Up and at ‘em!
I am trying to get our family back on California school time after our Hawaiian vacation (Hawaiian time zone is 3hrs earlier). Kids go to bed 1/2 hour earlier every night, get up 1/2 hour earlier in the morning, until we get back to a 8pm bedtime and 7am wakeup.
NOT easy. Trying to wake them up right now, and they’ll have none of it. Am resorting to playing loud music, turning on bright lights, and pulling off covers. Already tried kissing and tickling. Maybe I should offer a popsicle reward for getting the hell out of bed?
Did I also mention that I myself have zero desire to be awake right now? Ugh, sucks to be Mom sometimes. You have to do all this terrible stuff yourself to keep the household running, and then you have to make others do it as well. Small others. Who kick.
Duh, just figured out a brilliant solution. Put on their favorite cartoon in the living room, just loud enough for them to recognize it. And I’m singing the theme song. Up and at ‘em!
Score one for devious tactics, worked like a charm!
Too cool
“Losing Our Cool”: The high price of staying cool - by research scientist Stan Cox.
I lived in South Florida without air conditioning for 8 years, in houses that were built to have good cross-ventilation. Ceiling fans are essential. We had hot and sticky weather 9 months a year…we drank a lot of iced tea, or went swimming on really hot days. I don’t remember it ever being a big problem, but I do remember FREEZING and having to bring a sweater whenever we went to the supermarket.
Here in Northern CA, we only have a few days a year that are over 100F. But even in hottest summer, we almost never turn on AC at our house. We turn on fans. We sit under trees. We drink cold drinks. We are lucky to have two big sycamore trees in our yard to shade the house, but over the last 5 years that I have lived here, I have planted a lot of tall shrubs and bamboo that give us almost complete shade in the front yard on summer afternoons. It’s lovely. I don’t understand people that live with AC turned on 9 months a year and never think about planting a shade tree or two to cool their house.
We are renting a cottage on Maui in July for our vacation, and one of the reasons that I chose it was the structure of the house. It has excellent tropical architecture…big screened windows on all sides for maximum airflow, ceiling fans in every room, large eaves to keep the interior shady. No carpet, no air conditioning.
The alternatives were all so depressing. Seriously, I’m not going to Maui to sit in a concrete tower 10 stories up with the air conditioning blasting. I want to feel those tropical breezes and pretend that I’m actually living there. I’m *going* to Hawaii to be warm.
It’s completely true that a house with the windows closed and no air moving can be 80F and feel stiflingly, nauseatingly hot. Open the windows, turn on a fan, and 84F can feel just perfect.
This spring we stayed at Spin & Margie’s Desert Hideaway in Joshua Tree, where average summertime temperatures are well over 100F. No air conditioning there, despite being extremely luxurious. Instead, they have evaporative coolers, aka swamp coolers. I have never seen a house with one though. Why not?
Here’s an LA Times review of “Losing Our Cool”:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-losing-our-cool-20100702,0,1459131.story
Air conditioning, he writes, generates more than 300 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. This is the same amount of CO2 that would be “produced if every household in the country bought an
additional vehicle and drove it an average 7,000 miles a year.”
Wow.
“Air conditioning displaced a culture of social solutions to hot weather,” said Gail Cooper, author of “Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900 to 1960″ and a professor
at Lehigh University. “We used to get out of the hot house into the garden. We would sit in the shade and be lazy instead of productive. We would drink ice-cold drinks to cool our bodies instead of cooling our
houses. We would wear light-colored — and very little — clothing to cool down. There was a whole hot weather strategy of social solutions that air conditioning displaced.”
Dreamland: The Golf Lesson
This morning in Dreamland: I’m at a golf lesson, and the instructor is asking me to stand on top of a giant pile of laundry, plant a plastic candy cane into it, and then hit it 50 yards with my club. I am having a hard time balancing while standing on the giant pile of laundry. She gets disgusted with me and says, “You… might be better at this if you weren’t DRUNK at your last lesson.”
My subconscious is hilarious lately.
In my dream I was ashamed, because I *did* remember coming to a previous golf lesson drunk, with my best friend Angela, no less. What was that dream memory? Did I *have* a dream previously where I came to a golf lesson drunk, or did I just make the whole thing up? Mysterious.
A solid chill groove, and trains besides.
What’s not to like? The beat kicks in around 1:37.
Perfect for cleaning one’s desk off late at night.
Family Camping Checklist – What to Bring
Last time I went camping (at Memorial Park, mid-August, glorious time) I decided to make a list of all the items I had with me that were useful and helpful. I would also include the things that I did NOT bring that were sorely missed. This fine endeavor would then provide me with a list of exactly what to pack for the next camping trip, and thereby save me about 5 hours worth of agonizing about what I might have forgotten, and then missing a useful/crucial item once there.
So here’s my list of what I like to have when camping. This is a car camping list, not a backpacking list, which you probably would have figured out by the time you got to “carpet remnant for tent entrance”. Still, I can fit everything in a smallish VW station wagon with two giant carseats, so it’s really not all that much stuff, either. You certainly don’t need an SUV.
SLEEP + SHELTER
tent
air mattress
sheets for air mattress
manual or battery-powered pump
sleeping bags for everyone
pillowcases (stuff them with sweatshirts/towels to make pillows)
carpet remnant for tent entrance
lantern
solar flashlights
headlamps for little kids (or for everyone, if you prefer. Little kids under 5 need headlamps because they don’t get the concept of pointing the beam where they want to go, also they tend to drop flashlights and lose them)
EAT
tablecloth (Tuffo Mat works fine)
camp table (don’t need if there are picnic tables)
camp chairs
firewood
kindling
newspaper
single burner camp stove
propane bottles
tea strainer/tea
coffee press/coffee
dishwashing bucket
Dr. Bronner’s soap (not peppermint, stings eyes when used as face wash)
sponge
scrub brush
Klean Kanteens, one for each person.
sharp knife
cutting board
scissors
corkscrew
can opener
bottle opener
matches and lighter
ice chest w/ice (if you are bringing perishable food)
trash bag
large water cooler
saucepan
frying pan
dutch oven
plates
bowls
forks
spoons
knives
aluminum foil
roll of paper towels
PERSONAL CARE
toothbrushes
toothpaste
nail clipper
nail file
washcloths (one per person)
towels (one per person)
shampoo (or can use Dr. Bronner’s soap)
conditioner (for long hair)
moisturizer (body and face)
sunscreen (body and face)
lip balm
sun hats for everyone
sunglasses
diapers (for kids who still need them, or for bedwetters. You do NOT want to experience a peed-in sleeping bag. Better safe than sorry)
wet wipes
deodorant
hairbrush/comb
ibuprofen
first aid kit
any necessary medications or vitamins
CLOTHING
underwear, one pair per person per day
socks, one pair per person per day (ideally Smartwool, as they do not get stinky or feel damp)
jeans
sweatpants (can be used as pajamas)
sweatshirt (ditto)
black or dark-colored wool sweater
shorts
T-shirts
fleece vest
fleece hat
warm coat
hiking/walking shoes
Crocs (for going in the water, beach, pool, wearing in campsite showers, slipping on to go pee in the middle of the night, etc.)
bathing suit
MISCELLANEOUS
baby/toddler carrier
screwdriver
pliers
camera
journal
maps and guidebooks
pens
Swiss Army knife
clothesline (for hanging towels, bathing suits, washcloths, rinsed out clothing)
prefold cloth diapers (used for drying dishes, cleaning up random spills and wet spots, padding, endlessly useful to have 5-10 of these along)
guitar and pick
games, books and toys for kids. My favorite is a big bucket of Legos.
iPod for car stereo
cell phone
cell phone car charger
laptop
laptop power supply
FOOD
Don’t forget food! This depends on the facilities available, personal taste, etc. I like to bring a cooler with apples, avocados, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, salami, chocolate, oranges, hot dogs, peanut butter, jelly, cans of baked beans, bread, nuts, crackers, Clif bars, and marshmallows (for toasting over the campfire). Then I go to Trader Joe’s and get a whole pile of healthy snacky things. Fruit leather and trail mix and dried cranberries, etc.
I don’t really like to cook a lot when I’m camping. Some people are really into it, I am not, unless I am camping with a group to share the labor. When camping with kids, if I spend time and effort cooking over a campstove and they don’t eat it, it’s a GIANT PAIN. With my camping pantry stand-bys above, they can just grab what they want and not waste food or create a pile of dishes that need to be washed. After all, the whole point is to have fun and relax, not chore like I do at home.
Radio France
Imagine if the US had TWELVE public radio stations covering everything from news to politics to culture, with a full range of music, from pop to classical, and didn’t have to cram everything into NPR.
And imagine that all 12 would be available throughout the country, (no matter where you were, even out in the most rural areas!) and imagine that they didn’t constantly have to interrupt the broadcast to beg for money.
Yeah, Radio France is pretty cool. http://www.radiofrance.fr/
It’s good for practicing my French comprehension (which is rusty), but listening to the level of discourse (smart! unabashedly intellectual! no pandering to the base redneck mob!), the rich cultural offerings presented for the listener’s appreciation and enjoyment (music, history, cuisine), and the real *international* news that we never hear about here in the US… I feel like i”m living in an impoverished second-tier country.
Instead we get multiple flavors of HBO, which cost close to $100 a month per household, and although some are good, in general it’s a ripoff. We pay much, much more and get much less.
NPR is good, I mean, I’m completely grateful for it, but it would be really cool if *everyone* could get their programs on their radio stations for free, and could get it full-time, not just for a few hours a day because that’s all the local alternative radio station could afford to buy.
Put your clothes on the rack, and let Nature dry them for free!
I’m trying to use less energy, for a lot of reasons. To save money, to keep our carbon footprint minimal, etc. Lately I’ve been reading up on line drying of clothes…the average US household spends 6% of the total energy bill on running the clothes dryer. Plus, our clothing has been getting shrunk by the excessive heat of our dryer. Fits fine when I buy it, after I dry it a few times, it’s tiny. Even our fleece clothing shrinks up, sweatpants turn into high waters! If I turn the heat down, then it doesn’t dry all the way.
I bought one of these expandable accordion-style drying racks many years ago for drying delicates in my tiny San Francisco apartment. It has been sitting in my laundry room folded up on a shelf (it folds down flat, which is great) until a few weeks ago when I read how most Japanese apartment dwellers air-dry their clothing using these same racks, hardly anyone uses gas/electric dryers. That article reminded me that I had a rack like this, so I resolved to start using it for at least every other load of laundry. Took it down, dusted it off, and put it to work.
Turns out, it’s great! I usually do a load of laundry around dinnertime, hang it up in about 5 minutes, and it’s dry by morning. Our clothes don’t get as much wear and tear, and our utility bill has gone down by about 10%.
The only disadvantage is that some fabrics (usually heavy cotton) come out a bit crispy, but I have figured out that I can hang them on the rack until they are almost dry, then I throw them in the dryer for the last few minutes of drying time. And even if they are crispy, usually they soften up within a few minutes of wearing.
I was also surprised to find that outdoor drying on a line (which is what I thought of when I thought of air drying your clothes) is not optimal. Dirt, dust, bird poop, tree sap, leaves, etc. can dirty your clothes. It’s better to dry them inside and keep them clean. Saves a lot of hauling of wet clothes too.
Another added benefit to drying inside, especially in winter, is that it will humidify your air and make it easier to breathe. Pretty cool!
I just found this URL (http://www.tiptheplanet.com/index.php?title=Air_dry_washing) with every possible type of air drying device for clothing on it, plus resources for where to buy. Astounding. There are some really cool gadgets on there. They knock my accordion rack, but eh…considering that I already have it and use it and like it OK, I’ll keep it. It’s true that it’s difficult to dry sheets on it. Maybe someday I’ll make an investment in one of the other racks. Europe has all the killer technology, of course.
The Winter Garden
This is by far the most intensive gardening effort I have ever made. Trying to do it right this season finally (now that I no longer have tiny clinging babies to deal with) and actually sustain us through the winter from the garden. Cause hey…in California, we can do that!
I just tore out some annoying large woody bushes in my garden plot (and one 8 foot mystery tree with 3-4 inch long deadly thorns that was supposedly Meyer lemon, but grew into something else) that were taking up a big chunk of room right in the sun, so now I’m preparing the ground, digging it up, mixing in iron and blood meal and fish emulsion and compost. Large amounts of manual labor, but once it’s done, it’s done until next year.
OK, here’s my list of seeds that I started last night with the kids…
* Copenhagen Market Cabbage
* Early Dividend Hybrid Broccoli
* Long Harvest Broccoli
* Kohlrabi – Crispy Colors Duo
* Snowball Cauliflower
* Ruby Queen beets
* Purple Top White Globe Turnips
* Kind Midas Long Sweet Carrots
* Baby Leaf Spinach – Catalina
* Lacinato Kale
* Oriental Giant Japanese Spinach
* Gala Mache Salad
* Endive/ Escarole/ Radicchio Mix
* Amsterdam Seasoning Celery (no stalks, just flavorful leaves)
* Slow-bolt Cilantro
If you are thinking of starting a garden in pots, or on a small-scale plot, I would personally start with a salad mix of some sort and Bright Lights Swiss Chard. Maybe throw in some carrots, for a planter garden.
My Swiss Chard from last year re-seeded itself and grew profusely in my garden, in the shade, with no/little additional water, ALL WINTER LONG. Then, when it got hot in later spring, it started to go downhill again (it likes cool to cold weather, like almost all of the above crops). It bolted, re-seeded, I trimmed it back to the ground, and now it has resprouted with vigor in the cooler weather.
Plus, Swiss Chard is DELICIOUS. Easy and delicious and grows profusely. A big winner in the beginning garden.
Broccoli is really fun to grow, watching the flower heads form. I planted it late this spring and it was too hot for it. Right now is a good time to plant, nice and cool.
I’m definitely no expert, I just try to improve and expand on what I did last time around, so over the years I’m getting there, but it certainly hasn’t happened all at once! Hopefully I’ll be a wise gardener by the time I’m a middle-aged lady and have time to putter around out there.
There is nothing better than going out to the garden to gather food for your meal, and not having to go to the store. So convenient! Also, storing food in the ground or on the plant, instead of in the fridge. EASY.
A hot day, a feverish child, and games
The weather was very hot, humid and still yesterday afternoon, so while Adrian napped, Julian and I laid on his bed and played UNO under the ceiling fan. Reminded me of playing Hearts with my family in Florida on the patio when I was a girl. Endless games of backgammon with my mom in between dips in the pool. Playing Skip-Bo and UNO with my grandmother in her kitchen while we drank tea.
We played one practice hand, and then Julian wanted to keep score. I was all for it at first (you know, math teaching opportunity and all), but then he started crushing me.
So then I stopped hinting that he should say “Uno” when he only had one card left and I just started calling him on it and making him take two cards. No more Ms. Nice Mommy, I busted out all my UNO skills. And he still whipped me! Darn 5 year olds. The game is FOR AGE SEVEN AND UP, you aren’t even supposed to be playing, much less BEATING YOUR MOTHER, OK?
Around dinnertime Julian started complaining that his eyes hurt. Half an hour later, he felt cold (despite the rest of us feeling hot and sweaty). Uh oh. Gave him a hot bath and put him to bed.
Woke up crying and hysterical an hour later, BURNING with fever, his whole body hurting…eyes, head, legs. Gave him some kids’ Motrin and held a cold cloth on my forehead while he sat on my lap and cried. 
Dan had the bright idea to play Connect Four with him as a distraction while we waited for the Motrin to kick in. Perfect! He perked right up and sat down to play with Daddy, forgot all about feeling lousy…. Read More
Dan beat him once, then Julian beat him twice in a row. My turn! I beat him the first time, then he beat me the second time with a total surprise move. Dang, I thought I was pretty good at games, but my kid is something else. Huh.
Cuddled him to sleep as his fever subsided, and this morning he seems fine. Fingers crossed! Nothing worse than a sick child.
Laura and Marcella
I’ve been reading “The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” by Marcella Hazan. I’d love to do a “Julie and Julia” type project where I cook my way through it, but alas, I probably won’t. Not in the next few years anyway. Just no time. Plus I can’t imagine giving up tacos, which are my current obsession.
Maybe I can cook my way through it with one recipe a week, or something manageable like that. I’m sure Dan would be thrilled.
I have this loose meal schedule right now:
MONDAY: Homemade pizza
TUESDAY: Tacos
WEDNESDAY: Pasta or noodles
THURSDAY: Crockpot
FRIDAY: Grass-fed beef burgers, homemade fries and salad
SATURDAY: Quiche or Pot Pie
SUNDAY: Roast Chicken and salad
Maybe every Wednesday I’ll do a Marcella Hazan menu? Hmmmm, not a bad idea.
Just read this in the pasta section and loved it:
Do not be tempted by one of those awful devices that masticate eggs and flour at one end and extrude a choice of pasta shapes through another end. What emerges is a mucilaginous and totally contemptible product, and moreover, the contraption is an infuriating nuisance to clean.
And no, English is not even her first language. But she does have a Ph.D. in Biology and Natural Sciences. Marcella is FIERCE and fabulous in her geekiness about how these foods should be just so. A little later on, she calls black pasta colored with squid ink “deplorable”.
OK, off to make lasagna with some of the fresh goat cheese ricotta that I bought at Harley Farms last week. No, not making a Marcella recipe. This lasagna is not as authentically Italian, and I’m not even making my own fresh lasagna noodles for it (the horror!) but it’s still delicious.
Ahem…
Well, I’m back.
That was rather embarrassing…I got a new laptop and desktop and didn’t transfer the link to my blog editor, so I just now dug it off my old laptop and bookmarked it on my new computers.
I’ve been neglecting this poor blog for some time now. Twitter and Facebook have taken its place, for the most part. But I miss blogging. I miss being able to type out what I really want to say without being cut off after 140 characters. Even on Facebook the length of an allowable comment is ridiculously short.
But the nice thing about Facebook and Twitter is that people actually *read* what I write there, so the discussions are much more interesting. I actually get comments, sometimes quite a lot, and of course, being able to comment on other people’s postings is great too. Here I’m a voice in the wilderness. No one ever comments, and it’s just me talking. Pretty lonely.
However, one thing that I realized is that everything I write on Twitter and Facebook disappears into a black hole after a certain length of time. I was trying to go back to a conversation that I had with a friend on Facebook just a few months ago, and it was GONE. I went back as far as I could, and then I was told, “You don’t have any older posts”.
Who knew? I was thinking that I could look back on my archive of Facebook posts and use that as a journal of sorts as time went on. But nope, I’ve been writing into the wind. It’s not searchable, it disappears…what a drag.
When I went camping recently I kept having “status” moments. Nowhere near a computer, no cell reception, and yet every few hours something would trigger a “status message” in my brain. I’d form a little 140 character message describing some interesting little event or emotion, without even trying! Pretty weird.
It kept happening, so I did an experiment. I took out a notebook and wrote down my “status messages” as they popped into my head. Well what do you know, it was pretty cool going old-school and writing down posts on paper. But the words lay dead in my book. No comments, no conversation. It was nice not being limited to a certain number of characters, but I was pondering whether there was any value in my writing, since I was the only one who would ever see it. If a tree falls in the forest…
2009 Desert Spring Road Trip photos are finally up!
You can find the photo set in chronological order here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mslaura/sets/72157617705686612/
Click on the first photo in the series (at top left) and then click through the series by clicking the thumbnail shown to the right of each individual photo. That will take you to the next photo, and so on…
I’ll post highlights from the trip here in the near future, but wanted to get the set up for those of you who requested it.
Spring Cleaning
Time to get in shape after the long winter. Cold/flu season and lots of rain has wiped out my exercise routine. I feel sluggish, stiff & I’m 15 pounds over my pre-kid weight.
I need to get back on the Mummy Tummy routine. I need to start getting daily cardio. Time to start hiking 2x/week, swimming, yoga, biking, weights… all the things I like to do and need to do. Cannot fall victim to the insidious creep of a sedentary habit.
Two little kids are definitely a challenge to performing exercise on a regular basis. Sometimes even just going for a walk around the block can be a hassle. But I’ll have to figure it out somehow. I can swim and do yoga on the weekends when Dan is home to take over parenting duties. It’s fitting an hour of exercise into the day during the week that’s a challenge. I already have every waking moment jam-packed full of work and kids and household chores. But this has to be fit in somewhere. I don’t want it to get away from me. It has to be built into my schedule.
Also need to do better meal planning, and more food prep so I have snack options ready. Smaller portions for meals too. I wish that I could go vegetarian for a while, but Dan isn’t into that. I guess I could do plant-based meals for me and cook a separate piece of meat for him and the kids.
This is all going to take a lot of planning and effort. Well, I guess I can take it day-by-day at first, just eat less and do some kind of exercise for an hour a day. Then slowly build on that.
Today I’m taking the kids and going for an hour bike ride, about 10 miles. Some hills, which are a real workout with 75 pounds of kids on back. I don’t know what we’re going to do tomorrow. Hike?
Time to rally my friends to join me too. It’s always more effective if you have a date, with someone else expecting you to show up. So, are you ready to bike, hike, walk or ???? I’ll join you for just about anything but running.
Better late than never
Ha, you just got Rick Rolled! Now pass it on…How to Rick Roll Somebody (which is a priceless video in itself)
I have to say, at first I was cracking up at the cheese factor of this 1987 video, but the longer I watched it, the more I liked it. You GO, Rick Astley. You’ve got a great voice, snake hips, and that’s one hell of a catchy pop song. It’s not your fault those blonde chicks don’t know how to dance.
Rainy Day Activities
Kids playing with the dollhouse on a rainy day. Julian decorates the house and Adrian undecorates it. All family members (mom, dad, two brothers) love to jump off the roof instead of using the ladder. Well, *sometimes* they use the ladder. But mostly not.
The next morning, it’s still a nonstop downpour. Hmmm, what to do? We’ve played with playdough, rolled balls, played every Wii Sport, painted, drawn, worked in workbooks, taken baths, played cards, read books, played computer games, built train tracks…off to the Children’s Discovery Museum, I guess.
15 things you should know about Obama’s plan (but probably don’t)
Well, here it is. Last week, President Obama unveiled his budget—his blueprint for America—and it’s ambitious, amazing, and unapologetically progressive. As Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist said, it will set America on a “fundamentally new course.” 1
President Obama called his budget “a threat to the status quo,” and trust me, the status quo noticed. Oil companies, big banks and insurance companies are already mobilizing to stop it. 2
Unfortunately, most folks don’t realize how far-reaching and progressive the plan is—that’s where we all come in.
Here are 15 really incredible things about Obama’s plan. Check them out and then send them on to your friends and family so that millions of people will have the information they need to fight to make this vision a reality.
1. Makes a $634 billion down payment on fixing health care that will go a long way toward paying for a more efficient, more affordable health care system that covers every single American. 3
2. Reduces taxes for 95% of working Americans. And if your family makes less than $250,000, your taxes won’t go up one dime. 4
3. Invests more than $100 billion in clean energy technology, creating millions of green jobs that can never be outsourced. 5
4. Brings our troops home from Iraq on a firm timetable, finally bringing the war to a close—and freeing up almost ten billion dollars a month for domestic priorities. 6
5. Reverses growing income inequality. The plan lets the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire and focuses on strengthening the middle class. 7
6. Closes multi-billion-dollar tax loopholes for big oil companies. 8
7. Increases grants to help families pay for college—the largest increase ever. 9
8. Halves the deficit by 2013. President Obama inherited a legacy of huge deficits and an economy in shambles, but his plan brings the deficit under control as soon as the economy begins to recover. 10
9. Dramatically increases funding for the SEC and the CFTC—the agencies that police Wall Street. 11
10. Tells it straight. For years, budgets have used accounting tricks to hide the real costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts, and too many other programs. Obama’s budget gets rid of the smokescreens and lays out what America’s priorities are, what they cost, and how we’re going to pay for them. 12
11. Stops unnecessary government subsidies to big banks, health insurance companies and big agribusinesses. 13,14,15
12. Expands access to early childhood education and improves schools by investing in programs that make sure every child has a qualified, strong teacher. 16
13. Negotiates for better prescription drug prices using Medicaid’s tremendous bargaining power. 17
14. Expands access to family planning for low-income women. 18
15. Caps the pollution that causes global warming, and makes polluters pay to support clean energy innovation.19
Sources:
1. “Climate of Change,” The New York Times, February 27, 2009
2. “Obama Calls His Budget Sweeping, Needed Change,” The New York Times, February 28, 2009
3. “Obama Offers Broad Plan to Revamp Health Care,” The New York Times, February 26, 2009
4. “Obama Expects Fight Over $3.55 Trillion Budget Plan” Bloomberg News, February 28, 2009
5. “Energy Budget Is Sunlight After Eight Years of Darkness” Center for American Progress, February 26, 2009
6. “The Economic Cost of War in Iraq and Afghanistan” The New York Times, March 1, 2009
7. “Tax Cuts” The New York Times, February 26, 2009
8. “Energy Budget Is Sunlight After Eight Years of Darkness” Center for American Progress, February 26, 2009
9. “Student Loans” The New York Times, February 26, 2009
10. “Obama unveils budget blueprint” CNN, February 26, 2009
11. “Obama budget would boost SEC, CFTC, FBI” Reuters, February 26, 2009
12. “Obama’s budget” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2009
13. “Student Loans,” The New York Times, February 26, 2009
14. “Health Insurance Stocks Dive on Medicare Advantage Cuts” The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2009
15. “Agriculture” The New York Times, February 26, 2009
16. “Investing Wisely in Our Children” Center for American Progress, February 26, 2009
17. “Obama Offers Broad Plan to Revamp Health Care” The New York Times, February 26, 2009
18. “Setting ‘Green’ Goals” The New York Times, February 26, 2009
Goles Son Amores
Did you know that I was on the Most Ridiculous Spanish TV Show Ever?
When I was living in Madrid in 1992-1993 my roommates and I saw an ad for a new TV show, “Goles Son Amores”, and we immediately reviled it as the worst of the WORST of Spanish TV. Get this…it was a variety show, and not like that’s not bad enough, it was a variety show revolving around soccer. But not very informative, rather it used futbol as a loose theme around which to parade a series of dancing girls in states of tacky undress, costumed clowns, extremely bad jokes, a near-naked Brazilian samba troupe (because you know, samba > Brazil > soccer…see the connection?) and showcase the toothy skills of the host Manolo Escobar (a tiny yet bombastic singer from the 1960s, see him singing one of his hits, “Viva Espana” below), and his blonde sidekick Loreto Valverde, about 30 years his junior. Occasionally they would actually interview a player or coach, but mostly it was like “The Donny and Marie Show”, except with a goofy Spanish cast of characters, and a whole lot of half-naked girls gratuitously scattered about.
Don’t you love the over-the-top evening/stripper-wear combined with belted, acid-washed mom jeans? That is a hot look. So 1992.
Here is another short clip, with a rabid group of soccer fans cheering their team, the toothy Manolo looking on in apparent disbelief at their fervor. He was quite an odd choice for host of this program, since he didn’t really seem to care about soccer too much.
Anyway, I had seen the ads for this new show and had been making fun of it for a while. Cut to the biggest disco in Madrid, Pacha, which, unbelievably, is still around. I was there with my friend Andres, and at one point a wiry, average-looking guy approached me and asked me if I was interested in being on TV. Since I had been hit on about a hundred times already that evening, I assumed that this was just another come on, and I blew him off. Before he left, he put a card in my hand. “If you change your mind, here is my card.” I put it into my coat pocket, and there it stayed.
Months passed and my boyfriend Andrew arrived from the States. He was looking for work as a fashion photographer, so he was going around to modeling agencies. We were at an agency one day, and the street name sounded familiar. I pulled the card out of my pocket, and the street was the same, the address was nearby. I figured that since I was already almost there, and had time to kill, I might as well check it out.
It turned out to be an agency, which was promising. I was surprised to find out that this guy had been for real, and started to get a little excited. “I have this card from one of your scouts. Can you tell me what openings you have?”
The receptionist said she would check. She went back into the offices and I waited in the front. When she came back a few minutes later, I was all ears. “Yes?”
“We have openings right now for someone like you in a new television program.”
“What is the program?”
“It’s called ‘Goles Son Amores’.”
That took more than a few seconds to sink in. The program that I had been reviling as the stupidest possible thing on television, out of an astoundingly bad pool of candidates…THAT was the show that wanted to hire me?
Well, whatever. I got over it and decided that the experience was just too rich to pass up, so I went to the audition, and, being blonde, female, young and pretty, I got the job right away. Not sure what I would have to have done to NOT get the job.
I didn’t go to Madrid to be on a cheesy TV show. I had gone to Madrid to study at the Universidad de Madrid through a San Francisco State University exchange program. Unfortunately, when I arrived I found myself with a group of whiny, obnoxious 17-18 year olds (I was a sage 22 year old)who complained about everything…the food, the people, the language, the culture. I was looking forward to the end of orientation, so that I could rid myself of my fellow ugly Americans and go to real classes with Spaniards at the University.
Orientation ended and I went to my first day of school. Horror when I entered class and found myself with exactly the same group of people! What? I went to complain to the director of the program and found that I would not be in standard university classes at all, instead, my classes would all be with members of the group that I had come over with, and not integrated at all. You would think that I would have figured that out somewhere along the way, but I didn’t.
I asked the director for a full refund of my university and program fees, and set out finding a place to live. Along with two of my fellow program compatriots, I found a dark yet decent and fairly inexpensive apartment in Moncloa and we moved in. OK, now what? I was there to become fluent in Spanish and become part of the culture, so I set about doing that, and it was in that frame of mind that I took the job on “Goles Son Amores”
Surprisingly, I was the only foreigner among the “azafatas”, which technically means “stewardess”, but is also used as the term for pretty girls hired to promote products. Telecinco TV5 was the station running “Goles”, and it was known for having scads of girls in the background of every program, no matter how irrelevant they were. So I was one of 20 girls on the show representing the 20 Spanish soccer teams in La Liga, the professional soccer league. My team was going to be Cadiz, one of the bottom-ranked. Sigh.
Our job was to come out at the beginning of every show and serve as a line of eye candy behind the host Manolo Escobar and his two hostesses, Loreto Valverde and Inma Brunton. We 20 girls were not sufficient though. There was also Cacao, a Brazilian samba troupe, and another group of half-naked dancers called…Mamachicha, I think.
Every Monday I took the Metro to the Telecinco studios outside of Madrid and stayed there all day for about USD$60. Sometimes Manolo would throw a fit and the “stars” would have to do a million takes, and then it really got to be a very long day indeed. We chicas would wait for our call in a tiny closet-sized windowless room, every single last one of the girls chain-smoking the entire time, so that the room was completely fogged with thick, choking blue cigarette smoke. I shudder to think of how many years I lost off my lifespan sitting in there for sometimes as little as $6 per hour.
As I mentioned, my team (Cadiz) was ranked at the bottom of all the teams in La Liga. As they would announce the teams one-by-one, the girl representing that team would run out into the spotlight and do something to act out how her team had done that week, while the announcer gave a quick summary of wins/losses.
Since my team always lost, I usually had to run out and do a pantomime of crying and being sad, wringing my fists into my eye sockets and flinging the back of my hand across my forehead in mock agony. Occasionally the producers would ask me to do a particular kind of dance, which would have been fine if I had known what any of them were, but a tarantella? Beats me. So I would just snap my fingers and do a mock flamenco kind of thing. Nobody complained, so I guess my blondeness made up for the fact that I really had no clue what the hell I was supposed to be doing out there.
Or maybe it was my outfit, which was a tight-fitting Cadiz jersey on top, tiny little Dolphin running shorts on bottom, knee-length tube socks (!) and cleats. Oh, plus a ton of garish stage makeup and poofy teased sky-high 80′s hair. Stunning, right?
I would often forget that I was supposed to be *performing* on camera. Manolo would be bantering with Loreto and Inma, all with us girls arrayed in a semicircle behind them. The camera would often pan behind, down the line of pretty girls, all of them smiling brilliantly at the camera and posing perfectly, except for ME staring goggle-eyed at at the presenters with not a scrap of smile on my face. I would totally forget that the camera was there, and that I was actually part of the show and expected to smile and pose etc. at all times onstage.
The other girls were all Spanish, and rarely took any notice of me, dismissing me as a foreigner. One day in the cafeteria I was listening to the conversation around me and I absent-mindedly squeezed a slice of lemon into my glass of water. All conversation stopped and heads swiveled. Apparently that was an utterly strange thing to them…squeezing a lemon, into WATER! Personally I didn’t find it so strange, but it simply was not done. Who would do a thing like that?
Their concept of California was hilarious. “Oh, I have a friend who lives in California, do you know her? Maria Jesus Fernandez?”
And this: “Since you are from California, you must have acted in a lot of movies and TV shows. What famous people do you know?”
I had to explain delicately that things were a bit different in California, and usually they had *auditions*. Most people who tried out for a role on TV or in a movie actually had some acting experience, and weren’t just chatted up in a disco as their sole qualification. You usually didn’t get hired just for showing up.
Then I tried to explain that San Francisco wasn’t really like Hollywood, and the film industry wasn’t so big there, but I lost their attention at that point and they went back to ignoring me. Which hey, I don’t blame them…what a boring answer. I should have just made up a few crazy stories to entertain them and boost my status, but I was quite the serious bluestocking and stuck to the hard, cold, facts.
Here’s Manolo singing one of his early hits, a patriotic number from 1973 called “Y Viva Espana”:
I love Spain and all, but who are all those non-Spanish elves in the background marching around? Couldn’t they find a torero or two? Love Manolo’s sideburns though.
This is my personal favorite Manolo song, it’s catchy and he’s hot in this video from 1969, the year of my birth. Those ultra-mobile eyebrows, the way he points it out to you, and shouts out the words? Drama!
In case you don’t speak Spanish, the song lyrics translate loosely to “Dude, Where’s My Car?” This video was later extended and re-made as a movie starring Ashton Kutcher. Kidding, kidding.
“Goles Son Amores” was filmed in 1992-1993, so even back then he was about 20 years off his prime. Not that he was so bad-looking as a strapping young man, and what a set of pipes! Even as an old man, the dude could definitely belt it out with the best of them.
The big climax of “Goles Son Amores” came when Manolo sang the theme song, “Goles Son Amores”. The clapping! Take a listen, press the play button below:
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The lyrics are, of course, intelligent and complex.
Y es que goles son amores,
un programa de televisión.
Y es goles son amores
espectáculo y diversión.
Y es goles son amores
Telecinco marcará el mejor.
Y es que goles son amores
vive el fútbol pero con humor.
(Goals are loves,
a television program (this is the best line, isn’t it?).
Goals are loves,
entertainment and fun.
Goals are loves,
Telecinco will make the best.
Goals are loves,
soccer, but with humor.)
Y si el martes duele la derrota
para el miércoles ya estás mejor.
En el jueves vuelve la esperanza
para el viernes te ves campeón.
Llega el sábado estás preparado
y si el domingo vuelves a perder
vente el lunes a nuestro programa
fuera penas y diviertete!
(And if defeat hurts on Tuesday,
for Wednesday’s you’ll be better.
On Thursday, hope returns,
Friday you are a champion.
When Saturday arrives, you are ready,
and if Sunday you lose again…
come on Monday to our program,
no more pain, have fun!)
Y es que goles son amores
un programa de televisión.
Y es goles son amores
espectáculo y diversión.
Y es que goles son amores
Telecinco marcará el mejor.
Y es que goles son amores
vive el fútbol pero con humor.
(Goals are loves,
a television program (this is the best line, isn’t it?).
Goals are loves,
entertainment and fun.
Goals are loves,
Telecinco will make the best.
Goals are loves,
soccer, but with humor.)
Deep!
After a year of this nonsense, I was fed up with sticking around Madrid just to show up at Telecinco every Monday and lose lung tissue and brain cells for only $60. I wanted to go travel around, so I did. I quit my “Goles” gig. Enough was enough. My friend Carlos Perrino did manage to record my last appearance, but I doubt he still has that video. Would be a treat to watch, just for the comic value.
Shortly thereafter, the program was canceled. RIP, Goles.
Now you know more than you ever wanted to know about my TV career. Short but sweet. Well….short.
Recipes from our New Year’s Day Open House
I made this soup, bread and punch for our New Year’s Day party and they were big hits. Along with the leftover ham, you should be set for a few days if you make a batch of soup and a batch of bread, and both recipes are super-easy, though not fast. Start soaking your beans the night before for a meal the next day.
If you make a full batch of the champagne punch for yourself, you will be too drunk to care about eating, but try it for your next adult get-together.
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STEWED BLACK-EYED PEAS WITH HAM
Prep Time: 10 min
Inactive Prep Time: 8 hr 0 min
Cook Time: 55 min
Level: Easy
Serves: 6 to 8 servings
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup chopped onions
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 bay leaves
1 sprig fresh thyme
2 cups roughly chopped ham pieces (I buy one of those big uncured spiral cut hams at Trader Joe’s, use 2 cups for this and make sandwiches on buttered bread with avocado with the rest, or just eat it straight. Mmmm, ham….)
1 pound dried black-eyed peas, soaked in cold water overnight and rinsed well (if you use a slow cooker you don’t have to presoak – see below)
1 quart low-sodium chicken stock
1 cup cold water
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
(1/2 package of Trader Joe’s precooked bacon, cut with scissors into little strips)
In a medium stockpot, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the onions and cook for 2 minutes. Stir in the garlic, bay leaves, thyme, and country ham. Add the black-eyed peas, chicken stock, and 1 cup cold water. Bring the liquid up to a boil, partially cover and reduce to a simmer. Simmer the peas for about 25 minutes, uncover and cook an additional 20 to 25 minutes, or until the peas are tender. Season the peas with salt and pepper as needed.
Alternatively, you can throw everything into a slow cooker and let it go on low for 7-8 hours, or on high for 4-5 hours.
If you got the bacon, you can throw that in right before serving. If you put it in too far ahead of time it gets a little too soft.
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SPEEDY NO-KNEAD NYT BREAD
3 cups bread flour
1 packet ( 1/4 ounce) instant yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
Oil as needed. (Spray Olive Oil from Trader Joe’s is the easiest)
1. Combine flour, yeast and salt in a large bowl. Add 1 1/2 cups water and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy. Cover bowl with a plate or with a larger bowl placed upside down on top. Let dough rest about 4 hours at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
2. Lightly oil a work surface and place dough on it; fold it over on itself once or twice. Clean your original bowl, oil it, and put the dough back in for about 45 minutes to rise again.
3. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6-to-8-quart heavy covered pot or dutch oven (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats.
When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Dump the dough from the oiled bowl directly into the hot pot. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes.
4. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 10 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.
Yield: 1 big loaf. You can easily double this recipe, just make sure that you use a bigger bowl to mix it in and let it rise. You can use the same amount of yeast, just double the flour and salt.
When you go to do the second rising, split the dough into two equal pieces and put each in its own oiled bowl. Bake one, and then when it is done, plop the second one into the already-hot bread-baking pot.
This is my slightly edited version of the NYT bread recipes from Mark Bittman.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/08mini.html for the original article and
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/dining/08mini.html?ref=dining for the faster updated version and all the details, plus photos of how it should look at each step.
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CITRUS CHAMPAGNE PUNCH
2/3 cup fresh lemon juice
2/3 cup superfine sugar
1 cup vodka
1/2 cup limoncello
2 teaspoons vermouth
1 (750 ml) bottle chilled dry Champagne or sparkling wine
Ice
Lemon twists, for garnish
Combine the lemon juice, sugar, vodka, Limoncello, and vermouth in a large nonreactive bowl and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Cover and refrigerate until chilled, 1 to 2 hours. Add the Champagne and stir to combine.
Serve over ice in highball glasses, garnished with lemon twists.
Yield: about 1 1/2 quarts, 8 to 10 servings
6th wedding anniversary
It was actually last Saturday (our wedding date was 1/3/03), but we celebrated today at our local seafood bar with oysters on the half shell, ahi tuna, calamari, baked oysters asiago, lemon drops, gin and tonics, and a glass of excellent pinot grigio. Good times!
Dan asked me on Friday night, “Do you know what tomorrow is?”
I responded, “Of course, it’s the day before our anniversary!” and that’s when the endless ribbing began. Because hello…our anniversary was the next day.
I remembered that it was the 3rd, but for some reason I got confused and thought that the 3rd was Sunday. Anyway, Dan has been teasing me ever since. But I DID NOT FORGET OUR ANNIVERSARY. I just got confused about days, that’s all. OK?
Anyway, we had a great time on the actual day, (which we spent playing, chatting, eating and drinking over at Jeff and Susanne’s house), and at our official celebration.
Still need to take our rings in for their annual polishing. Platinum gets scratched up so easily.
It has been a good 6 years so far. Lots of hard work making and raising two little boys, but we are happy and more in love than ever. Life is good!
What have you done?
Here’s a new meme that I got from Steph. Feel free to use it on your own site if you like.
I’ve bolded all the things that I’ve done personally…66 out of 100. This makes me think that I should create a list of all the things I’d like to do that I haven’t done yet.
1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band (yes, I played the tuba my freshman year of high school)
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland (yep, my grandmother lives in Anaheim)
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo (sure, plenty of times, not sure if it needs to be formally in a band or anything)
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning (yes, from bad oysters in North Beach…it was HORRIBLE)
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise (not on a cruise ship, but on our family sailboat, yes)
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors (hmm, been to England, Scotland, France and Germany, but not Norway)
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language (yep, French and Spanish)
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing (zero desire to do this)
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa (Morocco)
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain (today!)
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class (not yet, but I have major plans to learn Krav Maga at some point)
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma (yep, I’m B+)
65. Gone sky diving (no desire to)
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy (still have Blueberry Bear, the only stuffed animal I ever cared about, who was actually my Mom’s bear when she was a girl)
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job (yes, at age 16, for selling hats and pocketing some of the profits. Bad girl!)
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible (nope, couldn’t get past all the sex and violence!)
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life (and also almost took someone’s life, once upon a time…but he really deserved it)
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous (but not very impressive)
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day
Wrapping it up
I have been slacking on the blogging lately, because honestly? It’s a whole lot easier to just update my Twitter status than it is to sit down and hammer out coherent thoughts at length.
Plus my hands and wrists are BEAT UP from all these years of working at a computer, so I’m trying to limit my keyboard time. Just ordered a new keyboard last week, so hopefully I can update my poor ergonomics and sit at a decent workstation setup again. Laptops are very convenient, but they are MURDER on your body. If the keyboard is low enough to not inflict damage on your wrists, then you will have to look down to see your screen and kill your neck as a result. Move the screen up to the perfect viewing height and now your typing fingers are up by your chin. It’s impossible to work safely on a laptop for any length of time. Guaranteed to destroy your body eventually.
I am recovering from the Christmas holidays. Already took down the tree, it was shedding needles like mad and Adrian finally pulled it over. Goodbye! I was feeling guilty about not putting up the Christmas lights outside this year, but hey, it sure does work out in the long run! No need to take them down now. Hooray!
This year Julian got a totally sweet bike for Christmas, which is what he wanted. There was some drama first though, before the happy ending.
I went to our fave local bike shop and had this Electra Mini-Rod all picked out (except no training wheels):
but then the bike shop dude on duty said, “Hey, for a 5 year old you should get the Rat Rod instead.”
It looked big, but I didn’t have Julian there with me (the surprise element, you know), so I wasn’t sure. I figured the bike dude would know. Except he doesn’t know that I have a very petite *almost* 5 year old, and that makes quite a difference.
The Rat Rod was super cool-looking, so I snapped it up and put it in the car, thrilled that I had such a great present for Julian. Then I found a really nice drum set for Adrian, the kind that you can sit at and play, with a foot pedal and cymbals and everything. And I was done! Two big presents, that was all I planned on doing, because last year I got a bunch of little presents for the kids and half of them broke within a month and the other half morphed into the Least Interesting Items Ever to my kids within the same time frame. Waste of money and resources.
Best quote from Christmas Eve came from Dan, who wins the award for “Unclear on the Concept”. We had just gotten back from a lovely dinner at Firat and Martina’s house with lots of wine and food, and put the kids to bed. I asked Dan to bring in the bike and the drum set from their secret hiding location in his office so that we could set it up under the tree and he said (drum roll please)……
“Oh, I’m too tired to bring that stuff in here tonight. Can’t we just do it tomorrow morning?”
GONG! Sorry, Jewish guy. You need to go back to remedial Christmas 101.
I set him straight on the whole “finding presents under the tree, not waiting for late-rising Dad to bring them inside after he has a cup of coffee first”, and he brought the stuff in.
Christmas morning came and Julian was all over it. “Mommy! There’s a bike next to the tree! It’s for ME! And a drum set for Adrian!”
I rolled out of bed, made sure that everyone went potty first (no puddles of excitement on Xmas morn, please) and then we set out to investigate. Julian was in awe of his bike, but D’OH! He could not get on or off of it by himself. I’d call that a major safety hazard. He could pedal OK, with the seat at its lowest possible level, but couldn’t straddle the bar. UGH.
He was a real trooper though, and wasn’t too disappointed. Also, it was raining cats and dogs outside and gusting enough to blow the bamboo in our front yard almost completely horizontal. So not much of a bike riding day. Still…it would have been nice to have the RIGHT SIZE BIKE, and I was kicking myself for just going with the flow and not sticking with my original choice.
We unpacked Adrian’s drum set and it was a big hit, except that the freakin’ FOOT PEDAL for the bass drum was missing from the box. I was envisioning going back to ToysRUS and explaining to a brain-dead customer service person about how the foot pedal was missing, and asking for *just* the foot pedal, and trying to wrangle that, and I was not pleased at the notion. Luckily, Adrian totally did not care. But I was bummed.
At this point Dan came out and started playing with the kids and their defective/dangerously oversized toys, and he noticed something that I did not….a puddle of rank liquid DOGSHIT right in the middle of our white, fluffy, wool rug. The ONLY rug in the living room, I might add, and a small one at that. Our dog has lived with us for over five years now, with not one single accident in the house, but when he *does* decide to blow liquid mud indoors in the middle of the night? He chooses the single spot where it is guaranteed to be the most difficult and disgusting to clean.
So then I spent about 45 minutes gagging and dry-heaving while spraying poo pudding out of the carpet and dousing it with enzyme treatment. Foul utterly foul. Thanks for *that* Christmas gift, you lousy beast. Yeah, your tummy was upset, whatever. NEXT TIME CHOOSE THE HARDWOOD FLOOR, IT’S EVERYWHERE. What a dick maneuver, crapping on that white rug. Asshole!
We had a lovely Christmas Day feast with my cousins Anni and Hana, Firat and Martina and their daughter Claire.
A big ole crab feed with mussels and fresh-baked bread and stuff. The crab was not nearly as good as it has been in the past, so I was kind of pissed about that, because hello, it’s XMAS and it’s supposed to be THE BEST EVER, but oh well. The company was good.
The next day we went to the bike shop to exchange the bike, but they were closed. Major upset for Julian. Sorry kid. So we went to ToysRUS to get the missing foot pedal for Adrian’s drum. I was really dreading that whole procedure, as I mentioned. When we walked in I had a bright idea and went over to the music section. There in the middle of the aisle, as fate would have it, was a thrashed, opened drum set box. I reached inside, fished around, and found the missing foot pedal. Hooray!
I tucked that under my arm, and since I felt a little bad for not going through the usual channels, I went and bought a Wii Sports game attachment set and a rechargeable battery set for our Wiimotes. Then I left. Hooray!
The next day the bike shop was open, and I exchanged Julian’s bike for the appropriately-sized Mini-Rod. He immediately hopped on it as soon as we got home, and he has barely gotten off it since. I have it all tricked out with a bell and super-bright lights on both front and back (for when he’s riding at dusk). He LOVES it.
So in spite of a slight delay in fulfillment, we managed to have a merry Christmas after all. The bike gets ridden almost every day, the drum set gets played almost every day, the kids are thrilled, and that’s wonderful. We did not clutter the house up with junk. We got to spend the day with family and friends (although we *sorely* missed my mom, but here’s to next year!). We didn’t have to work too hard. We played a lot. Too bad for the carpet, but overall…a resounding success!
Snowy trail at Long Ridge
We recently had a cold snap combined with a few days of heavy rain, and that meant…SNOW! Well, not here, but since we live at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains the snow was just a short drive away.
This is Julian at Long Ridge, up on Skyline/35 above Palo Alto. It’s one of my favorite places to hike when it’s NOT snowing, as you hike through beautiful forest, up a big hill, and then BOOM! Spectacular, expansive views of the gorgeous Pacific coastline, Monterey Bay, the works.
We didn’t get that far on this occasion, we just hiked down into a little valley where the snow was a few feet deep, threw snowballs, made a snowman, slid down the hill a few times, crackled ice under our feet on the little wooden bridge, etc.
Adrian has never seen snow and Julian had only seen a smallish dirty patch of slush when he was about 2yo, so this was great for them, they LOVED it. Very glad we don’t live in snow though, since after about two hours of it they were totally done, and bring on the hot chocolate already, OK?
Christmas tree run
Me and the boys at a Christmas tree farm off Black Rd. They had a great selection. We got a smallish tree because I knew that Adrian was going to maul it, and I wanted to minimize the potential destruction.
Last year Adrian pulled the entire tree over on himself, and broke almost all of our glass ornaments in the process. This year he has pulled off about 6-7 of the lower-hung plastic ornaments and torn the hooks out of them. I only hung ornaments on the top half of the tree, but he still got a few.
Three days ago I found the last remaining glass ball broken, in the trash. Puzzled, I went over to the tree and found a pile of glass shards. Adrian had apparently been swatting at the ball with a broom, finally succeeded in knocking it off and smashing it to smithereens, and then disposed of the big pieces of the remains in the trash, leaving only the wickedly sharp shards behind. Sigh. At least he cleaned up after himself a little bit.
Two days ago we were going for a bike ride with the Burley Piccolo tandem that I tucked away 2 years ago when they stopped making them. I needed to blow up Julian’s bike tires a little bit, so I went to go get my pump. Well, it didn’t work, because Adrian had somehow managed to remove the internal fitting for the pump interface. Also, he emptied my little case of pump attachments, like the ball-inflating needle, air mattress valve, etc.
Yesterday I went to get my camera for a Christmas party at the Falco’s house. I had been charging the battery, and I went to get it from the charger, but it was gone. Guess who? That’s right, Adrian took it out of the charger and disappeared it somewhere. Who knows where? Not me. It could be anywhere. He likes to drop things into small crevices, so I have no real hope of finding it in the near future. I had to buy another one today to the tune of $55.
Ah, the joys of a wild almost-2-year-old.
Sleepy in Saratoga
We have a Burley bike trailer and the hitch comes off so that you can convert it into a stroller. It’s rainproof, so we bundled up the boys and then Dan took them out for a long walk in the rain. It was definitely time for them to get out of the house, if you know what I’m sayin’.
They fell asleep on the walk and Dan took this photo. As you can tell, the trailer is getting a *wee* bit snug. But hey, it IS waterproof.
A birthday surprise
For Dan’s birthday weekend of October 17th, I took him on a picnic at Byington Winery up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about 20 minutes away from our house.
The surprise part was that our good friend John Yrazabal showed up at the winery as we were getting out of the car and asked, “You guys need any help carrying that stuff?” Dan started to respond and then realized that it was JOHN! John moved to Portland a few years ago, but was going to be in the area with his husband Walter for the weekend, so I arranged for him to meet us at the winery and surprise Dan. It totally worked. We got Dan good. And the picnic was fun too!
As you can tell, the weather was lovely. Byington is lovely. Their wine is excellent. We and drank and walked around the vineyards and looked at the spectacular mountain views, and chatted. The kids played on the bocce court and roamed around. Good times!
This photo is memorable because of our T-shirts.
Me: Barack
Dan: I ROCK
Watch out for cone-head baby
Adrian came into the bedroom with one of the long couch pillows unzippered and worn on his head like a hat. Hilarious.
Double jumpers on a rainy day
We are loving the rain. Bring on that weather!
Must See TV!
Warning, none of these SNL Digital Shorts are safe for work…unless you have headphones on.
#1 Dick in a Box – A Xmas special
Justin Timberlake gives the best gifts!
#2 Lazy Sunday with Adam Samberg
the Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia!
#3 Natalie Raps
You know Natalie Portman, that sweet vegan actress?
39 years
It’s my 39th birthday today, and it’s a good day and a bad day.
It’s a good day because I am actually going out to dinner tonight, to The Plumed Horse, which is a very swanky joint that I have wanted to go to for ages. I’m dining not just with my beloved husband, but with my best friend Angela (who flew in from Arizona yesterday for a surprise visit) and my friend Mimi, who is coming down from San Francisco. So that is definitely something to look forward to! Angela will be staying with us until Tuesday, so we will get a chance to visit and queen it up.
The bad part is that Adrian is sick with a really bad cold/flu and he has not slept more than an hour or so at a time for the last 4-5 days without waking up, coughing his brains out and screaming at top volume for “MOMMMMYYYYY!!!!!” Last night he coughed so hard that he actually barfed on me. Poor guy, but I am WIPED. I can’t even walk away from him into the next room without him freaking out, and my evenings from 7:00pm on have consisted of laying in bed with him in a dark, humidified room and being coughed on after a a long, hard day of wiping his nose and listening to him shriek and not nap. Zero down time.
To add to the joy of this, I’m pretty under the weather myself. It’s luckily not a full-fledged illness, just a lingering sore throat, runny-nose thing with a feverish undertone. Just enough that I’m going to keep the wine consumption to a minimum tonight, and eh, I don’t have much of an appetite.
I’m also stressing out because we’re going out fairly late, past the kids’ bedtimes, which means that Kim will be putting the kids to bed. Julian is no problem, but Adrian is going to be a nightmare. I mean, he’s a nightmare for ME lately, and he has been put to bed by someone other than me exactly two times in his two years of life. I guess I’ll just have Kim rock him to sleep in the rocking chair and then try to lay him down. I think that might work the best out of anything.
So hooray for the fun evening planned and the next few days hanging with Angela, but boooo for the goddamn illness around here. Sick kids SUCK. At least Julian’s not sick. YET.
Apart from all this, I am having some weird anxiety about turning 39. I just don’t like the 9 years. It’s like, I might as well be 40 already. I’ve already done that, actually. I spent all of age 36 thinking that I was already 37 ( I was pregnant, preoccupied, and mush-brained from hormones and back pain) and then when I turned 37 I thought I was turning 38, until Dan informed me otherwise.
On the one hand I was happy to only be 37. On the other hand I totally missed being 36. It was weird.
OK, Adrian is whining for me again, gotta go. Kid had better get well soon! I can’t take much more of this.
Hmmm, maybe I should cancel those FedEx pickups.
Nah, I think 70 pounds of kids is enough of a workout.
Julian shows how he can even *sleep* on the bike.
Julian shows how he can even *sleep* on the bike. Adrian holds onto the stoker bar, but skips the footpegs entirely., originally uploaded by mslaura.
Adrian holds onto the stoker bar, but skips the footpegs entirely.
Anyway, I was putting the seats on late at night in the living room (as opposed to the cold garage) and so when the kids came out they saw the bike first thing. Before ANYTHING else, they insisted on sitting in their new seats and testing out the whole thing. Pretty hilarious.
I don’t think they had yet realized that they could actually *lean back* in those seats. They figured that out on the first ride though.
Tomorrow is an exciting day, as it will be my first time taking Julian to preschool on the bike!
My Two-kid Cargo Bike Setup
My rockin’ two-kid setup for my new Radish Xtracycle cargo bike.
http://www.xtracycle.com
I bought two canoe seats from REI (http://www.rei.com/product/754619 ) and used three cam straps from Xtracycle to secure them onto the snapdeck of my bike.
The canoe seats have buckled straps underneath as well, so those secured the seats onto the snapdeck and frame nicely. Then I used a cam strap to go all the way around the perimeter of the seats and tighten down the edges that were hanging over.
The final touch was using two more cam straps to go under the frame beneath each seat and act as seat belts.
You can click on the above photo and go to the Flickr page for it, them mouse over to see notes where I point out how I attached the seats. Frankly, I’m thrilled and somewhat amazed that I was able to do all this without tools, just with the canoe seats themselves and a few very secure straps.
It took me about two hours of fiddling around to come up with this configuration, this was probably my fifth attempt. But it works GREAT. It’s super secure, I didn’t have to drill through my snapdeck or create a second snapdeck. I didn’t have to do anything fancy or complicated at all.
We have been on three rides since I rigged this up yesterday… two short five mile rides and then a 10 mile ride today with some hills (nothing major).
With two kids totaling 70 pounds on back, my ass feels like I’ve had a severe spanking. Then again, it’s good exercise and great fun. The kids and I LOVE it. I can barely keep them off the bike and they sing and point things out the whole way.
I don’t have to pay childcare fees ($12/hr minimum) to go get a workout, I can run errands, I get to be outside in the fresh air, I don’t pay for gas, I don’t pollute, and I can carry stuff.
I have not been riding my regular bike at all, so I’m sorely out of biking shape, though I’m in fairly decent shape overall. I can imagine that the hills will get a whole lot easier once my biking muscles start kicking in.
I can carry 4-6 bags of groceries in those expandable pannier bags. Luckily it’s TOTALLY flat between here and Trader Joe’s, and only about 1.5 miles away. The other stores I regularly go to are the same distance away, or even closer, and all on flat terrain. Our club is the farthest place that I go regularly, and that’s about 5 miles away max. There is one hill. A steep one near Jack Fischer Park. But I can walk it for now, and my new fitness goal will be to get up it without getting off the bike. We’ll see….
The Radish
I just ordered my Radish, check her out:
I’ve been looking into a bunch of different 2-kid configurations, and finally decided on this one (different base bike, just look at the kid seats):
Except that I got some canoe seats that are more thickly padded on bottom, taller in back (for better upper body support, possibly nappable in Adrian’s case?) and a little bit shorter in the seat.
So I will need to attach the seats for the kiddos, and then I got a set of “stoker bars”, which is basically a set of handlebars that attach to my seat post, so Adrian will be able to hold on to something if he wants to.
I can’t wait to get my new bike. I’ll be able to go do my grocery shopping and run errands, go to the gym, pretty much everything.
I went back and forth for a LONG time between this bike and a Bakfiets, which is a Dutch cargo bike also known as the "Amsterdam Minivan"
There is an awesome, very detailed review of the Bakfiets here, if you are interested. And if you want more photos of ALL different sizes and configurations of these Dutch treats, see the Bakfiets Flickr group
I am feeling a pang of remorse right now about not getting a Bakfiets, because MAN, they are really fucking sweet. However, I chose the Radish for a few reasons.
1) It is less than half the price. The Bakfiets delivered (closest dealer is in Portland) comes to about $3250. Expensive for a bike, but totally cheap compared to a car. Remember…no gas, no oil changes, almost zero maintenance. Still…I don’t have that much right now. I saved up about $1500 for my Radish and accessories, and I don’t want to have to wait until I can save twice that.
2) The Bakfiets is heavy. It’s remarkably nimble, but it does handle better when you have a load of something inside it. Right now I would always have a load of kids + whatever, but a few years down the road, maybe not, and I don’t want to have to get a second bike for times that I’m riding without cargo. The Bakfiets is also not all that great on hills, as it was perfected in Amsterdam, which is flat as a pancake.
Still, I do feel some regret. Having the kids in that fine wooden Bakfiets box, safely harnessed into their bench seats…that sounds safer than the two kid seats on the back of the Radish. Plus on the Bakfiets I could actually carpool and carry *several* kids at once, up to four! I can’t carpool with anyone now in my station wagon because I can only fit two carseats in my car, which are already occupied.
The Bakfiets also has a lovely rain/cold weather cover for the box, so the kids stay nice and dry and toasty in inclement weather. Oh well, I live in California, so this isn’t *too* much of an issue for me.
I would also relish being able to carry more than four bags of groceries + kids, which is my probably limit on the Radish. But hey, I’ll just have to start going grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s more often, and not wait until the situation is so dire that I need to buy half the store.
Anyway, I am thrilled with my Radish, and I can’t wait until it arrives and Mike gets it assembled. I am thinking about carrying them in my store for local customers, already assembled, with the two-kid seats already added.
Speaking of two kids on a bike:
This bike carries up to 8 kids
This Danish model (the Christiana) carries up to 4 kids on two benches:
A front tandem bike that can carry two kids (the front kid can help pedal, or not, works either way)
And there was a totally sweet Dutch bike that I saw yesterday that had two built-in bike seats for kids on the back, and a big cargo basket up front. Gorgeous. Can’t find it now though.
Bikes! Screw cars, I can’t wait to get my two wheels out on the road.
The Golden Rule covers it all – no God required!
The following article took me by surprise. I’m pretty much on the same page with the Humanists, and yet I never knew that this particular philosophy had a name. Go figure.
More discussion after the article….
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God, humbug: Humanist holiday ads say just be good
By ERIC GORSKI Associated Press Writer
Nov 11th, 2008 | You better watch out. There is a new combatant in the Christmas wars.
Ads proclaiming, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake,” will appear on Washington, D.C., buses starting next week and running through December. The American Humanist Association unveiled the provocative $40,000 holiday ad campaign Tuesday.
In lifting lyrics from “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” the Washington-based group is wading into what has become a perennial debate over commercialism, religion in the public square and the meaning of Christmas.
“We are trying to reach our audience, and sometimes in order to reach an audience, everybody has to hear you,” said Fred Edwords, spokesman for the humanist group. “Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion.”
To that end, the ads and posters will include a link to a Web site that will seek to connect and organize like-minded thinkers in the D.C. area, Edwords said.
Edwords said the purpose isn’t to argue that God doesn’t exist or change minds about a deity, although “we are trying to plant a seed of rational thought and critical thinking and questioning in people’s minds.”
The group defines humanism as “a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism, affirms our responsibility to lead ethical lives of value to self and humanity.”
Last month, the British Humanist Association caused a ruckus announcing a similar campaign on London buses with the message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
In Washington, the humanists’ campaign comes as conservative Christian groups gear up their efforts to keep Christ in Christmas. In the past five years, groups such as the American Family Association and the Catholic League have criticized or threatened boycotts of retailers who use generic “holiday” greetings.
In mid-October, the American Family Association started selling buttons that say “It’s OK to say Merry Christmas.” The humanists’ entry into the marketplace of ideas did not impress AFA president Tim Wildmon.
ITALICS MINE:
“It’s a stupid ad,” he said. “How do we define ‘good’ if we don’t believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what’s good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what’s good, it’s going to be a crazy world.”
Also on Tuesday, the Orlando, Fla.-based Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian legal group, launched its sixth annual “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign.” Liberty Counsel has intervened in disputes over nativity scenes and government bans on Christmas decorations, among other things.
“It’s the ultimate grinch to say there is no God at a time when millions of people around the world celebrate the birth of Christ,” said Mathew Staver, the group’s chairman and dean of the Liberty University School of Law. “Certainly, they have the right to believe what they want but this is insulting.”
Best-selling books by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have fueled interest in “the new atheism” — a more in-your-face argument against God’s existence.
Yet few Americans describe themselves as atheist or agnostic; a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll from earlier this year found 92 percent of Americans believe in God.
There was no debate at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority over whether to take the ad. Spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said the agency accepts ads that aren’t obscene or pornographic.
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I have never understood people who claim that there is no motivation to do good without the threat of a heavy-handed badass God looming over you. Or alternatively, people who claim that we can’t know what good behavior is without the guidelines of the Bible.
Now first of all, there’s this little thing called the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Plain and simple.
That covers a lot of ground as far as ethics and morality goes. Don’t lie, cheat, steal, bully, torture, etc. Be a kind, noble and generous person. Help your fellow beings, human and otherwise. Give a hand up to those who are worse off than you, the poor, sick and needy. Comfort those who are hurt or grieving.
This rule also leaves out a lot of BULLSHIT associated with certain aspects of certain religions. Such as discrimination against people who are not like you for whatever reason. Be they a different color, a different religion, or a different sexual preference….the Golden Rule says to treat them all as you yourself wish to be treated by others. That’s it.
Now, what is the motivation for following the Golden Rule? If there’s no Mr. God up in the sky ready to kick your ass into eternal hellfire and damnation for breaking the “rules”, then why waste time playing nice, right? Just go out and grab everything you can. Lie, cheat, steal, whatever you want.
Well first of all, society doesn’t function very well if you don’t follow the Golden Rule. Civilization starts to break down. Not because of God, but simply because people need to be able to rely on a certain set of expectations.
If you go to work every day, you will be paid and treated fairly. If you need medical help, you can get it. If you proceed through a green light at an intersection, the cross traffic will stop for you and not T-bone your car.
Did God makes traffic laws as well? No. Well then, why do people follow traffic laws? Well, not all of them do, of course. But most do, and they do so because if they didn’t, the streets would be complete chaos and you would never arrive anywhere on time, or even in one piece.
Same with the Golden Rule. I know that if I am an asshole and start treating people badly, I will lose friends. I will lose status. I might lose my job, or even my family. If I break my word enough times, no one will trust me anymore. Because I’m breaking God’s law? No, because I’m breaking the Golden Rule. I am treating people differently from how I expect to be treated. I am breaking the rules of society.
This doesn’t address people who are so abused and down-trodden that they *expect* people to mistreat them, because abuse has become their norm. But I still think that those people can *imagine* how they would like to be treated, and act accordingly towards others. Yes, in a dream world maybe, but if you can’t imagine it, you can’t make it happen. If we all work together, and look out for one another without regard for petty differences in class, income, skin color or religion, that kind of situation shouldn’t happen too often.
If your God helps you to look upon other beings with compassion, kindness and respect, and encourages you to reach out and help those in need of food, clothing, shelter, companionship, comfort….great!
However, if your God points to those who are different from your little group, and asks you to hate them, fear them, fight tooth and nail against them and never imagine yourself as being like them…man, then you need to find a better way. There are a lot of gods out there. You can choose no god too, and that’s OK.
I think a huge problem with religion is that many people are simply taught to follow orders unquestioningly. They are taught to obey without thinking. So if critical thinking is suppressed, and blind obedience is encouraged, then yes, there will indeed be a problem if God’s Rules are not there, because what else do people have? They can’t think for themselves, or think of others in any other way except as Others. They are crippled and cannot mentally apply the Golden Rule, because it requires empathy, and the dissolution of perceived differences between people (not very popular in religions that set their members apart from the rest of the world) . It also take a little bit of thought sometimes. You have to be able to reverse the situation and imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes. So in a way, religion can sometimes undermine true morality.
Personally, I think that there is some kind of spiritual energy in the universe. I have felt it from time to time like a deep vibration, underpinning everything. I don’t know what it is, and I wouldn’t necessarily call it a god. The best word that I can use to describe it is an energy, or vibration.
I have felt protected from the brutal winds of fate in my life. Many horrible things could have happened to me, and didn’t. I have had many mystical experiences that were unexplainable. But can I say for sure that there is a GOD as other people understand the word? I don’t know. I don’t much care. If people want to believe in God and don’t hurt anyone over it, then wonderful. Likewise, if people don’t believe in God and don’t hurt anyone over that, fabulous! To each his own. I really don’t care what people in believe in, as long as they treat their fellow beings (and our shared planet) with care.
I think that if there is a God, she won’t mind what I believe in, as long as I live my life in a way that improves the world around me….more love and kindness and enlightenment, less environmental damage and hatred. I just can’t imagine the kind of vengeful God that would care what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms, for example, or who would prohibit people from dancing to music and expressing joy and happiness.
I’ll keep looking to the Golden Rule for my moral compass. For the rest, I’ll rely on Science. No need for a threatening God to keep order in my house, thank you very much. I never was a big fan of those authoritarian types.
Oh, as for Christmas…I celebrate it. I say “Merry Christmas” to people, because I think that it’s a seasonal thing that everyone can get on board with. After all, almost every religion celebrates *something* in December. It’s the time of the winter solstice, and there’s no evidence at all that Jesus was actually born on December 25th, but rather the early Christians co-opted this date because the Romans used it as the birthdate of several of their major gods.
Anyway, I think the more holidays the better, and I’m not at all fussy about celebrating. If people want to choose a certain day to promote peace on earth and goodwill to men (and by that I mean women and children too!), then hallelujah, I’m all for it! I will argue with you on the concrete truth of whether or not Jesus was born on that day, otherwise…take your meaning where you find it!
It’s a waste of breath to get offended over the specifics of “Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays”. If someone wishes you well…accept it as the kind gesture that it is meant to be. Only a real grinch would get pissed off about getting the *wrong* kind of seasonal greeting from someone who is just trying to be nice. Come on people, what would Jesus do? 
I have Uma Thurman’s belly
I just came across this today, and even though it’s just celebrity trash, I found it very, very comforting.
When Stars Have Bad Days
Wow, Uma Thurman has the same belly as me! That’s awesome. The creepy part is that all the tabloids were like, “What’s in her belly? Is she pregnant? Does she have a tumor?” Um, no. She has had two kids, same as me. Looks like she blew out the muscles around her belly button by carrying two big kids. Periumbilical hernia.
I actually have good core strength now, but man, if I turn sideways and bend over like Uma, I look exactly the same. What a relief.
More comforting fun at the link above. Check out Cindy Crawford!
Party time!
Because it feels just like this right now:
At the Show: The Lady Tigra [Obama-rama in Spaceland] – “First Black, First Lady” from Spaceland Recordings on Vimeo.
Taking our country back
Obama’s victory was a triumph not just for Democrats but for the American spirit and the world.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/11/05/obama_victory/
By Gary Kamiya
Nov. 05, 2008 |
Today the embattled American people stood, and fired a shot heard ’round the world.
Only rarely does one know that one is experiencing history while it happens. Barack Obama’s victory is one of those occasions. This amazing day marks a decisive change, not just in America’s politics but in its soul. It announces the arrival of a new America, of a multitudinous, multihued people whose time has come and who have demanded a politics worthy of them. Their voice echoes across the land from Stone Mountain to Seattle, and its message rings out loud and clear: We have taken our country back.
We have taken it back from the mean-spirited demagogues who were willing to tear the American people apart to stay in power.
We have taken it back from the apostles of selfishness who pretend naked greed is noble individualism.
We have taken it back from the deluded hawks who cavalierly sent our youth off to die in a war that should never have been fought.
We have taken it back from the incompetent officials who lived up to their antigovernment credo by bungling everything they touched.
We have taken it back from the reactionaries whose intolerance, xenophobia and religious zealotry have been encouraged by a distorted Republican Party for far too long.
Some will say that this election didn’t prove that much. They will argue that considering Bush’s unpopularity, the war and the financial crisis, this race should never have been even competitive. They will say the race was tied in September and only an inept McCain campaign and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression tilted it toward Obama. They will say that America is still a center-right country.
But those arguments are like dead trees standing in the path of a spring-snow torrent. A great change has come upon America.
Watching Obama speak after his victory, I was reminded again of the subtle and profound depths of this man. It was a subdued speech, on the surface almost disappointing, but its eloquent restraint spoke volumes about not just Obama’s character but what we could call, harking back to another age, his taste. He chose not to mount the messianic pulpit, knowing that if he did he would alienate many Americans. Because of his complex and hard-earned comfort with his own racial identity, he is a self-reflective man, a man of many parts.
We have seen his facets. Obama can parry and thrust with Hillary Clinton. He can be hip with Jon Stewart. He can speak eloquently of race, as he did in his victory speech, without foregrounding his own race. He can reach out to those who didn’t vote for him, and his native sensitivity makes his words believable. His rhetoric is soaring but never self-aggrandizing: He is too confident in his own identity to need the fix of adulation. A leader with these qualities, a black man whose racial consciousness is so evolved as to be unreadable, has the ability to take America places it has never been before.
The election of Obama marks a change in what it means to be an American. It is a change that is as true to the essence of conservatism as it is to liberalism, for it has its roots in a generous vision of civic life that both share. And all Americans will benefit from it.
The Obama triumph means the Reagan revolution is over. The antigovernment, antitax, trickle-down, every-man-for-himself ethos collapsed with a whimper during the catastrophic presidency of George W. Bush, and Obama’s election put it out of its misery. By electing Obama, the American people have emphatically rejected the selfishness, masquerading as freedom and rugged individualism, that has been the calling card of the American right wing since Barry Goldwater. In its place, they are calling not just for a new and expanded vision of government’s role in American life but for a new vision of American society.
That vision represents a return to the idea that Americans are bound together by more than just a flag, that we are all part of the same community, and that the strength of a community, like the strength of a family, is measured by its members’ commitment to each other. The America envisioned by Obama is one in which the privileged care about the plight of the less fortunate because that care, that solidarity, is an inseparable part of who we are as Americans.
And that solidarity extends beyond our borders, to the people of the world. More than our wealth and power, this is what has made America a beacon of hope across the globe. After 9/11, Bush had an opportunity to reach out to the rest of the world. In his arrogance and folly, he chose to bully it instead. The election of Obama signifies that America is rejoining the world. How telling it was that in his speech, Obama said that America would defeat not our evil terrorist enemies, the rhetoric we have grown used to, but “those who would tear the world down.” His is a larger, calmer vision, one that does not play into the hands of terrorists by exaggerating their threat.
One of the many remarkable things about Obama’s campaign is that even its slickest, most professional, most Machiavellian messages — and how marvelous that Democrats should be slicker, more professional, more Machiavellian than Republicans! — always communicated the man’s essential idealism. Obama’s 30-minute infomercial is a case in point. That film was essentially the story of three struggling American families. It was crafted to appeal to voters who would relate to those families, and clearly its main purpose was to persuade them to vote for Obama out of self-interest: If Obama helped the families in the film, he could help them, too. But what is noteworthy about the film, and indeed about Obama’s entire campaign, is that it assumed that Americans are capable of going beyond self-interest, that what happens to that family in Ohio matters to us.
For a nation starved for inspiration, that implicit call was like water in a desert. For eight years, and for many years before that, Americans have been told that nothing is required of them as citizens except to make and spend money and jump in fear of terrorism when prodded. Those who tried in their personal lives to take steps to alleviate the greatest threat facing the planet, global warming, were derided by Vice President Cheney as practicing “personal virtue.” The country was thirsty for more.
And in his speech, Obama asked us to do more. In words that recalled Winston Churchill’s famous declaration in the darkest days of WWII that “I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears and sweat,” he spoke of “remaking this nation the only way it has been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.” He called on us to make sacrifices. Above all, he called on us to come together. “So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other.”
His words revealed the gaping fissure in conservatism’s moral vision. Conservatives claim to be the upholders of a threatened traditional morality. But their economic ideology is inherently amoral. Their refusal to see American society as a community implicitly rejects both the Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and the oldest moral commandment in the world, the Golden Rule. A party and movement that have rejected the idea that its members should care about their poorer neighbors, or simply denies that the less privileged are our neighbors, is one that has lost its moral compass.
The radical individualism of the right subverts not only its claim to be ethical and religious, but its claim to be patriotic. On what basis can patriotism be established, except on a communal one? Patriotism, if it is to be more than an empty slogan, means making sacrifices for a cause greater than oneself. That moral principle is the same one that underlies governmental policies to reduce inequality, such as progressive taxation. By limiting its vision of community and altruism to military service, the right has hollowed out its own ostensible ethics, and fostered an ethos of selfishness and irresponsibility that subverts the very patriotism and religion whose virtues it so emptily extols. “United We Stand” was never anything more than a bumper sticker under Bush. The party of “family values” embraced an I’ve-got-mine-Jack ideology that no responsible parent would teach their children.
Americans were aware of this, even if half-consciously. And so Obama’s victory in part reflects Americans’ deep, if not fully conscious, desire to create a more ethical society, one in which individualism thrives but is not set against conscience, in which capitalism drives the economy but is not allowed complete license, in which patriotism means more than flag waving. A real society. In the words scrawled on a piece of parchment 236 years ago, and which Obama referred to in his speech, “a more perfect union.”
Polls show that almost 90 percent of Americans, a record number, believe that the country is on the wrong track. Some of that response is no doubt driven purely by pocketbook issues. But everything we know about the American people — and the results of this election confirm it — tells us that their distress has deeper origins. Americans are aware, at some profound level, that they have lost their way. They recognize that this is no longer the country that came together to defeat Hitler, or struggled to overcome the injustice of racism, or whose plainspoken idealism and optimism inspired the admiration of the world. Beneath the neon glitter of our consumer-driven, media-saturated society, beneath the wealth and the spectacle, is a sterility, a purposelessness.
And this is why Obama’s victory is a victory not just for the left but for all Americans. The majority of Americans voted for Obama not because he was a “liberal,” but because he promised to take America back to what it once was, and carry us forward to where we want to go.
President-elect Obama will face an almost unbelievably daunting set of challenges. He inherits an economy in deep crisis and a nation whose international reputation is in tatters. He must figure out how to responsibly extricate our troops from Iraq, and come to terms with the fact that his hawkish campaign rhetoric about winning a military victory in Afghanistan is misguided. He must take decisive steps to address the transcendental international issue of our time, global warming. He must remake America’s decaying infrastructure, using deficit spending to rebuild the country, and raise employment without saddling us with so crippling a debt that we can never repay it. He must tiptoe through a domestic political minefield to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the greatest source of Arab-Muslim anger at the U.S., and the inextricably related issue of how to deal with Iran. He must begin to repair the grievous damage Bush did to the Constitution. He must try to rectify the miserable status of so many black Americans. And he must do all this in the face of a rump GOP that is bitterly opposed to everything he stands for.
No one expects miracles from Obama. It took years for America to dig itself into this hole, and it will take years to dig out of it. But Americans chose a candidate who has the tools to succeed. Forget ideology. Obama possesses qualities that are more important: brains and character. In professional sports, scouts talk about drafting “the best available athlete.” Obama was the best available mind. And Americans chose him.
And they chose a black man. All Americans, whatever their political views or party affiliation, should feel an enormous sense of pride today. The bitter legacy of America’s enslavement and unjust treatment of black people remains. But Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the day that, on the highest symbolic plane, the Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream that one day his children would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” ceased to be a dream and became a reality. Fifty-four years after the Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were illegal, 33 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed, and just 31 years after the last miscegenation laws were struck down, a majority of Americans chose a black man to be their leader. How many of us thought that we would live to see this day? The tears and the laughter and the disbelieving exultation across America give the answer.
In his classic defense of free speech, “Areopagitica,” John Milton famously wrote, “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.” After eight nightmarish years of Bush, Milton’s words feel like a benediction.
For Obama’s triumph represents the awakening of the American spirit, one that runs through our entire history. Eight dreadful years cannot kill it.
It is the spirit that animated the blacksmiths and farmers and clerks of Massachusetts and Virginia and Georgia, the despised rabble who everyone knew would turn and run when facing the British army, but who stood their ground at Concord and paid for a nation with their blood.
It is the spirit that inspired the soldiers, “sinewy with unconquerable resolution,” as Walt Whitman called them, who died at Gettysburg and Antietam.
It is the spirit of their president, who wrote a 10-sentence document that, if no other evidence of the United States existed, would prove that this nation had the stuff of greatness in it.
It is the spirit that brought the people of an impossibly diverse, far-flung country together, every American part of the same team, men and women, professors and ditch diggers, a mighty democratic brotherhood that defeated the most dangerous tyrant in history.
It is the spirit that led the Freedom Riders to risk their lives to give their fellow Americans the civil rights they had been shamefully denied.
It is the spirit of hope.
America is in for a long, tough fight. But we can now begin to fight it together.
– By Gary Kamiya
How I’m Voting on November 4th
For the record, here’s how I’m voting, and why:
President and VP: Barack Obama and Joe Biden
Wow, where do I even start? Obama and Biden are simply better, smarter, and more capable. If you don’t think you know enough about Obama by now, you haven’t done your homework.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/
1A – YES
Safe, Reliable, High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act
This one is a no-brainer. Of COURSE we need a high-speed rail line in California between Northern and Southern CA. Duh!
From the CA League of Conservation Voters website
Yes on Proposition 1A: Improve air quality and public transportation through High Speed Rail
Developing viable high-speed rail connecting Northern and Southern California is an essential component of California’s transportation future. A high-speed rail system throughout California would deliver an estimated 117 million travelers into downtowns well-served by local transit, all while reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
California is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, with approximately 40% of the state’s emissions coming from the transportation sector. By replacing car and airplane trips with rail trips, high-speed rail will help California achieve the greenhouse gas reductions outlined in the landmark AB 32 legislation, which requires greenhouse gases to return to 1990 levels by 2020 and to achieve levels that are 80% lower than 1990 levels by 2050.
California will grow by at least 15 million people over the next 25 years. Unless we make a serious shift in in-state transportation travel, we’ll have to invest in major freeway and airport expansion up and down the state even sooner. A high-speed rail system would cost less than half of what it would cost to get the same increase in capacity from highway and airport expansion. In addition, the proposition includes specific guidance on protection of sensitive habitat lands. With some of the most congested regions in the country, the urgency of climate change, and limited land and resources for highway and airport expansion, now is the time to invest in a new high-speed rail transportation system.
2 – YES
Standards for Confining Farm Animals
Requires that certain farm animals be given room to fully extend limbs/wings, lie down, stand up and turn around. Another no-brainer, unless you are a psychopath and love animal torture.
3 – YES
Children’s Hospital Bond Act
It’s a lot of money to spend in a bad economy, but then again, I can’t find any compelling reason to NOT update our regional hospital infrastructure. California is a leader in healthcare technology, we don’t want to fall behind, plus this will create jobs too.
- Authorizes $980 million for grants to California’s 13 regional children’s hospitals
- Funds the construction, expansion, remodeling, furnishing, and equipping of children’s hospitals
- Costs the state $64 million a year for 30 years
- Cost divided by CA population = approximately $1.75 a year for each Californian
- 80% of the bond proceeds go to eight regional nonprofit children’s hospitals that focus on serious diseases and illnesses and 20% go to five University of California children’s hospitals
4 – NO
Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Pregnancy
This measure has been on the ballot four times now, and has been voted down every time. Wingnuts just keep on trying, gotta give ‘em credit for that. This time the backers have phrased things a bit more deceptively, but it’s the same old wolf in sheep’s clothing. Proposition 4 threatens a woman’s right to choose and puts teens at risk.
Prop 4 states that in order for a woman under 18 to receive an abortion, she must tell her parents. But Prop 4 isn’t just about teens notifying their parents before they have an abortion. It was written by the same conservative groups that want to outlaw abortion. Backers of 4 have a clear agenda: they want to limit a woman’s right to choose.
And parental notification laws don’t work anyway. Not all teens live in homes where communication is possible. Remember that friend in high school who was truly afraid of what her parents might do or say…especially if she got pregnant? If Prop 4 passes, those teens will have nowhere to turn. Scared, desperate teens do scary things…take matters into their own hands, resort to an unsafe, back alley, illegal abortion, or even contemplate suicide.
Imagine the scenario for incest victims..yes, there are exemptions, but would you want to be the pregnant, traumatized incest victim who has to get up in court and explain to a judge why she needs an exemption from parental notification for her abortion? My god, the horror.
Prop 4 threatens Roe v. Wade and is simply another attempt by the religious right to drag California’s reproductive rights backwards into the last century. Don’t want your teen to have an abortion? Then EDUCATE HER ABOUT SEX AND CONTRACEPTION AND LET HER KNOW THAT YOU ARE THERE FOR HER IN GOOD TIMES AND BAD. Period.
5- YES
Nonviolent Drug Offenses. Sentencing, Parole and Rehabilitation
From the California League of Women Voters website:
There are three essential components of Proposition 5 (sometimes known as “NORA”):
1. Treatment diversion programs for adults
2. Prison system and parole reforms
3. Youth-focused substance abuse treatment reforms.
The League of Women Voters’ support for Proposition 5 is based on the aspects of the initiative that relate to juvenile justice.
As part of a comprehensive, common-sense solution to the prison overcrowding crisis, Proposition 5 will create a system of care for at-risk youth by:
1. Dedicating annual funding of at least $65 million per year for youth treatment programs, as well as about $4 million more from fines collected from adults for low-level marijuana offenses
2. Ensuring that the new system of care meets the spectrum of youth needs, including family therapy, mental health interventions, educational and employment stipends, and more
3. Requiring science-based educational programs and counseling, instead of a misdemeanor conviction, for young people found in possession of small amounts of marijuana.
Too often today, young Californians with drug problems get entangled in the juvenile justice system and may even be incarcerated. During the past few years, juvenile arrest rates have increased 39 percent, and yet fewer than 10 percent of adolescents receive substance abuse treatment programs.
Proposition 5 will:
* Create an independent oversight panel, which would have authority over major aspects of the implementation of NORA
* Provide better opportunities for rehabilitation
* Save prison beds by requiring local sanctions, not prison, to punish minor parole violations by nonviolent offenders
* Require that all prisoners receive appropriate treatment prior to release from prison
* Require that all parolees receive appropriate services for up to one year after discharge
* Build on and improve Proposition 36, the voter-approved initiative of 2000 that provided treatment, not jail, for nonviolent drug users
* Link three existing, but disparate, systems of court-supervised treatment programs in order to provide a continuum of care
* Give priority to treatment for people with mental illness and substance abuse problems
* Provide judges with annual training on drug and addiction treatment
* Allow schools and medical doctors to recommend these treatment programs to their students and patients.
6- NO
Police and Law Enforcement Funding
Puts more money into the prison system to lock people up, while not providing for rehabilitation, and keeping younger people in for longer periods, starting at younger ages.
If Prop 5 was written by the enlightened parent who will communicate and counsel you through tough times, Prop 6 was written by the parent who spanks the crap out of you and then locks you in your room when you screw up, you idiot.
Vote NO on 6.
7 – NO
Renewable Energy Generation
I was really confused about this one until I researched both sides thoroughly.
TheCA League of Conservation Voters is against it.
NO on 7 – Protect small solar producers and encourage solar energy production
The California League of Women Voters is against it too, and their arguments are good.
In 2003 the relevant state agencies adopted a policy that made energy efficiency the highest priority resource in the state’s “loading order” (the order of priority for procurement of energy sources). Proposition 7 fails to consider energy efficiency and reduction in the need for additional generation, the least environmentally damaging and the lowest cost resource.
California has led the nation in fostering ways to conserve energy over the past 30 years. The state’s appliance and building standards are the most rigorous anywhere in the world, and now the state is supporting development of a “smart” distribution grid to foster demand-side management—to encourage customers to decrease their demands for power, particularly at times of peak demand.
Proposition 7 calls for the overly simplistic mandate that half of all the power produced in the state should come from solar, wind and other alternative resources by 2025. For decades California has led the nation in the procurement and use of renewable energy—from solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and small hydroelectric facilities. Since 2002 the state has had a Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS) requiring electric providers regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) (i.e., the investor-owned utilities and the electric service providers) to increase their reliance on renewable resources to 20 percent of total generation resources by 2010. While sufficient contracts have been signed to meet this RPS, in fact, it is clear that many of those projects will not be operational before 2012 or 2013.
The PUC has conducted a study to determine the reasons for the delays in meeting the current RPS. There are four notable causes: (1) a lack of transmission capacity to carry renewable power from areas in the state where it is abundant to the load centers; (2) the failure of the federal government to renew the investment tax credits that currently are an important inducement to developers of renewable energy; (3) uncertainties regarding the siting of renewable energy projects on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, particularly in and around the Mojave Desert; and (4) issues related to the technical maturity of some renewable projects.
Major efforts are currently underway on the part of the PUC, the Energy Commission, and numerous other stakeholders to address the delays associated with achieving the 20 percent RPS, but the state does not have the authority to challenge either federal policies or local jurisdictions that object to expansion of transmission lines. Meanwhile, the governor and the Air Resources Board have called for an expansion of the RPS to 33 percent renewable generation by 2020 in conjunction with implementation of the plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as called for in AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act. This expansion would require all energy providers in the state to meet this requirement. The PUC has called for an analysis of issues associated with meeting this 33 percent goal and the establishment of a schedule.
Passage of Proposition 7, with its confusing and sometimes contradictory provisions, would certainly upset this effort to expand the deployment of renewable resources in the state.
The fiscal effects of the proposition are very unclear. We emphasize that the least expensive way to meet increasing demands for electric power in the coming decades will be investments in energy efficiency and in demand-side management.
8 – NO
Eliminates Right of Same-sex Couples to Marry
Proposition 8 is a hate crime made law. Plain and simple.
Hello….gay people have kids too. The latest statistic I found is that 30% of gay couples are raising children. Aren’t their kids deserving of parents who are able to marry one another?
And what exactly is marriage needing “protection” from?
Protect marriage? Then how about universal healthcare, better support for working families, quality affordable childcare, and low-cost rehab? Addiction, poverty, stress and violence are huge threats to marriage. Two gay people who love one another are not.
From the League of Women Voters of California:
Prior to the court decision, California had extended many rights given to married couples to gay and lesbian couples who registered as domestic partners. As of April 2008, almost half of the state’s same-sex couples were registered domestic partners. However, inequities between domestic partnership and marriage remain. In addition, domestic partnerships may not be recognized when a couple travels out of state, and even if domestic partnership is recognized, the rights that go with it are vastly unequal from state to state. On the other hand, at least one state (New York) recognizes legal same-sex marriages from other states and more may follow suit. Marriage also provides same-sex couples with a status that is understood by society in a way that domestic partnerships are not.
If Proposition 8 passes, rescinding the marriage rights of gay and lesbian couples will affect many families and children throughout the state. Same-sex couples live in every county in California and represent every racial and ethnic group. Nearly 30 percent are raising their own children (biological, stepchildren and adopted children). According to the U.S. Census, the children of lesbian and gay couples are more likely to be younger than five years old, adopted, and disabled than children of opposite-sex couples. All children are affected when their parents’ relationship is not accorded the same dignity and respect as the marriages of other parents in their communities. Without marriage, children may suffer if parents are not legally empowered to support and protect them because of inequalities in the law between marriage and domestic partnership, or if the family travels to a state where domestic partnership is weak or non-existent. Conversely, the concept of marriage, including parental rights and responsibilities, is well-understood and defined in family law.
9 – NO
Victim’s Rights. Parole.
From the CA League of Women Voters website,
The League believes that efforts to deal with dependency issues and provide juvenile justice should reinforce a young person’s right to safety, support, respect and justice. Juvenile Courts should be well managed, provide due process, protect the rights of all affected parties, work with community resources . . .
The LWVC Constitution position supports measures to secure an orderly and simplified state Constitution: provisions that enable the legislature to deal with state problems efficiently, flexibly and with responsibility clearly fixed.
The League believes that the California Constitution should permit the legislature and other elected officials to carry out their responsibilities with flexibility, unhampered by unnecessary restrictions, but with safeguards in the public interest. The League is opposed to highly detailed provisions including administrative and procedural detail.
In June 1982, California voters passed Proposition 8, known as the “Victims’ Bill of Rights,” which granted crime victims the right to be notified in advance, attend, and state their views at sentencing and parole hearings. Other separately enacted statutes have created other rights for crime victims.
This initiative would expand the legal rights of crime victims in various ways while undoing many of the rights of prisoners, as well as of parolees facing revocation of their parole, to due process and speedy parole hearings.
Recently, a federal court has ordered the state to hold prompt hearings and to provide legal counsel for juvenile parolees held in Department of Justice facilities while awaiting rulings on whether they have violated their parole.
10 – NO
Alternative Fuel Vehicles and Alternative Energy
From the CA League of Conservation Voters website
No on Proposition 10: Protect the environment and taxpayers — and stop the alternative energy scam
A fossil fuel corporation owned by Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens spent $3 million dollars to put Proposition 10 on the ballot. That same corporation will almost certainly reap the rewards if Prop 10 passes. California taxpayers will be stuck subsidizing big trucking companies at a cost of $335 million per year; they’ll shell out a total of $2.5 billion in subsidies to trucking companies to purchase “clean” vehicles. Prop 10 does not require any reduction in global warming emissions for trucking companies that get “clean” vehicle handouts of up to $50,000 per truck – and Prop 10 excludes hybrids from its definition of a “clean” vehicle.
If Prop 10 passes, Hybrids do get a rebate ($2000 ea.), but only the first 55k sold. Alternative fuel cars (and vans and lightweight trucks) get $10k each. The majority of these cars are not hydrogen or electric, they’re natural gas
The bottom line: California already faces a $15 billion budget deficit crisis, and Prop 10’s raid on the state’s coffers will mean cuts to our schools, our public safety and our health programs. Prop 10 is biased towards investments in natural gas technology— over cleaner alternatives such as wind and solar technology—while draining California’s already over-committed general fund. Although perhaps rooted in a commendable goal of environmental progress, Prop 10 is bad policy for California’s taxpayers and California’s environment. Why spend all that money just to trade one petroleum product for another, instead of investing in clean alternatives?
11 – YES
Redistricting
From the CA League of Women Voters website
Reform of the redistricting process has been a core issue for the League of Women Voters of California for over 20 years. In recent years, we have participated extensively in a number of efforts to achieve meaningful reform of the process by which Congressional, state legislative, and Board of Equalization district lines are drawn. We believe that the process should take place in an open, transparent manner with wide public input; that lines should be drawn according to strict, ranked criteria; and that the body drawing the lines should be an independent body that is selected according to well established conflict of interest rules and that represents the diversity that is California.
Proposition 11, the California Voters FIRST Act, meets all of our key reform criteria. We believe that the formation of the commission, the ranked mapping criteria, and the open, transparent process prescribed by the measure will give voters the opportunity to choose their representatives rather than letting elected officials draw districts that allow them to choose their voters. The League is particularly pleased with the importance given to respect for the Voting Rights Act and to keeping communities and cities and counties whole; the good conflict of interest rules applied to the commission; and the outstanding open process required.
12 – YES
Farm and Home Aid for California Veterans
Provides loans for vets to buy homes and farms. Program pays for itself through loan interest. Another no-brainer.
I looked at a lot of research and various endorsements, not *just* the League of Conservation Voters and the League of Women Voters. But I found that their voter guides explained in detail the motivation behind their decisions, especially the League of Women Voters website. Many other endorsements (from newspapers, for example) just offered a little sound bite on how to vote without much real substance explaining the background of the proposition, the details of it, how it would affect the state financially, etc. That’s why I included links to and excerpts from the League of Women Voters website so often above.
Now get on out there and have your say! And then go get a free coffee at Starbucks. You *have* heard that Starbucks is giving away free coffee to voters today, right?
Happily sleeping, all curled up with his, um…shrunken head impaled on a pike.
Happily sleeping, all curled up with his, um…shrunken head impaled on a pike., originally uploaded by mslaura.
Fresh hair cuts for the offspring
I just cut their hair that morning. Don’t they look cute?
Wazzup?
The Original Budweiser ad:
Superfriends version:
Super Friends Whussup!
Wazzup 2008, the update:
Very cool that they found the original guys to do the remake. I love the guy outside who is getting blown away by a hurricane from global warming.
Make some calls, please!
Do you want to see Barack Obama as our next president? Are you DISGUSTED by the thought that the other side might actually win? They could, you know. The election is far from over. Remember Al Gore? Remember John Kerry? Yep, I thought they were going to take the election. And then they didn’t. We’ve ALL paid the price for 8 years of Bush. You, me, the planet….it has been a disastrous mistake for all of us. Enough is ENOUGH.
Now is the time to get off the sidelines and take action.
Right now, go to this link:
http://pol.moveon.org/obama/teams/index.html?id=14373-1429134-F4n7YCx&t=1
and start calling MoveOn.org members in swing states to get them connected with their local Obama campaign office.
You can do it from home. It’s not hard. You’re calling people who are *already* on your side, they just need to be hooked up with local resources. The online system makes calling easy: You’ll get phone numbers and a script to read, plus you can practice first. You’ll need an Internet connection you can use while you’re on the phone (using either a land line or a cell phone). That’s it!
If everyone spends just 20 minutes making calls, it can make a HUGE difference. So pick up that phone! Call tonight! Don’t delay! Ready…..GO!
Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants
From today’s New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/14/opinion/20081014_OPCHART.html
October 14, 2008
Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants
By TOMMY McCALL
Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?
As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index* would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.
If the candidates were….
Trains:
If the candidates were ovens:
If the candidates were computers:
If the candidates were cats:
(From Buzz Feed)
Hey Sarah…
…I can see the end of your political career from my house.
That’s Jon Voight BTW, actor, father of Angelina Jolie, and staunch Republican.
10 things to know about McCain
For all the coverage this week of Senator John McCain’s background, there are some important things you won’t learn about him from the TV networks. His carefully crafted positive image relies on people not knowing this stuff—and you might be surprised by some of it.
Please check out the list below, and then forward it to your friends, family, and coworkers. We can’t rely on the media to tell folks about the real John McCain—but if we all pass this along, we can reach as many people as CNN Headline News does on a good night.
10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don’t):
1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.1
2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”2
3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.3
4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”4
5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.5
6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.6
7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”7
8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.8
9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”9
10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year.10
John McCain is not who the Washington press corps make him out to be. Please help get the word out—forward this email to your personal network. And if you want us to keep you posted on MoveOn’s work to get the truth out about John McCain, sign up here:
http://pol.moveon.org/mccaintruth/
Sources:
1. “The Complicated History of John McCain and MLK Day,” ABC News, April 3, 2008
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/04/the-complicated.html
“McCain Facts,” ColorOfChange.org, April 4, 2008
http://colorofchange.org/mccain_facts/
2. “McCain More Hawkish Than Bush on Russia, China, Iraq,” Bloomberg News, March 12, 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aF28rSCtk0ZM&refer=us
“Buchanan: John McCain ‘Will Make Cheney Look Like Gandhi,’” ThinkProgress, February 6, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/06/buchanan-gandhi-mccain/
3. “McCain Sides With Bush On Torture Again, Supports Veto Of Anti-Waterboarding Bill,” ThinkProgress, February 20, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/20/mccain-torture-veto/
4. “McCain says Roe v. Wade should be overturned,” MSNBC, February 18, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17222147/
5. “2007 Children’s Defense Fund Action Council® Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard,” February 2008
http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=act_learn_scorecard2007
“McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance expansion,” CNN, October 3, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/03/mccain.interview/
6. “Beer Executive Could Be Next First Lady,” Associated Press, April 3, 2008
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h-S1sWHm0tchtdMP5LcLywg5ZtMgD8VQ86M80
“McCain Says Bank Bailout Should End `Systemic Risk,’” Bloomberg News, March 25, 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHMiDVYaXZFM&refer=home
7. “Will McCain’s Temper Be a Liability?,” Associated Press, February 16, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4301022
“Famed McCain temper is tamed,” Boston Globe, January 27, 2008
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/27/famed_mccain_temper_is_tamed/
8. “Black Claims McCain’s Campaign Is Above Lobbyist Influence: ‘I Don’t Know What The Criticism Is,’” ThinkProgress, April 2, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/02/mccain-black-lobbyist/
“McCain’s Lobbyist Friends Rally ‘Round Their Man,” ABC News, January 29, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4210251
9. “McCain’s Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam,” Mother Jones Magazine, March 12, 2008
http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john-mccain-rod-parsley-spiritual-guide.html
“Will McCain Specifically ‘Repudiate’ Hagee’s Anti-Gay Comments?,” ThinkProgress, March 12, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/12/mccain-hagee-anti-gay/
“McCain ‘Very Honored’ By Support Of Pastor Preaching ‘End-Time Confrontation With Iran,’” ThinkProgress, February 28, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/28/hagee-mccain-endorsement/
10. “John McCain Gets a Zero Rating for His Environmental Record,” Sierra Club, February 28, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/environment/77913/
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Target: Women
These “Target: Women” videos by Sarah Haskins are both hilarious and thought-provoking.
I mean, what IS up with all the ridiculous ads for:
Yogurt….
Anti-wrinkle pharmaceuticals…
Wedding shows…
Birth Control…
and Cleaning Products….
Wonder Woman and her super…um…..
I ordered some little superhero toys off eBay for Julian, because he is so infatuated with all things superhero right now. I got a Spider Man and Wolverine that you have to put together and build, pretty cool and with redeeming educational value.
The other toy that I got was a Wonder Woman action figure, because:
1) I think Wonder Woman is cool.
2) I want Julian to see that women can be superheroes too.
We opened the Wonder Woman action figure first, and Julian was playing with her, flying her around. He suddenly stopped and asked me:
“Mommy, what superhero powers does Wonder Woman have?”
“Well, let’s see. She has in invisible plane that she flies in. She has special bracelets that can deflect bullets and other weapons, if someone tries to shoot at her or throw something at her. She has a magic lasso, which I think she can use to tie people up and then make them tell the truth? Not sure about that one…”
I was trying to think what other superpowers WW has, when Julian interrupted.
“Mommy, I just see this (pointing at her super-enhanced superheroine cleavage, complete with golden-swirly breastplate)…her….her BOOBS!”
Um, yeah. It’s tough to be a female superhero, it really is.
Joe Fucking Biden!
I’ve been thinking about what to write regarding the VP Debate…and it’s this:
Joe Biden is the Man.
He had me at “inflection point” (see his speech in Wooster Ohio, logged in a previous entry). But after the VP debate, I love him even more. I love that he’s fired up, that he’s so passionate and informed about the issues, I love that he’s a real person with just one house and an average middle-class income.
I love him for sponsoring the Violence Against Women Act and single-handedly doing more for women’s rights than just about anyone else in politics. I love that he, a former stutterer, does not let that bring him down in the slightest bit. Hey, I’ve been known to stutter and stammer too. My mouth doesn’t work as fast as my brain.
But mostly I love him for speaking out for ME during the debate. He called Palin out on healthcare, he called her out on Cheney, he called her out on being a parent and understanding family issues, he called her out on that MAVERICK crap, he called her out on all the things that I was yelling at the TV screen for him to do. He did it nicely, but he did it with passion and zeal and did NOT LET HER GET AWAY WITH THAT BULLSHIT.
Sarah Hepola wrote in Friday’s Salon about what he did, and how she felt about it, and she expresses herself much better than I do, so I’ll just include this excerpt and call it a day:
I’m no pundit and don’t pretend to be, so all I can tell you is how I experienced the debate (on a couch, with beer and Vietnamese food and an open laptop, sitting beside my friend Bryan). I thought Sarah Palin began well — good eye contact, strong body language, that devilishly clever “Can I call you Joe?” — but as the debate wore on, I was struck more and more by how Biden was puncturing her shtick. Sarah Palin kept lobbing her zingers, and a few of them might have struck, but every time she aimed for his heart, Biden just laughed. A good-natured laugh — not forced but an easygoing, amiable laugh that proved just how game he was for this battle, how native this environment was and how thick his skin had become. And it yanked away a little bit of her power each and every time. She went from a forceful presence to a foolish scold. Maybe I’m overstating the imbalance. But I swear she was starting to get nervous and pissed toward the end, pulling out desperate moves, like that stupid wink. Have you ever tried to discipline someone and then had them laugh in your face? It’s maddening. Palin may be a pit bull, but last night, Biden was holding the leash.
I watched the debate on CNN, which has replaced its regular annoying scroll across the bottom of the screen with a special annoying scroll — a real-time graph that charts the reactions of certain undecided groups: In this case, undecided voters in Ohio, divided by gender. Depending on your viewpoint, this is either fascinating or infuriating — for me, it is a little of both.
At first, the division by gender struck me as ham-fisted, but I must admit it was a terrific prism by which to view the debate (to what extent it is correct, or indicative of any larger trend, I cannot say). From the beginning, Biden scored high with women and Palin was flailing. There were some exceptions to this trend, of course, but if you are interested in an overall snapshot I would have to say: Women buy Biden, and they are leaving Palin on the shelf.
This reflects my experience, and so it feels true. In a nutshell: I believe him, and I think she is full of shit. My God, my heart was pounding when Biden spoke about the loss of his wife and child — an eloquent, moving moment that, as Joan Walsh pointed out today, was one of the key exchanges of the debate.
“Joe Biden!” my friend Bryan said after that speech.
“I know,” I said.
“Joe Fucking Biden.”
“I know!”
“Are you in love with him?” he asked.
“A little bit.”
“What is it about him?”
I had to think on this. His face was a bit orange from the makeup. He has a bald spot, bushy eyebrows. Not my type, really. “That man is made of testosterone and decency and strong verbs.”
Bryan considered this. “He might be.”
I don’t know what Joe Biden is made of, exactly. (I suspect a doctor would disagree with my diagnosis.) But what I know is that he is well spoken and confident and had the decency not to correct Palin when she made amateur blunders (calling David McKiernan “General McClellan,” for instance). But he still refused to take her bullshit.
When Biden unleashed his righteous anger on Dick Cheney — “Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president in American history” — you could practically hear the stadium roar. And if you were watching that graph on the bottom of the CNN screen unfold its little narrative, you saw a spike in both genders’ reactions. (Bryan took a picture of the screen at that moment, which is displayed above.)
I have complained on this blog about the frustration I feel when people talk about how Palin is hot. And so as I explain how I feel about Biden — swoony, sweaty, Joe Fucking Biden! — I have to check myself. To what extent is this a base physical response, a girlie crush indicative of nothing substantive and perhaps even somewhat embarrassing? Maybe. Possibly. Probably. At least a little bit.
But to what extent is it the euphoria of watching a man with real command of facts, details and history? The gratification of agreeing with the person at the microphone when you feel as though you have been robbed of a voice? The satisfaction of watching Biden knock Palin down — not like an animal, but like a gentleman and a scholar? To what extent is it my throbbing boner (pardon the expression) for gentlemen and scholars? As one of my friends said this morning, he played the romantic hero. And I know it might sound weird, but as I watched him last night one word kept popping into my head, and that word was: virile.
Now, I have a soft spot for Barack O’Boyfriend as well. He’s smart as a whip, he’s good-looking, and that smooth, smooth deep voice. Yummy. But I think I have a new crush, and it’s Joe F. Biden.
First Black First Lady!
Getting fired up for the debate tonight, and getting my groove on at the same time. Everybody on board the Obama train! WOO WOO!
At the Show: The Lady Tigra [Obama-rama in Spaceland] – “First Black, First Lady” from Spaceland Recordings on Vimeo.
Katie Couric interviews Sarah Palin
The only thing more unbearable than Sarah Palin’s non-responses to Katie’s questions is her speaking voice. Ye gods, she really speaks like that? All screechy and droppin’ Gs left and right. Every time she said “tawkin’”, I cringed. Check out Katie’s face during the interview…she’s so badass here. I love it.
Here’s Part II. If you want to really cringe, skip ahead to 3:39 where Palin starts tawkin’ about Russia.
Oh man, I can’t wait to see the VP Debate. Biden just released an 8-page document partially listing all of the foreign leaders he’s met with, and Palin? Well, bless her heart, she just got her first passport last year. Poor thing, she can barely manage to put together a coherent sentence in English half the time, and the rest of the time, not at all. She’s WORSE than Bush as far as just blurting out nonsense, if that’s even possible. Yep, this debate is going to be good. If she shows up, that is.
Here are the transcripts of both parts of the interview. They read even worse than they sound.
(CBS) When CBS News anchor Katie Couric sat down for an exclusive interview with vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin Wednesday, she focused on the economy – but also addressed reports that the lobbying firm of Sen. John McCain’s campaign manager received payments from the controversial mortgage giant Freddie Mac until last month. Couric asked for her reaction to that.
Sarah Palin: My understanding is that Rick Davis recused himself from the dealings of the firm. I don’t know how long ago, a year or two ago that he’s not benefiting from that. And you know, I was – I would hope that’s not the case.
Katie Couric: But he still has a stake in the company so isn’t that a conflict of interest?
Palin: Again, my understanding is that he recused himself from the dealings with Freddie and Fannie, any lobbying efforts on his part there. And I would hope that’s the case because, as John McCain has been saying, and as I’ve on a much more local level been also rallying against is the undue influence of lobbyists in public policy decisions being made.
Next, Couric asked about the $700 billion government bailout of bad debt – and whether she supports it.
Palin: I’m all about the position that America is in and that we have to look at a $700 billion bailout. And as Sen. McCain has said unless this nearly trillion dollar bailout is what it may end up to be, unless there are amendments in Paulson’s proposal, really I don’t believe that Americans are going to support this and we will not support this. The interesting thing in the last couple of days that I have seen is that Americans are waiting to see what John McCain will do on this proposal. They’re not waiting to see what Barack Obama is going to do. Is he going to do this and see what way the political wind’s blowing? They’re waiting to see if John McCain will be able to see these amendments implemented in Paulson’s proposal.
Couric: Why do you say that? Why are they waiting for John McCain and not Barack Obama?
Palin: He’s got the track record of the leadership qualities and the pragmatism that’s needed at a crisis time like this.
Couric: But polls have shown that Sen. Obama has actually gotten a boost as a result of this latest crisis, with more people feeling that he can handle the situation better than John McCain.
Palin: I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it? (Laura says: WTF? What does that even mean?)
Couric: If this doesn’t pass, do you think there’s a risk of another Great Depression?
Palin: Unfortunately, that is the road that America may find itself on. Not necessarily this, as it’s been proposed, has to pass or we’re going to find ourselves in another Great Depression. But, there has got to be action – bipartisan effort – Congress not pointing fingers at one another but finding the solution to this, taking action, and being serious about the reforms on Wall Street that are needed.
Couric: Would you support a moratorium on foreclosures to help average Americans keep their homes?
Palin: That’s something that John McCain and I have both been discussing – whether that … is part of the solution or not. You know, it’s going to be a multi-faceted solution that has to be found here.
Couric: So you haven’t decided whether you’ll support it or not?
Palin: I have not.
Couric: What are the pros and cons of it do you think?
Palin: Oh, well, some decisions that have been made poorly should not be rewarded, of course.
Couric: By consumers, you’re saying?
Palin: Consumers – and those who were predator lenders also. That’s, you know, that has to be considered also. But again, it’s got to be a comprehensive, long-term solution found … for this problem that America is facing today. As I say, we are getting into crisis mode here.
Couric: You’ve said, quote, “John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business.” Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more example of his leading the charge for more oversight?
Palin: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings two years ago about Fannie and Freddie – that, that’s paramount. That’s more than a heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.
Couric: But he’s been in Congress for 26 years. He’s been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.
Palin: He’s also known as the maverick though, taking shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to understand what he’s been talking about – the need to reform government.
Couric: But can you give me any other concrete examples? Because I know you’ve said Barack Obama is a lot of talk and no action. Can you give me any other examples in his 26 years of John McCain truly taking a stand on this?
Palin: I can give you examples of things that John McCain has done, that has shown his foresight, his pragmatism, and his leadership abilities. And that is what America needs today.
Couric (AKA KATIE BADASS!): I’m just going to ask you one more time – not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.
Palin: I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you. (Laura says: WTF? WEAK!)
PART II
Katie Couric: As we stand before this august building and institution, what do you see as the role of the United States in the world?
Sarah Palin: I see the United States as being a force for good in the world. And as Ronald Reagan used to talk about, America being the beacon of light and hope for those who are seeking democratic values and tolerance and freedom. I see our country being able to represent those things that can be looked to … as that leadership, that light needed across the world.
Couric: In preparing for this conversation, a lot of our viewers … and Internet users wanted to know why you did not get a passport until last year. And they wondered if that indicated a lack of interest and curiosity in the world.
Palin: I’m not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world. (Laura says: WTF? Whose parents *ask* them to go travel the world, or provide funding for it? Because all of the backpackers I’ve met worked 1-2 jobs in order to make their trips.)
No, I’ve worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture. The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums (um, that would be media, Sarah)that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world.
Couric: Gov. Palin, you’ve had a very busy week. And you’re meeting with many world leaders. You met with President Karzai of Afghanistan. I know the McCain campaign has called for a surge in Afghanistan. But that country is, as you know, dramatically different than Iraq. Why do you believe additional troops, U.S. troops, will solve the problem there?
Palin: Because we can’t afford to lose in Afghanistan, as we cannot afford to lose in Iraq, either, these central fronts on the war on terror. And I asked President Karzai, “Is that what you are seeking, also? That strategy that has worked in Iraq that John McCain had pushed for, more troops? A counterinsurgency strategy?” And he said, “yes.” And he also showed great appreciation for what America and American troops are providing in his country.
Couric: The United States is deeply unpopular in Pakistan. Do you think the Pakistani government is protecting al Qaeda within its borders?
Palin: I don’t believe that new President Zardari has that mission at all. But no, the Pakistani people also, they want freedom. They want democratic values to be allowed in their country, also. They understand the dangers of terrorists having a stronghold in regions of their country, also. And I believe that they, too, want to rid not only their country, but the world, of violent Islamic terrorists.
Couric: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?
Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundary that we have with Canada. It’s funny that a comment like that was kinda made to … I don’t know, you know … reporters.
Couric: Mocked?
Palin: Yeah, mocked, I guess that’s the word, yeah.
Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.
Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…
Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?
Palin: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state. (Laura says: Wait, where is Russia again? Is it *right there*?)
Couric: When President Bush ran for office, he opposed nation-building. But he has spent, as you know, much of his presidency promoting democracy around the world. What lessons have you learned from Iraq? And how specifically will you try to spread democracy throughout the world?
Palin: Specifically, we will make every effort possible to help spread democracy for those who desire freedom, independence, tolerance, respect for equality. That is the whole goal here in fighting terrorism also. It’s not just to keep the people safe, but to be able to usher in democratic values and ideals around this, around the world. (Laura says: WTF? That is the least specific answer ever.)
Couric: You met yesterday with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is for direct diplomacy with both Iran and Syria. Do you believe the U.S. should negotiate with leaders like President Assad and Ahmadinejad?
Palin: I think, with Ahmadinejad, personally, he is not one to negotiate with. You can’t just sit down with him with no preconditions being met. Barack Obama is so off-base in his proclamation that he would meet with some of these leaders around our world who would seek to destroy America and that, and without preconditions being met. That’s beyond naïve. And it’s beyond bad judgment.
Couric: Are you saying Henry Kissinger …
Palin: It’s dangerous.
Couric: … is naïve for supporting that?
Palin: I’ve never heard Henry Kissinger say, “Yeah, I’ll meet with these leaders without preconditions being met.” Diplomacy is about doing a lot of background work first and shoring up allies (Laura says: Like McCain did with Spain? Go back two posts…) and positions and figuring out what sanctions perhaps could be implemented if things weren’t gonna go right. That’s part of diplomacy.
Couric: You recently said three times that you would never, quote, “second guess” Israel if that country decided to attack Iran. Why not?
Palin: We shouldn’t second guess Israel’s security efforts because we cannot ever afford to send a message that we would allow a second Holocaust, for one. Israel has got to have the opportunity and the ability to protect itself. They are our closest ally in the Mideast. We need them. They need us. And we shouldn’t second guess their efforts.
Couric: You don’t think the United States is within its rights to express its position to Israel? And if that means second-guessing or discussing an option?
Palin: No, abso … we need to express our rights and our concerns and …
Couric: But you said never second guess them.
(Laura says: Oopsie!)
Palin: We don’t have to second-guess what their efforts would be if they believe … that it is in their country and their allies, including us, all of our best interests to fight against a regime, especially Iran, who would seek to wipe them off the face of the earth. It is obvious to me who the good guys are in this one and who the bad guys are. The bad guys are the ones who say Israel is a stinking corpse and should be wiped off the face of the earth. That’s not a good guy who is saying that. Now, one who would seek to protect the good guys in this, the leaders of Israel and her friends, her allies, including the United States, in my world (Laura says: of the RAPTURE), those are the good guys.
Family portrait with headless dog, near forbidden Mt. Umunhum
We went hiking near Mt. Umunhum two weeks ago. It was gorgeous, but slightly spooky.
Mt. Umunhum is the tallest peak in that area of the Santa Cruz Mountains (4th tallest overall), and the most visible from our little slice of the world. It appears to almost hang over Los Gatos, and has a big “box” clearly visible at the top.
You are not allowed to hike to the actual peak. There is an abandoned and crumbling military base there with lots of lead and asbestos contamination. The “box” visible at the top of the mountian is actually a seven story concrete building. Click the photo below to see some outstanding night photos of the base.
The property surrounding the peak is privately owned, and by notoriously hostile individuals who don’t take kindly to trespassers. There are even rumors of a secret group of albinos living in the forest nearby.
You can read reports from people who have been to the top and encountered the property owners along the way, and even hear from a few of the property owners themselves in this thread.
I wish they would clean it up, but it will take millions of dollars and the Open Space District doesn’t have that kind of cash. Not sure why the military wasn’t required to clean it up. Backwards, don’t you think?
Anyway, we didn’t try to go to the top, we just hiked out to a nearby peak and kept it legal.
Our dog had a head when we started out, but lost it shortly before this photo. Yet another of the mysteries surrounding Mt. Umunhum…
The Idiot and the Inflection Point
Some interesting videos for you to watch, try to watch them in the order presented….
First off, we have John McCain. A Spanish reporter asks him if he, as President, will consider meeting with the Spanish leader, Zapatero, and if he will invite him to the White House. It’s a pretty basic, easy question, considering that Spain is our NATO ally, supported us in Iraq, etc. There’s absolutely no reason *not* to meet with Zapatero, right?
Or maybe you would prefer the animated version of his interview. It’s every bit as shocking, but there’s a whole lot more comic relief.
If you want to read more about McCain’s disastrous environmental record, or how scary and extreme his voting record on women’s healthcare and reproductive rights is, or maybe how Palin’s poisonous sprawl-and-polluter-friendly policies killed the lake in Wasilla. Did you know that Sarah Palin offers a $150 bounty for each severed wolf foreleg turned in? Hey Sarah…this is 2008, not 1908. I thought we were done with all that brutal wildlife destruction frontier yahoo stuff.
Next off, we have Joe Biden. Please be sure to note how spot-on his comments are. There is no time left for America to keep fucking up. The clock is at five minutes to midnight already. Tell ‘em, Joe….
When he mentioned the “inflection” point, I almost swooned. I heart this man.
“Just imagine a country that believes in science again”….oh, sweet music to my ears!
Are you still with me? OK, one more video, if you have the stamina. This one is Barack Obama, covering the main points of his Plan, and yes people, he has a Plan. Unlike, ahem…John McCain.
And if you would like to know the fine details, you are welcome to read the full text of the plan on his website. Details aplenty there. I think a few points could be better, specifically healthcare reform. I want universal health care for all Americans. I want a complete overhaul of the current system, which isn’t too likely to happen.
Obama’s solution is still drastically better than McCain’s, which would actually tax you on the healthcare benefits provided by your employer (if you are lucky enough to receive them) without changing anything else about the system. Same old crappy system, now costing you *more* money! Sweet!
3 kids, 1 mom, one bike
You go, mama!
Finally, the Dentist Love
I finally found the Dentist Love, after years of Dentist Heartbreak. My dentist is the MAN.
I have had some truly horrible experiences with dentists over the past few years. In fact, I can’t really remember the last time I had an excellent dentist, but I suspect that it was when I was about 7 or 8 years old. Well actually I did have a pretty enjoyable dentist in Mill Valley when I worked in Sausalito. Salt spray cleanings (no metal scraping) and standard nitrous mask for all work done. I don’t know how good the dentist was really, but the routine visits sure were fun. It’s so Marin County to get nitrous oxide for a cleaning. The only thing more Marin County would be to get a cleaning while wearing a bubble-gum scented nitrous oxide mask in a hot tub, right? Anyway, once I moved, going to a Sausalito dentist was no longer practical.
I have asked people for dentist recommendations, and eh….people aren’t too choosy. They put up with all kinds of things. My dear husband, for example, recommended his dentist to me when I moved down here. Nice guy and all, but a simple filling replacement turned into a root canal and crown because frankly…he fucked up.
My next dentist was killed in a freak airplane crash, and so I went to her replacement. He was a nice young guy with a good sense of humor, but never took my increasing sensitivity issues seriously, nor the increasing fear I was experiencing around routine cleanings as a result. Finally his sadistic hygenist tortured me enough to make me burst into tears and have a complete meltdown in the chair…see the link above about truly horrible experiences with dentists. So goodbye dude, and the hell with you.
I had a crown come off when I was about six months overdue for a cleaning, and was rather despondent about finding a new dentist, when my yoga teacher announced at the end of class one day that she had a list of recommended “healers” up at the front, if anyone was interested. Well sure…why not?
On that list was a dentist, Dr. Trent. I actually knew and liked a few of the other people on the list, so I figured Dr. Trent must be worth a go. I called up and scheduled a visit, hoping for the best.
OK, so first of all, his office is state-of-the-art. Plenty of excellent magazines, a flat screen TV playing decent movies at a non-annoying volume on the wall in the waiting room, efficient and organized staff with good uniforms, zero waiting time, flat screens on the ceilings over each dental chair playing beach scenes or Cirque du Soleil, or whatever you are in the mood for.
Everything is slick and modern and beautiful. You get a hot towel at the end of your time, to wipe yourself off and freshen up. I hear there are massaging dental chairs, though I haven’t had one yet.
Dental X-rays are digital, so there’s only 15% of the radiation compared to standard X-rays, no hard cardboard to bite down on, and the X-rays are available instantaneously for review.
Second of all, I told the hygenist flat out that I had some REALLY sensitive spots *here* and *here*, and I had had a lot of pain during past cleanings and was very nervous about them as a result, so if she could please please PLEASE be very careful, I would appreciate it.
Not only did she not scoff at me, she actually numbed me up topically before my cleaning, and took every care not to hurt me or be too aggressive. She took my pain seriously. It was the best cleaning ever. Zero discomfort.
Enter Dr. Trent. Brisk, efficient, at the top of his game, yet smooth, calming and reassuring. Up on the very latest techniques, a dental smarty pants if I ever saw one. Implants, cosmetics, general dentistry, the guy does it all.
Plus he’s suave, move-star handsome, and wears black scrubs like the Dr. 90210 guy, except he’s not at all cheesy like that guy. Just straightforward, friendly and pays attention.
I explain my sensitivity, show him my missing crown, and he checks me out. Within a minute, he tells me that my bite is a little off, and one of my lower teeth is pushing one of my upper teeth outwards every time I bite down. The rocking motion is inflaming the nerve in that upper tooth and probably causing some of my hypersensitivity. He suggests a slight “shaping” of the lower tooth so that the upper tooth is no longer being pushed around with every bite. A few buzzes of his instrument and we’re done. I can tell the difference right away. Wow. Why didn’t any other dentist catch that? Simple enough fix. It didn’t cure my gumline sensitivity, but my bite sensitivity went away completely.
Onto the crown. He tells me that it was done sloppily (which is why it came off) and it looks like there was decay underneath to boot, so he will have to re-work it a bit. Plus I have a cavity in another tooth. I am quaking in my boots at the prospect of all this potentially long and painful dental work. Yikes.
And yet it went off without a hitch. Dr. Trent was fast, careful, and numbed the bejeezus out of me beforehand. I watch Cirque du Soleil overhead with headphones on the whole time. The end result looked great and felt perfect. No weird clunkiness of a poorly fitted crown, and my new filling…awesome too.
Last week I had a standard checkup/cleaning and it was fab. Hygenist very careful around my sensitive areas, even while measuring my gum pockets with a sharp metal instrument, which made me break out in a soaking sweat of pure anticipatory fear. But no pain. She advised that I use a new toothpaste called Pronamel that hardens your enamel and decreases sensitivity, and gave me a big sample tube to try. I asked her about the new Sonicare toothbrushes and she said that they weren’t that different and if I had an old one I should just keep using it.
Dr. Trent came in, looking quite dashing in his scrubs, examined me and found a very small cavity. He pointed right at my most sensitive gumline spot, touched it lightly, and asked me if it was still bothering me. II said yes, so he told me about a sensitivity treatment that he could apply at the same time that he fixed my small cavity. Oh HELL yeah, bring it, baby!
Today he filled my cavity in 30 minutes and applied the de-sensitizing solution to my gumline. It’s a type of sealant that fills the pores in your enamel that allow your nerve to be irritated by cold, heat, sweets, air, etc. I watched an interesting documentary about New Zealand, sort of like an IMAX film. I totally forgot that I was having dental work done.
Zip-zap, it was all over in a flash with perfect execution.
Dr. Trent, you rock. Thanks for taking me seriously, and addressing my complaints. Thanks for being so smart, for knowing all about the latest advances and techniques, but using a simple fix when that’s all it takes. Thanks for being a nice person. Thanks for being careful with my mouth, and not hurting me. Thanks for looking hot (the idea of your fingers in my mouth is that much more appealing), but thanks also for being 100% professional.
And finally, thanks for charging me the same price for my filling-plus-sensitivity-treatment as Dan paid his (IMO) crappy caveman dentist for *his* last filling.
I fear the dentist no longer. I heart the dentist now.
Lying Liars and their Tsunami of Bullshit
Attacks, praise stretch truth at GOP convention
By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080904/ap_on_el_pr/cvn_fact_check
Wed Sep 3, 11:48 PM ET
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her Republican supporters held back little Wednesday as they issued dismissive attacks on Barack Obama and flattering praise on her credentials to be vice president. In some cases, the reproach and the praise stretched the truth.
Some examples:
PALIN: “I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending … and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere.”
THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a “bridge to nowhere.”
PALIN: “There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate.”
THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.
PALIN: “The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars.”
THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama’s plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain’s plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.
Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.
He also would raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise.
MCCAIN: “She’s been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America’s energy supply … She’s responsible for 20 percent of the nation’s energy supply. I’m entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America,” he said in an interview with ABC News’ Charles Gibson.
THE FACTS: McCain’s phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she’s no more “responsible” for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state — by population.
MCCAIN: “She’s the commander of the Alaska National Guard. … She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” he said on ABC.
THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under “federal status,” which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska’s national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.
FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin “got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States.”
THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor’s election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.
FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY: “We need change, all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin.”
THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate.
___
Associated Press Writer Jim Drinkard in Washington contributed to this report.
Inspiration
Huffington Post review of the speech
Remarks of Senator Barack Obama
“The American Promise”
Democratic National Convention
August 28, 2008
Denver, Colorado
As prepared for delivery
—-
To Chairman Dean and my great friend Dick Durbin; and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation;
With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.
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Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the one who traveled the farthest – a champion for working Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours — Hillary Rodham Clinton. To President Clinton, who last night made the case for change as only he can make it; to Ted Kennedy, who embodies the spirit of service; and to the next Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, I thank you. I am grateful to finish this journey with one of the finest statesmen of our time, a man at ease with everyone from world leaders to the conductors on the Amtrak train he still takes home every night.
To the love of my life, our next First Lady, Michelle Obama, and to Sasha and Malia – I love you so much, and I’m so proud of all of you.
Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story – of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren’t well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.
It is that promise that has always set this country apart – that through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams as well.
That’s why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women – students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors — found the courage to keep it alive.
We meet at one of those defining moments – a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.
Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.
These challenges are not all of government’s making. But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.
America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.
This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.
This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he’s worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.
We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.
Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land – enough! This moment – this election – is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On November 4th, we must stand up and say: “Eight is enough.”
Now let there be no doubt. The Republican nominee, John McCain, has worn the uniform of our country with bravery and distinction, and for that we owe him our gratitude and respect. And next week, we’ll also hear about those occasions when he’s broken with his party as evidence that he can deliver the change that we need.
But the record’s clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to take a ten percent chance on change.
The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives – on health care and education and the economy – Senator McCain has been anything but independent. He said that our economy has made “great progress” under this President. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. And when one of his chief advisors – the man who wrote his economic plan – was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a “mental recession,” and that we’ve become, and I quote, “a nation of whiners.”
A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud auto workers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know.
Now, I don’t believe that Senator McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn’t know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies but not one penny of tax relief to more than one hundred million Americans? How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people’s benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement?
It’s not because John McCain doesn’t care. It’s because John McCain doesn’t get it.
For over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy – give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is – you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps – even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.
Well it’s time for them to own their failure. It’s time for us to change America.
You see, we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.
We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma. We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President – when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.
We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job – an economy that honors the dignity of work.
The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great – a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight.
Because in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton’s Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill.
In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree; who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships.
When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for two decades ago after the local steel plant closed.
And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman. She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well.
I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States.
What is that promise?
It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.
It’s a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.
Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves – protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work.
That’s the promise of America – the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.
That’s the promise we need to keep. That’s the change we need right now. So let me spell out exactly what that change would mean if I am President.
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Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.
Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.
I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.
I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.
And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.
Washington’s been talking about our oil addiction for the last thirty years, and John McCain has been there for twenty-six of them. In that time, he’s said no to higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, no to investments in renewable energy, no to renewable fuels. And today, we import triple the amount of oil as the day that Senator McCain took office.
Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.
As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I’ll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America. I’ll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars. And I’ll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy – wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can’t ever be outsourced.
America, now is not the time for small plans.
Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy. Michelle and I are only here tonight because we were given a chance at an education. And I will not settle for an America where some kids don’t have that chance. I’ll invest in early childhood education. I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability. And we will keep our promise to every young American – if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.
Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American. If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don’t, you’ll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. And as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.
Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their jobs and caring for a sick child or ailing parent.
Now is the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses; and the time to protect Social Security for future generations.
And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.
Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I’ve laid out how I’ll pay for every dime – by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don’t help America grow. But I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less – because we cannot meet twenty-first century challenges with a twentieth century bureaucracy.
And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America’s promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our “intellectual and moral strength.” Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can’t replace parents; that government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need.
Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility – that’s the essence of America’s promise.
And just as we keep our keep our promise to the next generation here at home, so must we keep America’s promise abroad. If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have.
For while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats we face. When John McCain said we could just “muddle through” in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell – but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.
And today, as my call for a time frame to remove our troops from Iraq has been echoed by the Iraqi government and even the Bush Administration, even after we learned that Iraq has a $79 billion surplus while we’re wallowing in deficits, John McCain stands alone in his stubborn refusal to end a misguided war.
That’s not the judgment we need. That won’t keep America safe. We need a President who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past.
You don’t defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq. You don’t protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can’t truly stand up for Georgia when you’ve strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice – but it is not the change we need.
We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans — Democrats and Republicans – have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.
As Commander-in-Chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm’s way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.
I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts. But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease. And I will restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace, and who yearn for a better future.
These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.
But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism.
The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.
So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.
America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past. For part of what has been lost these past eight years can’t just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose – our sense of higher purpose. And that’s what we have to restore.
We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination. Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This too is part of America’s promise – the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.
I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that’s to be expected. Because if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.
You make a big election about small things.
And you know what – it’s worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn’t work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it’s best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.
I get it. I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career in the halls of Washington.
But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s been about you.
For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us – that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it – because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.
America, this is one of those moments.
I believe that as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming. Because I’ve seen it. Because I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it in Illinois, when we provided health care to more children and moved more families from welfare to work. I’ve seen it in Washington, when we worked across party lines to open up government and hold lobbyists more accountable, to give better care for our veterans and keep nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands.
And I’ve seen it in this campaign. In the young people who voted for the first time, and in those who got involved again after a very long time. In the Republicans who never thought they’d pick up a Democratic ballot, but did. I’ve seen it in the workers who would rather cut their hours back a day than see their friends lose their jobs, in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb, in the good neighbors who take a stranger in when a hurricane strikes and the floodwaters rise.
This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores.
Instead, it is that American spirit – that American promise – that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.
That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours – a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.
And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.
The men and women who gathered there could’ve heard many things. They could’ve heard words of anger and discord. They could’ve been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.
But what the people heard instead – people of every creed and color, from every walk of life – is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.
“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”
America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.
Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.
Moving right along….
Things are so much better than they were two weeks ago. I have been keeping my cool with the kids, and the kids themselves are so much easier.
Well, Julian is about the same, but Adrian is WAY easier, and when Adrian is not working my every last shredded nerve, then Julian is fairly easy to handle.
The big difference? Communication. Adrian can suddenly COMMUNICATE. Not like he’s speaking in full sentences or anything, but he really gets his point across. I want it, I don’t want it, I prefer the other one, I’m thirsty, I’m hungry, I have to go potty, I’m tired, I dropped my toy on the floor and need you to help me get it, I want to show you something, look at this, come here, that is Daddy’s shoe, that is Mommy’s bag, I like that ball, etc.
Adrian uses a combination of sign language and speaking and gestures, and it’s pretty awesome. Before, he would scream to indicate no, or scream with frustration we weren’t understanding him. Also, his own comprehension was not nearly as good. Now he really understands what we say to him, and is generally cooperative.
He has quite the large vocabulary at this point. When he’s sitting on his potty we read books (which he asks for by saying “eh?” and making the sign for “book”), and his favorites are word and picture and ABC books. I will ask him, “Where is the LION?” or “Where is the HELICOPTER?” and he almost always points to the right image. There are hundreds of pictures in the books we have, so he knows a ton of words by now. Very impressive for an 18 month old.
He doesn’t *say* too many actual words verbally, not identifiable ones anyways. There’s Mommy, Daddy, and Doggie. Let’s see what others I can think of off the top of my head:
Eat, Drink (dink!), Yes , No, I Want That, Baby, Door
Door is the newest one. He points to a door and says it. Kind of random that he would pick that word, but there it is. There could be many other words that he’s saying, but because he natters on a lot and it’s all kind of jumbled up, it’s hard to catch them sometimes. But his gestures and intonations are all spot on.
He likes to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle” to himself with the following lyrics:
“Mommy, Daddy, Doggie, Mom…Daddy, Doggie, Mommy, Mom”
Incredibly cute. He’s very musical, that baby boy.
Adrian still has no name for himself, and no name for Julian. He was very excited looking at a family portrait of the four of us today, and I pointed to each person and asked him who they were. Mommy, Daddy, no problem. Pointed to him…silence. I know he can say “Baby”, so I suggested that, but he didn’t repeat it. Silence when I pointed to Julian as well. “Julian” is hard to say, so I suggested “Juju”, but he wasn’t repeating that either. We’ll see what he comes up with.
Less screaming and more conversing makes for a much more relaxed parenting experience, and a happier household overall. Adrian has his 2-year molars coming in , and they are hurting him, but overall he’s still very happy and smiley and quite witty too. He has suddenly become ticklish, and loves to be tickled under his arms and in the crook of his neck. He cracks himself up by farting.
Julian is moving along to his next developmental phase quickly too. Today we were listening to Cachao in the car on the way to IKEA for lunch. Cachao was a Cuban guy known as the inventor of the mambo, and the music is mostly old-school Afro-Cuban jams that get your booty shaking.
As soon as I put the CD on, Julian said, “Oh, I LIKE this CD.” Then he thought for a moment and asked me, “Is this music African?” I was surprised and said, “Well, actually it IS African. It’s Cuban, and Cuban music is a lot like African music, even though they sing in Spanish.” I wasn’t really sure how to describe it simply enough, but I think he understood.
I asked him how he knew the music was African and he said he wasn’t sure, he just knew. He usually says at least one thing a day that surprises me…uses a complicated word in correct context, or discusses a subject in a very sophisticated, aware way. He’ s still very small for his age, which makes it all a bit more surprising when he talks like such a big boy. And then he’ll completely melt down over some tiny thing and all of a sudden it’s like he’s a 2 year-old again. Such an age of extreme behavior.
There has been a burst in helpfulness too. All of a sudden he can dress himself and put on his shoes and socks, and pick up toys and books and put them away. He doesn’t LOVE picking things up and putting them away (yeah, me neither), but he’s helpful if I stay on top of him and guide him gently to what needs to be done next. He likes to help me make applesauce, and can do every part of the apple peeling/coring process with my peeling/coring machine, except actually putting the apples on the prongs, because the prongs are sharp, and because the apple has to be perfectly aligned on them. But otherwise? He does it all, and I just throw the resulting apple slinkies in the kettle, season them with lemon juice and cinnamon sticks, stir, and wait. We’re a Badass Applesauce-making Team.
At other times there is just zero focus, of course. It’s surprising what he can do when he is motivated, and how little he can do when he is just not in the mood.
Dan took Adrian and Bugs for a walk last week and Julian stayed home to help me with some gardening. He was supposed to pick cherry tomatoes, but he lost interest after about two minutes. Granted, he had been at summer camp most of the day and was a little tired, but he likes to pick fruit, so I was surprised when he said he was done so quickly.
I asked him if he wanted to pick beans instead and he said “OK”. But no sooner had I walked back over to the place where I was planting chard than he was done with that task too. “Mommy, I’m DONE. My feet are tired of standing up and picking these beans.” Instead he wanted to help me dig holes for the chard, but then when I set him on that task he wanted to punch holes in the drip irrigation system. Whatever he thought he wanted do to, it only lasted a minute before he wanted to move on to something else.
I teased him that he wasn’t a very good farm boy, since a real farm boy would be working from morning to night picking beans and tomatoes and milking cows and feeding chickens and lots of other things besides.
He said, “I AM a farm boy. I AM.” I asked him how he could be a farm boy when he didn’t want to work for even five minutes on our little farm, and we still had to pick tomatoes and beans for our dinner. If we didn’t do our little tiny bit of farm work tonight, then what would we eat?
He looked at me and said, “Mommy, don’t you need to go to Trader Joe’s anyway? While you are there you can get something for dinner. Then I can be a real farm boy tomorrow when I am not so tired.”
Well hmmmm, can’t argue with that. Wouldn’t fly on a real farm, but luckily our tomatoes and beans weren’t like unmilked cows or unfed chickens…they could wait until tomorrow. The chard couldn’t really wait one more day to be planted, so I finished that up quickly while Julian played (he DID have energy to play with the hose) and then we went inside.
Speaking of our little farm…
This year I didn’t really till up the soil and amend it with compost like I did in past years. I just dug little pits, threw in some compost, and then mixed it up before planting something in each of the little pits.
Well, apparently that totally sucks as a farming technique. In years past my plants have grown tall and lush, and been very productive. This year? Nothing. Everything grew at a snail’s pace, and then it all slowly turned yellow and started to die. EVERYTHING. Tomatoes, squash, cucumbers…the only things doing OK were peppers and basil. Not so great, but they were at least surviving.
We have been having a very mild summer (I’ve had on sweatshirts during the day in August), so that is one factor. I went to the nursery and a very angry chick with a lot of attitude told me that I was watering too much. I should water less.
I figured she was way off, and I was right. I upped the water to twice as much, and dosed everything with a big fat shot of Miracle Grow. No, it’s not organic, but I had already given a big dose of organic fertilizer and it was doing zip. Next time I’ll mix it into the soil when I am tilling, and do this thing right. But I had to give the Miracle Grow just to keep things alive.
The Miracle Grow was like Veggie Steroids. Within a day my garden was looking revitalized. A week later I had new green growth on all the plants, the few hard, unripe fruits I had were ripening, and in general everything looked about a thousand times better. Dang. Miracle Grow is the bomb.
Lessons learned this week:
1) Kids can change unbelievably fast. It truly seems to be darkest right before the dawn. Also helps to not be a raving maniac.
2) If you hit rock bottom and vent about the darkness on your blog, that seems to speed up the dawning process immensely.
3) When gardening, take the time to do things right. Prepare the soil by tilling it and adding plenty of organic matter and compost to feed the plants later on. Make sure you are giving enough water for each plant. Monitor the situation carefully and be prepared to work hard to fix things if they don’t seem to be going right. Don’t listen to that bitch at the info counter at Yamagami’s Nursery. And finally…if all else fails and you seem to have fucked things up in spite of your best efforts, don’t be afraid to use some Miracle Grow to save the day. Try harder next year.
4) Most of the above works for kids as well.
5) Keeping your cool is worth the effort. Everyone wins.
My name is Laura, and I am an Angry Mom, godammit!
So here’s my big confession…I have been an Angry Mom for the past month, maybe two.
The kids have been going bonkers and being horrible, and I have had this never-ending PMS going on (two periods in a month, face a pimply mess) and I have been getting too little sleep, and I just have NOT been able to keep it together. Every time I go away from the kids I formulate extensive and detailed plans for improving my behavior, but then at the first shrill scream upon their return my nerves just shatter and I start yelling again and generally losing it.
The thing is, I totally know better. I have read many good parenting books, I know all kinds of good parenting techniques, what to do at times of less-than-stellar kid behavior, and how to preserve your relationship instead of sabotaging i.t.. but as soon as my buttons get pushed, which has been pretty much constantly, I JUST CAN’T DO THE RIGHT THING. Instead I yell, scream, swat, spank, throw kids in their room and basically feel miserably like I am going to have a heart attack at any second. OUT OF CONTROL.
All the books I have read on gentle parenting and positive discipline techniques were still sticking with me, but I have been so angry and so on edge 24/7 that I just can’t get back to any kind of calm center to be able to put them into practice. I get to the point where I just don’t give a fuck anymore about being a good parent, just EVERYONE LEAVE ME ALONE AND SHUT THE HELL UP. Mothering seems like a nightmare scenario that I will never escape from.
Of course, the worse I behave, the more the kids wig out and react right back. I recognized this and still couldn’t stop.
Dan has been awesome when I am at my worst. He stays calm and sets a good example, talking patiently with Julian at his most whiny and annoying, distracting Adrian at his wildest and most destructive.
Then I improve a little bit and Dan falls apart. We have been alternating back and forth, each holding it together when the other loses it completely, and then switching roles.
The kids have been incredibly difficult. I don’t know what’s up, some kind of developmental burst or disequilibrium phase, or whatever you want to call it, but both of them have been nearly unbearable for at least a month, maybe two. No excuse for bad parenting, but they definitely pushed things to the brink. They weren’t torturing small animals or anything weird like that, they were just being annoying small children. Whiny, loud, melting down constantly, demanding, beyond high-need, destructive, that kind of thing.
Mind you, I haven’t been beating them senseless or locking them in cages or anything (though I did fantasize about it from time to time), but I did an awful lot of yelling, and used mean verbally abusive language, and even smacked them several times. I am embarrassed at my bad behavior and lack of control. I have bad memories of my own parents going totally nuts on me and screaming and yelling and spanking and saying nasty things, and am 100% positive that I don’t want to repeat that with my own kids. I want to break that angry chain right here and now.
I very clearly remember being yelled at my my parents, and being treated poorly and unfairly. I remember being spanked by hands and then beaten with worse things when that didn’t hurt anymore. I remember being scared by angry red faces with bulging eyeballs screaming right in my face. At no point did any of that help me. It just made me want t rebel against them. It made me hate them. It made me stop trusting them. It gave me an ulcer at age 9, for crying out loud. It made me want to get the hell away from them as soon as I possibly could. They were good parents in lots of other ways, but damn, they were (and still are) angry people.
Dan and I laid down a NO YELLING house rule, and that has helped us keep our cool, but we still break the rule from time to time. Still, it’s better when you can at least agree that something is not OK and work towards stopping it. We told the kids that we were yelling too much and not being patient with them and talking things out, and that we were very sorry. If anyone breaks the house NO YELLING rule, then anyone else can call them on it.
I had one very bad episode where I screamed and smacked and completely lost it, and after that I was so DONE with being an angry parent, because honestly, it kills me too. It’s not like I feel some great satisfaction and release when I am a Bad Mom and yell and scream and go nuts. Instead I feel like I’m going to keel over from a heart attack and brain aneurysm all at once.
Anyway, I knew I needed help, but wasn’t sure where to start. A parenting crisis hotline? A therapist? I couldn’t even think straight, I was in such bad shape and so stressed out, and also it’s not so easy at all to admit that you absolutely SUCK as a parent.
What was my problem anyway? Maybe I should have never had kids. I said for a long time that I would never have kids. Maybe I was right, and I’m just not at all cut out for this mothering thing. I’m not patient. I like peace and quiet and lots of time to myself with a good book. I have never been a babysitter or a kindergarten teacher or a nanny or anything like that. Shit, maybe I’ve just made a horrible mistake.
But no…that’s not it. I HAVE been a good and generous and loving mom. I DO know what to do, and I HAVE enjoyed my children, and no matter who I was before, I have stretched and grown and changed into who I have needed to be in my current role. I don’t really want to just sit around with a good book 24/7 for the rest of my life, as much as I love to do that. I just don’t want to be so fucking ANGRY all the time. I want to be serene again.
ANGRY. That’s my problem. I’m too angry. It’s not that I’m a bad mom, or not cut out for this, or that my kids are horrible…maybe momentarily in the current phase they’re going through, but not overall. I just need some anger management, because it’s the ANGER that is my problem.
I’m not saying that no one should ever be angry. Anger is very useful for motivating people to take action on important issues. When someone is threatening you, or taking advantage of you, opening a can of whup-ass is often useful like nothing else can be. But to be expressing anger in a toxic way, so often, with people you love, especially children…that’s fucked up.
I had a moment of clarity and remembered the title of a book that was recommended on my positive parenting email list over and over again. “When Anger Hurts Your Kids“. I ordered it with Express Shipping and immediately felt better, like I had figured out the problem. INABILITY TO CONTROL MY ANGER. Step back out of the infuriating moment and take in the bigger picture. Be the grown up, not the two year old.
Book Description
All parents get angry sometimes, but research clearly suggests that the amount of anger expressed in the family will have a negative impact on a child’s performance in nearly every important area of life. When Anger Hurts Your Kids brings together the practical lessons of a two-year study of 285 parents. You’ll learn how to tell if your family has anger problems, how to combat the 18 mistaken beliefs that fuel anger, and how to practice the art of problem-solving communication-skills that will let you feel more effective as a parent and let your kids grow up free of anger’s damaging effects.
That just about nails it on the head. Anger is the #1 Beast that I must do battle with.
The book is good so far. The research is frightening (most parents are angry, and kids of angry parents tend to be depressed, less empathetic to the pain of others, do worse academically, commit more crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, are more violent and abusive to their children and spouses, and so on). I’m not really to the solutions part (I haven’t been able to read an entire book in over 18 months, remember?), but so far I am sold on the messaging.
One part that I liked was this…that it is a thousand times better to say “You are making me very angry right now by doing X when I asked you not to. It’s time to go to your room until you can stop doing that” than to say, for example “Goddamn it, you stupid brat! I told you to stop doing that! Can;t you do ANYTHING right? Go to your room!” So right off the bat, the expectation is not that you be a saint or be *without* anger, just that you begin to express it appropriately and without verbal abuse attached.
Things have eased up on the home front. Adrian is being a little less destructive and the decibel volume has gone down slightly. He can also suddenly nod for “Yes” and shake his head for “No”, and that, my friends, makes life with him so much easier, it’s amazing. He has been great at signing and other communication, but his way of saying NO to something until just this week was to scream and cry and act like the end of the world had just arrived. So let’s hear it for the boy…..WOOHOO!
Julian is still being super-whiny, but when he’s not whiny, he’s just fine. Yesterday he helped me with housework for almost an hour straight, folding laundry and putting it away, which was very sweet and much appreciated.
Even Adrian got into the housework act and had a little sponge and spray bottle to “help” me clean the bathroom. Yes, that “help” is in italics, because he made a pretty big mess, but he was cute anyways.
Also, BOTH KIDS SLEPT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE NIGHT LAST NIGHT. This is rarer than Haley’s Comet. I am still in shock. I think they were both so tired from being sick, and now that they feel better they just sacked out. Adrian did wake up briefly for just a minute, but he didn’t even scream and cry for milk like he usually does. He just snuggled in closer, put his arms around me, gave a big sigh of happiness and went back to sleep. Whoa.
I think my Super PMS might be easing up as well. My face sort of cleared up a little, and I stopped bleeding. That’s *something*, at least.
And I’m back to taking a deep breath and working on my calm, patient response to Kid Insanity when it arises. When I can be calm, they can usually be calm too, and we don’t escalate things into the Bad Place.
Julian was flipping out the other afternoon and started pushing my buttons. I stayed calm (though it was a struggle), poured him a cool drink, a snack, put it on a tray, started up a story CD on his CD player, and told him he had had a long day and needed some quiet time to relax in his room. I didn’t THROW him in his room, I helped him relax. I gave him a tool to fix himself when he felt out of control. Yes!
He fought me at first, but then he agreed that he felt tired and crabby. And then the other day after he got home from a long day at summer camp, he actually told me, “Mama, I had a long day at summer camp. I need some quiet time in my room. Can you make a snack for me and give me a cold drink please?”
High five to J! High five to me! When he felt better and more calmed down, he came out. He could rely on me to help him when he felt bad, instead of me just making him feel worse.
I think I’m on a roll. FAR from perfect, but hopefully getting back to a good place. I want to enjoy my kids again and not see them as a burden to endure until they leave. I don’t want to be angry anymore. I know I will be from time to time, but I don’t want to lash out and get nasty anymore. I want to be playful and calm and helpful and have my kids know that they can depend on me to show them what to do with difficult emotions, instead of getting medieval on their asses.
Because how can I tell them that yelling and hitting are wrong and then do it myself? How can I teach them effective methods of dealing with their own anger and sadness and frustration in life, when I am modeling exactly the opposite? I can’t. I just can’t. It doesn’t make sense.
Hard work ahead. Parenting is no job for sissies.
A Nasal Miscarriage
Everyone in the family has been sick for two weeks. First we had the flu, then Adrian’s morphed into an ear infection, Julian’s morphed into bronchitis and a possible sinus infection, and I am fighting a sinus infection right now.
Adrian was getting better from his flu, and then all of a sudden he took a big turn for the worse, with goopy green eyes and nose. That was right about the time that he stopped sleeping. Two nights in a row of sleeplessness, where he only slept for half an hour at a time, and then not at all after 3:00am. A 15 minute nap on both days. Crying all the time.
Julian was waking up every few hours screaming and crying and coughing, usually just when I had managed to get Adrian back to sleep.
This is the very definition of misery, when your kids stop sleeping, cry endlessly, and you don’t feel so hot yourself.
On the second night of Adrian’s not sleeping, he was crying “MOMMMEEEE!!!!” and I asked him “Baby, what’s wrong, can you tell me?” This time he pointed to his ear and made the sign for “hurt”. Aha! An ear infection!
Next morning I had the kids in to the pediatrician first thing. Unfortunately by the time I got them out of there, got the prescription picked up, and ran all the other errands I had to do, I was feeling pretty damn sick myself and it was too late to see anyone.
It was late Friday afternoon (of course…I ONLY get sick on Fridays after the doctor’s office closes). Super sore throat and one completely blocked nostril, accompanied by a burning fire in my left sinus. Since my last sinus infection was so bad I thought I was going to die, I was a little panicky about the prospect of developing a sinus infection late on a Friday afternoon, and so far it hasn’t been fun.
Yesterday I got out my Neti Pot and gave my sinuses a good cleansing. I normally do it just once on either side, but my left sinus was still blocked after I poured a whole pot through it, so I just kept going.
Green goo kept coming out, little by little, and then after the third pot I blew my nose hard into the sink and this….this….THING shot out of my left nostril. It was at least an inch long, and about half an inch wide, and the very first thing I thought when I saw it was that I had just had a miscarriage out my nose. It was a total meat purse. I am absolutely kicking myself for not taking a picture of it, because it was so utterly weird and unbelievable, but I was a little too freaked out at the time to think clearly.
I grabbed it and started dissecting it with my fingers. It had this meaty sort of tough core, and flecks of blood in it. I’m pretty sure it was just layers of dried up mucus that had piled up to form a stalagtite of sorts in my sinus, but Jesus Christ, it was odd. Odd and HUGE and more than a little bit creepy.
I could instantly breathe clearly on that side after it came out. No shit, huh? I can’t believe that was inside my head. No wonder I felt crappy. The other side was still kind of blocked, so I kept washing and washing it out with a few more Neti pots full of saline, but nothing else came out except a little more green goo.
I still felt sick last night, but my throat was not as sore today, and I *think* my sinuses might be improving. I don’t feel worse, and that’s a good thing.
So what I’m wondering is…if you have a giant freaky Snot Clot up in your sinuses like that, and you take antibiotics, that might kill the bacteria, but what happens to that creepy creature? Does it just break up and come out on its own? It just seems odd that a doctor wouldn’t try to wash things out somehow and get the blockage out of your sinuses in the first place, if the blockage is what’s causing the infection. Or is that what ENTs do?
Maybe I never did get the Snot Clot cleared out after prior infections, and that’s why, after NEVER having had a sinus infection in my life despite hayfever, colds, flu and even about of double pneumonia, I have suddenly started getting them in the past two years after every little cold and flu, even mild ones. In that case, I’m freaking THRILLED to have gotten that monster out of my sinuses. I’m thrilled anyway, but even more so if it has possibly been the root of all the sinus evil I have had over the past two years. From the looks of it, this thing had been up there a long time. It practically had hair and teeth.
We’ll see how things go…my fingers are crossed for improved health and LOTS more sleep for everyone.
The Mom Face
From my pal Tina Kugler, one of the funniest people I know, and creator of my TPB website logo:
Her caption: “i’ve realized that, really, the only time i’m not clenching my teeth is when i’m yelling. because even if one of the kids is actually being good, that means another one is not…
p.s. if you tilt your head, the drawing on the right is also what i look like when i’m sleeping.”
I have been utterly amiss in updating this blog for the past month. Not because nothing is happening…au contraire, mes chers amis, au-fucking-contraire.
I don’t even know where to begin, except to say that I have been struggling mightily with motherhood, and work, but mostly with motherhood.
The total, complete and utter loss of Me Time and Personal Space is hard to deal with. I have not read a book since Adrian was born, 18 months ago. This is a new world record for me, the Bookworm.
The constant noise is hard to deal with. Screaming and whining are hard to deal with.
Having my body parts constantly yanked, bonked, pulled, pinched, slapped, tapped and suckled on is a challenge.
Lack of sleep is a big one. Especially when you are awakened by someone headbutting you and screaming in your ear….”MOOOOMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEE!”
Fighting and arguing and one kid pushing/hitting/pinching another…not fun.
Never being in any public space without being on Red Fucking Alert that a big screamfest might be coming along any moment.
Broken, tattered, chewed, smashed, drawn on with crayon….all possibilities for my cherished personal items.
Yesterday Adrian broke the rear windshield wiper off my car. Just reached up, grabbed it, and yanked it off. Today he smashed a huge mug of sweet tea all over the bathroom, and then, an hour later, smashed a freshly prepared plate of lunch for Julian all over the kitchen floor. He was on my back and reached out and grabbed it with his FOOT, people.
It used to be that people thought I was 5-6 years younger than my actual age. Now? I don’t know, but I feel about 90. I look in the mirror and see a haggard, stressed out person looking back at me. Where did all those wrinkles and lines come from?
It’s not just stress and lack of sleep, and yelling. It’s falling asleep while laying down with the baby, without washing your face or brushing your teeth. It’s about being too tired to moisturize. It’s about being forgetting to put on sunscreen before leaving the house for the day. It’s about not having time to drive up to San Francisco to see my dermatologist, and hoping that I don’t have a malignant melanoma festering away on my back in the meantime.
Obviously, it’s not just me who feels this way. Tina’s in the thick of it too. She’s got THREE kids, for god’s sake.
And how about THIS woman, who just gave birth to her EIGHTEENTH child?
Here she is with 13 of her 18 kids. They look happy enough. But that poor woman is only FORTY-FOUR YEARS OLD. She looks at least sixty-five.
It will get better, I know. The kids will grow up and get older and won’t be so high-need, and I’ll have time to read books and put on moisturizer and sleep more than 4 hours at a stretch. The pinching and screaming will stop. The whining will die down.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad. My kids are super-cute and *generally* well-behaved, it’s just that they are small children, and small children? I’m starting to think that I don’t like them all that much, you know?
Julian’s starting to come out of it at 4.5yo. Most of the time we get along just fine, although he is maddening us at the moment by refusing to eat anything, and weeping/wailing/whining semi-continuously.
Adrian is 18 months, and he is a cross between a hurricane, the Tasmanian Devil, and a jet plane taking off next to your head. Good thing he’s adorable when he’s not breaking my plates, or my eardrums.
At this particular moment in time, each day is a long, hard slog of sheer endurance to the bedtime finish line, punctuated by moments of cuteness, comedy, and pure love.
Only four more years until they’re both in school. Yes!
The SUB – Sport Utility Bike
I just saw this article on Salon about Mark Benjamin’s SUB – Sport Utility Bike. Good article, made me smile and feel warm and fuzzy inside. That Xtracycle technology is sweet. I like the blender attachment. May geeks rule the world.
Check out the video, it’s very cute, and interesting too:
This brings back memories of my own biker chick past, and the ridiculous amounts of cargo that I would routinely load on my motorcycle. Being San Francisco and all, it would have been impossible to tote cargo of any sort up and down all those hills on a bicycle. I could barely get myself up and down them, and I was a very young woman in good physical shape. A motorcycle was much better. Less sweaty, and infinitely cooler and more badass.
I’m not toting anything here in the photo below, just looking good riding around with my friend Margie at age 19 or so. Note that this was way back before the helmet law was enacted here in California, though I did wear mine 95% of the time anyway. This photo is also great because you can check out my rack…the one on the back of my motorcycle, that is.
In this next photo from around 1991, I am up in the hills to the west of Silicon Valley, on Skyline…Hwy 35. Headed off on a camping trip with my then-boyfriend Andy, I think this camping trip was to Big Basin.
On this trip I was riding on back, so as packed as this bike appears to be with one person, it actually had two people on it while we were underway. It’s not so much gear, relatively speaking, because this was just a weekend trip. On a later month-long trip across and around the American West (over to Utah, up to Montana, back through Washington and Oregon) we had a TON of stuff packed onto every available surface of that bike. We had tank bags, we had cargo nets and bungee cords. Here you can see the tent packed onto the fender, but on the big trip we had like 5 times as much stuff strapped onto it. Craziness. But it was a FABULOUS trip.
This next photo was taken in 2001. My friend Julie Call and I were working at eCompany in San Francisco at the height of the Dot-com Era. She had just gotten a bike, so I took her on her first bike camping trip to Harbin Hot Springs up in Middle town, north of Napa. It was fun…we took this photo on the way back, after stopping for lunch in Napa Valley. I had a Honda Nighthawk 650 then….that was a sweet ride. Very smooth, silky and comfortable to ride, quiet and powerful.
Julie has THREE KIDS now, all under age 4. Fuck. I get cold sweats just thinking about it, as I am on the brink of insanity with my two.
Right now I am seriously interested in the Rhoades Car, specifically the four-seater model with a shade canopy and locking cargo trunk. Minus the rotating sign on top. Yes, THAT’S where you have seen these before. But they are still cool.
Here are a few of the other Rhoades models in action.
I could totally see myself commuting back and forth to preschool and the gym in this beauty. Not quite as badass as being a biker chick, but hey…a suburban work-at-home mom with two kids has to work her cargo bike whatever way she can. And Dan has his own seat!
$5000 with all the options I want though. Not going to happen anytime soon, unless my Portable Baby empire takes off big-time. Sigh. But I can dream.
Adrian 18 month stats
Took Adrian to the pediatrician for his 18month checkup today:
Height is 32.5 inches
Weight is 27lbs. 14 ozs.
Head circumference is 51cm
Why do they mix inches and centimeters? Weird.
Anyway, that is around 75th percentile for height and weight, and 95th percentile for head circumference.
Our boy’s not as huge as he used to be (he was at 95th percentile in all categories at last measurement), but he’s still pretty big.
I’m voting Republican…
About this movie…
http://www.imvotingrepublican.com/more.php
UPDATE: I am NOT REALLY VOTING REPUBLICAN! I almost gave my mom a heart attack with this subject line before she actually watched the video. Rest assured, I never have, am not going to now, and likely will NEVER vote Republican. Just watch the video, people.
Victory Gardening
During World War I and World War II, the United States government asked its citizens to plant gardens in order to support the war effort. Millions of people planted gardens. Emphasis was placed on making gardening a family or community effort – not a drudgery, but a pastime, and a national duty.
Today food travels an average of 1500 miles from farm to table. The process of machine-planting, fertilizing, processing, packaging, and transporting food uses a great deal of energy and contributes to the cause of global warming. I try to purchase locally through farmer’s markets, and through organic food delivery services like Spud that offer local food sources, but even when I can reduce the average distance traveled per grocery item to 350 miles (like I did on my last Spud order), well, that’s still 350 miles. Not exactly a short drive.
If I eat from my garden, that’s 0 miles traveled. Plus hey, the veggies and fruit from my garden are much fresher. I know what went onto them, I know who has handled them, and I know what kind of soil they grew in. Especially comforting these days when salad tomatoes are contaminated with salmonella.
Not to mention, food and food packaging waste are primary components of landfills. Growing your own food involves no shopping bags, no plastic wrap, no packaging…and any food waste leftover can go straight into your compost pile. Because you DO have a compost, pile, right? Another super-easy project that pays off handsomely and makes a huge difference in your waste footprint. Brown gold, baby!
Here’s what we’re growing in our garden this year:
Figs
Strawberries
Melons
Zucchini
Round Summer Squash
Buddha’s Hand (a non-edible citrus, used for scenting the house)
Globe Artichokes
Meyer Lemon
3 types of Tomatoes
Basil
4 types of Peppers
Corn
Red and Green Shiso (a type of japanese green)
Chard
Violetta Artichokes
Mixed Salad Greens
Pole Beans
Lemon Balm
Beets
Pumpkins
Santa Maria Plums
Apples
It was kind of a chore tilling the soil in my garden this year, but not THAT bad…just a few hours and then it was over. My veggie garden used to be a side lawn, but I had the lawn taken out and lots of soil and compost tilled in a few years back. Cost me about $450, and I had a drip watering system installed at the same time.
So now in the springtime I just push my shovel in at each spot next to a spout in my irrigation system, turn over the soil there, hack at it with my shovel a few times to mix up the soil, dump a little new compost in the hole, and stick the plant in.
Once I’m all done, I cover the area with mulch, water well, and that’s it. I go in about once a week to do a little light weeding, I put tomato cages over the tomatoes, and supports around the beans. Other than that, I don’t do much except harvest.
Julian helps me with plum picking, and we make plum butter (like jam, but thicker and not as sweet) and put that up in jars to eat the rest of the year on toast and in yogurt. Ideally I would like to grow enough to preserve other fruits and veggies for year-round eating, but with Adrian being so little, my time is kind of limited. He’s too little to help, and wants to be inside the garden fence with me. Maybe next year I’ll really kick things up, grow more and start canning my own tomatoes, making pickles, etc. The kids LOVE the garden. Picking a strawberry and popping it in their mouths totally sweet and warm from the sun is heaven for both of them.
I do have to brag that the applesauce from our mini apples is the sweetest and most flavorful you will ever taste. The regular jarred stuff has nothing in common, it’s all watered down and yucky.
Here are some interesting links to Food Not Lawns, Edible Estates, and an effort in San Francisco to revive the Victory Garden.
http://www.revivevictorygarden.org/resources.html
Dan sent me this NYT article today. I’ll try to post some of our garden photos in the next few days…
Banking on Gardening
By MARIAN BURROS
June 11, 2008
CASSANDRA FEELEY prefers organic ingredients, especially for her baby, but she finds it hard to manage on her husband’s salary as an Army sergeant. So this year she did something she has wanted to do for a long time: she planted vegetables in her yard to save money.
“One organic cucumber is $3 and I can produce it for pennies,” she said.
For her first garden, Ms. Feeley has gone whole hog, hand-tilling a quarter acre in the backyard of her house near the Fort Campbell Army base in Kentucky. She has put in 15 tomato plants, five rows of corn, potatoes, cucumbers, squash, okra, peas, watermelon, green beans. An old barn on the property has been converted to a chicken coop, its residents arriving next month; the goats will be arriving next year.
“I spent $100 on it and I know I will save at least $75 a month on food,” she said.
She is one of the growing number of Americans who, driven by higher grocery costs and a stumbling economy, have taken up vegetable gardening for the first time. Others have increased the size of their existing gardens.
Seed companies and garden shops say that not since the rampant inflation of the 1970s has there been such an uptick in interest in growing food at home. Space in community gardens across the country has been sold out for several months. In Austin, Tex., some of the gardens have a three-year waiting list.
George C. Ball Jr., owner of the W. Atlee Burpee Company, said sales of vegetable and herb seeds and plants are up by 40 percent over last year, double the annual growth for the last five years. “You don’t see this kind of thing but once in a career,” he said. Mr. Ball offers half a dozen reasons for the phenomenon, some of which have been building for the last few years, like taste, health and food safety, plus concern, especially among young people, about global warming.
But, Mr. Ball said, “The big one is the price spike.” The striking rise in the cost of staples like bread and milk has been accompanied by increases in the price of fruits and vegetables.
“Food prices have spiked because of fuel prices and they redounded to the benefit of the garden,” Mr. Ball said. “People are driving less, taking fewer vacations, so there is more time to garden.”
Each spring for the last five years, the Garden Writers Association has had TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, a polling firm, conduct a national consumer telephone survey asking gardeners what makes up the greatest share of their garden budgets. “The historic priorities are lawns, annuals, perennials, then vegetables, followed by trees and shrubs,” said Robert LaGasse, executive director of the association. This year, vegetables went from fourth place to second, which Mr. LaGasse called “an enormous attitude shift.”
People like Rita Gartin of Ames, Iowa, are part of that shift. Last year she kept a small garden. This year it has tripled in size into a five-by-seven-foot plot because, Ms. Gartin said, “The cost of everything is going up and I was looking to lose a few pounds, too; so it’s a win-win situation all around.”
Ms. Gartin, who fits gardening into her 12-hour workday as an interior designer and property manager, is not intimidated by the 20 kinds of vegetables she has planted: she was raised on a farm with a giant garden. A fence has been erected to keep the deer and people out, and it’s where the pole beans and snap peas are already climbing.
She is ready to take a stab at canning, but reserves the right to freeze everything instead, she said.
“I probably spent maybe $50 for everything and that’s less than a week’s cost of groceries or the price of a gym,” she said.
Seed companies and garden centers say they didn’t see the rush coming. There wasn’t any buildup last year, said Barbara Melera, the co-owner of the D. Landreth Seed Company in New Freedom, Pa., who takes the pulse of gardeners at the 13 garden shows she attends around the country each year.
“We pack for all the shows and bring 16 different beans, 10 packets for each kind,” Ms. Melera said. In earlier years, by the time the shows end in March, she said, “we are lucky if we have sold two of the 10 packets.”
“This year,” she said, “we sold out the first show and literally sold hundreds. We never sell any corn; this year we sold out of corn by the end of the season. We saw the same thing in the mail order business.”
She said the greatest demand was for what she calls “survival vegetables”: peas, beans, corn, beets, carrots, broccoli, kale, spinach and the lettuces. “It was so different from what it has been in prior years,” she added.
Randy Martell, one of the owners of the Garden Factory in Rochester, says it isn’t just vegetables. “The potted fruit trees were sold out by the first week of May,” he said. “Blueberries, raspberries and grapes are sold out. I think those sales have doubled. Overall sales are up about 30 percent.”
Dottie Wright, greenhouse manager at one of the Dammann’s Lawn, Garden and Landscaping Centers in Indianapolis, said she talks to people every day who are starting their first vegetable garden. “If they don’t have a yard they try containers for tomatoes and herbs. We can’t keep the herbs in this year.”
Thrilled as gardening experts are about this phenomenon, they know that many first timers don’t have any idea how much sweat equity is involved.
“Many people I sold seeds to have never gardened before,” Ms. Melera said, “and we have to find a way to educate them so the experience is successful. They have got to be taught.”
Mr. Ball of Burpee knows some of the new gardeners won’t stick with gardening beyond the first year. “Some people can’t get with the idea of digging a hole; getting buggy, sticky and hot,” he said. “Gardening is an active hobby; it’s a commitment.”
Doreen G. Howard, a former garden editor for Woman’s Day and now a writer for The American Gardener, is one of the committed. She has had a vegetable garden for most of the last 25 years. This year she has quadrupled the size of her vegetable plot in Roscoe, Ill., because of the economy and because she thinks the quality of store-bought produce has deteriorated. Once vegetables were just 5 percent of her garden; now they are 20 percent.
“Food prices have gotten to the point where we are seeing the difference,” she said. “It’s pushing our budget and we are a two-income family. It was never a concern before.” Ms. Howard said her grocery bill for two went from $100 a week to $140 a week this year.
She has chosen many vegetables that freeze well, investing in a secondhand freezer to store the bounty. She plans to dry the herbs that grow on the back porch next to boxes of mesclun, and to make pickles from the cucumbers and raisins from the grapes — her newest addition. And she is looking forward to a cellar full of Peruvian blue potatoes.
Some of Ms. Howard’s increased harvest will also go to food pantries through an organization called Plant a Row for the Hungry, which encourages gardeners to plant extra vegetables to share with the poor.
“I’m hoping to take $20 a week off my grocery bill,” she said. This is in the low range, according to Mr. Ball, who says a $100 investment will produce $1,000 to $1,700 worth of vegetables.
Ms. Gartin, now in her second year, says gardening is worth the effort.
“I got soft calluses from hoeing and digging,” she said, adding cheerfully, “but my fingernails are still pretty — long and not chipped. I probably spent 30 hours putting the garden in, and when I’d come into the house I’d be covered in sweat. But now it’s pretty easy because of all the rain we’ve had.”
And the vegetables, she said, are “awesome.” “It’s a totally different flavor from what you buy in the store. It’s exciting to go out and pick the fruits of your labor.”
More reasons to NOT let your baby cry it out
REASON #1
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Mom in New York finds snake in crib, coiled around baby’s leg
By the Associated Press
Article Launched: 06/11/2008 07:51:17 AM PDT
BRENTWOOD, N.Y. – A woman who awoke to her baby’s cries was shocked to peer into the crib and find a foot-long snake wrapped around her 7-month-old daughter’s leg.
Cari Abatemarco said she was visiting family in the Long Island town of Brentwood last week when she made the startling discovery.
“Once I lifted her up and the snake fell off of her, she stopped crying. But then I was the one crying all night,” Abatemarco told Newsday. She was in town from Troy, in upstate New York.
A relative removed the hissing snake from the crib with a back scratcher, and placed it in a bucket until animal control officers arrived. The child was unharmed.
The reptile, identified as a non-venomous California king snake, didn’t belong to Abatemarco’s family members. Officials say they don’t know where the snake came from.
The animal is being cared for at a Long Island animal shelter.
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REASON #2
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3-month-old Phoenix girl killed by ants during nap
Susan Carroll and Judi Villa
published in the Arizona Republic
May 20, 2003 12:00 AM
A 3-month-old girl was killed by ants while she was napping in a crib at a baby-sitter’s home Monday afternoon, Phoenix police said.
The caregiver, who has not been identified, put the infant down for a nap about 1:30 p.m., police Detective Tony Morales said.
When she went to check on the little girl a half-hour later, she was covered in ants and was in “severe respiratory distress,” he said.
Autumn White had “hundreds of ant bites” on her legs and her throat was swollen, Assistant Phoenix Fire Chief Bob Khan said. She was not breathing when firefighters arrived at the home near 83rd Avenue and Mohave Street.
“A child that age probably just couldn’t take the venom,” Morales said.
Khan said the baby may have had an allergic reaction, with the poison from the ants causing her respiratory problems.
At least 40 deaths occur annually in the United States from reactions to insect stings. A severe allergic reaction, anaphylaxis, occurs in 0.5 to 5 percent of the country’s population, ccording to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Children and senior citizens are more vulnerable.
“Their resistance is less,” Khan said. “They don’t have the ability to recover like adults do.”
Autumn was flown to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. After the little girl died, firefighters again were dispatched to the home, where the baby-sitter was so distraught that she was taken to an emergency room for treatment.
The black ants in the baby-sitter’s home were about one-eighth of an inch long and apparently crawled into the home between the carpeting and the wall, police said.
Neighbors in the new, upscale tract home development in southwest Phoenix said they started noticing more ants when daily temperatures started rising.
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REASON #3
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Our neighbor went over to a friend’s house to visit, leaving her husband in charge of the kids. The older boy went to bed, but the younger one (around 18 months at the time) refused to go to sleep.
He was playing with an empty soda can and started screaming and freaking out. The father was sick of him not sleeping and sick of listening to him scream, so he put him in his room alone. The child kept screaming and would not calm down.
Finally the father went in to check on the child and found his crib full of blood. Apparently the child had cut himself on the empty can (stuck his finger in the hole, presumably) and had a fairly deep cut that was bleeding profusely.
This was passed on to me by the friend whose house the mother was visiting. The father panicked and called for the mother to come home immediately. The child had lost quite a bit of blood by that time.
I’m not sure why the father didn’t notice the child’s bleeding finger when he put him in his crib. Maybe it was dark?
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REASON #4
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My own baby (16mo at the time) was sleeping in his bed at around 9:30pm. I was visiting with a houseguest in the backyard, out on the porch, and heard my baby wake up and start screaming.
Having company, I was tempted to let him cry for a minute to see if he would go back to sleep, but I got up and went to him. Ninety-five percent of the time when he cries at night he either has to pee, has *just* peed in his diaper, is hot/cold, or is sick.
He had tried to crawl off the end of the bed for some reason, and had gotten wedged between the bed and a rocking chair. He wasn’t hurt, but he was very scared.
Normally he stays in bed until I come to him. Occasionally he will climb over the side and get out of bed if he wakes up, then he comes to find me. He must have gotten confused in the dark and thought the end of the bed was the side. Anyway, I’m REALLY glad I went to him quickly!
48 MPG? Ooooo, you sexy beast!
Guys who drive fuel-efficient cars are hot, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so.
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Your fuel efficiency is so hot
by Judy Berman
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/06/05/fuel_efficiency/index.html
Put away your books, kids, it’s time for a pop quiz. When you picture the kind of car a high school boy might call a “real pussy wagon,” what do you see?
A. A vintage Mustang convertible
B. A giant, hulking SUV
C. A tricked-out van with tinted windows and shag carpeting
D. A sensible, hybrid sedan that gets upward of 40 miles per gallon
Well, regardless of what your little brother thinks, ladies love that hot, hot gas mileage. A new study conducted by General Motors has found that 88 percent of women would rather meet a guy with a fuel-efficient vehicle than a dude with a sports car.
Besides being great news for Larry David, the report confirms something women have known all along — namely, that men care a whole hell of a lot more about expensive, gas-guzzling cars that accelerate from zero to 60 in half a nanosecond than their potential mates ever could. (Reminds you a little bit of the whole “Does size matter debate,” doesn’t it?) I know I’m not the only girl out there who sees a guy in a Hummer and wonders what he’s compensating for. Conventional wisdom holds that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats his mother, so why should Mother Earth be any exception?
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I’d love to see a study on the average penis size of a male hulking SUV driver. I’d bet $50 it’s smaller than average.
In the comments for the article linked above, several guys wrote in that no woman in her right mind would choose a guy driving a Prius over a guy driving a Ferrari.
Well first of all, I have NEVER seen a man driving an expensive sports car (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lotus, and the like) who wasn’t at LEAST 65 years old. I check out the drivers of those cars every single time I see one, just to try to prove my theory wrong, but so far, not once. They are solely driven by old guys sporting a spare tire, as far as I can tell.
Same with any guy driving a Corvette. They seem to all be old men who always wanted a Corvette, but couldn’t afford it until they were ancient enough to look ridiculous driving one.
So given the choice between a slightly geeky young Prius driver and a fattish old guy squashed into a tiny sports car that he spent WAY too much money on, I’ll take the geeky guy with good MPG, thanks very much. Any day.
I like Aston Martins and old classic Jaguars, but rarely see anyone driving one.
Full disclosure…my husband drives a Honda Civic Hybrid. Sorry ladies, he’s taken.
I guess I should take my eBay auction down too
German parents post baby on eBay for 1 euro
May 24th, 2008 | BERLIN — Authorities in southern Germany have taken custody of a 7-month-old boy after his parents posted an ad on eBay offering to sell him for one euro, or about $1.60.
Police spokesman Peter Hieber says the baby was placed in the care of youth services in the southwestern Allgaeu region.
Hieber said on Saturday that the mother told police the Internet ad was only a joke. Authorities have begun an investigation into possible child trafficking against the parents.
No offers were made for the child in the two hours and 30 minutes the ad was posted. The Internet auction site deleted the posting later.
Several people who saw the ad alerted police.
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Ugh, I feel so sorry for those parents. Who doesn’t feel like selling a 7-month old from time to time? I make that joke about selling my kids on eBay at least once a week. I haven’t actually gone as far as to create a posting for them, but come on…child trafficking, for gods sake. Give me a break.
I would go for at least 20 Euros, but offer free shipping.
Kidding, OK? Kidding!
At Valentine’s wedding…
From left to right:
* My aunt Heidi (mother of the bride, youngest sister of my father)
* My second cousin Hana, daughter of …
* My first cousin Anni, daughter of my father’s oldest sister)
* Me, with a parasitic twin. Oops no…that’s just a sleeping Adrian strapped to my back.
In back:
* My charming husband Dan
* My charming uncle Dave (married to my aunt Polly, middle sister of my father)
It was a lovely wedding, we very much enjoyed it. Got to ride a narrow-gauge train to the ceremony!
Nursing policewoman to the rescue!
This story is great on so many levels. First.. a policewoman, second…a breastfeeding policewoman, third… a breastfeeding policewoman who is a lifesaving hero (shero?), and fourth…a breastfeeding policewoman who is a lifesaving hero and modestly considers it all just part of her job.
I have the feeling that if this were to happen here though, someone would be taking her to court.
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From Hugh Riminton
CNN International
JIANGYOU, China (CNN) — A Chinese policewoman is being hailed as a hero after taking it upon herself to breast-feed several infants who were separated from their mothers or orphaned by China’s devastating earthquake.
Police officer Jiang Xiaojuan, 29, was feeding nine babies at one point.
Officer Jiang Xiaojuan, 29, the mother of a 6-month-old boy, responded to the call of duty and the instincts of motherhood when the magnitude 7.9 quake struck on May 12.
“I am breast-feeding, so I can feed babies. I didn’t think of it much,” she said. “It is a mother’s reaction, and a basic duty as a police officer to help.”
The death toll in the earthquake jumped Thursday to more than 51,000, and more than 29,000 are missing, according to government figures. Thousands of children have been orphaned; many others have mothers who simply can’t feed them.
At one point, Jiang was feeding nine babies.
“Some of the moms were injured, their fathers were dead … five of them were orphans. They’ve gone away to an orphanage now,” she said. Watch the officer care for babies »
She still feeds two babies, including Zhao Lyuyang, son of a woman who survived the quake but whose breast milk stopped flowing because of the traumatic conditions.
“We walked out of the mountains for a long time. I hadn’t eaten in days when I got here and my milk was not enough,” said that mother, Zhao Zong Jun. “She saved my baby. I thank her so much, I can’t express how I feel.”
Liu Rong, another mother whose breast milk stopped in the trauma, was awed by Jiang’s kindness.
“I am so touched because she has her own baby, but she fed the disaster babies first,” Liu said. “If she hadn’t fed my son, he wouldn’t have had enough to eat.”
Jiang has became a celebrity, followed by local media and proclaimed on a newspaper front page as “China’s Mother No. 1.”
She’s embarrassed by the fuss.
“I think what I did was normal,” she said. “In a quake zone, many people do things for others. This was a small thing, not worth mentioning.” See the quake zone »
There has been a huge outpouring of support from families who want to adopt babies orphaned by the quake. But that process takes time and there are mouths to feed.
Jiang misses her own son, who’s being cared for through the emergency by in-laws in another town, but she is aware of the new connections she’s made.
“I feel about these kids I fed just like my own. I have a special feeling for them. They are babies in a disaster.”
Rip him to shreds OK?
In which Keith flays Bush alive for his latest unbelievable stupidities, including saying that he has given up GOLF to show his support for the families of soldiers killed in Iraq. Nice work, Keith.
BTW, I posted before about supporting Hillary Clinton (once John Edwards was out of the race, that is), but now I’m pretty firmly in Obama’s camp.
Hillary has been pissing me off with all this ridiculous gas-tax-holiday bullshit pandering, and her hawkish “if Iran touches Israel I’ll blow it off the map”….is that really helping anything, Hill? Because you know, we’ve been trying that approach for a while now, and it hasn’t really been working so well.
Not to mention all the innocent Iranian civilians who are already living under a shitty insane government and who would now be well, blown off the map. Not so cool. If that’s the way it worked, then the US would deserve to be wiped off the map as well, considering all the political, social and environmental destruction our president has caused. We don’t deserve that, and Iranians don’t either.
Logo Story
I have been wanting a good logo for The Portable Baby ever since 2005, which is when I started that venture. I came up with a header image on the fly just to get something up on the page, and since I’m not an artist at all, this is what it turned out like:
It’s not completely horrible, but it’s not exactly memorable either. It is what it is, plain and simple. Like an REI catalogue page or something. Ho hum.
Late last year, I finally got around to working on the logo thing. I called a big design firm and asked them what a logo would cost. $4500, they told me.
Holy shit, I said to myself.
So then I outsourced. I found a logo designer in India who was charging a little bit less than half of that. I liked her stuff, she seemed entirely capable. I didn’t LOVE her stuff, but I felt like she knew what she was doing, and she had gotten rave reviews from former customers. And I’m no logo designer, what do I know…right? Leave it to a professional.
The lesson that I have learned this year? If I don’t love something, forget it. Drop it and move on to something else. Don’t buy it, don’t sign up for it. Life is too damn short. I don’t have nearly enough time or resources for all the stuff that I *do* love. If I don’t love it, it’s not right for me. Wait for the love to happen, THEN take action.
A prime example of that here. Logo Chick was nice enough, but she just never got what my business was about. I explained it all sooo many times, filled out an entire sheet with info on what I wanted the logo to do, what message I wanted to convey, what target market I was trying to reach, blah, blah, blah. Then I repeated myself in emails. She just NEVER GOT IT.
At first, I suggested using the initial letters of “The Portable Baby” to create a groovy design. Dan and I actually came up with something pretty cool on a scrap of paper, but then I think Adrian ate it. It disappeared during the height of his paper-eating phase. Then I forgot what we had done, and what it looked like. Sigh. But I was able to vaguely describe the idea to Pro Logo Chick, as you know, just an idea to potentially kick around.
Pro Logo Chick had a fairly decent rendition, after several misses. This was round five or six:
Not bad, right? But I was trying to imagine this on my website as-is, and it was just too blah, too abstract, too black-and-white. But a good start, I thought. I was thinking more along the lines of an illustrated, fancy something-something, and not a stick figure, but hey…I’m not the expert, right?
I said I liked this, but I needed to convey motion, travel, portability, getting out and going places. This? This was more like sitting under a tree. Not bad, but not exactly screaming THE PORTABLE BABY. More like, sit under a tree and hold your baby. I also asked for less abstraction and more color.
That’s when it got weird. She started coming up with some very bizarre and ugly stuff:
OK, WHY would I want the text all mashed into the image like that? Is there any possible way that someone could look at that and think that it was NOT a mistake? Ooops, my Photoshop text layer slid too far left. Should I fix it? No, I’ll send it to my client. And what’s with the font? Screams 1980s Geek to me. Atari anyone? How about a game of Space Invaders?
Plus wow…what a sophisticated concept. Those two DASHES to the left of the figure indicating motion. DASHES. WTF?
Oh, and here’s where she adds color. Did I already say WTF? Well just in case I didn’t…WTF?
So I said no, no, no, I DON’T LIKE THAT AT ALL. Please move the text away from the image. Get rid of those dashes. That color is ALL WRONG. And I explained the motion concept again. So she sent this:
Which is a mom and baby riding a flaming ski lift. Or at least that’s what it looks like to me. Pretty scary.
But wait, it was about to get scarier! After firmly nixing the flaming ski lift thing I suggested maybe, I don’t know, an arrow? How about an arrow to indicate motion?
She first ridiculed me (an arrow is WAY too obvious!), which I didn’t really get, because hey, I want to be obvious! I want people to look at this thing and say to themselves, THAT MEANS I CAN TAKE MY BABY ANYWHERE. They shouldn’t have to puzzle over it, like wonder if maybe it’s really a ski lift, and is it on fire?
It looks like it might be on fire! Yikes! I don’t want to ride a flaming ski lift with my baby! Fuck this place, I’m going to BabiesRUs!
Anyway yeah, obvious is good, I think. But noooo, not to Logo Chick. But she valiantly made an effort to incorporate some arrows.
This is where the mom and baby are riding the ski lift BACKWARDS. Because that would be fun, right? Not nerve-racking or anything. Especially when it’s time to get off the lift, and it’s moving backwards, and you have a baby in your lap….um, I am not trying to provoke a major anxiety attack in my audience, thanks very much. My target audience is stressed enough as it is.
.
And here’s where there’s a bear offstage…he is clawing the mom’s eyes out. You can see his claw piercing her eyeball here. Ouch!
Awesome, right? I was literally ready to tear my hair out at this point. Is she fucking with me?
IS SHE FUCKING KIDDING ME? WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD COME UP WITH THIS STUFF?
I think it was at that point that I just halted all correspondence with her. I just couldn’t take any more. Pointless. Pointless waste of time and money. She emailed me a few more times, asking if I was OK, could I get back to her, and I just couldn’t respond. Because if I did I would have to open a giant can of whup-ass and tell her she must be NUTS for sending me this kind of COMPLETE BULLSHIT.
I put the logo plans aside. I had been pretty excited, but this demoralized me. What a letdown. What a waste of money. I fiddled around with the initial concept, and made it somewhat palatable, but still…too abstract. Too blah. I didn’t want a stick figure. I wanted a beautiful illustrated logo, lively and descriptive and colorful. Memorable!
I have always loved the graphic product advertisements from the early-to-mid century. Mostly European products. Works of art. Everyone buys posters of these ads, they are in every little cafe and bistro, and you know, I don’t remember the last time anyone bought a poster of say, the IBM logo for the aesthetic viewing pleasure.
I know, not really a logo, but oh well. I wanted an illustrated logo. I had…nothing.
Time passed, nothing happened.
Then I got an email from Dominic, with a link to a very funny website created by a friend and ex-coworker of his, Tina Kugler. (There is an umlaut over the U in Kugler, but I can’t do it on my keyboard without major machinations, and it’s already getting late.)
I found Tina’s drawings hilarious, and I loved her style too.
In one of her drawings, she mentioned looking for freelance work:
And DING! The light bulb went off over my head. Maybe TINA could do my dream logo! Obviously she gets motherhood. She’s funny. She’s amazingly talented. Why not ask, right?
So I asked. I told her very, very briefly what I was looking for. I told her I didn’t have a lot of money to spend, since I had already fruitlessly WASTED a load of it on Logo Chick. I even sent some of the worst that Logo Chick had to offer as an example of what I was NOT looking for.
And Tina? Bless her, she said yes. She said she would try to work on some rough sketches and send them to me, when she got a chance. She does have three small children mind you. THREE, including a 9mo baby. So I figured, I don’t know…2010 maybe? Take my two kids, add one more….yeesh.
But no…amazingly she came up with not one, not two, but THREE awesome sketches. THE SAME DAY. I picked one (hard to do) and she sent a more polished sketch back, almost immediately. And finally, today, she sent me this:
Which is more than I ever hoped for. Isn't it great? I just love, love LOVE it.
The only thing that might need to be changed is the title, because it's not quite as readable when you shrink it down to website logo header size. So I'll probably take out her hand-drawn title and add in "The Portable Baby" in my current Maiandra GD font. I've already checked it out, it looks good.
I am SO pleased. More than pleased, I'm thrilled. It's everything I wanted. I can't wait to make T-shirts!
So if you have any illustration needs, like maybe you need a change of address postcard or a product label, or a party invitation, or someone to illustrate a children’s book or maybe even just a tattoo, Tina is your woman. Did you know that she worked on Dora the Explorer? Spread the word. She ROCKS. Here’s her website again:
http://tinakugler.blogspot.com/
Now I just need to update my website. I can’t wait to go live with my new look. Exciting! Yippee!
Oh, and Logo Chick? IN YOUR FACE, BABY!
I heart FOTC
I can’t stop posting these Flight of the Conchords videos, each one if funnier than the last. This video is right up there with Business Time for hilarity, and bonus points for being a Prince-inspired groovefest.
So then I bought a new fridge
Our refrigerator sucks ass. We bought it from the previous owners of our house, because we didn’t want to move our old one from the townhouse. It looks nice, but like I said…it sucks ass.
On the left back side of the fridge shelves, things freeze solid. They also freeze solid inside the vegetable crisper. In case you are wondering, freezing is not exactly fantastic for vegetables. They get nasty and mushy. Frozen lettuce anyone? Horrible. So turn the temperature up a bit you say? Ah but then on the top shelf and on the right, it’s too warm. If I turn it up any more, then food outside the cold spots will spoil.
The icemaker has been touch and go for about a year. You set it to give you ice cubes and it crushes the ice. You set it to crush ice and it gives you cubes. Finally it gave out completely. We have had no ice at all for a month or two now.
Did I mention that this fridge sucks ass? Oh, and we already spent a few hundred bucks on fixing an electrical problem. There was a wire underneath that had frayed all the way through. Sweet. That meant not only no ice, but no water. It was nice to have the water dispenser fixed, but then the icemaker went out again.
After I had the pot lid fall on my head the other day, I really, really needed ice. No ice to be had! I ended up using a bag of frozen succotash to soothe my bloody bonk.
Then today, I really could have used a bit of ice to cool Adrian’s burned feet. But did we have ice? HELL NO!
I was so goddamn mad about the refrigerator being constantly on the fritz, I went online while Adrian was sleeping in my lap today and bought a new refrigerator. A nice new refrigerator, the kind I want, with refrigerator on top and freezer down below. None of this ridiculous side-by-side space-wasting bullshit. No more cold spots freezing my produce and ruining it.
Before you think I’m some crazy, extravagant shopaholic, let me tell you that I have several years worth of points earned on my credit card. I didn’t even know I had them until recently, when I clicked on a link on my online credit card statement and found that I had 160,000 points. 160,000 points can get you a lot of fancy stuff. I was mulling it over, trying to decide what to get with my points, but today’s events clinched it. I don’t want anything with those points more than a new refrigerator. Especially since I otherwise can’t afford to buy one.
When you are having a very bad day, it’s nice to get a free new fancy refrigerator. Next emergency that arises, at least I’ll have ICE.
KitchenAid 24.8 Cu. Ft. Architect Series II
Recovery
Here’s the burn victim, feeling much better after napping for two hours with bags of cold water tied around his feet, and lots of ibuprofen.
Blistered baby foot
Lessons learned today:
1) If you are a baby, do not take off your shoes and then step onto a hot deck that has been baking in direct sunlight for several hours.
2) If you are this baby’s mama, do not ever take your eyes off the baby or he will do something like take his shoes off and step onto a very hot deck.
P.S. Motherhood completely sucks sometimes.
P.S.S. Who the hell knew that our deck could get hot enough to blister feet?
Today’s disaster is…
Honestly, I can’t believe the shit that happens around here lately. Skylights randomly shatter, I’m collapsing in the driveway, getting locked out of the house on a freezing-cold day, I get horrible, incapacitating infections, or maybe just heavy metal objects fall on my head and dent it. My head still hurts, by the way. I can barely even comb my hair.
Regardless, I’d just like to give a big “What the FUCK?” shout-out to the universe. Cut it out, will you?
Today’s disaster happened to Adrian, not me. I don’t know which is worse. It’s pretty goddamn horrible when something bad happens to your baby. On the other hand, my kids rely on me to take care of them, so they are fairly well screwed when things happen to me, too.
It was very warm this morning, and the kids were happily playing in the backyard together. Somewhere along the way Adrian took his shoes off. He would have been wearing the shoes that *don’t* come off easily, but one of those mysteriously disappeared last week. Argh.
Around noon I was finishing up washing a few dishes, and getting ready to go call the kids in to go to the Campbell Farmer’s Market to do a little shopping. All of a sudden I hear a piercing scream from Adrian. The kind that strikes fear into a mama’s heart.
I ran outside and he was on the deck in front of Dan’s office on his hands and knees, screaming and wiggling backwards, trying to get off the deck. I knew right away that he was screaming because the deck had been baking in the sun, and was probably hot on his feet. I snatched him up and held his foot, only to feel a weird wrinkle on the bottom of it. Weird wrinkle?
I looked and his poor little foot was *already* blistered up, with a patch of white on the outer ball of his foot. I ran in to the bathroom sink and ran cold water over both his feet. Shit! How could the deck get THAT hot? It’s not like it’s made of sheet metal, it’s composite wood/plastic! And it’s not even that hot outside!
My poor baby screamed and screamed and screamed. I put his feet in a bowl of cold water and had Dan bring me a pair of earplugs, as my eardrums were in grave danger of being shattered. I couldn’t get his feet to stay in the bowl though, he kept kicking in pain and splashing the water everywhere.
As soon as I took his feet out of the water though, things got much worse. I totally understood how he felt, having been through some bad burns myself. The second you take the burn out of cold water, that searing, flaming please-knock-me-out-until-its-over burn pain comes right back.
I put some thin socks on him, thinking that would help keep his feet wet and cool and also protect the incipient blisters from being scraped or broken, since he was kicking around a lot. After a while I took them off, since he kept pulling at them.
Finally I ended up tying ziploc bags full of cold water around his ankles, and that worked better than anything else. Adrian was still screaming bloody murder, but I briefly took the bags off and the screaming got a whole lot worse, so I put them back on. And I say that casually, like it was no big deal, but you try tying bags full of water around the feet of a screaming child in pain. Not a task for sissies, I’ll tell you that. It took a while.
It was his naptime, and he had been screaming in pain for a solid hour, so once I got the bags tied back on, I rocked him in the rocking chair and he finally fell asleep. Still twitching and moaning though.
I had given him a big dose of ibuprofen at the beginning of the ordeal, so I was hoping that it would kick in at some point and give him some relief.
He slept two hours on my lap with the water bags on his feet, and just woke up a few minutes ago in a much happier state. His poor feet are a mess though. Big poofy blisters on the outer pad of each foot. His heel is OK, but the rest of his foot will take a while to heal.
So now what? Shit, he isn’t going to be able to walk for a while, maybe a week. I wonder if he’ll go back to crawling, or will he insist on walking and just scream a lot? I’ll carry him around as much as possible, of course. Thank goodness for baby carriers. But now he’s used to being independent, and moving around and playing without me.
Ugh, this is going to be a giant headache. On the other hand he has been out-of-control high-maintenance lately, pushing chairs and benches up to the counter and the kitchen table in order to get to all kinds of things that he shouldn’t. Pulling dinner plates down, knocking over glasses of water, grabbing my cell phone, my keys…I haven’t able to take my eye off him inside for more than a second without him causing some sort of of havoc. Outside has been a much safer place for him to be…until today.
Anyway, this might be a nice sort of respite, or pure hell for the next week. I’m not sure which. I’m just going to try to keep his feet as clean and dry as possible, and try to keep him from walking for as long as I can.
Jesus Christ…what next? Oh, pretend I never asked that question. I’m afraid to find out.
And yes, I do feel like a bad mom for letting him play outside without shoes on. Except I didn’t know that he had taken his shoes off. Yep, I feel like a bad mom for that too. Sigh.
Photos of the feet forthcoming. Yikes, poor baby.
More Flight of the Conchords hilarity
Jemaine and Bret are so funny, and so musically talented. Dan and I have been watching the first season of their HBO show on DVD (thanks Netflix!) and cracking up almost constantly. I just bought the CD, too, which is just songs from the show, but only *some* songs, not all.
I think this is the very first time we’ve seen an HBO show that is still on the air, by the way. We’re just getting around to putting “The Wire” on our Netflix queue, now that it has been on for five seasons and just ended a few months ago. Sigh.
Anyway, apart from Business Time, which is still laugh out loud funny every time I watch it, these three are my favorites so far. Be sure to turn up the volume so you can catch all the clever lyrics.
IF YOU’RE INTO IT
OMG, all the weird instruments! The rhymes with you, lewd, food and dude…
FOR ALL THE LADIES IN THE WORLD
The visuals for this song are not funny as the others, but the song itself is a total jam and the lyrics are of course hilarious. The song is longer on the CD. And it wasn’t until I read the lyrics on YouTube that I realized that they are NOT saying “Just wanna do something special, *fuck* all the ladies in the world.” But I ‘ll bet they are purposely trying to make it sound like that.
BRET, YOU’VE GOT IT GOING ON
Jemaine is so sexy. I love his “ogre that works in a library” look, and that smooooooooth deep voice. Yeah baby!
Pothead!
This afternoon I was cleaning up my garage/warehouse/workspace and opened up a tall cupboard. While I was looking at the shelf in front of me, a big heavy stock pot lid ROLLED OFF THE TOP SHELF AND HIT ME ON THE HEAD.
Did the flat side hit me in the head? No…that would have hurt, for sure. But not as much as being hit WITH THE FALLING EDGE OF A HEAVY STOCK POT LID.
What the FUCK. It hurt *so* bad. I was running in circles, alternately crying and shouting the filthiest obscenities I could think of. Thank goodness the kids were with Kim in the backyard and didn’t witness that outburst.
When I finally could bear the pain enough to stop circling and swearing, I looked in the mirror and saw a bloody ridge on my head. The goddamn POT LID hit me that hard. Not like, major bleeding, but bloody, with a huge long lumpy ridge. Like the typical egg you get from a bad head bonk, except long.
Fucking POT LID! What was it doing up there, you ask? I don’t know, last time I checked it was ON A GIANT STOCKPOT that I don’t use that often. It certainly wasn’t meant to be loose and rolling around. I threw that fucker across the yard though, with all my strength. Then I had to go back and pick it up, which totally sucked, because if I could I would melt that bastard down and bury it a thousand feet in the earth. ASSHOLE FUCKING POT LID. I HATE IT.
Several hours later, I have a major headache. And I still have a big bloody ridge on my head. I looked up skull fractures, but unless I’m puking or seeing stars, there’s not much to be done. I’m not puking or seeing stars, I just have a bad headache, a stiff neck, and I’m totally pissed off.
Well, no more working tonight. I’m taking a break from work for now and going to watch some TV with an icebag on my head.
Old-School Baby Care
Not what your parents did. I’m talking about what your great-grandparents did with their babies.
It turns out that what they did jives pretty closely with what we modern moms do. I was reading "Infant Care" by Mary Mills West from 1923, and most of it was exactly what you read in standard childcare manuals today.
Baby care doesn’t really change all too much over time. Being a good mother and taking care of your baby was hard back then:
Oh my god, can I just tattoo that last sentence on my bicep? Or at least have it printed on a T-shirt. Amen sister, amen. Being a good mother and taking care of your baby is still hard today.
I literally fall into bed at the end of each day, completely and utterly wiped out. Chasing after two boys is like running a marathon every single day. Well, Julian is not bad at this point, but Adrian requires constant monitoring, following, redirection and retrieval.
On other topics… breast was best back then, just as it is today. “Artificial milk” sounds pretty bad though, it was basically scalded cow’s milk with sugar added.
But look here, what’s this?
A soap stick! Yikes, glad I never had any issue with getting my kids to poop on the potty. Well, it took Adrian until he was about 3 months old to get down with the program in that regard, but it turns out that he just wanted to be held on the big toilet, like the big people. Once he wasn’t so floppy and I was able to hold him there on my lap, no problem. He started happily doing his daily poops in the toilet like the rest of the family.
Granted, it does say to just use the soap stick for 2-3 days max, to get things started, but wow. That is definitely an old-school idea from another era. My grandparents were all about enemas and suppositories. My grandfather loved to joke with me about this…”Better give her an enema!” he would call out to my grandmother if I was misbehaving, and then shoot me a wink. I thought that was a hysterical joke too, probably because I’ve never had one. And because it had to do with butts, and butts are always funny.
The manual is totally right though…establishing regularity of habit is a big help, and not just for pottying. As a single person, I used to be very freestyle about things and I didn’t like routines very much. I relished doing different things at different times. The longer I mother these kids of mine though, the more I learn how crucial daily routines are to their general well-being. If they can eat, sleep and poop at pretty much the same time every day, they thrive. One day of late meals, late bedtimes or missed naps and all hell breaks loose. Major crabbiness ensues, the burden of which falls squarely on me. And we all know that if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. A crabby Mama does not make for a happy household.
Here’s a link to my popular post on pottying your baby part-time . Without the soap stick.
Anyway, not bad for 1923. In some ways I’ll bet it’s better advice than a manual from say, 1953. You can read the whole manual at the first link in this post. Quite interesting.
I got Jetty!
If you go back in the archives for this site, you will find this post, in which I covet a nifty whiz-bang potty called the DoBidet. It has heated seats, washes you with warm water, and even dries you afterwards.
Well, I never got one. Boo hoo. It was too expensive, and I wasn’t really sure how it would be installed. Too mystifying.
That was a long time ago, but let me tell you…every time I sit on the toilet scrubbing my ass with half a roll of toilet paper post-poop, I feel SURE that there is a better solution out there.
Well whaddya know……there is! The Jetty! I randomly found it on some green product newsletter, was intrigued, and went to go check it out online.
First of all, it sounded easy to install. Second of all, it made sense, the engineering is simple. Third of all, I love the Indo-English copy on the site, which dished out fascinating facts like these, under the MEN category:
—————————————————
Personal Hygiene
Wiping with toilet paper does not adequately clean the hairy anal area. The process of wiping with toilet paper also greatly increases the chances of soiling one’s hands – despite this, 30 % of MEN do not wash their hands after using the restroom. The Jetty is a HANDS FREE cleaning device which provides a healthier way to feel clean, fresh, and confident all day long.
Intimacy
The Jetty will add an extra dimension to Men’s attractiveness – something they must experience in their intimate relationship!
Medical Conditions
Men often suffer from Constipation, Hemorrhoids, and various other medical conditions that make the use of toilet paper painful and undesirable. A precise and soothing stream of water from the Jetty lubricates the anus muscles as well as softens the hard stool, and thus reduces the discomfort caused during defecation.
—————————————————-
Duuuuude, the hairy anal area is not adequately cleaned by toilet paper! Yuck. I had an immediate mental image of crusty butt boogers. Nasty!
I’m not sure what they are referring to in the “Intimacy” section, but I imagine that when crusty poop crumbs are no longer adhering to your hairy anal area, that would indeed boost your attractiveness, no?
Anyhooo…..I’m really glad that I’m not a guy. Nasty!
I was all ready to order anyway, and then I found that by entering the code “GW” I could get half off. Sweet! I had a few questions about how to correctly ID my toilet so I would be sure to get the right kind of Jetty, so I sent an email and got an immediate response from Amit in Jetty Customer Service. He called me and we discussed my toilet for about ten minutes, making sure that everything was A-OK. He did everything but come over and personally hose my butt. Very nice man.
The Jetty arrived, and it was exciting. Just reading the manual was awesome, mostly because of all the euphemisms used for your poophole, like “the dirty body part”, “your private area” etc. But what was hilarious is that, amidst all the euphemisms, suddenly the manual would just bust out and say it…ANUS. And at one point they dropped all decorum and simply called it “Jetty – the best butt washer ever!”
Once I got through the manual and wiped the tears from my eyes, I set about installing my Jetty. It *was* easy. The only part that took any thought whatsoever was adjusting the water pressure coming out from the wall valve, so that when I had the Jetty on at full blast, it didn’t spray wildly across the room. No prob, I just turned the valve down until my Jetty had a forceful but not messy stream when wide open, and that was it. After that I became just another happy Jetty user. Very, very nice. You could practically eat off my bunghole, I dare say. It’s pristine.
So the days passed, and every bowel movement was simply another thrilling opportunity to rock my Jetty. Yahoo! Until yesterday….
Yesterday I sat down, did my thang, and reached for the Jetty knob as usual. BUTT (heh), instead of the soothing, cooling stream of water pouring forth, I instead was REAMED by a freaking FIRE HOSE BLAST of water that blasted me so hard I swear a few drops came out my nose. Can you say “high colonic”? Whoa….it was shocking, to say the least.
I scrambled off the toilet, dripping wet and frankly… a little traumatized. What the hell had just happened? I inspected the wall valve and someone had turned it back up to its normal setting. Who? Who would mess with my Jetty like that? Dan? One of the kids?
I doubted it would be the kids, not because they wouldn’t LOVE to mess with that if they could, but because the wall valve is hard to turn, and requires some strength. I don’t think either of them could manage it.
I asked Dan and he just looked at me like I was nuts. True, the last thing he would do is mess around with toilet valves. Not his bag.
So it must be Beh, Housekeeper Supreme. Once I eliminated all the Usual Suspects, I could imagine exactly how it went down.
Beh is cleaning the toilet, as he does every week. He flushes, scrubs some more, goes to flush again, and then notices that the tank is not filling up nearly as fast as it used to. (This is a side effect of lowering the wall valve pressure, there is simply not as much water out as before. No biggie, I don’t normally flush twice in five minutes anyway).
“So”, says Beh to himself, “What is going on here? Ah, I see that the wall valve pressure is too low to fill up the tank quickly like it used to. The children must have changed the valve setting. I will fix this for Ms. Laura.” And he cranks the wall valve back up to full volume, not realizing that he is at that moment dooming me to the aforementioned Fire Hose Butt Blast.
Anyway, I haven’t mentioned it to him yet. There’s not really a subtle way to bring it up. “Oh, BTW…I was almost blasted across the room by my Jetty the other day while lubricating my anal muscles with a soothing cool stream, can you please not touch that valve anymore?”
I did find out one funny thing, and that’s that Dan thinks that the idea of a stream of water aimed at his “dirty body part” is horrible. He says he takes care of things just fine, and he will never, ever use my Jetty. At least not this week.
He doesn’t yet know about the Jetty “adding an extra dimension to Men’s attractiveness – something they must experience in their intimate relationship!” And I might have to bring up the Anal Booger thing, because I’m not sure that I could stay married to someone whose hairy anal area is not adequately cleaned. Now that I have JETTY, I am particular about these things, you know?
Oh. My. God. I just went to the Jetty website to check something and just saw a blurb describing it as the “Groom of the Stool”. That is simply too much. I don’t know how I missed that before, considering that it’s on EVERY PAGE.
Jetty makers, I love you.
A long week, this one
This week my babysitter Kim was out of town, as I mentioned in my previous post.
I started off the week thinking, oh, this is so great spending all this time with the kids. At the end of a week and a half of it, I’m thinking childlessness sounds pretty good. Yeesh.
I do OK when I can just let go of everything, but the thing is…I can’t. I can’t just let my customers wait forever for returned phone calls and orders shipping out. I can’t let the house become a complete wreck, although it’s constantly threatening to become that even WITH Beh here MWF.
So I race around trying to cram stuff in and slightly panicking at the thought of how far behind I’ve gotten, and then I start snapping at the kids and they get snappy and high-need right back and there you go.
While I am desperately trying to achieve the smallest task, Adrian runs around wreaking complete havoc. He deconstructs everything he touches. Pulls all the Tupperware out onto the floor of the kitchen. Turns trash cans upside down. Tears apart new disposable diapers. And while I am kept busy cleaning up the trail of destruction, he is meanwhile standing on top of a wobbly chair near some sharp points of furniture, waving his arms in the air. I just get EXHAUSTED.
It’s like some ridiculous farce at times…this whole Buster Keaton act of Adrian’s. I look away for a second (oh say, to deal with the whiny demands of a certain 4yo), look back and Adrian’s dangling from the face of a clock 12 stories up above a busy city street. Not really, but almost.
Time out – less work and more paying attention
Well, not really, but sort of. My babysitter Kim has been on vacation since last week, so I decided to just take it easy on work and spend the time with the kids while she is gone. Kim was nice enough to find a substitute to fill in while she is gone, but J and A aren’t the kinds of kids who happily latch onto just anyone. I’m sure Adrian would be freaking out with a new person, and I’d end up having to hold him most of the time anyway. So why bother paying money for the disappointed expectation that I’ll actually be able to get some work done? Might as well just skip it.
On that note, I’ve been taking the kids to the playground, on long walks, kicking the ball around the backyard in the afternoons, that kind of thing. The stuff I used to do all the time, but now rarely get a chance to because of this whole *business* thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my business and am totally grateful for it becoming a success so far. But I have been working every spare moment of the day and night for a year now, and quite a bit for the two years before that. It’s crazy. I’m about to hire a shipping/receiving person to take that piece over from me, and it will be a relief. Of course I still have to interview several people, and train the person chosen. Not exactly easy, but oh well. Growing pains are inevitable.
I feel like I’ve been missing out lately. For example, Adrian is having a major, major developmental burst right now. It’s so much fun to be with him and watch him evolve new skills, sometimes in the span of a single day.
Last week I finally realized that Adrian has been saying not just “Ehhhh DAT!”, but actually “I WANT THAT”. Like hello, a full-on three word sentence! Kim pointed it out to me a few weeks ago, but I didn’t really HEAR it until recently. Then I repeated to him, “I want that!” and he totally enunciated it. Which makes me feel like a complete moron for not clueing in until now.
He also says:
“There he is!” (when someone like Julian or Daddy comes in the room)
“Look!” (to show me something that he finds interesting)
“Ick!” (trash or icky stuff)
and brand new as of yesterday, but in full and frequent use today:
“Uh-oh!” (indicating that something has gone wrong, fallen, spilled, broken, etc. A VERY frequent occurrence around here)
and then the old standby “Doggie!”, which was his first word, and which was Julian’s first word as well. This word is often blended with “Daddy” so that we don’t know which one he’s saying. Sometimes he does a chanted medley of “Doggie, doggie, doggie, doddy, daddy, doggie, daddy, daddy, daddy, doggie, daddy…”
Other new developments:
He points to his crotch when he has to go potty! This one is quite awesome. He gets my attention and then says “Dat!” while pointing to his crotch. He even did it at the dentist the other day. I took him in the bathroom and he took a huge pee in the toilet. Not too shabby for a 14 month old.
Tonight at bedtime he got my attention, made the “milk” sign and then pointed to the rocking chair in his bedroom. He even went over to it and patted it, like “Sit HERE.” Very clear…he does not want to be nursed to sleep in the bed, he wants to be rocked and nursed to sleep in the rocking chair. OK! And then he went to sleep like a little lamb, rocked and nursed in said chair.
He has a huge interest in dogs, birds, and most animals. He says “DOGGIE!” loudly and excitedly any time he sees a dog. The tiniest little bird chirp outside also has his immediate attention. We have a very active bird nest on the front porch, and every time I take him out there he points to it excitedly and makes a little chirpy sound.
He makes a “playing boy noise” that is completely adorable. He will get a toy car, or a toy plane, or even a toy animal, and while moving it around he makes a noise like “kshhhhhhhh”, except it’s in this little baby voice…so unbelievably cute. It’s like the embryonic version of Julian making car vroom noises, or animal growling noises.
Tonight he had a toy alligator in the bath and was making the “kshhh!” noise with it, then he had a little picture book before bed and in it was a photo of an alligator. He pointed to it, said “Look!” and then made the growling/vrooming noise. Cute!
I keep trying to film this stuff on my Flip, but as soon as I break it out he and Julian want to come and grab the camera and watch videos on it. Makes it very difficult to capture anything…frustrating. I feel like every video ends with an outstretched hand reaching towards the camera.
I’ve been testing him with little things, like I say “Let’s go outside!” or “Put it in the trash!” and he responds by leading me outside or putting a piece of paper in the trash. He understands! So now I’m making a big effort to *explain* things to him, rather than just treating him like a passive participant.
He gives delicious little kisses. He comes at me and sort of mouths the point of my chin. Sometimes in the morning he wakes up and sleepily presses his open mouth against my cheek for a few seconds, then makes a little smack noise afterwards, like a real kiss. Can’t begin to tell you how sweet it is to wake up to sweet and loving baby boy kisses, it’s worth all the middle-of-the-night headbutting.
I am doing a lot of signing with him, but so far apart from “milk” (which he uses way too frequently!) he hasn’t signed back to me. I THINK he signed “More milk” yesterday, two signs together, but I might have been imagining it. Or maybe not. He does understand the signs I use with him, he just doesn’t do them back to me yet…except for “milk”. Just like Julian.
I think pointing to his crotch is a great potty sign. Much easier than trying to do a “shaking T” (for toilet) in ASL…which is not so simple for little hands. But anyone can understand the crotch-pointing.
Julian is also having a burst in his verbal skills as well. Today he used new and surprisingly advanced words *four* times to describe things. Now ask me what those words were…I can’t tell you. Don’t remember. Mommy brain. I just remember being surprised and thrilled four times today by something that Julian said, a turn of phrase, an idiomatic expression or big new word used properly in context. I swear I’ll commit them to memory from now on. At least *one* to use as an example. Argh.
I’m getting rather desperately behind in my work, but eh…as long as I get stuff shipped out within a decent timeframe, I don’t feel too bad. I do feel bad about sitting here writing this when I’m so behind on customer emails, but then again, this is a bit more important overall.
Tomorrow is a full day. I have a Pilates Reformer class in the morning, which I really enjoy, then it’s off to work at Julian’s preschool (with Adrian on my back the whole time), then home for lunch and THEN hopefully I can get some work done. I bought new wire shelving for the other wall in the garage, so hope to nearly double my storage space. Plus I got a sweet new shipping table for the middle of the garage, so I no longer have to pack boxes on top of the freezer chest, for crying out loud, and I can store boxes underneath. But yeah, now to assemble all this new stuff and get it organized. Sigh. Plus keep shipping on a regular schedule, moving towards hiring someone, updating my website, etc. Very, very overwhelming.
But I’m trying not to think about that right now. I’m thinking about my little boys, and what a nice week we’ve had so far, and how fast this time goes before it’s gone.
Life Before Death
Wow. These photos were taken of people before and after their death. Be sure to read the text. Very powerful.
Apparently there is one of a 17 month old baby that is in the actual exhibit. I’m glad they didn’t include that one online, I don’t think I could have handled it.
So sad for the people who had miserable, joyless lives that were then cut short. The woman who waited her whole life for retirement and then got cancer! Ugh. Carpe diem, indeed.
But the old woman in the last photo who spoke about becoming “one of the million, billion grains of sand in the desert”….that was nice. I suppose I think that way too. Not that I’m not terrified of death. But I’m not so terrified for *me* at this point. I’ve done a lot of things and lived a joyous, full life so far. I’m terrified however, at the idea of leaving behind two small and very needy children.
If no one is depending on you, then I think death becomes a different thing entirely.
A thrilling moment
With the warming spring weather, I’ve been letting Adrian toodle around nakeybutt, which he greatly enjoys. I spend a lot of time out in the garage packing up orders, so I put a sun hat, long-sleeved shirt, socks and shoes on Adrian and he runs around outside, chasing DOGGIE! and his big brother, and stopping to pee in the grass and then point it out to whoever might be around. DAT!
This, on top of our regular EC pottying routine, has meant that very few diapers are being used around here lately. A few if we are out in the car, or when Adrian is with his babysitter Kim, and one at night.
Well, Baby Boy just came over to me in my office, pointed to his penis and said “DAT!”, very urgently and enthusiastically. I set him on his potty and a huge pee ensued. He stood up, pointed at the potty with the pee inside, showed me what he had done (again with the DAT!) and took off to go play some more.
I love this age, 14 months old.
I love EC.
I love Spring!
Life is good.
More gifts from the Internet
Oh Internet…I love you so much. Now will you leave me alone and stop distracting me so that I can get some work done?
Stuff White People Like
Hot Chicks with Douchebags
Passive Aggressive Notes
It’s Business Time!
OMG, *hilarious*. Thanks to my girl Erika in Chicago for the link to this:
I am not a doll person
This is a scary weighted doll that I bought off eBay for doing baby carrier demos.
Pretty horrifying. Her hair is all weird and coarse, like it was cut with a butter knife by a crazy person, and her outfit is um…not exactly stylish. Like Holly Hobby mixed with clown.
And you know, I don’t like clowns. At all.
The kids are both fascinated and repelled by her. They want to touch her, but veeeeeeery carefully, like she is going to come to life and attack them at any moment.
She is very unlike our only other baby doll Paul (bought for Julian to prepare him for having a baby brother), who gets hugged and kissed and dragged around and dropped on his head. Paul is the best, because he never complains, no matter what you do to him…which is SO unlike a real baby.
Occasionally we waterboard Paul, and then squeeze him and watch him pee. Then he continues to leak water and leave wet spots all over for the next few week, even though you squeezed and squeezed and thought he was empty. Just like a real kid!
I think I’m going to change her clothing and see if that helps. Maybe it’s her intense, ice-blue eyes that make her so creepy? Or her mouth? Geez, does her mouth need to be THAT wide open?
I was making her talk to Adrian and say scary things, but he just thought it was funny and laughed.
This photo is funny because the Hindu god Brahma and I are looking at these two. Brahma AND Mama. And I just realized that the doll’s crazy-person hair looks just like Adrian’s crazy-baby hair.
On Santa’s lap asking for a teenager. Wha?
Our neighbors Tracy and Pete had a fun Xmas party, during which Santa came and paid the kids a visit.
Julian was the very last kid to sit on Santa’s lap, and Santa asked him to whisper what he most wanted for Xmas into Santa’s ear.
He did so, and Santa got a puzzled look on his face. He asked Julian to repeat his wish. Downright confusion on Santa’s face.
“He says he wants a TEENAGER for Christmas! Is that right?”
Julian nodded yes.
Santa is now all weirded out. Some comedian says, “Hey, a teenager… that’s Dan’s wish, not his!”
I am totally mystified, and have no idea where he came up with this. Later on I ask him what a teenager is, and he says, “It’s this toy…” but can’t describe any further.
I tell him it’s a person who is older than a kid, but not yet a grown-up. Is that what he wants for Xmas?
Oh, no.
Still can’t figure out how he came to the conclusion that
(A) a teenager is a toy, and
(B) he wants one!
Tattoo
This tattoo was for Yellowtail brand of Australian wine. It was on a magazine insert card. It was a pretty awesome tattoo of a dragon.
That dragon tat stayed on Julian for over a MONTH, and only in the last few days did it even start to look bad. Incredible!
So if they have that technology, why do most temporary tattoos for kids rub off after a single day?
Now that I know that temporary tattoos can be this cool, I’m totally going to start wearing them.
You guys…can’t you see I’m BUSY in here?
A cute little girl came over with her mom to try on a baby carrier. She and Julian hit it off immediately and Julian soon invited her into bed.
“Do you want to read a book?”
“Yes!”
“OK, let’s go in my bed!”
Sly, very sly! So the two of them hop into bed and start reading the book. Just as they start flipping the pages, Bugs hops up on the bed.
Then, within a minute, Baby Brother has to try to horn in on the action as well.
And don’t forget that Mommy is standing there the whole time, ignoring her customer and snapping photos because this whole situation is too funny.
Never a moment’s privacy in this house. GOSH.
Happy Valentine’s Day, you ass
This is a baboon’s butt, if you didn’t guess that already. What an awesome valentine.
Swingers
This is what the kids were doing while I was getting Happy Feet.
Happy Feet
Happy Valentine’s Day, feet. I took you to Happy Feet Foot Spa today and you will never be the same.
This place is the greatest find ever. It’s unbelievable. If you live anywhere near Cupertino, RUN, do not walk to Happy Feet. I am not joking.
Happy Feet Foot Spa
1045 S De Anza Blvd
San Jose, CA 95129
(408) 777-8855
I was driving down De Anza to run an errand at the beginning of January, and all of a sudden I spied the sign for Happy Feet Foot Spa. I had never heard of it before, but the name alone was enough to make me check it out. I had the kids in the car, but I drove slowly in front of the window and saw *One hour foot massage* and a reflexology chart. Hot damn!
For Valentine’s Day, Dan and I changed plans last minute and decided to go check out Happy Feet instead of going out to dinner. We called up to make an appointment yesterday. How much was the one hour foot massage? TWENTY DOLLARS. That’s right. We were so shocked that he called back and asked again. Same answer. What? No way! Yes. Yes way.
We went to our appointments today (his at 4:00pm, mine at 5:00pm) and it was truly killer. This place is insane, in a great way.
The spa consists of a big room full of reclining massage chairs, almost like a movie theater. It’s pretty dark inside, and there is nothing on the walls except a meditation video playing on a flat screen TV. Well, you don’t need much more, because your eyes will be closed in bliss, so don’t worry.
Dan had his appointment first, then I came an hour later and passed the kids off to him. His eyes were all bleary and he looked drunk with relaxation when I arrived. A good sign. I switched car keys with him and the owner hurried me into my chair.
As soon as I sat down, I was swathed in towels, and my feet were placed in a bucket of VERY hot water. This was the overall motif of the visit…you are exposed to sensation that is very intense, ALMOST to the point of pain, or even a little past it, but it’s all good.
At first I was like, “WOW, this water is hot!”, but a second later I was loving it.
While my feet were soaking, my masseur got to work rubbing my shoulders, arms, head and hands vigorously. No light prissy touch, this was some serious working out of knots and kinks. I never knew my forearms were so tight!
After 10 minutes or so, he got to work on my feet. I will admit, it was painful in spots when he was digging his knuckles into my arches, but it was also pleasurable. I am not normally a fan of *hard* massages, but even though he was rubbing my feet really hard, I never asked him to ease off. It just felt good.
After the initial hard rub, he took a lighter touch and did my toes, heels, and every single spot on both feet, basically. Then he did my ankles, calves, and knees. Man, it was AWESOME. So blissful. Total relaxation, and incredibly therapeutic.
He finished up my legs and feet by literally *smacking* them with his hands, which again sounds painful, but it felt great, really got the circulation going. I was totally laughing to myself though.
I thought the massage was over, but then he asked me to turn over. I was fully clothed, BTW, I just rolled up my pants, and we were in the room with all the other customers.
So now….the back rub. Holy bejesus. At this point I will reiterate that I am not normally a fan of hard massages. I never get the sports massage or the deep tissue or anything like that. I prefer a nice Swedish.
But this man literally BEAT ME, and it felt great! I have never had such a hard, intense back rub. I don’t even know what he was using, his elbow maybe? The knots in my shoulders and back never stood a chance. He literally crushed them into submission.
I was right on the verge of telling him to ease up, but even though it hurt at times, it completely relaxed my back and shoulders, and I could feel knots dissolving under the pressure.
He did ASK me if the pressure was OK, and I said yes, so you can certainly get a lighter massage if you want. I was surprised that I liked it, but I did. My back is really tight, and it was awesome.
At times he dug into my back so hard that I burst out laughing. He probably thought I was a little nuts, but oh well. It just completely cracked me up that I was laying on a table while some strange man absolutely beat the CRAP out of me, and I loved it. He was rubbing me so hard that my mouth was getting smashed into the massage chair face cushion, and I was literally biting it. Yes, there was a disposable slipcover thing on it, but still. Too funny.
Anyway, at the end I felt GREAT. I got up, paid my $20 + $5 tip, and walked out. My shoulders and feet were tingling and my whole body was relaxed.
Dan and I compared notes and we both loved the massage, even the parts that were slightly painful. We are still amazed that it is so incredibly cheap. OK, so you’re on De Anza Blvd, and the setting is not so chi-chi, but you know what? For the same price as ONE killer 60-minute massage at Burke-Williams, I can get NINE HOURS of killer massage at Happy Feet, and I think it might even actually be more therapeutic.
Dan asked me who I had for the masseur, and I realized that I didn’t even know. I had my eyes closed pretty much the whole time, and once my guy was done, he took off. I couldn’t pick him out in a lineup to save my life. Um, he was Asian, like everybody else in there?
I love living near Cupertino. Goddamn…the things you can get. Crazy fruits and vegetables and bizarre snacks and live fish at Lion Market, smelly durian tapioca pearl drinks (and yummy NON-durian pearl drinks), every kind of tea you can imagine, awesome Vietnamese food, and now a kickass hour-long massage for $20. TWENTY BUCKS. I love the Bay Area. Love it.
Hurry up and get over there fast. At these prices, they will either go out of business or else be booked solid. Personally, I plan on going there at least once a week from now on. Actually, when Dan was in there was a woman who had already been there that morning and she was back for a return visit.
Happy Feet. This place ROCKS. Don’t miss out. Your body will thank you.
According to the chart below, I have some issues with my intestines. That was the most tender spot on my feet.
On Julian’s 4th Birthday
Whoa, four years. You are like, this BIG BOY now. I can’t believe it. You can hold rational conversations with big words and everything. And of course, still be totally impossible at times.
Well, aren’t we all.
I’m so excited to hang out with a big four-year-old boy. Wow, you can do all kinds of things now. I think back to your birthday last year, when your baby brother was brand new, and no comparison. You were just a little boy then, and you are definitely a whole different boy now, with all kinds of ideas and opinions and my oh my…don’t you love to debate with me on some of them. That’s fine, I don’t mind a good debate from time to time.
We had a good day today, didn’t we? It wasn’t too fancy or anything, but we packed in some fun today. Started off with you and your brother at Kids’ Club while I went to a Pilates class. You love Kids’ Club, and you love it even more when your baby brother doesn’t cry and scream and embarrass you with his ear-splitting loudness. Today he wasn’t loud and he didn’t scream. He must have known that it was your birthday. What a nice brother. Mommy was glad about the not-screaming too.
After Kids’ Club, it was time for school. There are a bunch of kids with food allergies at your school, but Mommy found a gluten & dairy-free brownie mix at Trader Joe’s, and got some veggie chips and strawberry fruit leathers too, and brought them to school for a party snack.
The kids are used to getting rice cakes for a snack at your school, which seems like a nasty snack to me (styrofoam, anyone?), so they were all pretty damn happy to see veggie chips and strawberry fruit leather and brownies. Big success!
You got to pick a story for Miss Marianne to read to the class, and you wore a crown at the snack table, like a Birthday King. You are so cute.
You played Hide and Seek with your friends today at school, and it consisted of all you kids counting randomly (14! 17! 28! 29! 30!) and then all rushing off like a swarm of bees. Not sure who you were seeking, or who was hiding…..maybe a little unclear on the concept? But everyone had fun, and that’s the important part.
Then we went home, got a snack, took Baby Brother potty, and headed off to the playground for a spell….then to the toy store to pick out a birthday toy, and finally to Baskin-Robbins to get a quart of strawberry ice cream at the drive-up window.
By the way…whoever invented the DRIVE-THROUGH ICE CREAM WINDOW should win a Nobel Prize. Best thing ever. Oh wait, there is *one* thing better than drive-through ice cream, and I’ll get to that in my next post. But back to Julian’s birthday.
So, we got home with the ice cream and set up your miniature golf course (the present you picked out). I made a yummy dinner with lamb tenderloins, broccoli, and carrots. It took a little persuading to get you to eat your broccoli, and then it was on to the ice cream, with FOUR candles on top.
What a fun day…we just played and played and played. Good times! I’m so proud of you. You are so smart, and so sweet and loving, and even very polite when you want to be. Happy birthday, my dear boy!
Politan
I heard this song on “A Prairie Home Companion” last week and was hypnotized by it. Such a pretty tune, such a lovely voice, and such haunting lyrics. She sang it slower on the show, which I think was better, but hey, it’s still pretty great.
Do you like it too? Take a listen…
Politan by Nellie McKay
Oh, at the end…the voice of the island? If it sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the voice of the guy from Schoolhouse Rock, who did innumerable voices for that wonderful series. “I’m Just a Bill” ring any bells?
This palace can be yours…
Lookee here, you can buy this veritable palace in Detroit for LESS THAN THE AVERAGE HOME PRICE here in Santa Clara County.
It’s pretty sweet. Too bad it’s in Detroit, but then again, would you ever need to leave home, when home is that fancy? Plus, it looks like it’s out in the burbs, not in the urban center or anything. I love the sun porch. Nice paintings on the ceiling. You can see it better here.
Disaster Baby Part I – Explodes a Box of Kleenex Supposedly Out of His Reach
This stuff happens so often that I am going to start documenting it. I wish I had thought about this during the last few days, what with the poop, shattered glass and Pepto-Bismol disasters. And those were only a handful. Now that I have a plan around it, he’ll probably be as good as gold. Wait…maybe I’m onto something…
DisasterBaby explodes a box of Kleenex in the back seat of the car from Laura Hamilton on Vimeo.