we are back from the frozen wastelands of slightly-north-of-here. despite being this far north (relative to the residences of many of my readers), this was our first “truly white” Christmas in several years. yeah, yeah, yeah…there’s been snow on the ground the last few years…snow like somebody went and opened a fifty-pound bag of flour over every square mile. this year, there were actually a few inches of sun-and-wind-skinned snow setting, and some appreciable drifts courtesy of the wind.

it was an early Christmas this year, thanks once again to the sisters’ conflicting work schedules. one of my brothers-in-law got half the family sick because of something he brought along with him after having gotten it from one of his kids. so our short, early Christmas rapidly became a care center for the stricken: my other brother-in-law, my son, and both of my parents-in-law. i knock on wood several times a day.

i am trying to pump out the blog transfer for the otherwhirled and synthaetica, but i have experienced a wordpress import problem that may ultimately require me to do the import directly from the database. in fact, i should probably just do that and scrub the support ticket. it’s been a while since i did something completely databasey, anyway.

and, for what it’s worth, i know this will eventually come up in searches for wordpress+'import & problem'which is by no means the point of this post. but in case that happens, i hope you read down to this to discover me saying “the wordpress import problem is probably somewhere in my php.ini, the default installation of which is an excellent example of too much information in the way of code-comments provided in the file.” because if it wouldn’t be such a butt-pain to read without all the comments, but my limited understanding of regular expressions keeps me from making that available in any sort of responsible, feasible time. besides which, i’m not really confident of the intrinsic, ongoing, and long-term benefit of seeing that file as just a bunch of settings with no explanations. heh. i’ll just have to sit down and read the whole damn thing one of these days, but….*yawn*….

anyway, we are back, except for #1 Daughter, who is continuing her annual stay with her grandparents, who always enjoy her company. she’ll be coming back on New Year’s Eve, i believe. and we are back, but will quite likely be moving—out of this house at a very likely minimum, and possibly even out of the state. it’s all rather hypothetical right now, but the bottom lines are fairly simple. the Spouse Unit is getting laid off where she works, and some of her best job opportunities could potentially lead us to “follow the money” to places as far apart as Santa Clara, CA to Colorado Springs, CO to Minneapolis, MN to somewhere in Florida. Colorado Springs would be our preferred area if our current location isn’t an option, although Minneapolis would put us closer to the Spouse Unit’s sisters.

but even that aside, the other bottom line is the fact that even after putting a lot of money down on this house when we moved here, the inherent limitations on how much i can make when working almost entirely alone coupled with the fact that companies out here do not come even close to compensating intelligent, well-educated females for what they’re actually worth is forcing us to consider selling this house and moving into town. None of us want to do that, but since we put so much down on the house (which was actually a very good idea on the time, just one that was based primarily on the expectation that it’d take the Spouse Unit about six months to get hired. instead, it took almost 18. and then her layoff comes at the bottom of the bell curve of my business cycle (not many people get married in the winter, and soccer’s not a good game when it’s less than 40 degrees. cold-weather injuries are a bitch).

so, it looks very strongly like we’re moving. we just have to figure out how not to make it an entirely bad thing for #1 Son and #1 Daughter. the photo is from our current front porch just this morning. several retouch methods, obviously. predictably, with the prospect of moving looming over us, i will be more inclined to document the views for what little time i have remaining.

congratulations to my father, by the way. it took the VA until just this past Monday to finally award him 50% disability with back-pay. it should have been at least 75%, but now that he has finally been awarded something, the paperwork, while considerable, is much easier to file. i’m glad you finally got something out of them, Dad. hang in there!

i was able to captured #1 Daughter’s school Christmas Concert, but where we sat for her Nutcracker performance didn’t really allow for me dragging in one of my decent lenses, and the Moscow Ballet is rather stringent on the “no photography” issue, so i declined to go there. #1 Son, apparently, would not have been very happy with me if i had shot his choir concert, either, but his grandfather did. if those photos are provided to us digitally, i’ll get them up here so we can embarrass #1 Son, who really has no reason to be embarrassed at all.

obviously, i need to get a little point-and-click with a decent zoom lens, where i can shut off the back screen and any other lights so i can illegally photograph her dance performances. that, or a nicely compact extreme telephoto lens i can put on something like the D70. bah.

at any rate, these are from #1 Daughter’s Christmas Concert on December 4, 2007. she’s quite the ham, isn’t she? once i figured out where they were, i tried to capture some of the neighbor kids as well, but that really wasn’t my focus, of course.

on to the photos…

#1 Son turns 13 on December 20th. We’re sitting together at the breakfast table the other day, and I’m reading this letter to the Spouse Unit written by this guy who happened to be around at a certain car dealership the day she decided to purchase her car, and who has apparently believed himself to be God’s Gift to Carbuyers for roughly the last two years. Anyway, it’s a one-page handwritten letter (very thoughtful and personal, of course), that in four sentences contains more spelling and grammatical errors than typically exist in one semester of assignments in a second-grade classroom. So, I read it over, hand it to #1 Son, and ask, “Okay, kiddo. What’s wrong with this letter?”

He reads through it, chuckling several times, thinks for a moment, then answers, “He didn’t have someone else type it for him so he wouldn’t look so stupid.”

Deadpan.

Yep, the boy annoys me sometimes, as all kids occasionally do, but Gawd I love ‘im.

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this looks like a screwed-up photograph, but it isn’t. although i will admit it was difficult to keep the wind off the camera during the thirty seconds it took to take this photo at night. i don’t get to do as much late-night photography as i’d like (and i’ll readily admit that Nikon DSLR’s aren’t really the best tools for dark shots), but the color here is completely unretouched, taken at ISO 800, f/5.6, 30″ in the light of a nearly full moon. the camera is pointing roughly west, about 2.5 hours after sunset. even that long after sunset, there is still a noticeable gradient to the light falloff. i just kinda thought that was neat. sadly, the rest of that night shoot was pretty poopy, because i had to use longer lenses and the wind was such that it was impossible to keep them from shaking over such a long period. this one and a couple of others are all that are going to make it.

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well, i guess that’s about it today. best be shoving off to work, work, work!

i hadn’t intended on writing this morning, actually. in fact, i had made a pact with myself last night to be even more diligent in regards to client services and to spend more time treating my clients right, then right off the bat, i discovered i was out of space on my Epson P-5000 [eek! product plug!], which i use as the primary backup device for my shoots, and it was time for me to archive it. which essentially means i’ll have two drives tied up for the better part of two hours, and unfortunately, doing any heavy processor work on images during the transfer runs the risk of screwing up the files that are being copied and the files that are being worked on. so, i’m switching my workflow around a little bit today and blogging while doing the boring stuff, instead of getting into the photo processing first.

But back to the title. that old Mother Goose rhyme always wigged me out as a kid, because i don’t think it’s really indicative of any personal condition of anyone in particular. to refresh your memories, here’s the whole thing:

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go.
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
But the child born on the Sabbath Day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.”

so, let’s see how much that fits the people i know:

heck, let’s start with me. i was born on a Wednesday. damn, that’s not a good way to start. is it accuracy or coincidence? probably the latter. but, i’m not always woeful, and in fact, i’m not even usually woeful. aren’t we all prone to woefulness from time to time? but, i’ll grant that i wasn’t a very happy child, or at least i don’t remember being happy all that much. so, i’d give it about a 7 on an accuracy scale of 1 to 10.

the Spouse Unit was born on a Friday.  well, now, wait a minute. with very few exceptions, “loving and giving” fits virtually any mother, so that’s not fair! and of course, i didn’t really know her as a child, but i’ll bet she was loving and giving even “way back then” (sorry, dear). okay, another seemingly accurate assessment, at least from this (mandatorily) biased perspective. i’ll rate that a 9, with one point off just because i feel peevish, and she does get mad at me sometimes.

yeah, right. ’sometimes’.

#1 Son was born on a Tuesday. of which kind of ‘grace’ is he supposed to be full?  if it’s the Christian kind, then the poem is well off the mark, since he’s not even baptized. if it’s the kind of grace that comes with dexterity, he’s getting there, but as he begins adolescence, it’s a sketchy thing. besides, once he gets there, that’d make him a “Tuesday’s adult”, not a “Tuesday’s child”. hrm, i suppose that’s just picking nits, though. assuming it’s the latter definition of ‘grace’, i’ll give it a 6.

#1 Daughter was born on a Saturday. work hard? well, i certainly have to work hard to get her out of bed each morning. and to keep her on task. and to get her to do her chores. or do anything else that requires, oh, i dunno, energy, thought, foresight, or planning. the little darling can spend ten minutes alone in the bathroom after breakfast and come out still without having brushed her teeth or her hair. i mean, if you look at it in the light of working hard to avoid responsibility, then sure, she works her ass off every day. bah. i’d give this one a 4, and that’s being generous.

sure, that’s a small sampling, but overall, not terribly accurate. which begs the question, why do such predictive practices creep up in various cultures across the world? and more to the point, are all republican politicians all born on Sunday?

ooops, i guess that’s the wrong definition of ‘gay’. my bad.

you knew i was going to do that, so hush.

and yes, i know there are deeper meaning attributed to those appellations which i am blatantly ignoring. i’d hate to be terribly serious so early in the morning.

hey, that rhymed. woe is me, indeed.

…the more changed by them I become. Or more properly, the more a certain level abstraction becomes more prevalent in my life.

The Elder and Unknown is no longer Unknown to me. “Elder and Unknown” was always a bit of a misnomer anyway, because I have been very aware of who she was and how she’s been doing, through her contact with my mother, and over the past year, with the Spouse Unit and even #1 Son. But, she contacted me directly yesterday, and so now I need to think of another way to refer to her without saying her name.

{I can’t refer to her as the Prodigal Daughter (although it oddly came to mind), because I don’t like the biblical reference, and it would be a misattribution because she never left me (it was the other way around). Other appellations that immediately came to mind are identifiable as unkind towards her mother, and while the typical male tendency to think of things that way is irrefutable, I don’t actually harbor such ill will.

Then of course, I went and called the two kids I’ve had the honor of raising “#1 Son” and “#1 Daughter”. I realized even back then that this would create some confusion later on when “she” finally contacted me, but those appellations are very much correct. For all the obvious reasons, they do and must come first in my life. Not only do I owe them that, but somewhat ironically, i owe “her” and her brother that as well. So….what to do. Ah…

“Daughter Prime”…no, that sounds like something out of Star Trek. “Elder and…” No, let’s drop the “elder” thing. I read that in older writings (and, uh, yes I do that sometimes) and I sometimes feel like I’m writing about my grandmother or an aunt. “Daughter The First”. There we go. #1 Daughter gets to keep her functional ranking, and “she” gets to keep her order of precedence.}

Anyway, my first contact with Daughter the First was relatively brief. Of course, when I responded, I couldn’t resist saying more than was strictly necessary. Gawd, I hate my lack of self-control in that regard. Ann has been letting me read some of her emails her over her shoulder, but there was something very special about that email being written directly to me that I cannot really describe. Of course, given the distance, it’s not “She’s here now!”, but it’s something very similar, and I’m not sure I have the words for it. Her conversations with the Spouse Unit and Mom have always been polite and often quite entertaining, and through those messages, I have seen glimpses of a young lady who is going to make a phenomenal adult. To have that engaging personality…that intelligence…that level of insight…that will…turned towards me was wonderfully intriguing, and I’ll admit: even a bit intimidating. She was very forthright with me in telling me that she’s never regretted her childhood and is proud of what it has helped form within her, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to ignore the facts that I wanted it to be different—so very different—and that I only left when it became obvious that such options were not going to be afforded me in a respectable way.

There were seven or eight times over the past decade-plus when I sat down and tried to compose what I thought should be my first words to her. I have kept most of them over the years, but one I wrote back in February, I may actually share with her. The rest, especially the oldest ones, were still too caught up in the typical acrimony that comes from a relatively biased reminiscence and the added angst of self-denial that comes from attempting to keep it all “objective”. The fact that I entirely changed my life for her and her brother, and ultimately for no functional recompense, doesn’t mean it should all be dumped on the shoulders of an eighteen-year-old young woman who has had enough troubles of her own.

Yesterday was a mixture of many emotions, many of them being inherently conflictive. By the end of the afternoon, I was elatedly melancholy: Elated because I had finally, after “all this time” (which ultimately isn’t very long at all, but still which constitutes just slightly less than half my life) been afforded the opportunity to speak directly with my daughter, and melancholy because I still haven’t heard her voice, and because it will be quite some time before I can finally see her and truly get to know her as the person she is becoming.

But it was certainly a good beginning, and I need to quit thinking too much.

Selanie:

I have struggled for many months, if not a year or more, to compose the first words that I would write to you, and as your birthday approaches (it is September 25, 2007 as I draft this), I have conceded that instead of something more profound or insightful, my first words to you will be “I have struggled for many months….” You will learn soon enough that I think way too much about things, and if that is the only thing I do that disappoints you, then I will consider myself well blessed. Conversely, if you choose to look at it this way, my first word to you was “Selanie”, the name I chose for you over eighteen years ago, and a name I have kept within my heart ever since.

I wax nostalgic fairly easily, by the way. There’s much in my life I could wish I had done differently, or more responsibly, but while I have regretted not being able to be with you and know you all these years, I have never regretted you. I knew before you were born that you would be something far beyond anything I could ever hope or expect, just as I knew that at the time, with the history that lay between your mother and I, that I would not be who she needed me to be for quite some time to come, if ever. That’s a very, very long story from my perspective that perhaps we can address at a later time. Understand for now, that despite everything I did and that was done to me, I hold your mother in an objective sense of admiration that is actually devoid of any acrimony.

I know that Ann has already told you that you have been a part of our lives since she and I first met, and that Kyrian and Brynne think about you quite a lot. I cannot number the occasions I’ve asked one or the other what they were thinking and the response has been something like “I’m just wondering what Selanie is doing right now.” You’ve never been with us, Selanie, but you’ve never been gone, either. Not a day has passed in my own life when I have not experienced a momentary silence spent in the singular thought of you.

Enough. I’m going to do one thing with this writing that is a bit different from my norm, and that is to not ramble on. I am naturally inclined to give you more information about me and us than you want in far more space than is strictly necessary, so I’ll spare you that. What I will say is that while there are obviously some bad feelings between your mother and myself, my honest desire is that those emotions can be responsibly set aside by both of us so that we, in our disassociation, can at least attempt to be who and what you need us to be for you.

And do know that while you and I may disagree on certain life philosophies, I admire you greatly. You have upheld your faith, your dignity, and your identity through many years of stress and misunderstanding, and whatever more you experience in life, you should always be proud of the fact that you were the most responsible for the person you are becoming. And for what it’s worth, that is something we have in common.

Selanie, I have no expectations of you, only love. I do not expect you to ever view your past from my perspective, nor come to believe in the things I know to be true, nor do I expect you to even want to meet us or visit with us. But you should know that our home is open to you, and there is much opportunity here in your chosen field should you ever elect to give it a chance. And like our love for you, that offer shall always stand.

And you should know that ever since I last saw you, sleeping in your swinging chair when you were just a bit over two months old, I have missed you dearly.

I hope you had a happy birthday, Selanie, and I hope that in the days to come, whenever you’re ready, you’ll make some time for us to talk. Email is always an option, and so is 605.214.1033 or 605.301.4071.

Peace to you.

~Dawnne

Yesterday marked one month until I can legally talk to the Elder and Unknown, although I will ‘do the right thing’ and leave it up to her to contact me.

Only a month, already. Time has flown by this summer.

Although this is on my mind quite a bit, I haven’t written about it much in recent months, because there is, ultimately, little worth in worrying about it, obsessing about it, or in many ways even planning for it, because things rarely go as planned anyway, and I honestly possess no expectations. As far as negative potentials go, it may well be that our religious differences will limit our ability to communicate effectively, or that the distance will limit us to little more than cursory interaction. But, we’ll be here for her however she wants or needs, and even getting to know her a little bit over the past year or so has been more than I felt I had the right to hope for as it is.

We have planned for this time for several years, including making sure that #1 Daughter and #1 Son have been looking forward to it. They are excited about the prospect of meeting her, but are also aware that she has her own life and will move in her own time, and just because she turns eighteen on a certain day doesn’t mean that she’ll come flying out of the blue and plop herself in the midst of our lives. We will continue to take each day as it comes, as patiently as possible, and truly, while we are all anxious to meet her, the timeline is in the hands of the Elder and Unknown, not ours.

We have been so scattered this summer that we only just now realized that we didn’t do anything for her graduation, so the Spouse-Unit and I are trying to figure out what we can do for her eighteenth birthday. If the Elder and Unknown happens to be reading this, and has any suggestions in that regard, one hopes that she will filter such information through the Spouse-Unit or my mother. The Elder and Unknown may be intrigued to know that Internet domain names have been secured, literally, in her name in both .com and .net fashion. Such can be verified to typing the relevant domain names in her address bar. Whenever she wants to do something with them, she is most welcome to.

Ah, yes. I’m a sneaky bastard, aren’t I?

When the Elder and Unknown turns eighteen in slightly less than a month, one of the relevant factors in her life will indeed be Balance. The concept of Balance is special to me, because its number, eight, is one of my birth numbers, and it is something for which I continually strive, if not struggle from time to time. It’s one of my life-lessons, in other words. I’m trying to figure out how to put the category descriptions at the top of category pages, but in lieu of that, the description for the Balance category is this: “issues surrounding the Balance Archetype (Voyager Tarot) and its Attributes: Synthesis, Stagnation, Change, Harmony, and Guardian. also, “Justice” in traditional tarot; the general law of action and reaction; I Ching hexagram #63 ‘Chi Chi/After Completion’; the Nordic rune ‘Tiwaz’; the Kabbalah letter-word ‘Lamed’; alchemical Air; the numbers 8 and infinity; and Libra.” As you can see, Balance is a rather significant concept on many levels, and you can naturally infer a relevance far beyond the divination means I list in that description. In light of that, I sincerely hope that the upcoming year will be a good one for her. Balance is sometimes the mean of certain extremes, after all.

Come what may, #1 Son and I are still in the midst of soccer season. If the Elder and Unknown chooses to contact me on or around her birthday, such will thankfully be a few days after the South Dakota High School soccer tournament, which this year is up in Aberdeen. With only the last few recreational games ahead of us on our schedules at that point, we may even be in a state of mind that is a bit less scattered, and more conducive to her needs. We are all looking forward to that day, regardless of whether she contacts us or not. Here is hoping you the best, Elder and Unknown. May Peace stand over you in all things.