My Temporary Office

The inevitable occurred.  I caught my daughter’s germs and I’ve been laid up in bed for 2 days.   Now, I’m trying to launch a website in 4 weeks so one can imagine how convenient such a forced convalescence is.  But wait.  Turns out, this “problem” isn’t all bad.

The good things about working from bed:

1.)  Those lap desks really work.  No more laptop batteries unnaturally warming my reproductive parts.  I’m a convert.  

2.)  Spontaneous naps.  With pillows propped up around me, it’s easy to nod off for a quick 27 minute refresher.  Seriously, that’s awesome.

3.)  Take-dinners delivered to the door.  Two nights in a row, guilt-free pizza dinners.  It’s like we’re on vacation.

4.)  Instant weight-loss.  I’m too sick to walk to the pantry and grab my hourly “pick-me-up” handful of Oreos.   Who needs will power and sit-ups when a virus can jumpstart your goal to lose those extra 10 pounds brought on by stress and bad eating habits?

5.)  Wearing your pajamas while you craft a Powerpoint Presentation isn’t depressing, demoralizing or ironic (as in “working from home on my start-up feels like make-believe business”).  Instead, it’s empowering.  It shows stamina and commitment.   I’m a Mom with a start-up.  Hear me roar.  Who knew a virus could do what months of therapy couldn’t?

6.)  Taking a shower IS a big accomplishment.  When you’re sick, the little things matter and To Do lists are irrelevant.   I’m damn near becoming a Zen Yogi with this kind of wisdom, no?

7.)  When Mom goes down, the kids rise up.  Payback is a wonderful thing. My kids bring me cold drinks and fresh boxes of tissues, unprompted.   They do their homework on the floor in my bedroom “just so they can be close” in case I need something.  My son insisted on giving me a back-rub (“the way you do, Mom, when I’m sick”) and my daughter gives me “power hugs” to kill off the germs.  Forget Mother’s Day.  Sick Days rock!

Sure, the laundry is piling up, most emails have gone unanswered, I’ve had to reschedule important conference calls, and my kids have gone to bed without their usual array of Mom & kid bedtime antics.   I don’t welcome this virus on anyone but it’s not as bad as I would have thought.  Sickness acts a great reminder of what we take for granted.

Turns out, my water glass on my bedside table is half-full.

Red Ants (aka Fire Ants)
Courtesy of Wikipedia

“Fire Ants Invade Lady’s Printer In Canyon:  Hysterics Follow”

My anxiety-ridden, dysfunctional relationship with nature continues.   Rats.  Snakes (real & perceived).  A multitude of spiders.  And now, fire ants and their ever-so-disgusting maggot-like eggs.

I’m ready to move to a high-rise building in the city.

“You’re not scared of a few ants?” you ask.

“Oh, you just wait until you hear this story,” I reply, flapping my arms as if to shake any invaders off.  A shiver runs up my spine.

Yesterday, I decided I wanted to use the scanner feature on my All-In-One printer.  I’ve had the printer for 18 months but was always intimidated by its scanning functionality.  Who isn’t, right?  But being that the world has gone digital (and that I want to stay relevant in this constantly-evolving state), I decided it was time to transform all my legal contracts into digital copies. Very tech-forward of me, no?

I opened the lid of the printer and what to my wondering eyes should appear?  A colony of frickin’ fire ants (and their transparent rice-kernel eggs) living underneath the glass of my scanner.  50 of them.  A Queen Ant.  A bunch of busy work ants.  Maggot-like eggs by the dozens.

AAACCCKKKKKK!

Then:

1. I screamed again
2. Took a photo of it (yup…)
3. Ran the printer outside
4. Let it sit in the driveway until the kids came home
5. Showed my kids (cause they LOVE gross stuff)
6. Tossed the whole damn thing in the trash can

Canon MX512: Where Technology & Nature Co-Exist

That Canon Company, what will they think of next?  All the while I’ve been printing out my daily To Do lists, a colony of biting ants has been thriving in the machine.   That’s taking “multi-functioning” to a whole new level.  Serious “Thinking-Outside-The-Box” going on at the company.

Fire Ants, in case you didn’t know, rarely make their home in modern pieces of technology.  They usually prefer moist outdoor locations.  But then again, nature and I don’t exactly have a typical relationship.  Clearly, the universe is trying to send me a message.  Humans must learn to cohabitate with nature.  Humans must stop the destruction of animal habitats.

Well, universe.   I have a message back.

Get the F*&#%$K out of my printer.

Courtesy of People Magazine

It’s like we’re twins:

• We live on the same street
• We both have a son & daughter between the ages of 7 – 9
• We’re in our early 40s (that’s code for she’s 40 and I’m 41)
• We both have blogs
• We like to talk about the food we make for our kids
• We’re “career moms”

Or not.

• She just published a second cookbook.  I have 7 drafts of an unpublished manuscript in my living room armoire.
• She sings on stage in leather pants.  I sing in my bedroom in my underpants.
• She works out 5 days a week.  I talk about working out at least 3 days a week.
• Her blog had 49,000 visitors in March.  Mine had 204.
• She has a successful “Styled Just for Gwyneth” line of products from top designers.  I’m still trying to launch my website.
• She has endless travel, cooking and lifestyle tips.  I don’t have a personal trainer, a personal assistant or access to a private jet.
• When she needs a cooking lesson, she brings in a celebrity chef.   When I need a cooking lesson, I call out for pizza.
• She’s a size a 0, she’s never photographed in the same outfit twice, when she walks around without makeup, it’s called “natural beauty”, she appears to have found the secret to balancing career and family (while working out 5 times a week), her predilection for short shorts (and sheer skirts) might cause a murmur but it’s not because she looks like crap, she does look better now at 40 than she did at 20, she’s achieving on her ambition, and she’s weirdly poised to become the next Martha Stewart, just sexier.   I… Oh, let’s stop pretending.   She might live down the street but other than our appreciation for old sycamore trees, we’re not going to be sharing a bundt cake anytime soon.

Oh, envy is such an unattractive emotion.   Especially, amongst women.   You go, Gwyneth.  I’m sorry for all my snarky thoughts.

Larry “Lawn-Chair” Walters
(1949-1993)

Here’s a short story about the difference between boys and girls.

At dinner last night, my husband told our two kids the story of Larry Walters, a man who decided to take flight on his lawnchair with 40+ helium-filled balloons to propel him 10,000+ feet above the ground.

My husband’s childhood recollection of the story was that Larry lifted up off the ground, unprepared for the height he would reach.  In order to come down, he needed the help of authorities and their beebee guns.  (The details of the story, as outlined in his wikipedia page, are a bit different but the general experience is the same).

This happened in the early 1980s.  There have been many “inspired by” flights since; with the most recent ”launch”  in 2012.  All of them have been led by men.

My Response

MOM

“Now kids.  Don’t ever do that, okay?  It’s dumb.  And really dangerous.”

My Kids’ Responses

DAUGHTER (age: 9 1/2)

“Duh, Mom.  A lawnchair?   On balloons?   That’s something they do on Looney Tunes.”

SON (age 7)

“Yeah, Mom.   Don’t worry.   I’d take a pin with me.   So I could pop the balloons myself.  Definitely.”

As a working mom,  preparing & serving healthy meals for the family is the most challenging of tasks.  Home-cooked dinners were the first casualty of my return to work.  They show no sign of resuscitation.

Here’s the problem, though.  Even my fat-pants are starting to feel tight.  I think my diet of pasta, pizza and frozen chicken nuggets is to blame.  Sure, they’re nitrate-free but really, I know it’s not healthy for me or the kids.  But how to get those good, made-from-scratch, healthy meals back into our lives?!

Fear not.  I have a plan.

Redundancy.  On a 14-day schedule.

Welcome to the launch of my “Two Week Recipe Rotation Plan.”  I’ve mapped out two work weeks’ worth of recipes (I’m no fool… we’re eating pizza and sushi on weekends).  They are easily prepared in advance (which I’m going to do on Sunday nights) AND can be thrown together the day of in 20 minutes.  I’ve got one shopping list per week (so I don’t have to think about what to buy as I walk the aisles & I’m eradicating the quick grocery run mid-week).   The meals are varied enough to keep everyone’s attention, they’re pre-vetted for healthiness, they’re kid-friendly & adult-worthy, and did I mention they are easy?  I’m going to make the same rotation every two weeks until it drives my family mad.  Then, I’ll find a new set of recipes.

I’m listing them, if you are interested, in the RESOURCES: Parenting section (see the top menu).

Imagine.  No More:

1.)  ”Oh, it’s Sunday night and here I am in the grocery store and I don’t know, what should I buy?  Another bag of tortillas and shredded cheese?  We can have quesadillas one night.  Oh wait.  We had that last night.  How about hotdogs?  Hotdogs are American, right?”

2.)  ”But I thought you liked my chicken stir-fry?  If I served ice cream for dinner twice a week, you’d still love ice cream, no?”

3.)  ”Oh shit.  I thought I had a can of black beans in here.  I always have beans in the pantry.    Sorry kids — We’ll do burrito night tomorrow.  Tonight, how about a stir fry?”

4.)  ”What?!  It’s already 6  pm?  Not again. Let me look in the freezer.”

5.)   “I’m sure there’s something I can make with frozen bagels, a bag of peas, a half-bag of tater tots and some chicken breasts dating back to December, right?  They do this kind of thing on tv all the time.

6.)  ”Let’s just order in some pizzas tonight.  Tomato sauce has tomatoes in it.  Tomatoes are vegetables.  Or are they a fruit?!”

7.)  ”I went to the Farmer’s Market’s on Sunday.  Bu why is the lettuce slimey?  And the zucchini shriveled ?  Is celery supposed to bend like this?  Let’s put the carrots in a bowl of ice water.   You’ll see.  In 2 hours, they’ll be totally firm again.”

8.)  ”YAY, kids.  It’s ‘Bizarro Night’ again.  What’ll it be, kids — Cheerios or Rice Krispies?  Who doesn’t love breakfast for dinner?”

Hear me now, believe me later.  This is revolutionary.  This is me, being more organized than I knew was possible.  That’s enough to make a girl go giddy.

Courtesy of Mattel

Move over Malibu Barbie.  HTML Barbie just bought some beach-front property and you’re getting evicted.

The internet used to be limited to the specialities of the web applications.  But now, every brick-and-mortar has an online component.  Banks, Grocery Stores, Schools.  You name it, its virtual service is as good (if not better) than its physical equivalent.  And it’s only going continuing that way.

So, if you want your children to get a job when they finish their education, they’d better know the difference between HMTL from PHP.

I know what you’re thinking.  Is PHP a typo for that vaccine we have to get our girls?

Java Ain’t Just An Island in the Pacific

Just because Ruby on Rails makes you think of Dorothy walking the curb on the yellow brick road (just a little?), doesn’t mean your kids shouldn’t become proficient in computers.  I’ve met great programmers who do not have a handle on the English language but wow, how they can structure a database!  They can live in any country and always know they will have work.  They are sought after with 4-to-5 job offers at any one time.  Now, I’m not saying we should forsake our English Departments (goodness, no!) but every school should prioritize technology languages in their curriculum as much as they do Math, Science and PE.  But until they do, it is the job of parents.

And I don’t mean buying them an i-Touch or a Game-boy.

Our children need to know how to program as much as they need to know how to read a map or calculate proper change at the register.

But you already know ALL of this. 

Actually, if you have a boy, he’s probably already bored with Scratch and Sketch-Up.  He’s asking for a summer programming classes.   Easy.  Done.  But wait?  What about your daughter?

She says she’s not interested.

Nope.  That will no longer fly.

“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one she has the means of settling well without further expense to anyone” – Jane Austen

Letting our daughters “not” learn to code is like letting our sons “not” learn to read.  It’s setting your daughter up for a life of limited options.  Who does that in 2013?!?

I just dropped my 9-year off at a Spring Break Tech Camp.  And guess what?  She’s the only girl in the camp.  The rest are boys.  All 15 of them.  She attended a programming camp last summer and of the 22 kids, 3 of them were girls.  Two of them were from other countries visiting Los Angeles for the summer.

I’m not going to delve into the reasoning for why girls aren’t drawn to computer (I’ll save that for another post).  Let’s leave it at this — Computers have a “boy” thing associated with them.

But we need to power through that perception and get our girls into the computer room.  A NY Time’s article “In Google’s Inner Circle, A Falling Number of Women” outlines Google’s aggressive pursuit of female technology stars because even they, a market leader, can’t fill their ranks with the 50/50 gender ratio they want.   Teaching girls to excel in technology is practical, if for no other reason than to insure they have real job options when they head out into the world.

Please sign your girls up for computer class.   It will make them happy and independent.

Courtesy of Netflix

Everything you hear is true.  ”House of Cards” is that good.

[Before I go on, here's my disclaimer:  I don't own Netflix stock.  I don't even know who runs the company. I'd share my account login but I'm afraid they'd find out and block me forever.]

What is “House of Cards”?  Oh, get thy to Netflix without haste.  Just trust me on this.  It’s as good as Downton Abbey.  Just totally different.  But kinda the same.  In the addictive, obsessive kind of way.

I know what you’re thinking.  Where do you find the time, Deb?  Aren’t you trying to launch TOTEFISH in May, enrich your two children during Spring Break, lose those extra 7 pounds and read that book on Creative Intelligence?

Yes…

But since I’m off wine (2 pounds right there) and my kids implored me to let them “hang with nothing to do like regular kids for a week” and it’s not possible to read more than 3 paragraphs of any book in bed after a 16-hour work day … I was ripe for a small leap into total obsessiveness.

Enter 13 hours of Kevin Spacey’s power-hungry deliciousness.  Yes, it can be done in three days.   Who needs to sleep from 9 pm – 2 am?  Apart from the brilliance of the sublime acting, the tight writing, the gorgeous sets and the intoxicatingly complex morality of the characters… I think it’s the back-to-back availability of the episodes that sucked me in like a sale sign at the Gucci outlet.  It’s the totality of the experience.  It’s like an all-nighter with new friends in Rome.  You know you should get to bed but you just can’t bring yourself to flag down a cab.  And in the morning, you just can’t stop thinking about it.

Now, I don’t recommend dedicating a full day of sunlight to watching all 13-episodes but… if you happen to catch that nasty flu going around, what’s a little chicken soup propped up against your iPad, right?

I’m just saying.  I hadn’t intended to do it.  It was so feckless.  13 hours of tv in 3 days?!   Who does that?!

I recommend you should, too.

Carrot and Stick? I say “Punch and Punch.”

My son is 7 years old.  He forgets that toilet paper shouldn’t be totally unrolled for fun.  He forgets that tennis balls shouldn’t be hit against the side of the house right next to the kitchen windows.  He forgets that feet aren’t allowed on the top of the dinner table (at dinner time).  It’s no big surprise he has a hard time remembering his reading glasses even when he’s got a book in his hand.

My son has a hard time distinguishing an “e” from an “o” in certain fonts but he’s a 7-year old boy.  He doesn’t seem to notice it.  But we all know it’s impossible to understand a story (let alone learn a fact or two) if you think the “pantry” is a “party” and a “horse” is a “home”.  But I don’t want to be a nag.  My son already wears hearing aids.  He’s wonderful about them.  Nagging about glasses… well, it just seems so unrelenting.

Don’t get me wrong.  I loved nagging when I was a full-time, stay-at-home Mom.  Nagging was a way to pass the day (and to pass on my frustration and stress).   But as a working Mom, there’s the “ratio factor.”  I’m not around my children as much and thus, I need to pay attention to the quality of our interactions.   The good news is that I have my own company so I make my own hours.  I take off from 5 – 7 pm so that I can be home with my children (and return to work 8 – 11 pm).  Although I spend most of that “quality” time running multiplication drills, pushing the attributes of cauliflower and arguing that the eraser was invented for a reason,  I don’t want to harangue my son about his glasses.

I needed a carrot and stick.  Reward and punishment.   But what kind?

Punching.

Yes, my son loves kicking, punching, poking, whacking and tearing at things.  I’m guessing it’s a boy thing.  But I’m a modern Mom.  I’m here to manipulate my kids without them knowing it, into doing what I want them to do, all the while they’re thinking they’re doing it because they’re motivated.

Here’s the deal I struck:

• If my son remembers to put on his glasses without any reminding, he gets to punch me (or my husband) in the arm
• If I have to remind him, I get to punch him in the arm.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking.  How hard can he punch?

Oh, don’t worry.  I’m not training the next generation of abusers.  I’m as staunch a feminist as you’ll find on the westside of LA.  My son created the rule that he couldn’t punch me hard because I’m “… a girl and Dad says we have to treat girls like flowers.”  Like all good feminists, I like a box of chocolates from time-to-time.

Guess what ladies?  It’s working!  The thrill my son gets from doing the forbidden has gotten him to wear his glasses nearly 90% of the time, without any parental prompting or jaw-jamming.  And we’re only 3-days in to our deal.

Now, if only I could figure out how to get Congress to sit down and balance the damn budget.

Pretty Please, with a smokey contralto cherry on top?!
(Photo: onlinesheetmusic)Just read  the LA Times that:

I just read in the LA Times that:  ”[Adele has been] focusing her musical output on her baby son, Angelo.  ’I've been out of the loop, really,’ Adele said.  ’just singing my baby nursery rhymes.’ “

Got me thinking.  Adele should make an album of lullabies.  Right?!

Anyone who has ever rocked a baby to sleep, knows the power of a lullaby.  And anyone who has ever listened to hundreds of hours of saccrine-toned, plinky-xylophone versions of “Toora, Loora, Loora” knows that lullabies can drive a Mom to a drink at nap-time.

Over the years, I’ve sung (which is code for mumbled, hummed and made up words for) thousands of lullabies to my children.  As they grew older (and I, more tired) they graduated from my untrained, slightly off-key voice to recordings made by professionals.  At bedtime, we popped them in the cd player and voila, 15 minutes later my children had fallen asleep to a synthesized verse of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”  Even now, long after the crib was donated to a neighbor, when nightmares rattle the peacefulness of their sleep, I pop in one of those old cds and watch the calm return.

Forget the mocking bird.  Why can’t Mama gonna buy you an inspiring lullaby experience? (Photo: Time.com)

But those lullaby collections?   Totally lacking in any true musical genius.  Maybe it’s the limitation of genre but I have got to believe that if anyone could accomplish the impossible, it is Adele.  Imagine giving the next generation the gift of a gorgeous rendition of “Hush Little Baby”?  Doesn’t it seem selfish that only little Angelo should grow up with such melody and inspiration???

Come on Adele.  Give us a lullaby album.  Then, maybe a tired mom could fade off to dreamland for a short little cat-nap herself.

“We can make every day better for each other.” – Kid President

I’m getting sappy in my middle-age.  Or maybe,  the relentless onslaught of bad news (and mean-spirited reality shows) has finally worn me down.  Yesterday, my 9-year old daughter asked, “Why does it seem like everyone wants to hurt each other?”  She’d just seen the front page of the newspaper filled with headlines about an assassination, a cop killer and the systematic use of rape against women in second and third world cultures.  I had to admit that some days are worse than others.

I’m ready for an inspiring story.  I’m ready to cuddle with baby kittens.  I’m ready for some feel good.

So, here it.  The Kid President video from SoulPancake.   The message?  ”Make this an awesome year for people.”

That’s positive enough for me.

Have a lovely Friday.