is so me.


Wilma Flintstone


Who 's Your Inner Sexy Cartoon Chick ?
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We're back in Denver, where it's warmish (50s) and sunny... Lazarus and I took a nice walk this afternoon and it felt wonderful to go outside in just two layers and without having to brace myself against the cold. I had a good time in Philly with my parents, but we only went out a few times, and if I hadn't been in winter hibernation mode, I'd have gone stir crazy.

As it was, I stayed indoors, listened to mom and dad enjoy Laz's company, and spent way too much time on Ebay bidding on fabric. I have such strange obsessions... I did procure some good flannels from various Ebayers for my Arden Baby line of two-sided quilted flannel blankets... And, in my usual roundabout way, I found an amazing source for batiks that happens to be just up the road, in Boulder. That's where I'll get materials for the Arden Baby batik rompers with patch-panel insets that will go into production, I hope, in another month or so, along with the bright and beautiful Arden Baby Guatemalan cotton overalls. More on all THAT later.

I realized today, cleaning up the bedroom and office upstairs, that thinking about my (now former) house doesn't make me cry anymore. I might be saying this too hastily -- I had middle-of-the-night sobbing fits last week thinking of Lazarus' nursery and the fruit cocktail tree we planted last year -- but for today, at least, I'm doing okay with all this. Of course, on Monday, Antonio mentioned going down to Magdalena (NM) next week to hang out for a while at William's house, go scout out the property, get to know the area better... something about the way he was talking made me wonder if he's thinking about us moving there sooner rather than later. That would make me so happy, I think... I've been craving New Mexico the entire seven-plus years I've been gone, and it's just getting more acute now that we don't really have a home. With the profit from selling our California house, we could start developing our little slice of heaven -- get the well dug and septic system put in, start the process to get power out there, and... just go stand on the mesa and get high on the pinon-laced air and the deep blue sky.

I'm ready.

Well, THIS is ironic... right now it's 19 degrees here in Philly and 19 degrees in Denver -- Fahrenheit and Celsius, respectively. (19 Celsius translates to 66 Fahrenheit, which means it's downright balmy out there on the Front Range.) Lucky for my half-frozen hide, though, the forecast calls for mid-50s (F) to continue in Denver for the rest of the week. Good thing, or I'd just stay on the damn plane and go on to Hawaii.

And Laz would be wearing this outfit (and probably this expression, too) when we got off that plane and rolled into the warm sunshine:

Remember when the trees had leaves, mama?

No comments:

My little subcontractor, wrestling with Windows...

I know I should know better than to travel to Philadelphia in January and then bitch about the weather, but dang -- it hasn't gotten above 30 since I got here nine days ago, and probably won't for the next week, either. Back in Denver -- "oh, wow, you moved to Colorado from L.A.? Are you just totally freezing all the time??" -- it's been in the 60s, and of course that won't last more than a week. I'll leave here next week and Philly will get their usual January thaw, and I'll hit Denver around the same time as some monster cold front from the Yukon blasting bountiful, frosty tidings from the Bering Sea.

I know I left California of my own free will. (repeat after me, Anna...) I know I don't miss the traffic, smog, crowds, or too-fast pace of life there. I know I complained endlessly while I lived there and dreamt aloud, to anyone and everyone within earshot, of getting sprung, someday, and I know I've complained endlessly since I left that I miss my house and blah blah blah. Come spring, when the sun stays up for more than a few half-hearted hours and the days warm up more than sporadically, I'll have a better attitude about everything. I promise.

Laz's uncle Charles came down from New York to see us -- I miss seeing my brother more often and am trying to talk him into coming out to ski (and visit us non-skiers) in Colorado. Laz got in on the act, too, wooing uncle with well-spun tales of pristine trails and that oxygen-thin high-altitude bliss you get only in the Rockies...

Trust me, uncle, it's a blast -- you've never seen skiing like this...

Sometimes, when a child is born, the world does change. On January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr., came into the world, and in his too-short lifetime he helped transform it into a better place. Far from perfect, but better.

I pulled the following from Stanford's MLKJr Papers Project (sorry for the funky spacing and formatting; I'm still working on those HTML skills).

	I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." . . . I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
. . . When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
--Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963 (see the full text of this speech here)

Here's some bad news (reporting) -- deconstruction, anyone? This crap makes me mad -- from the opening line the article makes an assumption that others have soundly refuted (Mothering mag has some good resources here). Not to mention the article's unbelievable racism.

"Research finds more bed-sharing with babies"

"More infants in the United States are sleeping in their parents' beds - a practice that can be deadly for babies.

"The percentage of infants who usually slept in a bed with an adult more than doubled from 5.5 percent to 12.8 percent between 1993 and 2000, according to a study led by Marian Willinger of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

"The practice is strongly influenced by cultural factors.

"The study found black infants were four times as likely as white babies to share an adult's bed, and Asian babies were almost three times as likely. Infants whose mothers were under 18 were more likely to bed-share; the practice also was more common in poor households.

"'They may not have a crib or bassinet for the baby, so the only place the baby can sleep is in the bed,' said Angelita Covington, an Atlanta pediatrician. Some parents, she said, may take their babies into their beds because it is a practice passed down through generations.

"Covington, who works in a community health center that sees mostly poor people, said she discouraged bed-sharing.

"The study, which appears in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, warns that babies can fall out of bed and get hurt, or can suffocate when an adult rolls over or the child becomes trapped between the mattress and the bed frame. Other research suggests bed-sharing can raise the risk of sudden infant death syndrome.

"According to a 1999 study by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an average of 64 young children die each year while sleeping in bed with their parents or other adults.

"Some have suggested bed-sharing has benefits, such as promoting breast-feeding.

"In this study, researchers from the National Institutes of Health concluded there needed to be more study on the benefits or hazards.

"The study was based on a telephone survey of a nationally representative group of 8,453 people."

Interpretation of the study results, however, was based on a narrow, privileged, crib-manufacturer-sponsored viewpoint that people universally don't know what's best for their children. Aside from the AP writer's complete lack of objectivity, present from the opening salvo, the cultural biases in this piece and in the study it reports on are staggering. "Cultural practices" is a code term for presumed ignorance anyway, but the study and article writers just had to add that people of color, poor families, and teenaged moms all do this more often than financially comfortable white people who of course "know better." And then the article writer just had to throw in that 1999 "study" by the oh-so-objective Consumer Product Safety Commission -- an organization that gets a lot of support (financial and otherwise) from crib and other baby gear manufacturers. By the way.

Lazarus and I took off for Philly today to see Grandma and Grandpa -- it's already been four months since they last saw him. And what a four months it has been... well, I've gone on and on and on about events in the past few months, so I'll just leave it at that. I'm hoping the change of scenery will do me some good -- this winter rut is getting deeper and muckier.

This was Laz's second cross-country flight, and did great, again. He had his mama to entertain him, and just in case he got tired of me I brought a few props -- mardi gras beads, the two little Audubon birds his papa bought him at the airport, and, of course, his binky to help him pop his little ears. And my camera --

Here goes the airplane: wwwvvvvoooosssshhhh...

Mama, when things get really bad, just find something to chew on. You'll feel better, really you will.

I think our house is officially sold -- escrow closed yesterday, unless someone is lying to us... it was quite an ordeal, not throughout but just yesterday, the "last possible day" (according to several involved) for funding, etc., because someone who didn't do their job a month ago decided Monday night to throw a monkey wrench into things. So we spent most of yesterday -- a beautiful 60+ degree day -- inside on the phone, looking up old records, faxing stuff, and sweating things out until we got reasonable assurances that everything would go through after all.

Funny thing was, we were about to go out around lunchtime but I couldn't find my keys *anywhere* -- a sudden problem I've had nowhere but here -- and while I was searching for them we got the first alarm/phone call. If we'd missed that call, we'd have come home to no check in the mail and quite possibly an expired deal. And I didn't find my keys until four hours later, after we'd made the last call.... Yesterday was just a bad day. Not just because of the troubles but also because my house isn't my house anymore. I'm really happy for the woman who bought it -- it's her first house; she has two kids and is moving from east LA, and our realtor says she "absolutely loves it"... but I still sort of can't believe I let this happen. We went to Home Depot today to pick up a few things, and as I was strolling through tile, flooring and carpeting, paint, etc., I got so sad... I almost wondered why we bothered buying a house and fixing it up, putting all that energy into it. But I thought it would be my home for a long time -- more than two years, at least. Time to make it worthwhile to put down some roots and invest myself in the place. Pick out paint and tile and window treatments, and plant a baby fruit tree that won't start bearing for four or five more years, and dream about what we might do next.

But I also know I made this decision consciously. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be -- both giving up my home and moving into a smaller, older house that isn't mine, but I keep telling myself to have faith that this passage will take us to the next, even better place. Both physically and spiritually. Here's the view I have in mind, that might keep me going through this darkish winter:

had to post something today just to see the cool date... (yeah, I'm a geek -- I *still* get excited when I look at the clock and it says "12:34")... but I also had to post this... time to buy up cheap land in the northern territories. If I get a lot and get it now, I can start me up a nature preserve. Then if Dubya and his cronies decide they need to drill for more oil up north, I can Just Say No. Trade your damn Hummer in for a Honda FCX, I'll tell 'em, and donate the rest to Greenpeace, and kiss my environmentalist tree-hugging butt. In a perfect world, that's just how the conversation would go, I know it.

Minute Shift in Temperature Has Had a Major Effect on Earth, Studies Show
Species are migrating northward because of 1-degree increase in last 100 years, data reveal. It also has sped up spring flowering, egg hatching.
By Usha Lee McFarling, Los Angeles Times

Gradual warming over the last 100 years has forced a global movement of animals and plants northward, and it has sped up such perennial spring activities as flowering and egg hatching across the globe -- two signals that the Earth and its denizens are dramatically responding to a minute shift in temperature, according to two studies published today.

One study showed that animals have shifted north an average of nearly four miles per decade. Another study showed that animals are migrating, hatching eggs and bearing young an average of five days earlier than they did at the start of the 20th century, when the average global temperature was 1 degree cooler.

That 1 degree, according to the studies, has left "climatic fingerprints" -- pushing dozens of butterfly and songbird species into new territories, prompting birds and frogs to lay eggs earlier and causing tree lines to march up mountain slopes.

In some cases, the shifts have been dramatic. The common murre, an Arctic seabird, breeds 24 days earlier than it did decades ago. And some checker-spot butterflies shifted their range northward by nearly 60 miles in the last century.

Although many individual shifts in timing and range have been reported by field biologists, the studies published in today's issue of Nature are the first to establish that a variety of organisms in myriad habitats are responding in similar ways to climatic change.

"There is a consistent signal," said Terry L. Root, a biologist at Stanford University and lead author of one report. "Animals and plants are being strongly affected by the warming of the globe."

... for the full story, see the Los Angeles Times article here (registration required) or the Nature abstracts and article links here.

And the oil wars keep on burnin', and the big wheels of progress keep on turnin'.... Hey Dubya, don't forget that we're animals, too -- all part of this ecosystem you and your buddies are hell-bent on fucking up. "Animals" includes you... unless you and your cronies are pod people, which I guess would explain your complete disregard for environmental and other earth-bound issues.

Happy New Year, you party animals...

What a year it has been... I got laid off from a career-defining dream job (company went under), had a beautiful sweet baby, took care of said baby on my own for two of his first four months (and loved almost every minute of it, actually), and moved away to a cold, strange place I'd seen just once, passing through, five years ago. How appropriate that as this year closes, our California house is still in escrow -- I'm crossing my fingers that I won't have to make the January payment -- and most of our stuff is still in boxes, in my father-in-law's basement and garage, while we camp out in his house and try to figure out what the heck to do next.

I miss my house terribly. I miss sitting by our white stone fireplace, with the cat warming herself next to me, listening to the birds chatter outside and watching the sun slip across the oak parquet floor we restored. I miss the "secret garden" I created outside my office window, with all its ferns and jasmine and hummingbirds. I miss Lazarus' bright, happy nursery that we created, with my parents' help, from a dingy dark closet that had a boarded-up window. I miss my gardens -- more weeds than anything this past year, but still beckoning, full of promise for next season. And I miss having our friends over, hanging out in the living room or outside around the firepit where we'd talk story and bang on drums and sometimes sit silently for a moment, enjoying the fire and each other's presence.

I miss having a space that's mine and that I really care about.

I'll get to the bright side of things tomorrow...

..."It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes or bags!"...

But they sure are fun in the right hands...

...
Every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small,
was singing! Without any presents at all!
He HADN'T stopped Christmas from coming!
IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!...
--Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

I've read and seen this story how many times, and I still get teary-eyed when all the Whos down in Who-ville join hands and start singing simply because it's Christmas... I read this story to Lazarus over the past few nights and he just watched me intently as I read. Usually he fidgets after a few minutes of me reading, but something about Dr. Seuss seems to calm him. Or my tone of voice, or whatever.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night...

My quick tears kill'd the flower, my ravings hush'd
The bird, and lost in utter grief I fail'd
To send my life thro' olive-yard and vine
And golden grain, my gift to helpless man.
Rain-rotten died the wheat, the barley-spears
Were hollow-husk'd, the leaf fell, and the sun,
Pale at my grief, drew down before his time...
--Tennyson, "Demeter and Persephone"

I've always greeted the winter solstice with mixed emotions, mostly on the blue side (that whole seasonal affective thing) but also thankful that the days will now start getting longer, however slowly. I remember, years ago, reading about Persephone and feeling a strange mixture of grief -- that what I was feeling was fairly universal, and would probably recur every year of my life -- and relief, that spring would also recur every year of my life.

Now that I'm back in the land of Real Winters, I again feel that "hollow-husk'd" fatigue of body and spirit... sometimes. It's nothing like before, though, since this creature

graced my life... I have to smile when a 21-pound, two-and-a-half-foot tall bundle of happy energy in nuthin' but a diaper lets out a belly laugh and reaches for me...

oh, ma...

did you really put a picture of me in my diaper on the frickin' Internet??? Geez.

Good news: I'm actually getting Christmas cards out this year -- the first time in two years... Bad news: I haven't gotten Christmas pictures of Lazarus to enclose with them. But at least the people we care about will have some notion of where we are now.

I'm still looking for my "real" camera (hence no Laz pix for print), but in the meantime, here's a little holiday cheer from the lil' guy:

So this being a soapbox and all, it's time for me to rant: When I read about the Bush administration sealing autism records and shielding Eli Lilly from lawsuits related to possible vaccination-related autism, I felt both outraged and scared. Outraged that they can get away with this, and scared because they must know something is up if they're going to all this trouble. I've had my doubts about whether vaccinations (via the mercury-containing thimerosal used to preserve the vaccines) had anything to do with autism, but now that I'm reading more about it, and especially now that I see people in power going to all this trouble, those doubts are fading fast.

I am slightly heartened to see mainstream media paying this some attention -- CBS, for example, in "To Vaccinate or Not," discussed the issue without dismissing non-vaccinators as irresponsible fringe dwellers. This issue might fade out, like most do, from public discussion... we can only hope the medical community is actually taking it seriously, discussing and studying it (using non-drug-company funds). In the meantime, having just gotten Lazarus his 6-month shots and then tended to a pretty sick baby for five days, I'm seriously reconsidering whether to continue with the vaccinations. Pharmaceutical drugs are big business, and thorough research cuts into profits. Sealing autism records? Shielding drug co's from future litigation? Sure smells like an attempt to bury evidence of problems whose source some researchers, not to mention families of the affected children, have suspected for a long, long time. We're not even guinea pigs -- no one in power wants anyone to see the results of this ongoing "experiment." And if vaccinations aren't the only culprit, we won't know that, either, because we don't have access to all the information and therefore can't make truly informed decisions.

This is why I care:

It's not the only reason, but I really get it now.

I'm back. I am shocked that I still have most of my previous posts (yep, mom, they're here!); my ISP lost my Web site last month and I was sure all my blogger archives were gone since I'd migrated the blog to my own site. Nope, I guess Blogger keeps entries on their own servers, too, so let me give them a big *mwah*... now to find a new ISP...

We're adjusting pretty well to Denver -- Lazarus has been pretty sick for the past five days or so, but seems to be getting better except for a hoarse voice and barky cough. He's definitely almost all the way back to being happy, thank God. On Monday and Tuesday my heart was just breaking both because he was so sick and unhappy and because I missed my sunny lil' guy.

So most everyone has already seen this picture, but I'll put it up again: a pumpkin for my pumpkin...

Hey ma, what's this I'm eating?

It's... PUMPKIN? You killed it???

Laz and I went on a lunch date a while back, and the waitress gave him a balloon. He loved it.

Now, most of our stuff is still in boxes (why unpack when we'll surely be packing up and moving again???), so we haven't found Laz's lil' cowboy hat yet. But Pop's fits pretty well. Well, howdy! Now, I'm the sheriff round these parts, so you watch your step, hear?

I got some new photos yesterday and will get those up as soon as I've finished my latest work project, which isn't officially late yet but will be soon. Good mama, bad freelancer.