California Dreaming - and the Reality

Rose Parade: "Just Imagine a Better Theme"

2012-01-04T00:49:00.026-05:00

Sometimes I get these ideas, and there's no way of knowing how they'll turn out. Fortunately my family is very tolerant and falls in with many of my crazy schemes. Last November I was walking home from work, trying to think of a little trip we could take over the New Year. Someplace warm, someplace new, someplace Benny would like ...

Our coworkers often talk of Tahoe and Hawaii and Disneyland and Legoland and Napa wine-tasting, but I was thinking of something a little more ... Midwest.

Then, 10 feet from our apartment building, it hit me: The Rose Bowl Parade! That would be SO COOL!

On nearly every New Year's morning in my entire life, I've switched the TV to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California, most recently over the protests of Ron and Benny. I decided 2012 was the year we would go.

But at 4:40 a.m. on Jan. 2, I was having second thoughts. You see, the parade starts at 8 a.m., and the closest hotel I could find was in Palmdale, a bleak, nearly deserted commercial strip an hour's drive away. We left in pitch darkness, padded stadium seats tucked in the trunk of our little Fit.

We ignored Greta, our new GPS Garmin system, who wanted to take us through the twisting Angeles Forest in pitch darkness, and kept to the main highways, entering Pasedena north of the parade route.

Which was a problem, because our reserved parking space and grandstand seats were south of the parade route along Colorado Street. There was no way to cross Colorado, everything was blocked off. So Ron slid the Fit into a miniscule parking spot on a residential street and we trotted off to the nearest checkpoint, Ron carrying a big white bundle holding the stadium seats.

Of course, we were hell and gone from our grandstand, and the white-suited volunteer at the checkpoint wouldn't let us pass. He recommended a circuitous northern route which might allow us to see the parade's final floats. Ron didn't think much of that, so we just moved away, then snuck back when Mr. White Suit's back was turned. A security guy barely glanced at our tickets, searched our bags, waved us through, then shouted: "That's the last one! The parade's starting! This checkpoint is closed!" Ron, Benny and I bolted for Colorado Street, keeping our heads down as Mr. White Suit watched us with disapproval. A stealth bomber flew overhead -- they were on to us.

Now we had to cross the parade route. We infiltrated the lines of cops in camo-print riot gear and came to a halt at the big Main Grandstand as the second float sailed past. "All right, there's a break!" an official said, and we dashed across after the float, skirting the car carrying the Grand Marshal and ducking into a tunnel to Green Street. Then it was a sprint along Green, parallel to the parade route, Benny leading the way, Ron taking rear guard.

But we couldn't get to the grandstand! Hordes of onlookers were packed in front of the fence dividing ticket-holders and the rabble. Ron was ready to watch the parade where we were, but I noticed some people tugging a bit of fence away from the wall, leaving a little gap.

"You think we can get through that?" I asked the saboteurs. Two people slipped through the fence while I hesitated, so I sent Benny through. I shoved my way through the tiny gap, then someone held Ron's stadium seats while he pushed through, popping out like a cork.

Then it was only a matter of going to the wrong grandstand, going to the wrong side of the right grandstand and finally finding our seats. "You haven't missed much," said the nice lady sitting beside me.

We had a great view — the Wisconsin float and band went by. I took a few pictures, then dropped my camera about 20 feet into the weeds below the bandstand. Oh well.

The parade was very exciting to watch in person. The floats were big, the bands were loud and the crowd cheered wildly. One woman was sitting on the edge of the street in a furry Wisconsin Badger hat, and half the Wisconsin band suddenly broke out and circled her, trumpets blaring.

The theme of the parade, as you can tell by the title, was "Just Imagine," and a more vague, amorphous theme would be difficult to find. The best application was by U.S. Bank's "Idea Factory,"which had some mechanical assembly line turning ideas into real-life objects. We missed the Royal Court (which was fine with me), but here's the flagrantly patriotic "Imagine in America" float, the only float picture I shot before I dropped my camera.

We cheered the Wisconsin and Oregon people, and then came Paramount's Hollywood float with the huge Starship Enterprise on top. (The rest of these pictures and videos were taken with Ron's iPhone.)

Benny loved the tiny ponies pulling costumed people in carts and the China Airline's huge dragon with the smoke puffing out of its nostrils. He also liked the cowboys performing rope tricks on horseback.

After all the horses came sweepers in white jumpsuits, who had to work fast to keep from being run over by a fast-moving float. The City of Alhambra's train float was appropriately named "Bearing Down the Track," because it was gaining threateningly on the Cowgirl's horse sweepers. They barely got out the way.

Ron liked the bands the best. The biggest band came from Texas and seemed miles long.
My favorite favorite band featured these amazing musicians from Kyoto Tachibana High School:

Here are some other floats:

Most people in reserved parking had to clear out right after the parade, but since we'd parked on a residential street, we could hang around. First I hunted down a Sharp Seating employee, and he took me under the grandstand and hunted around the weeds with me until we found my digital camera.

Then Ron, Benny and I had lunch at a cafe and wandered down Colorado Street buying souveniers. One pedestrian walking behind us, obviously from the Midwest, had a little trouble crossing streets. First the lady and her friends wandered vaguely out into the intersection against the light, then when that was prevented by the cars, milled around on the corner. The light turned, and Ron, Benny and I crossed. "Look!" the lady cried. "They're crossing diagonally! You can do that? I've never seen that before!"

We drove back to Palmdale, and Ron and Benny played in the outdoor pool. After dinner, we sat on the bed and watched the parts of the parade we missed. And sure enough, on local station 5, we saw Ron scuttling across the parade route, carrying a big white bundle of stadium seats, behind Bayer's "Garden of Imagination" float. And there I was on the corner for an instant in a pink shirt, holding Benny's hand, before crossing.

Benny said: "I want to go to the Parade every year!" And I'm thinking, the city lets you reserve RV parking spaces along the parade route, so we could rent an RV next year and load it with people and watch the Rose Bowl Parade from our RV. That would be SO COOL!

The Balancing Act in America

2011-09-26T17:33:00.002-05:00

Feeling a little off-balance lately (have I ever been balanced?), I've been following a new blog called CW that's all about work-life balance.

And Chrysula — neat name — referred me to an intriguing column by NYT's Maureen Dowd, "Blue is the New Black."

But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?

According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

It makes sense to me and generally, this can be traced back to one fact: Women put up with a lot.

A whole lot. They sigh and sign on and somehow feel that whether they actually want to do something is entirely beside the point. They constantly feel obligated, and guilty if they say no. Doing something just because they want to, or not doing something because they don't, is nearly unheard of.

Perhaps it comes down to control of your own life. So many women have utterly ceded control of their own lives to their husbands, kids, bosses and family. If you feel you have power and can make your own decisions, you're happier. If you feel yanked about by powers greater than you, even if you choose to be yanked, then you're not happy.

So maybe it's not so much a shock that men grow happier as they age and women grow less happy. As they get older, many men feel they have more control over their own lives -- their careers offer them more autonomy, they get more respect, they remain attractive. Whereas women get deeper into the childraising trenches, juggling jobs and family, which would be fine -- men are doing it too, after all -- except women don't make themselves a priority.

So women feel less powerful. They're spending their days on stuff that is important to others, not to them. (Experts don't think it's because women do most of the housework, by the way, men are working toward more parity.)

I agree with Dowd that it's because of this:

When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.

Yikes! No wonder we're miserable! Plus we have to look good doing it all too!

The key word here is, of course, judged. Women judge themselves -- hell, I judge myself -- under a powerful microscope. Every imperfection is highlighted. Do men live this way? I don't think so. They approach everything from an entirely different baseline. Let's say a school event comes up. I'd guess the first question an average guy would ask himself is: "Do I want to go?" The first question a woman would ask herself is: "Should I go?" See, totally different approaches here. Now maybe this guy and gal should go to the event, perhaps the end result is the same -- they go. And they go for the same reasons. But see how that first question makes a difference:

GUY: Hmmm, Back to School Night. A chance to see the kid's classroom and meet the teacher. Do I want to do that? Yeah, sort of. Might be interesting. Nothing else going on. (writes it down) Oh wait, there's a game that night. Well, I should go to this thing -- I'll tivo the game.

GAL: Oh, Back to School Night. A chance to see the kid's classroom and meet the teacher. I should really do this. It will be important to Kid, he'd be embarrassed if he was the only student there without a parent. Plus I'll look like a bad mother if I don't go. (writes it down) Oh wait, there's my book club that night. Well, I just don't have a choice, I'll just have to miss it.

So which one is happier about Back to School Night? The Guy, who has determined he wants to go and has made an independent choice to forgo the game because he feels it's important and he should be there? Or the Gal, who is crushed by the weight of Kid's expectations and other people's expectations? Deep down, she wants to go just as much as the Guy, but is it any wonder that she feels less happy about it?

In the end, this is rather abstract, because people don't fit into such tidy categories. And I think there is a very clear reason why I'm more content today than I was two or four years ago -- I feel more in control. I don't have to prove myself to anyone -- to the other parents or to my colleagues. I don't have to prove anymore that I can be a good editor after four years out of the newsroom. I don't have a toddler or preschooler any more. And now that our finances are more on an even keel, I feel less trapped.

So in the end, I think many women are feeling blue because they often feel powerless and trapped. But I also think that, in many cases, those women voluntarily give up their power and trap themselves.

Ignorance is truly bliss

2011-08-24T10:51:00.002-05:00

Reading the San Francisco Chronicle's web site is always an adventure. Today under the label WE RECOMMEND:

* Pregnant Pacifica woman killed by family pit bull
* Broadway actor who had teen sex drops Calif. show
* Giant rodent spotted on Calif Central Coast
* Woman dead in Caltrain collision -service halted
* Heart attack kills Philly cheesesteak stand owner
* Teen dies after falling on Yosemite hiking trail

Frankly, I don't want to read any of them.

We attack Caturday, pass it on

2011-08-23T17:04:00.001-05:00

Sadly, this product has been discontinued, but I'm scheming how to make one for Callisto.

First Day of Second Grade

2011-08-16T16:48:00.003-05:00

Here's Benny humoring his mother, standing outside his elementary school on his First Day. It was all very low key and non-drama. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this stuff. I could describe his attitude that morning only as "resigned." I think this year's going to be a little demanding for him, so I'm glad we got off to such an easygoing start.

Just for comparison, here are his First Day picture from kindergarten. Oddly enough, his expression is surprisingly similar.

Weekend for Grownups

2011-08-09T12:22:00.013-05:00

Benny's worst nightmare.

We had a busy weekend recently, and not for the usual reasons. Looking back, it's clear that the schedule revolved around Ron and myself rather than Benny. That's rather unusual, because for many families the weekend revolves around kids' activities -- sports, practices, lessons, playdates, family outings with kids' activities and treats.

The weekend of Aug. 5 was a little different -- Ron and I pretty much set the tone and Benny was swept along, patient but a little nonplussed.

Friday was our company picnic. Benny spent the morning at the office playing "AdventureQuest" on the intern's computer before we all headed to Golden Gate Park. Ron and I had a very good time, sipping beer and wine and chatting with coworkers. Benny spent the first 90 minutes devouring mass quantities of hot dogs, chips, ice cream and cookies. He spent the second 90 minutes waddling around and moaning because his stomach hurt from the hot dogs, chips, ice cream, etc. By the end the day, he was exhausted.

Saturday was spent dashing around doing chores. Then at 5 p.m., we packed Benny's pajamas and drove him across town to the babysitter's. This was under protest, since he really wanted to stay home and watch TV and defeat the Americans in his "Civilization" video game. But Ron and I had plans to see a French movie and eat food that Benny hated, so off he went. We picked him up late and carried him to bed, wearing moose PJs from Yellowstone and wrapped in a Playboy bunnies fleece blanket.

But the fun didn't stop there for Benny. Ron was performing in a church bell choir Sunday morning, so he left the apartment early. Benny was allowed 45 minutes of cartoons before I made him put on his best sweater and drove him to a brunch.

A friend's parents were holding this 50-person buffet brunch at a beautiful home in San Francisco. There were children there, but most of them were babies and all of them were female. The food was amazing, with specialty breads and crackers served with a choice of eggplant spread or mashed chicken liver. Then there were fritattas and salmon and all kinds of confusing, delicious foodie dishes, all of which Benny hated. He wouldn't eat a thing, not even a muffin.

He spent most of the brunch drinking orange juice out of a champagne flute and trying not to drop things and knock things over. Benny is not a clumsy kid, but there was a lot of glass in this house. The poor kid couldn't even drink the orange juice at first because his well-meaning hostess put blueberries in it. He didn't say anything to her, just looked Eeyore-like at it until I fished the berries out. He drank it then, but not with enthusiasm. Then all the poor kid could do was follow me around until I took pity on him and found the dessert trays in the corner. Then I plied him with brownies until his stomach hurt again.

On Monday, he was stuck in the apartment while I worked from home. He spent most of the day re-enacting the Tour de France with his stuffed animals. I did take time out to make his stuffed camel a yellow jersey. Apparently he doesn't need water bottles because he has a hump. It was actually quite dramatic with Benny's commentary: "Does Horsey have the firepower to win? There's Chipmunk coming off the back end! And here comes Cow with everybody on his back wheel! Who will win the stage? Who? Who? ..."

But the fun didn't stop there on Monday. At 4 p.m. I knocked off work and we went ... wait for it ... Back to School Shopping. Yup, we went to four stores and a Target before he was rewarded with dinner at McDonald's. I really should have taken one of those giant carts at Target -- instead Benny and I walked around loaded down with stuff and poor Benny tripped and fell and dropped packets of underwear all over the cat litter aisle.

Things got much better for Benny on Tuesday, when Daddy Camp began. (It was the last week before school started and we hadn't arranged childcare -- oops.) They rode bikes, they played games, they ate hot dogs and played "Plants vs. Zombies." They also went to the grocery store, got haircuts, did laundry and vacuumed out the car. But at least Benny didn't have to eat chicken liver on toast.

Arrival Day 2011: Prithee, Peace!

2011-07-23T12:15:00.006-05:00

Yesterday was Arrival Day, the fourth anniversary of our arrival in San Francisco. Ron and I try to remember that day each year, but generally can only celebrated with a nice lunch during the workday or a beer that evening.

This year's Arrival Day was much more fun. It was a Friday, first of all, and Ron and I drove to work that morning in our car (yay!) after dropping Benny off at Shakespeare Camp. Benny has been very cool about Shakespeare Camp, although he still contends he was lured into the camp under false pretenses. Two years ago we attended a summer camp expo and Shakespeare Camp had a booth full of toy swords and one of the "teacher artists" taught Benny swordplay. Well, after that it was all "I want to go to Shakespeare Camp." We couldn't afford it last year, but this year I laid out a shocking amount of money for the two-week camp.

Well, then Benny comes home the first day looking a little glum and I ask him how he went and he shook his head. "It's a lot of reading," he said. As the days went on, however, he started to get into his role as King Alonso in "The Tempest," making his crown and his sword and running around the apartment yelling "Prithee, peace!"

But he still feels like he was had -- he confessed to me that he always thought Shakespeare Camp meant you could shake a spear.

Yesterday we saw the result of all his hard work: "The Tempest". Ron and I worked a half day, and it was a good day for me. A special publication was going to press, called — and I swear I'm not making this up — Health Care Heroes. Thankfully, however, I was not the editor of that project, so I could bug out at 1 p.m.

We stopped at home to get Ron's Flip camera and went to the big Methodist church on Geary where the camp was held. We'd never been to any Benny performance except for Little League games, so I sat the whole time with my mouth half open while Benny said lines like:

"O thou mine heir
Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish
Hath made his meal on thee?"

I must admit though, my favorite part was when Benny wore a mask and was a dog spirit — he hopped around the stage on his hands and knees and then crawled out the door.

After that, there was a cast party, where I met the amazing little girl who played Ariel. (She also plays the piano and the violin and does ballet.) Another girl who looked about Benny's age sat on a chair like a throne while her family surrounded her and gave her flowers and wrapped presents. Ron was immediately gripped with remorse because we didn't bring Benny anything, so we took him out for ice cream.

Then we went home and ordered Chinese for dinner and sat around watching the Roomba vacuum the living room and were happy.

It was a great Arrival Day.

Arrival Day 2007: How Far We've Come

2011-07-22T11:39:00.002-05:00

Every year around this time we celebrate Arrival Day. It was July 22, 2007, when Ron and I loaded up 3-year-old Benny and the cat and flew to San Francisco. It was the culmination of 7 months of preparation, including six weeks of separation from Ron and five months of trying to sell the house.

It truly ranked as one of the most stressful periods of my life and every year I take a minute to see how far we've come. Four years ago on this day I was awake at 1 a.m. in our Ann Arbor house, our luggage piled in the empty living room. The whole house smelled like cleaning wipes, since we had a showing later that day.

By July 2008, I'd survived a year at the Business Times filling in for a senior editor, produced a giant real estate publication, negotiated the sale of our house to Andy and went with Ron and Benny on our first trip (a few days on the coast) since arriving in S.F.

By July 2009, we'd managed to to pay for Benny's fiendishly expensive school for two years and managed to score a spot in a good San Francisco elementary school. The recession was clamping down, with layoffs and paycuts at work, so we huddled in a tiny one-bedroom and concentrated on paying down debt.

By July 2010, we'd gone to Mt. Lassen — our first long family vacation since our RV trip to Shenandoah Valley in 2006. Four of our credit card lenders imposed giant APR hikes on our balances, requiring us to “opt out” and close the cards. We threw Benny's first real birthday party since he turned one and moved (finally) to a two-bedroom apartment that is walking distance to Benny's school. And July 2010 was a great month for us, even though Benny didn't like his summer daycare: we visited the Charles Shulz "Peanuts" museum, I joined a geology hiking group, and Benny and I went to Muir Woods.

Now here we are at July 2011. In the past year we bought a car (!)and I flew to Alabama with Benny to see Greg's graduation. We still miss Ron's dad, who passed away in November. In February we traveled to Death Valley and paid off most of our debt, thanks to an sum of money from Ron's dad. Benny joined spring Little League baseball and I wrote another NaNoWriMo novel. (You're supposed to write it all in November; it took me until April.) I visited Greg in Fort Hood, Texas, before he left for Afghanistan, and saw Cindy, Scott and Andy too. Then we topped it all off with a cross-country drive by way of South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.

Yes, I'd say we've come pretty far.

Lego Helm's Deep

2011-07-02T15:17:00.004-05:00

Benny didn't feel well yesterday, so he didn't go to camp and I worked from home. When I wasn't making photo assignments, reading stories and bugging reporters, Benny and I worked on a Lego project.

This is Helm's Deep, from the second Lord of the Rings book "The Two Towers." The orcs (red, yellow and blue bears) are attacking the mountain citadel while the soldiers of Rohan stand waiting on the walls. The mysterious Forest (green bears to the right) looms ominously, waiting to take its revenge on the orcs. Note the King's tall tower (complete with satellite dish) on the left, the little red orc preparing to scale the walls with a ladder, and another little red orc with a battle hammer.

Home Again

2011-06-28T00:17:00.003-05:00

The trip starts here.

The Mad Dash Home

2011-06-27T23:25:00.010-05:00

I must say, Idaho didn't quite live up to its hype. You may be wondering "What hype? Dancing potatoes?" I know, I know. For some reason I built up Idaho in my mind as a picturesque state, and perhaps it is in the north. In the south, however, driving along 86 and 84, it felt like a bit of letdown. However, this route did help us avoid Utah, which I've crossed at least three times already.

Unfortunately, Idaho couldn't help us with Nevada. We spent the night in Jackson Hole, and then pushed on through Nevada. Our original plan was to stop at Elko. But we were making good time and Ron was starting to think about getting home early so he could prepare for his Sunday flight to Washington, D.C. So we stopped at an underwhelming Mexican restaurant for dinner, then put Benny in his pajamas for some night driving.

We drove another 60 miles through a blinding, sinking sun on the horizon to Battle Mountain, where their one hotel was full. So we pushed on another 60 miles to Winnemucca, It was 10 p.m. and every hotel was full there, too. Well, not every hotel -- the Winners Hotel was only $50 a night and was never full, the helpful Holiday Inn desk clerk said. Did not sound good, so we reserved a hotel room in Sparks, just east of Reno. It was another 2 1/2-hour drive, and Ron groaned when I told him the news. We had to get more windshield wiper fluid, though, since we'd drained the minivan's supply washing away the battalions of squashed bugs during this drive. Ron entered a Chevron just minutes before it closed and we had a diverting 15 minutes trying to open the minivan's hood while Chevron's employees celebrated the end of their shift in the parking lot.

We woke up the next day groggy but determined to arrive in San Francisco that day. Benny was disappointed he couldn't see Lake Tahoe from I-80. Tahoe seems to be the vacation destination for the Bay Area. "Every week one of my friends goes to Tahoe," Benny said. "Sometimes three of them have gone. I think they meet up with each other." Certainly Ron's and my coworkers love to trade tips about Tahoe cabins and skiing. "The North Rim's the place to be," one likes to say wisely. Of course, Ron and I are so contrary that Benny will be lucky to see Tahoe before he's 18.

We emerged from the Sierra Nevadas and cross California's central valley, then enter the Bay Area. I found myself surprisingly excited to return to San Francisco. We found a parking spot for our Honda Fit across the street from our apartment and the parked the filthy, bug-splattered minivan in our garage space. Benny cheerfully toted bundles and small pieces of furniture up the stairs so we were settled at home in no time.

My last task that night was to check the trip odometer: 2,891.6 miles over 11 states in one week.

There's something satisfying about crossing a continent from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. We watched the whole panorama unfold: the waters of Lake Michigan, the congestion of Chicago, then through relatively flat Wisconsin and Minnesota to enter South Dakota's prairie. Then cross the Missouri River into the West, with mountains and monuments and the Rockies drawing ever closer. Then through the hills of Montana and Idaho down into the Nevada desert. A quick hop over the Sierra Nevada mountains, through the Central Valley and we find ourselves on the Bay Bridge, one minute after the toll goes from $5 to $6, but who's complaining.

I don't know what else to take away from it except this is the source of Americans' helpless obsession with automobiles and the lure of the open road. In Europe you want to throw a few stacks of cash in a carpet bag like Phineas Fogg and board the Orient Express to Paris-Munich-Vienna-Istanbul or the Trans-Mongolian Railroad to Moscow-Ulan Bator-Beijing. In America you want to point your car toward the setting sun and drive until you're too tired to see. Some writers say the last hundred years will be seen as an amazing anomaly, when ordinary people could just pile into a car and go anywhere, limited only by their money for gas. They say that era is coming to an end, and it is true such habits greatly harm the Earth. Twenty years from now, will Benny be able to rent a big minivan with unlimited mileage, fill it with his family and odd pieces of furniture and drive across the country? Has this trip passed on the precept that cars equal freedom to another generation?

Now I'm back in San Francisco, and tomorrow I'll take a bus to Benny's summer camp and then a train to work like the good tree-hugging liberal I am, but when I'm looking out the windows of the N-Judah, I'll probably imagine I'm driving through Yellowstone's Gallatin mountain range.

Bison and Basement Rocks

2011-06-21T18:43:00.022-05:00

Yellowstone Day! Ron had never been to the national park before and I hadn't seen it since I was 17. Benny spent the winding trip south to the park carefully ranking all the animals he wanted to see: "First bears, then bison, then antelope ... no, first bison, then bears, then antelope ... wait, there are moose? Okay, first bison, then bears, then moose, then wolves ... oh wait, the antelope ..."

I had cracked open my "Roadside Geology of Montana" again, since the route we chose took us through the length of Paradise Valley between two mountain ranges. I dutifully took pictures of mountains and moraines (those ridges left by the retreat of a glacier) and sandstone ledges, wondering why I bought the darn book. But then we came upon a great roadcut near the southern end of the valley. At Yankee Jim Canyon, the Yellowstone River, which we had been following for much of our travels in Montana, cuts through Precambrian basement rocks. These rocks are the oldest of the old, the rocks formed before life left any traces on earth. Basement rocks, as the name implies, are the bottom layer of the land, and generally considered the last rocks before the mantle (the plastic rock that the earth's plates float on).

Maybe it's the picky editor in me, but I always like to see the basement rocks of a region before I learn about all the mud and sand being laid down and then volcanoes barfing basalt all over the landscape. Montana's basement rocks are about 300 million years old.

Ron stopped the minivan so I could take some closer pictures. Fortunately there was a wide, graveled pullout opposite the roadcut, so I didn't have to take my life into my hands on a narrow shoulder the way I did in the Shenandoah Valley.

These Precambrian basement rocks are complexly folded gneisses (pronounced "nices").

We continued on to Yellowstone, grumbling slightly at signs warning us of a $25 entry fee, and had a nice surprise at the entry point. Since today was the first day of summer, all entry was free! What luck, to hit the most expensive park of the trip on June 21. We started twisting along to Mammoth Hot Springs when we saw a short line of cars pulled off to the side. Someone might have a flat, but generally pulled-over cars in Yellowstone mean one thing: wildlife.

We were not disappointed. Three shaggy bison were grazing by the roadside, unfazed by the vehicles.

We tried to have a picnic lunch at Sheepeater Cliff, but black flies clustered thickly under the trees, where the picnic tables were. So we ate in the minivan again. We haven't had much luck with the picnic lunches on this trip, really. Afterwards we climbed all over the cliff, which is actually basalt lava that broke into columns as it cooled about 500,000 years ago.

We arrived at Old Faithful just as it began its eruption.

And the park said goodbye with a final sighting of wildlife. Probably mule deer.

We stayed the night at a very nice Holiday Inn Express in Jackson Hole, which looked a little forlorn with its ski slopes bare of snow. Tomorrow we head to our ninth state: Idaho.

Little Bighorn

2011-06-20T17:48:00.017-05:00

It was a big day today -- we went to see Montana and Little Bighorn Battlefield. I'd visited both when I was 17, on a trip with my family and grandparents before leaving for college. While I remember the Badlands, Yellowstone and Mt. Rushmore from that trip, I'd completely blocked out Little Bighorn, coming near the end of a long road trip. I guess I was burned out after too many scenic vistas and big pancake breakfasts.

The rockies still lined the western horizon, touching the heavy gray clouds, as we crossed into Montana and sped north on I-90 to Little Bighorn. We all were a little grumpy -- the minivan was beginning to resemble an attic on wheels, what with the bundles of clothing and piled-up furniture. Benny had rediscovered the paper airplane kit my mother had given him and was complaining because we wouldn't let him cut paper during the drive. The rocks along this stretch were a big yawner, all sandstones and shales. We stopped at a market to stock up the cooler, planning a picnic lunch at the national monument. But there were no picnic tables or areas at Little Bighorn, so we munched peanut butter sandwiches in the minivan while Ron read aloud about Gen. Custer and the battle.

The fine displays at the Little Bighorn visitors center cheered us up. Five years after I last visited in 1986, the Custer Battlefield National Monument was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Efforts were made to incorporate the Native American perspective and red granite blocks were added to mark spots where Native American warriors fell. We headed to the back porch where we listened to a mesmerizing talk that covered the geographic, social, military and economic causes of the battle. In 1868 a treaty had been signed giving the region to the natives, but gold was discovered six years later in the Black Hills and the army couldn't keep the settlers out. Although the Indians won the battle, they subsequently lost the war to protect their independent, nomadic way of life.

Ordered to attack the Indian encampment, Major Reno galloped down into this valley and crossed the Little Bighorn river. The attack failed and his shattered battalion retreated to the bluffs.

Benny with a red granite marker for Cheyenne warrior Lame White Man.

Soon we're on the road again. The sky has cleared and the Rockies are bigger now. We spend the night in Livingston, Montana, and plan to drive down to Yellowstone's north entrance in the morning.

There's a Mastadon Following Us

2011-06-19T14:24:00.008-05:00

Well, we missed the missile site, which was a shame, because I'd looked forward to a brief moment of contemplating the Cold War that had millions of 1950s schoolchildren cowering under their desks. But it was cold and rainy this morning, with ominous storm clouds spreading over South Dakota's enormous sky. We at fistfuls of Cheerios in our dreary motel room and scrambled into our clothes for an early start.

A light rain was falling as we drove into the Badlands. Benny hopped around on the Door Trail while I stood on the platform with my umbrella. Tour buses disgorged dozens of shivering tourists in shorts. A lovely family with three children tripped by, all dressed in shiny raincoats, rain hats and boots. I looked at my flip flops and Benny's wet t-shirt and ball cap and sighed.

We drove through a downpour to Rapid City and dashed into an Applebee's for lunch. Benny laid out his new plastic cowboys, Indians and Wild West animals (which included a buffalo and a giant meerkat). Ron studied the map and I ate a giant bowl of pasta. We decided to check out the nearby Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. "World-Renowed!" the web site claimed, sounding like an 1880 Town billboard. But it promised to be dry, anyway.

Well, the museum was superb. It highlighted fossils in South Dakota and Wyoming: Oligocene mammals, giant marine reptiles, Jurassic dinosaurs. Benny was immediately taken by a giant Mastadon skull hanging 13 feet above the floor. We admired the skeleton of a 29-foot mosasaur, a reptile which swam in the shallow inland sea that covered much of North America. Back in the Badlands visitors center, we'd seen a lovely tableau of a big piglike animal ripping flesh off a little rhinoceros stuck in the mud while a small three-toed horse snuck away. Here in the museum we saw the bones of those three animals.

At the gift shop, Benny scored a toy mastadon and a sabre-toothed cat to threaten his plastic Indians and cowboys. I bought a copy of "Roadside Geology of Montana" and the woman behind the counter didn't look at me strangely at all. But then, she was wearing a T-shirt that said "Sedimentary, My Dear Watson."

We emerged from the museum and lo, the sun shone brightly. We dashed to Mt. Rushmore, which I hadn't seen since Ron and I drove a moving truck from Kalamazoo, Mich., to San Francisco in 1999, right after we returned from Prague. Benny clutched his mastadon while we hiked around the monument.

The four presidents are carved into the Harney Peak granite batholith, a huge expanse of continental rock that cooled underground, like the Sierra Nevada batholith in California. Mt. Rushmore's granite cuts across older schist, which was originally mud and dirty sand on an ancient sea bottom. You can see the color change below Washington where the white granite overlies the gray schist.

Then it was time to race the rain to Wyoming. There were the Rockies ahead, blue and distant, their swirling snowpacks blending with the overhanging clouds. We spent the night in Gillette, Wyo., and prepared to enter Montana the next day.

South Dakota and 5-Cent Coffee

2011-06-18T21:16:00.018-05:00

I'm writing this post in a 1950s time warp in Kadoka, South Dakota, typing away to the creak creak creak of the rusted-out swings outside our motel room door. Touted as the "Gateway to the Badlands," the motel was probably cute in the 50s, rundown in the 70s and now edges toward the decrepit. But it's been a long drive from Sioux Falls and we're not inclined to be picky.

Checking in at the lobby was delayed by the woman in front of me, who counted out eight 10-dollar bills with painstaking care. Behind me were six motorcyclists in leather and little matching bandanas. They talked about some big motorcycle rally and when the motel clerk mentioned a motorcyclist discount, I immediately said, "My hog's out front," but I don't think he believed me.

We ate dinner at a restaurant/gift shop across the street, where I found a copy of the book "Roadside Geology of Southern Dakota." The cashier stared as I brought it to the counter. "That book's been here forever,” she said. “We wondered what kind of person would buy it.” Then she eyed me suspiciously.

We woke up this morning in a Sioux Falls Holiday Inn, where Ron let me sleep in and took Benny to its fairly extensive water park. As we barreled down I-90, I tried to distract a bored Benny by telling him the plots of the Little House books set in South Dakota. He was quite intrigued, so much so that we took a not-so-quick detour to De Smet, the setting of the last three books. Benny has decided that he wants a farm now, and bought some toys at the Laura Ingalls gift store and spent the next 60 miles enacting elaborate scenarios involving a stuffed chipmunk, a stuffed horse and a wooden gun.

Traveling by covered wagon

Benny's ready for school on the prairie

East and west South Dakota are quite distinct, divided by the Missouri River, East South Dakota is all prairie and pretty farms with lots of water and west South Dakota is hilly and rugged with a daffy western obsession.

Ron and Benny at the Missouri River in South Dakota

After we crossed the Missouri, the billboards became more aggressive and pleading, sprinkled with cheery Wall Drug signs touting 5-cent coffee. Then they turned positively menacing as we neared 1880 Town. 1880 Town was amazing, we were told, it was exciting, it was nothing we have seen before. We simply could not miss it. Bad things happened to people who missed it. It had dinosaurs! It was 40 miles away, it was 30 miles, 20 … 10 … 8 … 5 …. We pressed our noses to the windows, anxious to see this fabled place. And there it was, a tiny fake town attached to a big Shell gas station. As we drove on without stopping, I half-expected to see a billboard saying “Did You Miss 1880 Town? Turn Around Now!” I’m sure tomorrow we’ll see a billboard saying “Did You Skip 1880 Town? How Do You Sleep At Night?”

We officially started this cross-country drive from South Haven, Mich., to San Francisco on Thursday. The first week of our vacation was a rushed, pollen-induced haze of sorting papers, mopping basements, hauling carpets and chauffeuring an antique cabinet all over Berrien County. I also caught a bad cold. But there was lots of family time and cookouts on the grill. I saw only brief glimpses of Benny as he spent every moment with his cousins.

Benny in Ann Arbor, Mich.

At 1 p.m. Thursday we finally hit the road, with Ron in the driver’s seat, Benny napping in the back and me sneezing in the front. Chicago traffic slowed us considerably, but we made it to Madison, Wisconsin by dinnertime and spent the night at Ron’s niece Christina’s condo.

On Friday morning, I was still a sneezing, coughing wreck, but we piled into the rented minivan and drove across Minnesota with grim determination.

But life became all kinds of better after a night at a very nice Holiday Inn. This morning my cold was almost gone and Benny has adjusted to road life and no longer demands snacks every half hour. Tomorrow we see the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore and quite possibly the Minuteman Missile Site. I simply cannot miss the missile site. It might have dinosaurs.

Cover Letter

2011-05-28T17:19:00.003-05:00

The Cincinnati Review recently received this brilliant cover letter. Who would ever have the nerve to reject such an applicant?

Sipping the Texas Tea

2011-05-19T16:28:00.010-05:00

Unless you're me, then you're drinking Kahlua Martinis in Austin. Anyway, here are some photos from my Texas visit a few weeks ago to see my brother Greg. He's an Army helicopter pilot and is heading overseas this week.

My sister Cindy, her husband Scott and my brother Andy arrived for the weekend as well. We took a tour of Fort Hood, had a great weekend in Austin, watched the Red Wings and stayed up Sunday night to hear the news about Osama bin Laden.

I really liked Austin and would return in a heartbeat. A great steak dinner, lots of cool bars and dressed-up girls wearing beauty queen sashes. Is that something young women do in Texas?

Here are some pictures:

Look out Andy! Tanks are coming out of the trees behind you!

A Soviet-built T-55 tank. It can lay its own smoke screen and has an infrared searchlight. The tank was captured by the 1st Cavalry Division during Desert Storm. Can I have one of my very own?

Cindy's hanging out with the PT-76, a Soviet amphibious light tank from the 50s.

Here we are in the lounge of an Austin Hilton.

Viewing my life through the funhouse mirror

2011-04-27T14:19:00.006-05:00

Corporations attempting to appeal to women would be much more successful if they weren't so creepy and patronizing about it.

Here's a hilarious post about a Proctor & Gamble coupon book presumably targeting stay-at-home moms. My faves: The page where diapers and female products are displayed together and the picture of the woman feeding her man his dinner by hand.

This reminds me of a post I wrote long long ago about an issue of Ladies' Home Journal, which portrayed women as crazed insomniacs cooking artichoke hearts and fretting over nuclear winter when they weren't trying on culottes and putting salicylic acid on their face.

Not to mention a column about Franklin Covey organizers who assume if you're a man, you build infrastructure and buy swim goggles and if you're a woman, you make manicure appointments and plan the Collins' anniversary party.

Swinging with the Pendulum

2011-04-18T12:40:00.004-05:00

I'm a little burned out on reading history right now, so I've selected a baffling novel called "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco. It was an international bestseller in its day, which means that people all over the world bought the book and pretended they knew what the hell it was about. "Endlessly diverting ... intricate and absorbing," Time magazine called it, but then they probably had fact checkers to help figure out the hundreds of obscure references packed into every page.

It's been a long time since I've read a book where I didn't know every other word, which means A. I'm brilliant or B. I've been lazy bum who reads too much Philippa Gregory. I suspect the second. Since FP is supposed to be a thriller, and it promises a fair amount of mayhem, I'm going to take it on.

But since I don't have a scholar versed in philosophy and religion in my pocket (or even in my life, which might be a good thing), I have to go it alone with the help of Google. So far this morning I've learned the definition of sublunar (earthly), chthonian (relating to the underworld), chelae (claws), archons (evil forces) and much more. And I'm only to page seven. I had to look up the first word in the book "Kester," meaning crown in Hebrew.

(One of the things, I've learned, by the way, is to use dictionary.com, NOT thefreedictionary.com. The second site is totally wretched, with skimpy definitions and appalling ads. When I'm trying to improve my mind, the last thing I need are gross pictures of yellow teeth to advertise whiteners, or cartoon women squeezing their stomach fat. Please Lord, bring back the dancing mortgage people!)

Ahem! Back to FP ( no, I am not typing Foucalult's Pendulum over and over). I'm not sure why I'm reading this book, which I picked up at a preschool yard sale for $3.50 two years ago and have been trying to ignore ever since. It looks intriguing, I guess, and I know very little about theology and philosophy and the Knights Templar. One could argue this is a good thing and I'm just taking a short route to a permanent headache, and that's probably true. But it's a challenge, and I'm always one for challenges that have no physical risk or practical use whatsoever.

Plus, those first few pages have been kind of neat. He's got a nice turn for imagery, this guy. His description of the swinging pendulum in a Paris museum of machines and inventions was striking. "Here the pendulum is flanked by the nightmare of a deranged entomologist," he writes, comparing the skeletons of early airplanes, bicycles, autos and other machines to mechanical insects. The museum itself, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers or Museum of Arts and Crafts, is housed in an ancient priory, Saint Martin Des Champs, and seems to foreshadow the violent conflict between art, science and philosophy.

I don't plan to blog exhaustively about this little project (really - you can relax now), but I might mention it once in a while. I leave you today with a neat quote I found while searching for the definition of simulacra:

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?

E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Rumanian–born-French philosopher. "Strangled Thoughts," sct. 3, The New Gods (1969, trans. 1974).

(Oh, and by the way, the Pendulum is no longer at Saint Martin Des Champs. It's in the Pantheon now. )

Well, that's done

2011-04-15T16:53:00.003-05:00

You find me today on the field of victory, fresh from completing my National Novel Writing Month novel.

NaNoWriMo, as participants call it, issues a challenge each November to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. In 2002, I wrote a science fiction novel titled "Killer Robots Never Work." In 2003, I wrote a novel that borrowed heavily from Greek Mythology called "Escaping Olympus." Then I took a few years off, returning to start a goofball murder mystery based on the Da Vinci Code called "The Fred Code." I made it to 14,000 words before giving up.

Now I have another completed NaNo novel, this one so sappy and shamelessly derivative that I'm too embarrassed to tell you the title. I call it the Stealth Novel. The only person who gets to read it is Benny, who provided many of the plot twists and the bright idea to set the climatic final scene in a swamp. Every few days he asks me to bring it out and read it to him and I oblige, skipping over any scenes I deem too violent, sexy or laced with profanity. (Sometimes I have to skip entire chapters.)

My favorite scene in the novel is when my bad guy spontaneously combusts. Well, it wasn't spontaneous, really — I mean, the Really Bad Gal intended it to happen, but she hoped he'd end up as a charred corpse. Instead, she got carried away and he ended up as a pile of ashes, which really ticked her off.

Anyway, the paragraph above should make it clear why Stealth Novel will never be sent out to publishers. But I consider it a great achievement anyway, I mean, writing 50,000 words is always worth a pat on the back, as long as it isn't the same word repeated 50,000 times.

Now, you more astute readers will be thinking, "Hmmm, write a novel in the month of November, eh? But it's ... April."

Well spotted. Yes it is April, which means it took me five and a half months to write the thing. I was at about 25,000 words when Ron's father passed away, and I did not hesitate to put Stealth Novel on the shelf, with an earnest promise to myself I would finish it later.

But there is no harder goal to achieve than a goal without a deadline, and it was so easy to shove the novel aside whenever I was hungry, tired, stressed or simply anxious to get to the next level of "Metal Gear Solid." (I'm fighting some villain in Prague with a rocket launcher now.)

But as Tolkien once said about another fantasy novel that also has a swamp, "I felt that the story could not be wholly abandoned." Except in my case it wasn't because I was producing a classic loved by millions of readers, but because I had made that promise in November. And I, for one, am sick of breaking writing promises to myself. I've got a file drawer and computer hard drive stuffed with unfinished works: plays, stories, memoirs. I couldn't bear the prospect of having yet another half-finished draft cluttering my mind.

So now that I've finished my Stealth Novel and crossed one more item off my To Do list, I'm turning to my next unfinished project: a memoir about our move to San Francisco in 2007 as the housing crisis and recession hit. And yes, I will finish it. And no, I won't set the ending in a swamp.

Visual Aids

2011-03-22T15:50:00.009-05:00

We plan to pay off all our credit card debt this summer, which is quite exciting. We've already eliminated some cards. For anyone unclear on how I feel about our debt I've included some illustrations:

This has been our credit card debt for four years:

This is our credit card debt now:

This will be our credit card debt at the end of the summer:

The last picture illustrates our debt once we're paying off our balances every month. Credit cards are mischevious, though, you have to watch them or they'll sink a little claw into you.

SF Little League Upper Farm Royals with SF Giants World Series trophy

2011-03-12T23:40:00.000-05:00

Benny and his Little League Team (plus team parent Ron) get to pose with the 2010 World Series Trophy.

Sunny day

2011-03-03T17:36:00.006-05:00

Here's Callisto looking out our apartment window on a sunny day last week.

The Good Life in Death Valley

2011-02-07T13:23:00.029-05:00

I'm sitting in front of my computer today in a little sunstroke-induced daze after our four days in Death Valley.

Death Valley is a huge national park tucked between the Sierra Nevada mountains and the state of Nevada, about 530 miles from San Francisco. We planned to leave early Thursday morning, but it was 10 a.m. before we were all tucked into the Honda Fit and backing out of the garage. We were feeling pretty good about our frenzied, last-minute preparations until we passed Livermore on 580 and realized that we'd forgotten Benny's suitcase.

It was an odd time for a vacation, I know. This four-day weekend was provided courtesy of the San Francisco Unified School District. Thursday was the Lunar New Year and Friday was a Furlough Day — otherwise known as We Can't Afford To Educate Your Kid Today day.

So we decided to drive our Fit, which has logged only 2,000 miles since we acquired it in August, to Death Valley and see what the hottest, driest and lowest place in North America looks like. It looks like this (click to enlarge):

Badwater

We made good time and stopped at a Bakersfield Target to buy groceries and clothes for Benny. But long hours in the car is tough on a kid and he had a major meltdown when we wouldn't buy him a pack of 24 Pokemon cards to go with the 230 cards he received for his birthday. We left Bakersfield with Benny red-faced and hiccuping in the backseat, announcing that he hated vacations.

View from Dante's Peak

After a peanut butter sandwich for dinner and a bathroom break on the side of a lonely highway, Benny fell asleep. We drove up the Panamint Valley toward the park and started climbing the Panamint Range to enter the desert valley. It was nearly pitch black as we climbed the looping narrow road. We couldn't see past the guardrails and I kept picturing a yawning abyss just inches away. There were hardly any other cars, so it was just us, the stars and dim shadows of mountains. Finally the road began to drop steadily and wind less and we drove through tiny settlements to Stovepipe Wells Village, checking in at about 9 p.m.

The morning, however, was glorious. A perfectly flat valley, 150 miles long, ringed by a wall of mountains up to 11,000 feet. Snow-topped Telescope Peak brooded to the south. We piled back into the car and drove to the nearby sand dunes, 14 miles of soft beachlike sand. Benny ran about and played Pokemon Chicken (don't ask). It was climbing to a high of 72, and the weather remained that mild for the entire trip. But the sun was still relentless and the air was bone dry — I spent the trip under a Death Valley baseball cap and covered in layers of lotion, sunblock and aloe chapstick.

Sand Dunes

But we didn't have all day to play Pokemon Chicken in the sand dunes. I had a List. Fans of the Elizabeth Peters novel "Crocodile on the Sandbank" might find my List familiar. In that novel, the 19-century heroine has hired a boat to cruise down the Nile, looking at the tombs. Most tourists simply rode straight along the river, visiting tombs along the way. The heroine wanted to visit the tombs in chronological order, which meant drifting down to one tomb, then forcing the locals to row her back upstream to the next, then back up to the next, then drift down to ... well, you get it. All so she could see 3rd Dynasty Old Kingdom tombs before the New Kingdom tomb of Tutmosis III.

Well, Amelia Peabody lived on in my List. There were 18 stops, from Precambrian to the Quaternary, and this meant starting with Badwater's 1.7 billion-year-old gneiss to the south and then dashing north to Titus Canyon's 500 million-year-old limestones. Let's just say that the sand dunes were not exactly first on my list, being very recent features. Benny hopped out of the Fit, shouting "The sand dunes! They're number 12 on Mommy's list, but we're gonna see them now!" A nearby retired couple heard him and cracked up.

We stopped at Furnace Creek, the central settlement in Death Valley, for lunch, where Benny found a map of the United States in the gift shop. This map's drawings of all the major buildings, monuments and features in the country captivated Benny and he spent the rest of the day hidden behind it, like a 1950s husband behind his newspaper at breakfast. Whenever I tried to point out a particularly fetching alluvial fan, Benny would just grunt.

He did like Badwater, though, elevation 282 feet below sea level. Death Valley is very conscientious about keeping tourist updated about their elevation. Unless one lives in the Himalayas, a person's current elevation isn't something to be constantly checked. In Death Valley, though, green signs constantly update drivers on their elevation. "Oh look," I'd say. "We just gained another hundred feet." Yawn.

Badwater's contorted, ancient rocks

Still, it is kind of cool to stand in a sun-baked salt pan below sea level and look at the ancient, contorted, metamorphasized Black Mountains. Then we drove back to the hotel, where Ron, worn out from three crazy days of writing an entire biotech section, followed by an 11-hour drive, collapsed on the bed. So I took Benny to Mosaic Canyon, No. 2 on my list.

The history-minded might remember how Queen Marie Antoinette had a little pretend farm near Versailles, where she and her ladies could milk the cows with porcelain pails engraved with her initials. Well, if Marie Antoinette had suddenly decided she wanted to hike a canyon, she would have commissioned a Mosaic Canyon. Running water cut into a mountain made of Precambrian limestone and dolomite created when Death Valley was a tropical sea. The rock was transformed into marble, and the rocks and debris washed down the crack polished the marble to a smooth sheen. It was stunningly beautiful. Benny was in heaven, sliding down the smooth marble slopes on his butt.

Mosaic Canyon

After we woke Ron up and got some dinner into him, we headed back out to the sand dunes. One thing about traveling in February is that (and I can't be the first one to have noticed this) the days are short. By 5 p.m., any sightseeing is pretty much done. So by 7 p.m. it was dark enough for stargazing.

It was an amazing show, all the twinkling, flashing and shooting stars. The Milky Way banded the moonless sky and smudgy nebulae were scattered among the constellations.

Benny tore his shoe wide open on a rock, so the next day we stopped at Stovepipe Wells' general store to buy duct tape. I wound half a roll around his shoe and after he wallowed in some desert dust, it blended right in. Then we headed to No. 3, Titus Canyon a narrow slash in the mountains and impressive in a gosh-am-I-in-a-Hollywood-Western kind of way. After that, we departed from my list to check out Ubehebe Crater. The mile-wide crater was formed by an explosive basalt volcano, so the surrounding area was covered with black, volcanic debris, which clashed with the brown stripes in the crater itself.

Ubehebe Crater

We were standing around looking at a crater when suddenly a loud, jet-engine kind of rumble exploded behind us. Another eruption? No, merely a giant tour bus, stuffed with retired Asian tourists, who swarmed out, the women with big hats and the men in big cameras. They covered the area like locusts, snapping pictures of everything in their path as the tour bus idled and belched exhaust. We fled to the car to eat lunch. Then after 10 minutes, like there was some sort of silent signal, all 400 of them raced back to the bus. (And I mean raced, it was like the bus was going to leave without them and they'd have to hike to Las Vegas or something.) The bus' engine exploded into action, rumbled down the slope and disappeared.

Time to get back on the List again. We drove south to Dante's Peak, a splendid overview of the Valley, first stopping at Furnace Creek again. There we bought Benny another map (this one of the world) and saw our only wildlife at Death Valley — a road runner in front of a phone booth at the gas station.

View from Dante's Peak

We turned in early that night, because the next day we were driving home and Ron and Benny wanted to catch part of the Super Bowl. And by now we were a little tired of the bleak, brown desert. I just wanted to see a tree. We headed down the Panamint Valley again, passing a series of depressed, rusted-out little towns. One town was particularly desolate and its only remarkable feature was a big gleaming high school. "Why is it so messy here, Mommy?" Benny asked. Ron and I could only guess that the mining jobs that created the town had disappeared, leaving only boarded up buildings and hundreds of high-schoolers to educate.

I'm proud to say we arrived home for the second half of the Super Bowl and Benny and Ron cheered on the Packers while I lay in the bedroom and streamed "The Tudors" on NetFlix. I did emerge for the last quarter, however. Great game. Groupon mortally offended Ron with its "Too bad for Tibet, but hey they make great fish curry" ad and he emailed him and wrote a blog about it. Groupon, of course, is offended that anyone could be such a dip as to be offended.

So here we are home again, where we learned that while we were enjoying 72-degree days in Death Valley, it was 80 degrees in San Francisco. Apparently we went to the desert to escape the San Francisco heat. Go figure. We will definitely return to Death Valley, if for no other reason than that I have 12 more stops on my List.

Weird Day So Far

2011-01-12T14:21:00.005-05:00

I'm having a weird day. I dreamed last night I left my purse at a movie theater and they demanded a $1,500 ransom. I said, "Let me see it for a minute -- I want to make sure it's mine." Then I ran out with it. Then I returned with crumpled McDonalds bags in my pockets and started throwing them at the lady: "Look, I left garbage here! How much will you charge for it? How much?"

I have issues.

Also a bit of advice for other cubicle dwellers: If you decide to put your hair up mid-morning and you grab a hair spray bottle out of your desk to tame a few straggly hairs, do NOT choose a hairspray bottle you haven't used in months if not years. Especially if it's some cheapo Walgreens hair spray you never use.

One spritz and I remembered why I never use it. I'm still smelling it while I'm sitting here editing. It's driving me crazy. Sigh.

On a brighter, more self-indulgent note, I drove into work today. Parked in the platinum-priced basement of my paper's downtown Financial District building. Ron's been working 15-hour days at the JP Morgan conference and something has got to give. I could get used to this.

In other news, Rio recently released its new logo for the Olympics. Looks like a thong. Although perhaps that's appropriate. This is a very multi-layered design, however. It's supposed to represent unity and its silhouette evokes the country's Pão de Açucar (“Sugarloaf”) mountain. The colors are those of the Brazillian flag. Sometimes logos can get a little too cute.

Hello Andromeda!

2010-12-30T12:41:00.005-05:00

On Dec. 30, 1924, astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that Andromeda is not a funny gas cloud, but actually a galaxy, and that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies in the universe.

First we thought the earth was the center of the universe, then the sun, then the Milky Way. Now many people reasonably believe that the center of our universe is the center of the universe (although NASA is telling kids there is no center of the universe, that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once).

But last month some guys at Oxford University and Yerevan State University in Armenia proposed a new model for universe. They found some cosmic microwaves (wouldn't the Cosmic Microwaves be a good name for a rock band?) with cocentric circles. Their conclusion:

This, they say, is exactly what you'd expect if the universe were eternally cyclical. By that, they mean that each cycle ends with a big bang that starts the next cycle. In this model, the universe is a kind of cosmic Russian Doll, with all previous universes contained within the current one.

Random side note: We've got one of those Russian Dolls by the way. Actually it's a Christmas snowman with smaller and smaller snowmen inside until the last one holds a tiny penguin. Benny finds it endlessly fascinating.

But on to science. The beginning of all this speculation was Hubble's identification of the Andromeda galaxy, which remains my favorite galaxy. (Yes I have a favorite galaxy - I am a dork.) It used to be called a Nebula before Hubble promoted it and is the furthest object visible to the naked eye. I saw it through a planetarium telescope once, but I can't claim any real acquaintance with it. If I met the Andromeda Galaxy at a cocktail party, however, I'm sure it would be polite. ("Of course I remember you, and how's Rick?")

Torture at the Voting Booth

2010-11-03T10:16:00.004-05:00

Despite a hectic day yesterday, I managed to scurry out of work at 2:30 p.m. to vote. I took a bus to my voting precinct, which in my case was a tiny garage down the street from my apartment building. Four voting booths and a single table were crammed among hanging tools and bicycles. Kind of dangerous, actually, since a frustrated voter might conceivably snatch a wrench hanging from the wall and go on a rampage. I personally considered it, anyway.

For I was trapped behind a woman who was obviously The Dumbest Voter in San Francisco. I knew we were all in trouble the minute she approached the table and opened her mouth.

DVSF: My name's Nelson, ___ Nelson, but you won't find it on your list.
ELECTION WORKER: You're not on the list.
DVSF: Why not? I voted here last year!
EW: You're not on the list ... let me ...
DVSF: I've lived in this neighborhood for four years. I can't believe I'm not on the list!
EW: Let me give you a provisional ballot. Fred, where are the provisional ballots? Provisional ballots! The ones in the red folder. Provisional ...
(He leaves table. Line behind me lengthens.)
DVSF: I've lived in this neighborhood for four years.
EW: (returns) Now here is a provisional ballot. This is what you fill in, then ...
DVSF: I know what a provisional ballot is. I used one when I voted here last year.
(Crowd groans.)
EW: That doesn't mean this is your precinct. You can vote by provisional ballot anywhere in the city.
DVSF: I looked it up. The computer told me that I'm supposed to vote here.
EW: May I ask your address?

Then (this really happened) the Dumbest Voter in San Francisco's husband turns up.

DVSF: You're here!
EW: Name?
DVSF husband: ____ Nelson.
DVSF: You won't find his name on the list. We're not on the list, can you believe it? We've lived in this neighborhood for four years.
EW: May I ask your address?
DVSF husband: _____ Clayton.
EW: This precinct only goes to 1000 Clayton. You might be in another precinct.
DVSF: But the computer said 265 Fake Street Name.
(crowd groans)
EW: This is 147 Fake Street Name.
DVSF: Oh. I was walking down the street and this was the first polling place I saw. Does this mean I can't vote here?

Oh, we should have been so lucky. Instead she and her husband took copious time filling out a provisional ballot while I went into a booth and wrestled with a 10-page ballot with a zillion propositions.

Maybe next year I'll adopt her strategy: Leave my apartment on election day and walk down the street until I find a polling place. Then, when my name isn't on the list, shout, "But I've been in this neighborhood for two years!"

Hiking California: Angel Island

2010-10-20T15:05:00.018-05:00

As with most parents, it's obvious that I Need to Get Out More. Just meeting up with our friend Doug at a tapas bar Friday night took two weeks and numerous emails to arrange, plus a very good friend offering to take Benny for a few hours.

The tapas bar was, of course, worth all the trouble. I found myself surrounded by teeny plates of meatballs, tomatoes on bread, corn and mushrooms, and a pile of chard and it was all amazing. San Francisco will not stop trying to make me a foodie. (Ten years from now I'll be debating sauces with waiters. Shudder.)

This post, however, is not about food (sorry) but about the geology hiking group I joined. I'm not one of those people who happily dives into new things, especially if said things are full of total strangers. But San Francisco's geology is really interesting and yes, I Need to Get Out More.

Now I've taken those online personality tests and they keep giving me labels like "Lively Center of Attention", but that doesn't mean I can march up to a group of 20 total strangers and start jamming about rocks -- even metamorphosed Franciscan rocks. So I was a little nervous, which either makes me very quiet or neurotically chatty. Fortunately for the group I chose the former and ended up near the back of the pack, scribbling in my notebook and trying not to look winded on the steeper slopes.

Angel Island rocks are kind of neat. They're Franciscan rocks, like most of the rest of the Bay Area. The Franciscan complex is a group of basalts, granites and serpentine along with cherts, sandstones and shales. The whole bunch is cracked up with faults and looks pretty much like a mess.

Angel Island's Franciscan rocks are different because they're metamorphosed. That means they've been exposed to enough heat and pressure to change their chemical makeup. So they look different, and in some sandstones the dark spots that are usually round are elongated.

The reason Angel Island's rocks were metamorphosed is because they ended up in what's called a subduction zone. In a subduction zone, one plate of the earth's crust is shoved under another plate. After Angel Island's rocks were pushed down and cooked up, another crack in the earth arrived. Called a thrust fault, it shoved the metamorphosed rocks over a big sandstone block called the Alcatraz Terrane. So at Angel Island, you can see the old, weird, metamorphosed rocks on top of the boring sandstone.

And there you have it. So off I went on a week ago Sunday, carrying my lunch and my notebook in a backpack. It was, of course, Fleet Week, which meant the Blue Angels were scheduled to loop-de-loop over the Bay that afternoon.

I took the ferry to the island and met the group. We trudged over to the first stop, which promised metamorphosed sandstone with flattened pebbles in it. Here it is. Yeah, it looked that exciting in person, too.

Our leader passed around little lenses, but we couldn't find any of the fabled flattened pebbles. Oh well. We hiked down to the beach, looking for pillow basalts, but the tide was too high and we found ourselves squabbling about whether a few wet, black, suspiciously round boulders were in fact pillow basalts or just wet sandstone.

Now pillow basalt is one of my favorite rocks. These basalts are formed at a crack in the seafloor when new seafloor is spurting out. Once the molten rock hits the icy seawater, it forms blobby, shiny shells like the chocolate shells on Junior Mints. Blobs pile on blobs until the whole thing looks like a bunch of black pillows. Then the molten rock inside slowly cools. So when you're looking at a pile of pillow basalts, you're looking at rocks from the ocean floor, frozen as they formed. Love that. There are places where you can see pillow basalts far away from any water and it's mind-bending to consider how they got there.

Since the rocks weren't that riveting, I shot a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in fog:

But the real show happened on the ferry ride back to San Francisco. The Blue Angels started cork-screwing all over the Bay. They even buzzed the ferry with an ear-splitting boom.

Here is one of my favorite pictures ever with Alcatraz, a Blue Angel and a masted ship:

And here are some more Blue Angels:

All in all, I consider my hike a success. This Sunday I'm meeting the group to hike Ring Mountain in Tiburon. I'm told we'll see much more dramatic examples of metamorphic rocks associated with subduction zones. But sadly, no acrobatic jet planes are planned.

D is for Dense

2010-10-13T17:27:00.007-05:00

(The letter grade for Drake University's new logo)

Sometimes there's nothing I like better than reading about a bunch of government or academic types trying get all creative with marketing. Longtime readers of this blog might remember my post about the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau's weird logo.

The DMCVB (yes, they really do that) gave up on silly slogans ("It's a Great Time in Detroit!") and reduced its gritty, struggling city to a single letter: D. The Detroit Free Press chimed in with a fawning article ("Whatever happens in Vegas can stay there. This is the D.") Then the editors presented a montage of D's through history.

Well, D is the letter that Will Not Die, because the bright folks at Drake University in Iowa decided that their admissions recruitment literature needed a giant D+ on it. Drake officials said they wanted to attract students who would appreciate the irony. And, they'll have you know, “D” stands for Drake, while the “+” represents the opportunities the school offers students. Sounds a bit like that girl on a flying carrot, no?

("It's a rocket! And the orange is the glow of the Jovian clouds. And the green is the path to Earth ...")

Drake tested its D+ logo on 921 high school students, and three-quarters said they loved it. Only 3 percent were turned off by a giant D+ on school stationery. Obviously, they didn't appreciate the irony.

Transit First San Francisco, Part 2

2010-10-11T18:05:00.012-05:00

Last month I ran a series of dull errands using my car. I left my apartment at 12:55 on a Friday afternoon and returned at 3:25.

I couldn't help but wonder: How long would it have taken me to do those identical errands using Muni and my own two feet? Lo and behold, on a recent Friday afternoon, I had a list of nearly the exact same errands to do: go to the drug store, drop off dry cleaning, mail bills, get quarters for laundry, visit a bookstore, use the ATM and visit a West Portal business.

So I decided to use public transit rather than drive and leave at the same time, 12:55 p.m. Because San Francisco is, after all, a transit-first city. At least that's what the politicians say when asked why our parking meter rates are some of the highest in the nation.

12:55 p,m.
I leave the apartment sporting a backpack, a bag of dry cleaning, a bag of wire hangers and an iPod loaded with three episodes of "NPR: Marketplace." I give my shiny Honda Fit a wistful look, but walk by to the 37 bus stop. At least I didn't have to haggle with a construction guy to let my car out this time.

1:02 p.m.
I miss the 37 bus by seconds. (I know that driver saw me!) The next one isn't for 17 minutes, so I walk down to Cole Valley.

1:24
I arrive at Walgreens, dodging a car backing out of the parking lot. On the day I took the Fit, I was at Walgreens at 1:07. I'm already 17 minutes behind, red-faced and out of breath. I buy an envelope to mail a program from my brother's flight school graduation (It's on its way, Mom!) and a Milky Way Dark.

1:34
I'm waiting at the bus stop outside Walgreens, watching three UCSF shuttle buses roar past in a row. Since Muni is so unreliable, UCSF has a big fleet of buses for its personnel. Transit first, San Francisco!

1:45
I arrive at the dry cleaners and gratefully surrender my bags. Ron's suit is ready, but I can't pick it up because I don't have a car with me. I am now a half-hour behind.

2:17
Like my day with the Fit, I did some walking around: walked to the post office to mail bills, walked to a laundromat to get $10 worth of quarters from the change machine. I check out my favorite used bookstore and buy a biography of Queen Mary I of England, otherwise known as Bloody Mary.

On my day with the Fit, I had 10 minutes left on the parking meter. So I sat in the car, eating my Milky Way and reading.

Today, I'm sitting on a filthy concrete island in the middle of a high-traffic, exhaust-spewing street. N Trains rush by, rattling and squealing their way downtown. I check my phone to see when the next outbound N trains will arrive: 13 minutes, 14 minutes and 16 minutes.

2:38
A packed N train arrives, with an empty one right behind it. I board the second train, then transfer to a 28 bus.

2:51
I arrive at my credit union. I'm now 41 minutes behind.

3:07
The 28 bus dropped me off at 19th St. and Taraval and I'm waiting for an L train to take me to West Portal. The street is pretty dirty and noisy. One of the challenges of taking public transit in San Francisco is that the streets are often dirty and there are few places to sit. So if you're tired (and by now I've taken three buses and a train so I'm starting to flag), the only place to sit on a litter-strewn curb.

3:27
I arrive at West Portal. On my day with the Fit, I was here at 2:34. Last time I had an appointment at a salon; I decide to get a pizza instead. My salon appointment took 23 minutes, so that's how long I have to eat a pizza. Which is good, because I'm kinda cranky now and need a beer.

3:50
I leave the West Portal pizza place and hop on an L train.

4:05
I arrive at Church and Market. Another exciting -- but dirty -- traffic island, but a 37 comes in 2 minutes.

4:25
I'm home

So basically, running these errands took an extra hour. And let me tell you, there are other things I'd rather have done with that extra hour than sit around on dirty traffic islands as cars, buses and trains race by. Plus, on the day I used the Fit, I returned full of energy and ready to tackle some household jobs.

Today, I was wiped out, even with the brief pizza interlude in West Portal and ended up playing Civilization for 40 minutes before I could drag myself off the couch and pick up Benny from school.

As I've said before, my little Fit doesn't use much gas, so my daily decisions whether to drive are based on two criteria: amount of time and level of aggravation.

My judgment, therefore, is:
CAR 1, BUS 0.

This result illustrates Muni's biggest obstacles to increased ridership. Muni isn't going to get more riders from the working poor -- they already have no other choice. The system can't get more riders from the destitute, who can't pay anyway. Muni can't get more riders from San Francisco truly affluent; they wouldn't ride a bus if it had gold-plated hand rails and butt-warmers on every seat.

So the only demographic they can target is mine -- people with cars who are willing to take Muni if it's convenient, reasonably priced and somewhat stress-free.

I don't mean it has to be perfect -- a bus will be occasionally late and a driver will sometimes growl. I mean free of the soul-sapping, blood pressure-raising, white hot rage-inducing screwups and delays that riders routinely tolerate.

Transit first, San Francisco? Right now, I don't think so.

Transit First San Francisco: Part I

2010-10-01T11:36:00.013-05:00

Now that we have a car, I have a choice when I leave the apartment for any reason -- do I walk, drive, or take the bus? I'm glad to live in a place where I have different transportation options but it means I must walk that fine line between conserving resources and wasting time, between efficiency and outright laziness.

Our need to conserve resources vs. our need to pick up our kid on time is an issue many Americans are grappling with, and often the pocketbook has the last word. Whenever gas prices spike, people watch their driving habits more closely and sometimes that amounts to a permanent change in habits.

My little Fit doesn't use much gas, so my daily decisions whether to walk, ride or drive is based on two criteria: amount of time and level of aggravation. If I can do something quickly and calmly on foot or by bus, I'll probably do so.

Or will I? Am I just being lazy? To help answer that question, I'm conducting an experiment.

A few weeks ago I ran a series of errands on a Friday afternoon. I left the apartment at 12:55 p.m. to do the following things: go to the drug store, drop off dry cleaning, mail bills, get quarters for laundry, visit a bookstore, use the ATM and get my eyebrows waxed (ouch). So I climbed into my new car and sped away.

Well, not really. I couldn't, because there was a big old pickup truck blocking my driveway. I had to cross the street and shout to the guys piling wood into a rusted-out dumpster: "Is that your truck?" No, it wasn't, but they knew who it was, and a man in his sixties with a shock of white hair came dashing out to move it. Actually, he didn't move it right away, he came up to me instead.

MAN: I can move the truck really quickly. You just tell me when you want to get out, and I'll come right over.

ME: Well, I'd rather you didn't block my driveway. I come in and out a lot. (Actually I'm at work most of the time, but I wasn't telling him that.)

MAN: It's no trouble -- I don't mind moving it. So I'll park it here, all right? It's just while we're doing the work. (He points to the scaffolding on the house across the street.)

ME: How long will the work take?

MAN: Two months.

At that point I started chuckling, then saw he was really serious. "No," I said, glaring. "Please don't block my driveway."

The man went off in a huff. Apparently this is what it's like to own a car in San Francisco. Hmmm.

So it's 1:05 before I even back out of the garage, but I'm soon on my way and the Walgreens in Cole Valley has a parking lot. I pick up batteries and saline solution and add a Milky Way Dark to reward myself for not screaming at the Truck Man. I had to drive the car in reverse out of the Walgreens lot and back out into the street, but that was okay.

1:16: I pull into a meter spot right outside my dry cleaners in our former Inner Sunset neighborhood. Even though we've moved, we remain faithful customers. The meter already has 7 minutes on it! Yay! I add enough change to bring it up to 40 minutes. The dry cleaners are devastated that I didn't bring my son — they often make balloon animals for him.

Then I did a little walking: walked half a block to the post office to mail bills, walked another two blocks to a laundromat to get $10 worth of quarters from the change machine. Then I use the quarters to do laundry in my apartment building. The laundromat at 9th and Irving are surprisingly nice about this; they ask only for an extra quarter. Nobody is there; the staff booth is shuttered and locked, so I slide two quarters under the locked office door.

Across the street is my favorite used bookstore, Overland, where I buy another book from the lady who wrote "The Three-Martini Playdate." My kind of person. When I get back, the meter still has 10 minutes left, so I eat my Milky Way in the car and start my book. I pull out of the spot at 1:57.

I need cash and I'm too cheap to use another bank's ATM, so I drive to a Patelco branch in the neighborhood. I've never been to this branch and my scrawled directions are woefully inadequate, so I pull into a empty spot (plenty of parking in this area) and call my husband at work. While he's explaining the location, I see the branch across the street. Oops.

By 2:34 p.m., I've found a meter spot in West Portal, only four blocks from the salon. A man sees me feeding the meter and asks me about the Fit. He just bought his wife a Scion. We jammed happily about small compact cars with wussy engines and then I walked to the salon.

I was pretty early for my 3 p.m. appointment, but they took me anyway. I'm back at the meter spot by 2:57. It's a little bit of a drive from West Portal to our apartment, but I finally pull into my truck-free driveway at 3:25.

All in all, I think it went pretty well. At 12:55 today I will leave the apartment to run the same errands, but I'll walk and ride instead of drive. Let's see how I do.

Driving to the mailbox next door

2010-09-30T13:25:00.005-05:00

OK, maybe it's not that bad, but I can't deny that I've been driving our new Fit around on the slightest excuse. Yes, I know it's more environmentally sensitive to walk down into Cole Valley to get Benny from school and then catch a 37 bus back home.

Oh, but that car ride is so insidiously ... predictable. Two minutes to get into the car, 10 minutes to drive down and park the car. Once we're back in the car, it's five minutes back to the apartment. Two minutes later, we're walking through the door.

If I walk, it is admittedly a nice 10-minute walk to the school (when it's not raining). Then I get Benny and we walk to the 37 stop. The bus might come in 2 minutes. It might come in 20 minutes. Or 30 minutes. 20-30 minutes is crucial chunk of time when you're on the dinner-homework-bedtime march.

Frankly I'd rather spend it at home than on a bus stop bench telling Benny "No, we are not buying madeleines while we wait. I know you're hungry. Listening to you is making me hungry. What did you do today? Nothing? You sat in total silence for eight hours? Hookay then. No, we are not buying madeleines while we ..." Finally, we lapse into sullen silence and I check my phone for the next bus. 17 minutes.

Whereas if I drive him home and get started doing something else, Benny becomes a fountain of information. He'll follow me around, scattering graham cracker crumbs, and tell me about his kickball games, his teacher and that weird 2nd grade girl who chases him.

If I sound a little guilty and defensive, well, maybe I am. But you can't change people's behavior with abstract expectations. You change people's behavior by offering a better alternative that suits their needs. Or maybe it's the Midwest girl in me; I simply feel more relaxed and comfortable behind the wheel.

For three years City CarShare has suited us well. If anyone asked us about it, we praised it to the skies. But neither Ron nor I fully appreciated how much mental work this system required. Every decision, every errand, had to be parsed out: "When should I reserve the car? Which car can I get? For how long? How much will it cost? Should I cancel the other reservation? Should I make it a Freedom Trip ($50 for 24 hours)?

Then, once you were out and about in the car, you had to make the most of it. Time was money. Yes, this reservation was for grocery shopping, but maybe I should swing by the dry cleaners, too. And take in the vacuum cleaner for repair. And pick up that new book by Robert Reich about how the middle class is doomed.

OK, maybe I'm a little defensive.

We have a car!

2010-09-24T15:34:00.003-05:00

Last month we leased a 2010 Honda Fit. Look out, world!

Fly, fly away

2010-09-10T15:10:00.010-05:00

Benny and I flew out to Ft. Rucker, Alabama, last week to attend Greg's graduation ceremony from Army flight school. My sister Cindy and brother Andy, along with my mother and her husband Paul, drove down from Michigan.

It was a rare reunion for me and my siblings — the four of us haven't gathered in one place since Christmas 2008. The ceremony was great and we were so proud of Greg. After everyone else left Friday morning, Greg took Benny and me to the local AdventureLand, where we hit baseballs, rode go-carts, played video games and played 18 holes of miniature golf.

Flying home was a bit of a pill, though. I had to beg the cook at the only restaurant at Pensacola Municipal Airport to keep the kitchen open long enough to cook us hamburgers. (It was 5:20 p.m., apparently too late for dinner.) We changed planes in Dallas and boarded a night flight to San Francisco. The plane was chilly and we didn't have sweaters. Benny was tired and wanted to sleep. I asked the American Airlines stewardess for a blanket and she said it would cost $8. "It comes with an inflatable neck pillow!" she chirped. Well, I thought $8 was an enormous ripoff for a blanket during a night flight, so I literally gave Benny the shirt off my back. He curled up under the frilly blue blouse and I shivered in a very revealing camisole for the whole flight. Good thing the plane was dark.

Anyway, here are some pictures:

I feel fine. Thanks.

2010-09-08T11:48:00.002-05:00

Ann Arbor is a little nervous about sustainability. They wouldn't want to offend anyone with their new-fangled streetlights.

My Boring Brain

2010-08-07T11:29:00.006-05:00

I've always been a terrible multitasker. I can't drink a bottle of Snapple and walk across the kitchen floor without tripping over my feet. This was a huge problem when I started working in San Francisco during the dot-com boom, when many of my colleagues could talk on the phone, edit a story, send an email and answer my question all at once. Some people still do that and tweet and IM as well. Amazing.

I just assumed I was hopelessly old school with my single-minded ways, missing train stops while I'm reading and walking into light poles while talking on my cell phone. For a while it looked like web surfing would change my ways as I bounced from site to site. But after 10 minutes I'd get tired and cranky with all that information at my fingertips and go find a nice book.

But today I read a May 24 Wired article called "The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains." It's been sitting in my inbox for more than two months, waiting for me to read it. That's my lastest strategy to manage the web; I'm always finding interesting articles to read while surfing, but that doesn't mean I want to bring everything to a screaming halt and read one article for 10 minutes. So I send myself an email with the link and it sits there until I'm ready to truly read and think about it.

It works pretty well. Often I'll start an interesting article or blog post or comment thread and I find myself impatient and skimming, not because the information isn't interesting, but because I'm not in the right frame of mind to read it. I need to check my work email or Benny's school website or reserve a car right then. I'm not prepared for the latest Muni weirdness or 65th anniversary of the atom bomb.

So, back to that Wired article. See, I'm not easily deflected from point (sometimes to Ron's dismay). A UCLA professor discovered that experienced web surfers developed distinctive neural pathways due to their Internet use. He also found that if novice web users spent six days surfing the web, the Internet use rewired their brains too. At first everyone cheered: Hey, Google makes us smart! But, said the UCLA guy, more brain activity doesn't mean better brain activity.

Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

When schools started bringing in computers, everyone thought all those documents with hyperlinks would increase learning. But the work involved in navigating all the different documents disrupts concentration and weakens comprehension. That makes sense to me: who can read a Wikepedia article straight through?

The article goes on:

A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse.

I totally agree. I'm reduced to clicking on the print-only version of long articles just so I can read them without being distracted. Sometimes I print them out. The article also points to constant computer distractions such as those little envelope icons that pop up on your desktop. Yes, you're busy reading my blog post but look! You have an email! Are you going to look at it? Look! Someone sent you a tweet? Don't you want to know what it says? Yeah, it's probably trivial, but it's new, it's compelling, and it distracting you RIGHT NOW.

Finally, the article aims a long, pointing finger at those ultra-efficient multitaskers:

Last year, researchers at Stanford ... gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

This society seems to value the ability to skim rather than read, a quick glance rather than a long look. Is reading comprehension a lost art? I just read a blog post on the Consumerist titled "I Can't Afford Cable Anymore. How Can I Revive My Analog TV?" One commenter said:

Nowhere does she say her TV is analog. Without the most basic information such as her TV model and specific hookup needs, it is next to impossible to give the needed information.

To which another commenter said:

Nowhere except in the headline of the article.

Reading is hard!

So what can we do? Well, if you've read this whole blog post, you're obviously pretty good at staying on task. Here's what I do so I'm not overwhelmed when I'm web surfing:

- I make a conscious effort not to get distracted. When I went to Consumerist.com to get the above example just now, it was tempting to click on the post about the guy who called 911 to get a drive to the liquor store, the couple who named their baby Adolph Hitler and the latest vile behavior by Chase. I read this blog about every other day, so I reminded myself that the post about Dell's imaginary shipping time trap isn't going anywhere. Doesn't always work, but I try.

- Don't leave the original site you're working with. When I'm on wikepedia, for example, I keep a window of the original article on my desktop, so that even if I'm clicking madly on hyerlinks, the main article is still the focus and I don't end up wandering in new territory. I always come back.

- If I hit an interesting article or blog or page, I email myself the link so I can come back to it later. That way my main goal isn't derailed.

As you can obviously tell, I like to think things through. At my favorite lunch buffet, I tend to pile up a few types of food when others are scooping up a little bit of everything. I miss out on some interesting food that way, but who says I have to take advantage of every opportunity out there? Sometimes I just want to eat lunch.

Editor Kitty

2010-07-27T12:05:00.002-05:00

Hiking California: Muir Woods

2010-07-20T15:19:00.016-05:00

Last year I picked up a $5 copy of "Best Hikes for Children: San Francisco Bay Area." It lists 90 interesting hikes, ranging from easy (strolling among the ferns near Fish Ranch Road) to the difficult (climbing ladders on Steep Ravine Trail in the North Bay).

Ron, Benny and I have done a few hikes from this book:

Huckleberry Path Nature Trail
Corte Madera Ecological Reserve Trail
The Miwok Trail

On Monday, Benny and I knocked down another one: No. 84, the Redwood Grove Trail Loop in Muir Woods.

(We tried to hike this one last year on Mother's Day, but by the time we arrived at the national park, the place was mobbed and parked cars lined the road practically back to Hwy. 101. So we instead walked along an exhaust-filled, traffic-choked roadway, otherwise known as the Corte Madera Ecological Reserve Trail.)

So I had Benny tucked into the car yesterday by 8:30 a.m., even though it was a non-holiday Monday. It was a good thing I did, because we we were lucky to find a place in the first overflow parking lot. Tour buses in front of the entrance were disgorging hundreds of tourists every minute.

This, of course, is not a hiking trail, but a wooden sidewalk curving along the line of Redwood Creek. You don't really walk, you shuffle along in a crowd. The tourists were mostly foreign, thank goodness, so the kids were well-behaved. The trees were lovely and Benny liked to have me read the descriptions that matched the numbered signposts. I'm raising my own little vacation dork right here.

But I was feeling a little stressed out; I mean, I left San Francisco to get away from people. TIme to take a side trail. Since Muir Woods does not have many picnic sites, my only option was to take Benny on the Camp Alice Eastwood trail, 3 miles round-trip, where we could eat our lunch. That, or buy an $8 organic salad at the gift shop's cafe and watch Benny spit out the leaves.

(Option 3, which was to find a secluded spot somewhere and eat really fast, wasn't an option because Benny's absorbed all this California environmentalist attitude and wouldn't allow it. Sigh.)

So we headed up the trail. Hiking makes me nervous because I'm terrible at reading trail maps and have a deep-seated fear of wandering in circles until the trail mix runs and I finally collapse and become part of "the nurturing decay of the forest understory." The first crossroad blessedly had a little signpost which, as is my habit, I read out loud three times to make sure I was going the right way. The second fork had no signs. I then blindfolded Benny and spun him around three times to point the way. No, I actually puzzled over the map, chose a fork and trudged up another couple of switchbacks. When we arrived at a dusty, bare clearing labeled "Camp Alice Eastwood," we started cheering and slapping high-fives.

The walk back was much easier, but Benny was getting tired. Back on the main trail, confused tourists kept asking me which way was the visitor's center. Honestly, how can anyone get lost on a wooden sidewalk? When I told Benny I couldn't afford to buy him a combination compass/magnifying glass/telescope/egg-beater/barometer, he burst into tears and cried all the way to the car. I dosed him with Milano mint cookies and he slept all the way home.

All in all, Muir Woods are very nice and the side trails could be spectacular, for all I know. But Benny and I think the redwoods further up the coast, which we saw on the Skunk Train from Fort Bragg, were much more impressive.

Save our serpentine!

2010-07-13T14:30:00.007-05:00

Some fiend of a senator in Los Angeles named Gloria Romero has introduced a bill to pull serpentine from its throne as California's state rock. Advocates of the bill claim that asbestos fibers found in some forms of serpentine can be hazardous, and therefore that nasty, slippery little rock doesn't deserve the honor.

First of all, serpentine is a seriously cool rock. It forms when rock in the earth's mantle (below the crust) are smushed and heated up. It's totally unstable and very hard to build on and, of course, is all over earthquake-prone California. But I love it, and I sent Senator Gloria Romero the following email, which I copied Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on:

Dear Senator Romero:

I am surprised that with all of California's pressing problems, you are spending time and money on bill SB624. I am not a geologist, but I do like rocks, and serpentine has a deep, rich history in California.

I know some types of serpentine contain asbestos. So what? Nobody's telling people to go around sniffing crushed serpentine because it's the state rock. It's a naturally occurring mineral, not manmade insulation. People put aspects of the natural world to bad uses all the time. Is oil a bad thing because it's gushing into the Gulf of Mexico? Is sand a horrible thing because it could be made into glass, which can be broken and used to hurt somebody?

There have got to be better ways to raise public awareness of the dangers of asbestos than wasting time, energy and resources on SB624.

Signed,

Christine Iloveserpentine

______________________________________

Here are some great links from Garry Hayes, Professor of Geology, Modesto Junior College, who's getting wiggy on the issue:

Garry Hayes’ blog
The history of SB624 is available here.

A good summary of serpentine with links to news and the debate can be found here.

Good Grief!

2010-07-12T16:05:00.004-05:00

(Click on pictures to enlarge)

We took a day trip on Monday to the Charles Schulz museum in Santa Rosa, about 60 miles from San Francisco. We've been reading Benny a lot of "Peanuts" books lately, so we thought he'd like the trip.

It turned out to be a very relaxed, undemanding outing. There were no crowds and the museum felt like somebody's spacious home, complete with a little Video Nook, where people could watch films on beanbag chairs. We ate lunch in the sunshine outside the Warm Puppy Cafe and watched the Zamboni circle around Schulz's ice arena.

The day before we went to Golden Gate Park and listened to a local band play Fourth of July favorites play Gershwin and other old-fashioned favorites. We sat on the grass and ate ice cream bars and listened to John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

Little Norman Rockwell outings like these are nice because they remind me that traveling doesn't have to be a Huge Big Deal all the time. Not even in California.

Vacation pictures!

2010-07-08T14:45:00.015-05:00

(Click on the pictures to make them larger)

Top: Benny and his cousin Ian.

Bottom: Kris, Jackie and I in South Haven.

So we've returned from a great two weeks in Michigan visiting family. We rented a Kia with a messed-up rear window that made strange flapping sounds whenever we drove on the highway. We flapped all over Michigan, back and forth along I-94.

We started at my brother Andy's in Ann Arbor. Andy bought the house from us in 2008 and heavy rains in early June meant he had water on the side of the basement that didn't have the $4,000 drainage system Ron and I installed three years ago. I spent two days mopping the basement and playing "Civilization" with Benny on Andy's PlayStation 3.

Benny: "You're going to make me eat a pie?"

Then we hit the road to Kalamazoo, where Ron's brother and his family lived. Benny learned to play "Sorry" and beat everybody 10 times in a row.

We stayed at my sister Cindy's for a week. My mother came up from Indianapolis and my two college roommates visited with their families.

On the Friday before we flew back to San Francisco, we drove back along I-94 to Ann Arbor, trying to ourun a huge line of thunderstorms. The radar's yellow, black and red blotches covered Lake Michigan at one point and was heading east at 50 miles an hour. The weather in front of us was blue skies and sunshine. Then we'd look out our Kia's rear window and the sky was completely black.

We barely made it to Ron's brother's house before the deluge hit, where we waited out the worst of the storms. Then it was a long, tense drive home. I'm kinda happy to be home in San Francisco now, with its watercolor weather.

Top: Charlotte and Madeline.
Bottom: Benny and Sophie.

Goodbye Kindergarten

2010-07-05T16:15:00.002-05:00

Benny and his teacher Miss Cathy

Benny's last few weeks of kindergarten were a bit — ahem! — lively: Ron and I ran around baking cakes for Funfest, writing checks for summer camps, chopping fruit for picnics, decorating teacher gifts, going to fundraiser parties and attending Miss Cathy's World Tour Slide Show.

On Benny's last day, I stayed at work until 8:30 p.m. to put a major project to press and prepare for vacation. The next day, we flew to Michigan.

I shouldn't have been surprised, because the craziness attending a child's last month of school is well-documented, most hilariously in Judith Warner's 2006 column "My Last Day of School." Moms were showing up at her daughter Emilie’s last-day-of-school party sobbing with stress. (“I hate this [expletive] time of year,” one mother said.)

But still, I was blindsided by the sudden activity. It was like the school took all the events they didn't have time for during the year and stuffed them into the last month. And I have little reason to complain, since I was the slacker mom who rarely helped in the classroom and didn't attend the School Talent Show OR the Parent Assembly (mostly because both events were on a workday morning).

I reason, however, that Benny has five more years at Lucky Elementary and the low standard I set last year should be easy to surpass. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying our summer schedule -- without an ironclad 7:50 a.m. start time, I've been late to work nearly every day.

Biking in Detroit

2010-06-29T12:39:00.002-05:00

Here's an awesome article about bicycling in Detroit. The photos of the excited kids watching Critical Mass are my favorite, but there are also bits about Detroit's bicycle history. Nice to read something about Detroit that doesn't mention Kwame.

Weekly Update

2010-06-28T16:45:00.006-05:00

This is an idea I'm stealing from a nauseatingly cheery blog. It's a good way to get posting again after a long hiatus.

Outside my window … I'm at work. I can't look out the window. The glass isn't dripping with moisture, so it must be an okay day.
(Cheery blog: "I can see the forest, all sunny and warm ...")

I am thinking … evil thoughts about our office vending machine vendor because all that's left in the machine are jalapeno-flavored potato chips.
(Cheery blog: that I might have been all wrong about what I needed in order to be content.)

I am hearing … Ron conducting a phone interview. Glad one of us is working.

Some highlights from the week … We returned from vacation last weekend, started Benny at summer camp, baked a cake for Father's Day, attended a Dinosaur Preschool festival and saw the visiting Russian battleship from Vladivostok.

I am thankful that … I didn't have to go anywhere in the city on Sunday, because the Gay Pride Parade messed up all the transportation.
(Cheery blog: "A place to live.")

From the kitchen … Ron and I did four sinkloads of dishes apiece and we still have dirty pots on the counter. Grrr.
(Cheery blog: "Had to restart my sourdough starter, and have that working again. Doing water kefir still ...")

I am reading … "War in European History."

I am hoping … that the vending machine vendor comes tomorrow. That Benny will like his summer camp better this week. That I'm not catching a cold, because I feel sniffly.

One of my favorite things … Junior Mints. (Still hungry here.)
(Cheery Blog: "My sweet child.")

A few plans for the rest of the week … I have Friday off and plan to do some writing. We are also making plans for the Fourth of July weekend.

Have a good week

Still Golfing

2010-05-26T16:12:00.006-05:00

Here's Benny golfing at the Lucky Elementary Funfest last year ...

... and again this month.

Hole in one!

Yes, We're the Creepy Family

2010-05-25T13:59:00.003-05:00

So my husband and son are apparently determined to get us on some List of undesirable people at the local elementary school.

Benny brought home a chunk of wood and a large metal screw from the park on Monday. While I was lying down in the bedroom reading People magazine, he borrowed a rubber band and fashioned this:

He's planning to sell the prototype to the U.S. Army so they don't have to use real guns, "just scare people" instead. I told him that while I'm sure his little friends would love to see this homemade weapon, he was NOT to bring it to school for ANY reason.

He also told me "I know more about weapons than any of my friends." My coworker reassured me that little boys probably all say that. But I suspect his little friends went home that day and told their parents "Benny knows more about weapons than anyone else in school."

The following morning, Ron volunteered to drop Benny off at school and meet a Kindergarten mom in the courtyard who has my sunglasses. (I'd left my sunglasses at her house last week during a book swap/wine and cheese thing.)

Ron didn't know the woman — he just had my fuzzy description ("skinny, with glasses and hair that does this ...") So he stood around the school courtyard by himself after dropping off Benny, looking closely at the passersby.

The results were predictable. The principal came over to make sure he wasn't some sicko stalker and was relieved to hear he was Benny's dad. ("You look just like him!") Ron helplessly explained his mission and they walked over to room 101, where a flock of moms were chattering outside the classroom door. One of them handed over the sunglasses, and Ron fled the building.

"I'm not going back to the school for the next five years," Ron declared to me later at work. He's convinced that from now on, whenever he's at the school, people will point and say, "there's that guy who was hanging around the courtyard."

Creepy guy, violent kid and lazy mom — we're the All-American family.

You Don't Know Me

2010-05-24T15:27:00.004-05:00

So I did something today for the first time I'm quite proud of: I mailed off an opt-out form from a privacy notice.

Like everybody else, I get these baffling little notices and leaflets describing a company's Privacy Policies: "Weirdo Financial Services will not sell, rent, share, or otherwise disclose personally identifiable information from customers with other companies, unless of course there is an affiliation, such as doing business in the same hemisphere ..."

Opting out is easy, the privacy notices say. All I have to do is call a number and wait on hold forever, get online and click a dozen boxes ("Are you really sure you don't trust us?") or fill out some wretched little form, make a copy, find a stamp and mail it off.

The outcome is predictable. I add the privacy notice to a little stack of similar notices on my desk and there they stay unless I spill Snapple on them or move to a new apartment, whichever comes first.

But not for Comerica. I'm a little cranky about Comerica, and Ron and I are in the arduous process of closing our bank account there. We're in a new relationship with a credit union and have adjusted our direct deposits and automatic bill pays and received our new checks. Now I'm just waiting for PG&E to get its act together and start pulling our monthly bill from the right account. I know, the way PG&E works, it might be Christmas before we can close our Comerica account.

However, I am optimistic. I can't wait to get out of Comerica, which has annoyed me mightily with its minimum balance requirements, piddly ATM network, giant fees, credit card rate hikes and refusal to issue money orders. There are other reasons, but that's enough to go on. "It's not me, it's you," I look forward to telling them.

So I'm happy to inconvenience them in any way, and this morning I checked the boxes that said "NO, don't share my credit info within the Comerica familly or market to me based on my transactions" and "NO, don't share my credit info with any fool company you decide to contract with." AND — this is the important part — I actually dug up a stamp and mailed the thing.

And maybe next time I get a Privacy Policy notice, that one won't get buried on my desk either.

Ron in Chicago

2010-05-17T14:36:00.002-05:00

Ron made this cool video while attending the annual BIO national biotech conference in Chicago, showing many shots of the city. Check it out!

Too Busy to Fail?

2010-05-04T16:02:00.000-05:00

You find me on the field of defeat, not victory, and yet I feel all right about that. It’s Tuesday, the second day of my week off. Yes, you read that right, I have a week off, a little five-day gift card of time that I still can’t figure out how to spend.

Yesterday was very successful, except for a squabble between Benny and myself as he rejected jacket after jacket in the morning and we were late as hell and I finally snapped, tossing his spurned hoodie into the waste basket and announcing it would NEVER be worn again. Benny looked shocked and I fished it back out again, feeling not guilty (I don’t seem to have the quick-to-flick guilt switch that most mothers have), but pretty damn stupid.

So we finally left, and I sat Benny down on a little stone step and we talked it over a bit so that we’d feel good again and Benny wouldn’t smack some kid with a paintbrush or do something else at school to release his emotions. And while we were late, we weren’t Tardy, so I didn’t have to go to the office and get a Slip.

Not an auspicious start, I know, but things perked up after a round of shocking self-indulgence: a manicure, pedicure and half a bag of Ruffles. Then I talked to my sister for a mind-bending amount of time. Then I slathered on a layer of Hawaiian Tropic and headed out into the sunshine to eat a donut, buy some used books and drop off dry cleaning.

Muni buses being what they are, this took all afternoon and I barely made it to Benny’s aftercare on time and had to feed him hot dogs and tater tots because I’d forgotten to take the stew out of the freezer. Then we played videogames and I put him to bed.

So I felt I was on a roll here today. I woke up to a fairly clean apartment and Benny and I had a serene morning. I just missed a 37 bus heading back home, so I went to Cole’s Hardware with the grand ambition of buying drapery sash rods to install over our bedroom window. Our blinds do a poor job of blocking out the enormous streetlight outside our apartment building. (Longtime readers of this blog might remember our neighbor Big Foot back in Ann Arbor and his 1,000-megawatt light shining right into our bedroom. The Fates just don’t like me sleeping in a dark bedroom.)

I found find some drapery rods and mountings that were fastened with nails, per the rules on our lease. Just to make a party of it, I went next door and picked up a newspaper and pound of ground beef for tonight since I’d forgotten to take the stew out again. As I was paying, I watched the 37 go by again.

The next one wasn’t coming for 25 minutes (according to NextBus), and the day was turning warm, so I asked the meat guy to hold the beef in his fridge for 15 minutes or so. He agreed enthusiastically, sounding very relieved that I was going to be responsible with the ground beef he’d sold me. I think he was happy it was going to a good home.

Then I tried to make the best of it by going to the café across the street and spending Benny’s inheritance on a cup of lemonade. My drapery rods and I took a sunny table outside. I checked NextBus … 17 minutes … read how our Mayor wants to rename Third Street after Willie Brown … 15 minutes … read the funny pages … 10 minutes … pondered if going to see “The Ghost Writer” would mean tacit approval of Roman Polanski’s criminal activities … about time to go and get the beef … and watched the 37 go by again, 7 minutes early.

Well. I didn’t have the heart to tell the meat guy the truth, just picked up the beef and glowered at a the bus stop for a solid 18 minutes before the next one came.

Once home, I installed the drapery rods. It was an irritating process, and my God, they looked awful. Obviously I had not treated the thin rods with the delicacy required as I carried them from hardware store to grocery store to café to meat guy to bus top and then on the bus. Both were bent. I tried to straighten one, and made it look worse. Disgusted, I pulled out the mountings and now had little holes around my window, lined up in little pairs, like vampire teeth marks. I didn’t have any spackle, so I busted out my acrylic paints and mixed up a little beige paint to dab on the holes. So now there are spots around my window that look oddly, subtly discolored, like tiny water pipes in the wall had leaked.

And how did I feel, after wasting $15 and two hours of my precious vacation time to end up with weird spots on my bedroom wall? Strangely OK with it, at least after drinking a restorative Snapple and eating the rest of the Ruffles. I’ve realized that in the frenzied activity of most modern families, we don’t have time to fail. Not that we don’t fail – oh boy, do we fail. Late pickups, forgotten lunches, missed deadlines, temper tantrums, really bad hair days, things we shouldn’t have said, emails we shouldn’t have sent … the list goes on.

But we rarely have time to consciously embark on a risky project, knowing it might not turn out, feeling confused, embarrassed or incompetent (or all three). Trying new things takes time and energy. It’s easier not to make the attempt. I realize I’ve been spending my minutes like a little miser, looking for maximum ROI. Looking at things that way, wasting time and failing spectacularly can be very liberating.

Now I’m looking at the kitchen doorway. What if I found a little teeny tension rod to put on it and hung some thin drapes to cordon off the kitchen …

Dancing with the Doofuses

2010-04-07T16:08:00.002-05:00

I try not to do this often, because if I were to post all the clueless emails I get from PR folks, I'd have no time for anything else. But it's deadline day and I have no time for anything, so of course I'm posting one today.

My current work project (let's call it The Sustainable Oscars) involves badgering green companies and their PR flacks for nominations. Here's an email I received this morning:

____________________________________

Hi Christina,

Quick ?- can you tell me when winners in the solar category will be
notified? I submitted my client Doofus Solar and I'd like to tell them when we
can expect to hear.

P.s. We no longer represent Weirdo Biofuels for PR. Sorry I could not enter
them!

Thanks!

Ima Nitwit

______

Well, dear readers, you can see three problems here right off the bat. First, my name's not Christina. Secondly, telling me to do something Quick actually slows my response time. And thirdly, I wish Ima had told me earlier that she no longer represented Weirdo Biofuels, like before the deadline for nominations had passed.

In other news, Ron left for Washington, D.C., yesterday to beef up our sister paper's reporting staff. I vowed to go to bed early every night while he was gone to keep my energy level up. So of course I stayed up until 11 last night watching the History Channel's "How the States Got Their Shapes." I knew about the War of Toledo that gave Michigan its Upper Peninsula and how West Virginia split from Virginia. But did you know that Missouri has that weird little notch on the bottom because some big landowner didn't want to be part of Arkansas? Or that there was this little phantom state called Franklin that now only lives on in State of Franklin Insurance signs? Or that the border between Colorado and Kansas was set because Kansas didn't want any gold so they wouldn't have to deal with sex-crazed prospectors? It was a great program.

Happy Birthday to Me ...

2010-03-15T12:49:00.003-05:00

Here's Benny singing "Happy Birthday" at his own party. What a ham.

Killer Robots Never Work

2010-02-16T15:39:00.003-05:00

... And don't turn into a snake. It never helps.

The first piece of wise advice above is the name of my as-yet-unpublished science fiction novel. I just submitted a synopsis and the first four chapters of "Killer Robots Never Work" to a contest, and the effort inspired me to start a writing blog. There are a lot of writing blogs out there, all of them so earnest, with writing goals and Muses and much fretting about the moral Core of their writing. My writing, of course, doesn't have much of a moral Core. I subscribe to the "This guy's boring, let's give him purple eyebrows and a shovel collection" style of character development.

So now I have a third blog, called "Killer Robots Never Work." There I maintain that every story needs a killer robot. Life is hard enough without taking your writing seriously.

Benny's 6th Birthday Party

2010-02-02T16:06:00.006-05:00

Well, we threw a 6th birthday party for Benny at a neighborhood park on Saturday and lived to tell the tale.

The planning was pretty intense, involving multiple trips to Target, repeated phone calls to a nearby Asian bakery emphasizing "DARK green frosting", and online ordering and delivery angst.

In keeping with the football theme, I decorated the cake to look like a football field. Cakes are a lot easier to decorate than cupcakes. Ron's idea to line the edges with colored sprinkles to represent the spectators was pure genius.

The timing of the event was a little tricky — I reserved the park clubhouse from 1-4 PM and set the party time for 1:30. So I packed all the party supplies in labeled plastic bins except for the cake, ice cream, tables and chairs. (One of our friends brought the bunches of balloons, thank heavens.) I fit almost everything in the car, although Benny had to ride to the park with a card table on his head. Then Ron and I carried the first load to the door of the clubhouse and he and Benny stood guard while I went back for the second load. I struck gold with a nearby parking space and arrived with the cake at 1:05. Yay!

After all that, the party itself was a breeze. My ritual goat sacrifices to the weather god at dawn obviously paid off, because after spitting rain on and off all morning, the skies cleared on cue at 1:00 and the sun shone down. Benny and his friends played on the playground, ate cake and ice cream, threw footballs and batted balloons.

We broke with San Francisco tradition and had Benny open his presents at the party. People don't do that here, probably because kids' birthday parties in this town average 20-70 children. But we had a small group, so I told Benny to go for it.

Happy Birthday Benny!

I Can't Wait to be Part of the Problem

2010-01-27T18:10:00.004-05:00

I'm thinking of a magic number — can you guess what it is?

The number is 220. It's a very nice number, and not just because it's in my address. 220 is a common voltage in many countries. It's also divisible by the sum of its digits. The Goths invaded Asia Minor and the Balkans in the year 220. It also saw the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period in China.

But my affinity for the number 220 is not so historic. My magic number is actually 220 dollars, as in $220 a month. $220 is the most I'm willing to pay for a monthly bus pass for my family.

Right now, we pay $120 a month for our Muni fast passes, which allow us to ride any Muni bus or light rail in San Francisco as much as we want. We should be buying a youth pass for Benny as well ($15), but so far we've been able to sneak him on the bus for free. (Yes, apparently I am willing to compromise my morals for $15 a month. That's a whole other magic number.)

So the current cost of Muni transportation for a family of three (if they're not thieving cheats) is $135. Which would be completely reasonable, if San Francisco's public transportation system was a well-oiled machine, with consistently reliable, safe and pleasant service.

Ha ha.

Muni is well, pretty bad. The buses are dirty, the schedules are a joke and the drivers hate everybody. (These same drivers are guaranteed the second-best salaries in the country. Seriously, guaranteed. It's in the city charter.)

Still, we have made our peace with Muni, rarely venturing from the No. 6/N Judah cow path we take to work. I take other buses as little as possible, preferring to use City Car Share. Last night I took the 43, and a fellow rider pounded a rear window until it gave way, then leaned out and shouted at pedestrians.

This year, we plan to buy a car. Then we'll use Muni even less, probably only to commute to our jobs downtown.

Unless ... Muni hits the magic number.

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency is proposing cuts to every Muni bus line to close a $16.9 million budget gap. Just a month ago, the SFMTA made a ton of service cuts and raised the price of monthly passes from $55 to $60. The cuts will reduce frequencies on every Muni line and increase fares for historic streetcars, express buses and cable cars. They also want to increase the Youth monthly passes.

When Ron and I arrived in San Francisco in 2007, the cost of a monthly pass was $45. Now it's $60. Obviously Muni is gunning for the passengers and the cost of the passes will keep rising. Quickly.

Hence the magic number. I figure that if adult monthly passes hit $90 each, and the youth pass is $30, the total cost is ... wait for it ... $220. The SFMTA is already talking about raising youth passes to $30.

So what will Ron and I do if monthly passes total $220? The answer is simple: Climb back into a car.

For $250-$300 a month, we can get a nice parking spot downtown near our jobs. Then we can ride into work every day in our car, dropping Benny off at school on the way. A nice, relaxing ride with the family twice a day. If Muni keeps raising its fares, while providing substandard service, why not drive?

Then we will be part of the problem, spewing carbon exhaust every day while adding to traffic congestion in this "Transit First" city.

My essay lives on

2010-01-25T16:18:00.006-05:00

An essay I wrote for the SF K Files about Benny's Lucky Elementary has appeared on a San Francisco Chronicle blog. Click here to check it out.

The comments following the last parent essay on this blog are um ... vivid. Check out "crotch fruit," the newest hip phrase for "children." I know I should feel demeaned and offended, but I can't quite stop giggling. I can imagine introducing myself: "Hi, I'm a breeder and this is my crotch fruit." I guess I'm immature.

(giggle)

Benny at the Park

2010-01-25T12:22:00.004-05:00

Here's Benny on the swings at the park near our apartment, courtesy of Ron's iPhone.

Christine Takes It to the Streets

2010-01-21T12:40:00.003-05:00

The blog "Muni Diaries" posted my experience on a Muni bus this week. Check it out here.

I am outraged that a transit operator would treat customers in this matter. Think of that woman passenger who initially complained. How is she going to feel riding Muni every day, knowing that a whole bus heard her called an awful name? How is she going to feel knowing that if she speaks up about anything or stands up to herself, she's asking for abuse or name calling? Is this what SFMTA wants for their passengers? Is this what San Franciscans want for their city? And worst of all, no other passengers stood up in her defense — in fact, another passenger called her an obscenity. Is this the city we all want?

By the way, the comments are fun, too. One reader is having trouble making the intuitive leap required to connect this example of Muni's unsafe, unreliable and uncivil service and Muni's plan to cut service and increase fares. Why would one driver's behavior lead me to oppose drastic service cuts? Because if Muni can't provide safe, reliable and civil service now, what will the system be like after new layoffs and service cuts?

Annoying Travelers Attempt to Catch Flights

2009-12-30T12:51:00.005-05:00

Detroit Metro Airport is reproaching travelers for showing up for flights too early. The nerve!

Poor Verizon, So Misunderstood

2009-12-22T14:01:00.005-05:00

A Verizon Wireless patsy (er, vice president) had to write a letter last week to the FCC defending its $350 early termination fee and its little “arrow button” cash cow.

She begins by saying those big early termination fees (ETFs) “promote consumer choice” because that way Verizon can offer smart phones at cheaper prices. Customers can pay through the nose for a month-to-month plan, but most (surprise!) choose to sign up for long-term contracts.

And after all, the executive writes, those smart phones are expensive to provide, so they get higher ETFs. It’s a risky business, the mobile industry, and Verizon needs to protect itself. All that technology and all those customers just spooks them out.

The FCC wanted to know how Verizon told people about the $350-and-up ETF. Well, the morons could look on the web site, answers the Verizon exec. It’s right there in teeny-tiny type. In fact, we put the ETF on ads, telemarketing scripts, sales receipts and letters. We do everything but stick it on billboards on Interestate 80! What is wrong with you people?

The FCC then presses Verizon about the rationale for the high ETF, and the Verizon exec gets upset. Do you have any idea, she asks, what a canceled contract does to Verizon? It messes up all our plans! It turns off a guaranteed revenue stream! We have to provide all that mobile broadband service and that costs money! If a customer cancels a contract, it destroys our entire business model. We can’t eat! We can’t sleep! The entire world economy could collapse! Do you want that, FCC?

The FCC also wants to know the cost difference between what Verizon pays for mobile devices and what it charges customers, but Verizon is too cagey to answer that. They just repeat that the difference is twice as much for smart phones. And remember, the executive says, we have to buy ads and pay salespeople. Who’s gonna pay for that? The company? We got shareholders!

At this point, Verizon feels that the whole ETF issue has been pretty much hashed out and turns to the second problem.

Customers are mad because if someone accidentally presses an arrow key on their device (which has been preprogrammed by Verizon for internet access), the customer is charged $2 even if he cancels the connection immediately. And those buttons are kinda small, guys.

The Verizon exec utterly denies that the button takes users anywhere but the Verizon homepage. Those hordes of doofus customers must be recklessly navigating elsewhere on the web, the executive writes. And we’re happy to credit their account if they feel they’ve been unfairly charged.

All in all, I think Verizon is a little bitter about how complicated and expensive providing mobile broadband is. It’s so annoying having to buy the equipment and build a network and hire sales reps and pay for office coffemakers and all. I think Verizon is feeling a little unloved for all their hard work. Verizon is probably wondering why it didn’t go into something easier, like banking.

Poor Verizon.

Very Cold Paws

2009-12-21T14:05:00.002-05:00

I'm a little link-happy today. Here's a picture of a cute kitty in the snow that was posted Consumerist.com, one of my favorite sites. Cat pictures and crabby consumers. These are my people.

San Francisco Photo Story

2009-12-21T12:39:00.003-05:00

Here is a remarkable collection of pictures of San Francisco from photographers that love the city. Most of them were familiar to me: the redwood grove in Golden Gate Park, the hills of Twin Peaks, the beaches, the bridges, the buildings.

Beautiful pictures like these remind me why we're here and the how much I take for granted every day. This is especially good on days where the sky is gloomy, the car horns are blaring and the price of monthly bus passes are raised (again!).

See San Francisco

I Don't WANT to be Special!

2009-12-05T20:12:00.005-05:00

I just wrote this note to BIC USA:

"I just bought a pack of Comfort 3 Pivot razors. They were pink, they had three blades, good enough for me. I didn't realize they would smell like berries. Is this really necessary? Has Bic lost its mind? What makes your company think that American women LIKE their razors to smell like berries? It's nausea-inducing, really. I couldn't wait to wash the smell off my hands. I'm a working mother and now on top of everything else I have to think about, now I have to make sure my razors don't smell?"

Now these razors will join the no-sodium chicken soup, the celery-and-green-pepper diced tomatos and the garlic crescent rolls as yet another stupid special version I've bought this week. I have to check any product's packaging three times before buying it, lest I end up with diet tomato sauce or lime-flavored tortilla chips. Gross!

That's It, No More Sports

2009-12-04T22:04:00.003-05:00

I think Benny's been watching too much sports on TV.

At dinner tonight:

ME:
... So It sounds like that poor lady has a real problem ...

BENNY:
Got a problem? Ask your doctor about FLOMAX!

2009 Review

2009-12-03T13:25:00.003-05:00

This seems like an appropriate time to review the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of 2009. It was a tough year for everybody, but we're still here at the end, reasonably secure and healthy. Compared to the train wrecks of 2007 and 2008, we're doing great.

BOO HOO
- The sale of our house last year resulted in an angst-ridden month working with our tax accountant and a $3,000 tax bill.
- Four credit card companies imposed giant APR hikes on our balances, requiring four letters to “opt out” and close the cards.
- Ron's workload went beyond heavy and passed into frightening,
- Ron and I got a 5 percent pay cut. (However, my hours are not reduced, and that's very good.)
- We still can't get a car. This drives me crazy.
- We can't go to Michigan for Christmas.

CELEBRATE!
- BENNY GOT INTO LUCKY ELEMENTARY! YAY! Logistically, financially and yes,
educationally, this is the best thing that could happen to us..
- Benny leaves the Dinosaur preschool, eliminating a $1,500/month expense. (yeah, I know.)
- I celebrated our improved cash flow for buying new, shockingly expensive glasses.
- First family vacation in three years to Mt. Lassen
- Benny and I read all three books of "The Lord of the Rings."
- I finished a big fat book about the Franco-Prussian War.
- I started sending my science fiction novel to literary agents.
- I started a new novel: "The Fred Code."
- Benny no longer has to meet with the endocrinologist after two years of a good growth curve.
- Ron finished a corporate Wellness Plan and received $500, which he spent on new work clothes and an iPhone. He's crazy about his iPhone. After two weeks, it suddenly went dead and he couldn't figure out why. So I did some Googling and found the answer. So Ron can thank me and some weird online guy named Hoof Arted for fixing his iPhone.
- I bullied AT&T into giving me a new computer modem for free after the old one died in November. They wanted to charge me $80!

How was your year?

A Nice NaNo Moment

2009-11-05T12:29:00.001-05:00

Ron and I started today with a nice moment. We're stumbling around the apartment half-awake, and suddenly I have a question.

CHRISTINE
Hey Ron, do Protestant churches allow funerals for suicides?

RON
What?

CHRISTINE
Do Protestant churches allow funerals for suicides. The Catholic Church calls it a mortal sin.

RON
Uh. yes.

CHRISTINE
Good.

(short pause)

RON
... WHY!!!

CHRISTINE
For my mystery novel.

RON
Oh.

Happy Halloween!

2009-11-02T20:08:00.003-05:00

Festivities began Friday morning with a school parade down the neighborhood business district. I camped outside a Tully's beforehand and shot some pictures as they passed.

Then I stepped out with Benny Saturday night for some Trick-or-Treating fun. We started with a party hosted by Dinosaur Preschool parents. Then some of us refreshed our wine glasses and hit the streets with our kids. This is a big night for San Francisco and I only regret I didn't take pictures of random pedestrians.

Benny dressed as a ninja and his friend Quinn was a dinosaur. By the end of the night, their pumpkin pails were so full the boys could hardly carry them. Benny refused to let me carry any of his candy. (Probably afraid I'd eat some -- he knows me so well.) I asked him where he would put candy now, since his pail was overflowing.

"I'll stuff the candy in my pockets," he said matter-of-factly. And he did.

National Novel Writing Month 2009

2009-11-02T18:31:00.003-05:00

In a fit of insanity, I've decided to write a novel in a month again. I've joined National Novel Writing Month and have begun my first murder mystery. Think "Da Vinci Code" meets "Our Town."

The working title is "The Fred Code" and you can track my progress and read the novel here:

Here's the synopsis:

Local historian and general nutcase Fred Stark has been found dead in his beloved, lovingly restored 18th-century courthouse in the small town of Winslow, Michigan. The suicide note beside his body is packed with obscure historical references, prompting beleaguered police chief Skippy Bronson to call for expert help.

Enter Leda Morris, part-time history teacher, closet organizer and organizing freak. She never could stand Fred, who was her ex-fiance's uncle and a self-described "sixth-generation Winslowite." But the note is intriguing— and almost completely incomprehensible — and she finds herself researching the clues despite herself. Leda and her ex, Jeffrey Stark, attempt to sort out the bizarre riddles and follow a trail of clues hidden in “historic sites” throughout the town.

So welcome to Winslow, Mich., population 4,947, barely limping along economically since the Dodge air-conditioning vent factory closed in '92. Meet Winslow's secret, ruthless Society and learn about this small town's most valuable historic relic.

Wish me luck!

Take an Aspirin

2009-09-18T13:13:00.002-05:00

Ron's causing trouble over at Bayer Corp.

Vacation Pictures!

2009-09-14T17:20:00.008-05:00

Yes, at last, the long-anticipated vacation pictures from our road trip to Mt. Lassen. Here we are:

Here are some shots of Burney Falls, just north of Mt. Lassen Volcanic Park. Then we have Ron and Benny by Emerald Lake, a glacial lake near Mt. Lassen. The next picture is Mt. Lassen. Ron and Benny are beside King's Creek. Benny and I are next to a glacial erratic (a boulder that was carried a long way by a glacier and has no relation to the rocks beneath). We end with a weird feature near the summit of Mt. Lassen called the Vulcan's Eye.

The Science of Interviewing

2009-08-27T14:08:00.008-05:00

You'd think this tough economy would knock the stuffing out of the more obviously psychotic job seekers. I'm reading about job candidates rejected for minor typos and taking 10 minutes to return a call. But apparently some nutcases are still landing job interviews, and a few are using the opportunity to conduct elegant psychology experiments on their prospective bosses.

One of my favorite blogs, Ask a Manager, has this job search tip from a reader. This person likes to call a half hour before a scheduled interview, say he's running late and asks to reschedule. (After reading the post, don't forget to check out the comments.)

Once the rescheduled interview begins, this veteran job candidate will narrowly observe the interviewer's response. The best managers, in his worldview, will immediately gush about his thoughtfulness in calling to reschedule when he realized he was running late. Subpar managers will simply ignore his thoughtfulness, or worse, actually have the nerve to be annoyed that he was late.

Ask a Manager treats this suggestion with the disdain it deserves, and at first glance, I also wondered if this guy also expects a standing ovation for breathing in and out. But perhaps I'm being churlish. This is a whole new job-hunting paradigm, my friends, and the old habits of punctuality may be hopelessly passe.

So I've developed my own set of experiments for the discerning job seeker:

CASE STUDY ONE
- Interview for a job that is strictly on-site and in-office located 3,000 miles from your home.
- Bring a laptop.
- Whenever the interview mentions a duty you must perform, flip open the laptop and cry "Why, I can do that at home! See, I have headline-writing software right here! Look, I'm instant-messaging you right now!"
- A good manager will be instantly impressed and offer a telecommuting job and extra benefits. Subpar managers will insist you actually edit articles in the newsroom.

CASE STUDY TWO
- Arrive 40 minutes early to interview.
- Demand to receptionist that you be seen immediately.
- Deduct points for every minute you must wait for the interviewer to appear.
- Deduct points if there are no interesting magazines in the reception area.
- Deduct points if the receptionist does not offer you a lemon diet Snapple.
- Good managers will arrive instantly and apologize profusely for keeping you waiting. Bad managers will make you wait or worse, be absent from the building entirely 40 minutes before a scheduled interview.

CASE STUDY THREE
- Submit resume and land an interview.
- Arrive on time and professionally dressed.
- As soon as the office door is closed, announce that the resume you submitted is a "decoy." You are only comfortable releasing professional information in person. Hand out a copy of your actual resume.
- Allow interviewer 15 minutes to read resume.
- Eat resume.
- A good manager will value your discretion and prudence in these dangerous times. A bad manager will show you the door and thereafter refer to you as "Secret Squirrel" among his or her colleagues.

This mindset reminds me of a hilarious sales columnist who used to run in the Business Times. His mantra was "Don't sell, make them want to buy!" One of his cold-calling tips was to hang up halfway through leaving a voicemail message to whet their appetite. (Presumably he did this after saying his name and number.)

It's a brave new world. Feel free to suggest your own experiments.

Benny's First Day

2009-08-25T14:00:00.003-05:00

Monday was Benny's first day of kindergarten — yay! We hopped on the No. 6 Muni bus and took a 10-minute ride to his Lucky School. He was very cool about the whole thing. All the kids were, really — the only ones crying that morning were the mothers. As you can see there's quite a difference between his freshly scrubbed, buttoned-up look before school and his wacky after-school chipmunk impersonation with his shirtails hanging out. The last picture is Benny telling his Aunt Cindy all about his day.

Moving On

2009-08-10T19:33:00.005-05:00

Benny's Dinosaur School held its "Moving On Picnic" on Sunday. Benny has officially "graduated" from preschool and kindergarten is only two weeks away. Each outgoing child received a crown, a certificate, a big sunflower and a plate that he/she designed. It was a great event, mostly because it was so low-key. My hair stylist's niece's preschool had a big cap-and-gown event with printed portraits that looked better than my high school senior pictures. (Actually, I liked my cap-and-gown portrait; the mortarboard covered my big hair.)

Anyway, it's a big transition, and Benny's not the only one leaving a big emotional security blanket behind. I don't know how I'll get through life without chatting with his teachers nearly every day, not just about Benny, but about work and traveling and why parking just a tiny bit on the sidewalk warrants a $100 parking ticket.

I truly don't understand city life at times. On Sunday I boarded a bus with a new magazine and I found a seat near the back in the nearly empty bus. Then I started doing what I always do when I open a new women's magazine, tear out the 4 zillion two-sided advertisements. This reduces the size of an average magazine in half and there's something satisfying about thwarting the advertisers this way. (And I wonder why the media industry is struggling.) Anyway, this lady a few rows up turns around and starts glaring at me. Repeatedly. I just couldn't believe it. I mean, just in the few weeks I've dealt with fellow Muni passengers scribbling on windows, sticking their legs across the aisle and holding loud conversations with friends sitting in another part of the bus. I've seen drunk people, homeless people, crazy people, people with no shirts, people with no pants (just some strange skirt-thing, do I really need to elaborate?) ... and this lady is offended by me?

So I did what any self-respecting Muni passenger would do. I ripped each page even more loudly. Sometimes twice. So there.

AnnArbor.com: Managing Expectations

2009-08-05T15:20:00.012-05:00

(Image of gluten-free acorn muffins from the Book of Yum.)

So what if I came to you one morning and said:

“I’ve got a great homemade muffin for you. I’m not going to tell you what’s in it or how big it is or whether it comes in a little paper muffin cup, but you’re gonna love it. Just love it. It’s like no muffin you’ve seen before. We’re throwing out the book on muffins. The old muffin paradigm is dead. What’s more, this muffin is going to be about you, you and the ingredients you care about, you and the ingredients your entire community cares about. Everyone, just everyone, will love this muffin.”

Well. I imagine your first response would be “Who are you and what have you done with Christine?” because I never talk that much in the morning, not until I’ve had two Snapples and three cereal bars.

But besides that, you’ll be drooling, right? You can’t wait. On the Morning of the Muffin, you skip breakfast and show up with your special Muffin plate, ready to be amazed. The result, of course, is predictable. The Muffin will never be as good as the glittering Muffin of Your Mind. You stalk off, disgusted, and eat a 6-month-old granola bar out of your desk.

AnnArbor.com has a Muffin problem. Touted as a “local news service and social networking site,” it replaces the daily Ann Arbor News, which closed in July. Now in the interest of full disclosure, I’m familiar with the Ann Arbor News. My husband was involved in launching business weeklies with this bunch and we know many of the players. So we’ve taken a lively interest in AnnArbor.com from out here in California.

Bless their hearts, they haven’t changed a bit. They still think you can generate excitement through breathless announcements: “We are pleased/proud/thrilled/practically hysterical to announce our fresh/revolutionary/molecule-changing way to present news/dialogue/rambling blog posts ...”

Look at us, they say. We promote ourselves relentlessly in the name of “transparency,” posting long, laudatory biographies of the lucky Ann Arbor News alumni we decided to hire at (presumably) fire-sale prices. We bury the city in an explosion of paper flyers. We draw kicky graphics on sidewalks. We are nothing you’ve ever seen before!

Maybe you can generate excitement that way if you’re the Cartoon Network. (Remember their little ad gizmos in Boston that looked like bombs on bridges?) But you can’t with something as vital as local news which depends on credibility above all else. It’s like going on a first date and raving the whole time how great you are. Actually, it’s like calling your date every day beforehand and raving about how great the evening will be. If your date has any judgment, he or she will run like blazes.

So there you go. AnnArbor.com hyped itself up to the nines leading up to its July 20 launch date. Then postponed the launch date. Then it launched July 24 and the whining began. Admittedly much of the whining was from the readers, who couldn’t give the site a full 20-minute read before blasting it about layout and comment moderation. But there were some serious concerns, prompting much whiny self-defensiveness from AnnArbor.com staffers.

Oh, you thought that was a real launch? AnnArbor.com asked. No, no, it’s just a beta launch. Wait a few weeks, let the reporters really know their beats, then you’ll really see something. Then the site went down.

I could list AnnArbor.com’s journalistic weaknesses all day (hey, why don’t you shorten the headlines and actually edit these stories?) but what’s the point. AnnArbor.com is trying to create something brand-new with the same tired old crowd they had before and that can’t be easy. They have to appeal to a readership still reeling from the loss of their daily newspaper and they had only four months to put the whole thing together. So why not admit it from the beginning?

So what if I came to you one morning and said:

“I’ve got a homemade muffin for you. It’s just a practice muffin before I make the good ones for Benny’s preschool. It’s a pumpkin-and-chocolate-chip muffin, but there aren’t many chocolate chips because I ate half the bag while mixing the other ingredients. My oven doesn’t heat evenly, so the muffin’s kind of lopsided as if it was trying to escape its pan. Oh, and I burned it a little too.”

With all those caveats in mind you might like the muffin. You might have some suggestions for a better muffin. You sure as hell will trust me to give you the straight dope about my baking prowess.

I wish we could say the same for AnnArbor.com.

Don't Skip Breakfast

2009-07-29T12:56:00.006-05:00

So this wasn't the greatest morning I ever had. I woke up late, which meant I couldn't work out or eat breakfast if I wanted to get to work on time. And what happened then?

Well, I had trouble with my contacts, trouble with my hair dryer, trouble with my peanut butter sandwich, trouble with my earrings and as a a final note, trouble with the !@#$% computer when I tried to load my iPod. As you may already guess, it was a computer that finally sent me into a string of expletives.

Which got me in trouble with Ron, since Benny was right there.

So there I am at the bus stop, steaming. A fine drizzle falls on my badly blow-dried hair. I blame my contacts, my sandwich, my new earrings and the !@#$% computer. But then I identify the real culprit: I skipped breakfast.

When oh when will I realize that a bowl of cereal or two waffles improves the quality of life for myself and anyone around me? Why does it take my poor husband dragging me away from a computer at 8 a.m. to remind me that being hungry and hurried is Bad Bad Bad?

It took three cereal bars and two Snapples consumed at my desk to put me in the proper frame of mind to edit stories and answer emails. By 10 a.m. I was able to field a phone call about our upcoming Most Pompous Executives publication (not its real name, but should be) with some poise. This lady calls every two days for information about Most Pompous Executives, and my repeated answers that I know zero details, my editor knows zero details and our publisher has made no decision about the breadth and scope of Most Pompous Executives fails to satisfy her. She's convinced that we're hiding vital Most Pompous Executive nomination guidelines from her. This lady works for an accounting firm, which is apparently lousy with pompous executives eager to be honored. Sigh.

Anyway, the moral of today's post is Eat Breakfast, especially if you expect a phone call from a rabid CPA marketer.. Maybe an All Powerful Cereal Bowl of Light (above) would help.

Arrival Day 2009

2009-07-22T15:30:00.010-05:00

Today is July 22. That's a big day for our family, and not just because it shares a month with Independence Day, Bastille Day and the Moon Landing. July 22 is the day this blog stopped being Lost in BabySpace and became California Dreamin'. Because this was the day that myself, Ron, Benny and Callisto the cat arrived in San Francisco.

July 22, 2007 began at 1 a.m. when I finally lay down on an air mattress in our Michigan house to catch a few hours' sleep before our flight to San Francisco. I tried to relax and think about California but the picture was dim and undeveloped. "Who gives up jobs, cars and Mackinaw Island fudge to live in a tiny apartment?" I asked myself. "Who wants to wait at bus stops, wheel granny carts to the grocery, feed quarters into washing machines?"

Well, we did. The next eight months passed in a haze of stress: a mad dash to our airplane flight; tense negotiations for a transfer to an acceptable apartment; a frenzied search for a preschool; my return to full-time work; severe financial problems; no heat over Christmas; and an insane work project called "Real Estate Deals of the Year." The culmination was the months-long process to sell our Michigan house, which we finally managed in March 2008.

But there were many large and small victories. We found a great preschool for Benny and paid shocking amounts of money to keep him there for two years. Ron won a national award for a feature he wrote during that crazy August 2007. I edited some big projects that came off well. We paid our fiendishly complicated California and Michigan taxes. We also guided Benny through important milestones such as toilet training, advanced Lego building and the ability to eat something other than pancakes, corn and Mac&Cheese.

I'd like to thank all the little people who made it possible -- Kathy, our beleaguered realtor, who never did get a commission on the house. And who can forget Ralf, our chronically depressed mover, whose unexpected delay in Kansas allowed us to transfer to another apartment before our stuff arrived. Or my friend Angelic Coworker, who arranged for a $1,000 freelance paycheck before I'd written a word of the story .

Happy Arrival Day!

Moon Landing Anniversary

2009-07-21T13:18:00.006-05:00

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing of Apollo 11. Ron, Benny and I headed over to Nasa Ames near Mountain View, Calif., to celebrate on Sunday. I don't think NASA expected such a big crowd; the traffic was backed up to the highway. We parked in an enormous parking lot next to the airplane runways.

We watched model rockets being launched and I took pictures. The first three pictures are of a black-and-white model of the Saturn rocket that carried Apollo 11 to the moon. The last rocket picture is of a yellow model rocket painted like a crayon. Ron put Benny on his shoulders to watch.

We had a great time, but it was ungodly hot. The march from the rocket launch to the parade grounds was like walking on the surface of the sun. We never made it to the displays and activities; instead we collapsed under a tree and ate lunch (see picture). Then I dragged a reluctant Ron across the complex to the gift shop and indoor display center. The center's exhibits included 3-D pictures of Mars and a videotape of the moon landings, plus a moon rock brought back by Apollo 15.

Ron was able to attend a NASA event on Monday morning and got to ask a question of Buzz Aldrin and the other astronauts. (He asked about public-private partnerships to fund space exploration.) Benny's spent the last two days playing with the moon landing Toys his Uncle Greg sent from Florida and building a Saturn model out of Legos. This morning he stranded his little astronaut outside Jupiter with no more oxygen. "He held his breath all the way to Earth," Benny told me.

Random Thoughts

2009-07-13T18:53:00.007-05:00

For those of you who'd like to know what I think about all day:

-- It was tough to pick out something to wear to work today. I think science fiction characters are kind of lucky; they can just wear jumpsuits. Of course, jumpsuits only work if you have a good body. That's why middle-aged guest stars in science fiction shows/movies always wear flowing robes.

-- One of Ron's magazines is requesting suggestions for another awful fee from airlines. I suggest: "In the case of an emergency, an oxygen mask will drop from the ceiling above you. If you would like the mask to actually dispense oxygen, please pay a $20 surcharge at the check-in counter. Be sure to pay your own oxygen surcharge before paying others'."

-- Saturday night I had a filet mignon pot pie at a pub with the great name The Monk's Kettle. The pot pie was great, but it still seemed a real waste of filet mignon.

-- This weekend I was riding the bus and saw a young guy scribble on the window with a yellow marker. The writing was unintelligible (Elf runes? Sanskrit?), but he felt the need to underline important points. As I exited the bus, I told the driver "The kid sitting in the back in the plaid shirt just scribbled on the window." The driver looked at me in utter bewilderment. Oh well, I did my bit as a concerned citizen.

-- I'm still reading Benny "The Lord of the Rings." He thinks Gollum is a riot. I drew him a little map so he could keep all the places straight. He wants to know if Saruman could beat Elrond or if Galadriel could take the Balrog. Thoughts?

-- I think I've figured out why I keep getting carded for alcohol in San Francisco. There are a lot of strung-out 21-year-old women around here who look like a 40-year-old sometime drinker. A friend of mine says it's because the city's servers are required to card anyone who looks under 40. I like my theory better.

Paycheck Liberation Day

2009-06-30T16:13:00.003-05:00

Today is a day I've been dreaming of for nearly two years, since September 2007 when I wrote my first astonishingly large check to Benny's Dinosaur Preschool.

I am forever grateful to this amazing school. Those teachers have pretty much raised Benny during the week after I returned to newspaper work. This year it received 80 applications for a handful of spots for the 2009-2010 year. But it wasn't cheap. For two years, my first paycheck of each month has been the Dinosaur School paycheck. This year, the amount of that paycheck and the amount of monthly tuition has been eerily similar.

Until today.

Today I received my June 30 paycheck and clutched it to my chest, resisting the impulse to shout "Mine! All mine!" For last month's tuition payment was our last. Our security deposit will pay the July tuition and this August Benny starts attending public school.

I never thought we'd make it. Now I know how parents feel after they put a kid through college. (What I've paid the Dinosaur School would finance two years at a pretty nice college.) I spent $250 we really didn't have on a personalized tile for the school's new mural. The tile will include our names and the dates Benny attended. I wish we could put the total dollar amount there too.

So what will we do with the extra money? My plans are pretty dull. First we'll go on a short vacation in August to Mt. Lassen Volcanic Park. Then I'll buy Benny back to school stuff and go on a (controlled, I hope) spending spree. Then we'll plump up our savings. We also plan to move to a larger apartment next year.

Yay!

Clueless Business Timeline 2008

2009-06-12T13:30:00.013-05:00

Sometimes families have a lot going on and don't notice the biggest economic events. We were no exception. I gathered a timeline of major financial events in 2007-2009 and added what my family was doing at the same time. My conclusion: yes, we really were that clueless.

2008
...

Jan. 11
Bank of America agrees to acquire Countrywide Financial.
-- Christine begins negotiating with her mortgage lender to sell the house in Michigan.

March 16
JPMorgan Chase agrees to acquire Bear Stearns at firesale price.
-- A week later, Ron and Christine sell their house. Hooray!

July 11
Mortgage lender IndyMac Bank becomes the third-largest bank failure in U.S. history.
-- Ron, Christine and Benny live the small life. “We've downsized our lives so drastically in the last year that I still have relatives convinced we sleep on straw mats and eat off a blanket on the floor. At the moment we have a small apartment and that's it. No deck. No car. No playroom.”

September
Lehman Brothers files bankruptcy; Bank of America agrees to acquire Merrill Lynch. Government takes control of insurer AIG. WaMu files for bankruptcy.
-- Ron and Christine hardly notice; we’re booking school tours for the Great Kindergarten Search.

Sept. 17
The government seizes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
-- Christine reads the Greek tragedy "Agamemnon" to boost her spirits.

Oct. 6
Dow closes below 10,000 for the first time since 2004.
-- -- Christine attends her newspaper’s Infrastructure Business Forum, still coping with the trauma from producing an infrastructure special section.

Oct. 9
AIG bailout #2.
-- Ron and Christine tour San Francisco elementary schools until they want to puke, until the very phrase “test scores” causes a PTSD reaction that involves excessive drooling and a fear of chalk. Who cares about AIG?

Nov. 10
AIG bailout #3.
--We buy Benny a snazzy TIE fighter toy and a little Imperial Engineer. Benny immediately sets the Engineer to chasing zebras on the African plains (seems a bit unsporting).

December
Automakers receive government aid.
-- We arrive in Detroit for the holidays. Merry Christmas!

2009
...

March
Dow Closes below 7,000 for the first time since May 1, 1997.
-- Benny is assigned to Lucky Elementary School in San Francisco. What stock market collapse? It’s a great day!.

March 30
Rick Wagoner resigns from his role as GM CEO.
-- Benny and Christine wander about Cole Valley to celebrate Cesar Chavez Day. Now Wagoner has time to celebrate too.

April 3
Unemployment report shows 8.5% of Americans out of work.
-- A San Francisco mother posts on Christine's mother's group looking for a desk job with no commute, no deadlines, no demands, nobody actually depending on her ... one that she can do only when she feels like it, and presumably requires no capitalization. Good luck with that!

Hmm, perhaps we’re not the only ones who were a little clueless in this economy.

My Clueless Business Timeline 2007

2009-06-12T13:02:00.016-05:00

In the frantic pace of everyday life, it’s easy to miss business events on a national or even global scale. Even a huge bankruptcy or plunge in the Dow can’t compete with unpacking moving boxes, rushing for the 43 bus or touring elementary schools.

Ron and I moved to San Francisco in July 2007, and even two business journalists like us failed to notice that this financial, professional and personal leap of faith was executed against a backdrop of economic collapse. Looking back, our sense of optimism was stunning, and surely had no basis in fact. We did notice the mortgage crisis – um, our house wasn’t selling – but there was still plenty of work in San Francisco, retail stores were packed with shoppers and San Francisco office space was reaching $100 per square foot (seems incredible now). We fretted about friends and family in Michigan —a state which never did get the full benefits of the most recent boom and was visibly sagging – but considered ourselves well out of it.

Like everyone else, we were simply too busy. Daily life requires some tunnel vision: you can’t remember to pack lunches and pay bills if you’re fretting over hedge funds at Bear Stearns or executive bonuses at AIG. I was too busy dealing with our own red ink to worry about Chrysler’s. I was tracking kindergarten tours in October 2008, not the Dow, which plunged below 10,000 that month.

Were we really that clueless? I didn’t want to believe that, so I gathered a timeline of major financial events in 2007-2009 and added what my family was doing at the same time. My conclusion: yes, we really were that clueless.

2007
...

June
Bloomberg News reports on the linkage between increased foreclosures and localized housing price declines.
-- Benny’s wooden Thomas the Tank Engine trains go on recall. Ron leaves for San Francisco.

June 14
Bear Sterns spends $3.2 billion to bail out two ailing hedge funds that invested heavily in subprime assets.
-- Two weeks of single motherhood in Michigan — filled with packing, potty training and house showing — and Christine’s ready for a padded cell.

July
The Boston hedge fund that manages money for Harvard University’s endowment and the Massachusetts state pension fund loses half its value.
-- Ron, Christine and Benny arrive in San Francisco to start a new life there.

Oct. 17
U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson calls the bursting housing bubble "the most significant risk to our economy."
-- Christine moans about her long to-do list. “I don't have a California driver's license. I can’t remember my new phone number. Benny's preschool needed a form filled out by a pediatrician, which required finding a pediatrician, making an appointment, finding the office, etc. Now I've finally got the damn form, but I keep forgetting to bring it to the school.”

December
The recession begins, although we don’t know it yet.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Franco-Prussian War: Revenge of the Paper-Pushers

2009-06-02T14:38:00.001-05:00

“The Franco-Prussian War” by Michael Howard

I’ll confess that when I opened this book, I knew very little about the Franco-Prussian War. I didn’t even know who won until I read the front flap. (“Darn, now I know the ending!”

The author, Michael Howard, would be appalled by this, of course. He wrote this book for serious history students who know all the players, read French and German fluently (1), and can find Staarbrucker on a map.

But despite the language barriers, the Franco-Prussian War fills a vital gap in history for me. I’ve spent some time with Napoleon I and Clausewitz and the Civil War generals, but then it’s a long dark night until Franz Ferdinand gets shot in Sarajevo in 1914.

So it’s time for the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871, between a barely united north Germany under Prince William and France under Napoleon III.

SPOILER ALERT: The Germans win.

In the 40 years following the Napoleonic Wars, Howard says, big armies supported by mobilized nations went right out of style. European governments were back to running little armies as a side hobby. The emerging middle class was more interested in making money than going to war.

“Everywhere armies languished in unpopular and impoverished isolation,’ Howard said.

Well, isn't that so sad. Poor, peaceful Europe.

That changed when Prince William took the Prussian throne in 1858. In a few short years he and his buddy Roon remodeled the army, created a North German Confederation and won some victories. The French also reformed their own military somewhat, creating a bigger army, but they didn’t account for the changes science and industry had made to war.

The Germans did. They realized that army commanders needed a good general staff now so they could split up their big armies and move them around. “The Prussian general staff acted as a nervous system animating the lumbering body of the army,” Howard said.

The French, on the other hand, “huddled together in masses without the technical ability to disperse.” They had a good breech-loading system, but terrible artillery. (2)

In effect, the Franco-Prussian conflict was the first Paper-Pushing War. Its outcome would depend on organization, not skill in leadership or courage in battle. Armies had to be in the right place, on time and in adequate strength. That certainly didn’t bode well for the French.

But in 1870, France felt fairly good about their reforms. They had nearly 500,000 soldiers available and could scrape up 300,000 more. They had tons of supplies.

“By the standards of its last campaigns, the French Army was ready,” said Howard. “It was the tragedy of the French Army, and of the French nation, that they did not realize in time that military organization had entered into an entirely new age.”

____________________________________________________

(1) The book's footnotes are filled with long quotes in French or German that probably begin “Ha ha, you monolingual Americans have no clue what’s going on here! Ha ha!” Not that I’m paranoid.

(2) Howard makes a little side joke about the artillery in French here. Apparently France’s minister of war just filed away reports about some great steel guns with the comment “Rien a fair.” I think that means “Nothing to do.”

Happy Memorial Day!

2009-05-26T17:35:00.002-05:00

We attended the Memorial Day Ceremony at San Francisco Presidio. The military cemetery there is the oldest national cemetery in the West, beginning with soldiers from the Mexican War.

There was a short parade before the ceremony and we followed National Parks servicepeople mounted on horses to the cemetery. There we heard tributes to veterans and a 21 howitzer cannon salute as well as songs and hymns — including "Taps" and "Amazing Grace" performed by the 191st Army Band. Best of all, a talented speaker delivered the Gettysburg Address from memory.

Then we had a picnic on the Presido grounds near a cannon brought over from the Phillippines. A great Memorial Day.

Please God, Don't Let Him be a Golfer

2009-05-26T17:32:00.003-05:00

Here's Benny at the Lucky Elementary School's annual festival. It was a marvelous event -- Californian people do everything with such style with a foodie flair. Benny threw bean bags, jumped in a jumpy house, ate hot dogs and popcorn, picked a lollipop tree and peeked into a kindergarten classroom. And, of course, got in a short round of mini golf.

Hiking California: The Miwok Trail

2009-05-26T17:27:00.002-05:00

This is a nice little trail in the Marin headlands. After a brief spell in the woods, it winds around the hills just above the bay. It was an insanely hot, sunny day, so we couldn't hike it for very long.

The Best Use for Credit Cards

2009-05-19T18:18:00.003-05:00

I'm not usually a "make a kicky mosaic out of recycled materials" kind of person, but I'm totally making this picture frame after Ron and I pay off the credit cards.

By the way, when I clicked on the link for CraftStylish's instructions on making the picture frame, a big banner ad appeared. It said "Chase Bank: We're Here for You."

Yeah, Chase, you'll be here in my picture frame. Take that!

Military History Seminar: Fun with Chainmail Hoodies

2009-05-18T13:22:00.006-05:00

The military history seminar is back! In fact, I've gathered my military history posts and formed a new blog called Pick Your Battles. It has a few new features and a picture of Benny and I at a Civil War battlefield. Check it out, if you like that sort of thing.

This will be my first military history review in a year and a half. I've been doing this since 2005 and read six books in Ohio State University's reading list. At this rate, in 40 years I'll be sitting in whatever nursing home Benny can afford, reading No. 32, "War and Imperialism in Republican Rome" by William Harris.

"The Face of Battle" by John Keegan.

This book is one of my favorites on this list and not just because it's one of the shortest at 342 pages. It's a nice little paperback with a cheery picture of the skull of a Swedish soldier at the Battle of Visby in 1561.

The publishers obviously chose the skull for its dashing, cocky air (complete with chainmail hoodie) since the book doesn't discuss the Battle of Visby. (That's a good thing, too, because I looked it up, and I'm not in the mood to hear about Danish troops battling peasant farmers. Guess who won.)

Instead, "The Face of Battle" analyzes three battles: Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815 and The Somme in 1916. All great battles and surely worth 342 pages and a grinning skull for that alone, but Keegan writes so creatively and eloquently that I'm ready to look up his stuff on the Battle of Visby. He begins with one of my favorite history book openers (edited for length):

"I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath. I have questioned people who have been in battle ... have walked over battlefields ... have often turned up small relics of the fighting. I have read about battles, of course, have talked about battles ... but I have never been in a battle. And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like."

This resonates with me, because I also have never been in battle (just some really mean editorial meetings). And it prompts me to consider why a 40-year-old wife and mother feels compelled to study military history. I have no military background, no ties except a brother in the Army. My paternal grandfather landed on the Normandy beaches as a combat photographer, my maternal grandfather and my father collected military history books. So there's some family precedent for this interest in battle.

Keegan says that some people read military history with the subjunctive question "How would I behave in battle?" I personally don't need a 100-book reading list to answer that question. I know exactly how I would behave in battle. It's like reading an airline pamphlet while flying over the Atlantic, the type of pamphlet titled "Your Role in a Water Landing." As author Jean Kerr wrote: "I know my role in a water landing. I'm going to splash around and sob."

So you see, I have no illusions here. At Agincourt, I'd be in the baggage park. At Waterloo, I'd be napping with the English 4th Regiment. (Where I wouldn't be at Waterloo is near Wellington, who apparently liked to be where the fighting was hottest.) At the Somme, I'd be the one wearing his gas mask in pouring rain. ("You never know!")

It's clear, then, that I don't read military history to learn about myself. I've done enough self-introspection and the results are rarely pleasant. Why then?

Well, reading military history helps me understand the world and how it came to be this way. Identifying patterns of human behavior is interesting. Most of all, I study the conflict and suffering of the past so it is not forgotten. My father and grandfather passed this interest on to me. Perhaps, by example, I will pass it on to Benny and the soldiers at Agincourt in 1415 live on nearly 600 years later.

Hiking California: Corte Madera Ecological Reserve Trail

2009-05-13T12:55:00.005-05:00

I suppose there's a reason why the authors of "Best Hikes for Children: San Francisco Bay Area" wanted my family to trudge along an exhaust-filled, traffic-choked roadway, but damned if I can figure it out. I'm looking forward to hiking the 90 trails in this book, but I hope the rest aren't like this one.

We had actually planned to hike No. 85, the Redwood Grove Trail Loop in Muir Woods on Sunday, but Sunday was Mother's Day, which meant I got to sleep in, which meant we didn't get over Golden Gate Bridge until 11 a.m. Apparently half of northern California also wanted to hike Muir Woods on Mother's Day, because the closest parking spot was a half-mile away along a winding road with narrow shoulders. Not the hiking ideal.

So we at a picnic lunch in the car and then found a nice little trail that wound around the hills and revealed great views of Sausalito and the Bay, But the hot sun was beating down on us, so we decided to try something with a little more shade — say, No. 86, the Corte Madera Ecological Reserve Trail, just a short drive away.

I should've guessed this wouldn't be a happy stroll through Marin County flora and fauna when I saw that this particular hike began at the parking lot of Larkspur's ferry terminal. "Head east on the path toward Remaillard Park," I read out loud to Ron as we stood in the nearly deserted lot.

"What, along the road?" Ron asked, pointing to the traffic whizzing by at 50 mph. That made no sense, so we piled back into the car and drove to Remaillard Park instead, where the book promised a duck pond restored by the Marin Audobon Society.

I suppose it's a very nifty pond for ducks and turtles and frogs, but we could see very little through the reeds as we circled the pond on a dirt path. Ron hoisted Benny on his shoulders so he could see the three lonely ducks huddled near a log.

"The book says we can go back to the terminal parking lot and walk to the ecological reserve," I said hopefully.

"What's there?" Ron asked.

Good question. The book said to climb stairs to an overpass, follow another busy road and turn left under the freeway. Included in the hike's description was a picture with the cheery caption: "The freeway is only a stone's throw from this catwalk."

I shut the book and tucked it into my backpack. "Never mind," I said. "Let's go home and eat cookies."

Prudent practices

2009-05-13T12:29:00.002-05:00

So the American Bankers Association is getting all nervous now that the Senate has the credit card reform act. They've sent a letter to the Senate detailing how a financial apocolypse will scour the land if they can't switch due dates and hike APRs for no reason. They've been playing a fun game of "gotcha" with consumers, those credit card companies, and made tons of money off responsible people in the process.

Here's an excerpt of the letter also posted on consumerist.com:
__________________

ABA recognizes that the Senate bill contains a number of important consumer protections embodied in recent regulatory action, and acknowledges that change is forthcoming in the way the credit card industry and its customers interact. However, we strongly believe that any legislation in this area needs to achieve the correct balance of consumer protections and market flexibility so as to not jeopardize access to credit.

ABA remains very concerned about the contents of H.R. 627 (as amended), and believes that if it is enacted as it currently stands, it will have a dramatic impact on the ability of consumers, small businesses, students, and others to get credit at a time when our economy can least afford such constraints.

The bill contains various provisions that limit a lender's ability to manage risk, price fees, allocate payments, and otherwise prudently conduct business. We believe these limits will necessitate reductions in available credit given current economic conditions, while increasing the price of credit where it remains available.
______________________

Prudent? Prudent? The lenders dare to use the word prudent? They have been anything but prudent in their behavior. It's like the Wild West out there in the financial sector. They are the ones who so prudently gave tons of credit to every meatball with a pulse. They are the ones who are jacking up every APR in sight for good customers in the name of prudent business practices. Switched due dates, double billing cycles, these are not prudent business practices.

Rail all you like about imprudent consumers who run up credit card debt, the reality is these people have this debt now and many have stopped spending and are trying to pay it down. Will it really benefit the economy to smack these consumers around some more? These are the same lenders who needed a godawful amount of time to to adjust to new rules effective next year and instead used this time to shove through every nasty business practice they could think of before the deadline. They certainly moved quickly on that.

And as for the reductions in available credit they go on about, that's a GOOD thing. There's still way too much credit out there, that was the problem. I feel for small businesses who depend on credit to keep going, but since when did the economy require underhanded tactics by credit card companies to prop up healthy small businesses?

Opting Out of Life

2009-05-07T13:17:00.003-05:00

I’ve got a new part-time job these days — opting out.

I opt out of daily emails, I opt out of telephone listings, I opt out of ad-targeting and personal-info sharing. It seems like every week somebody is presenting me with something nobody in their right mind would want (piles of junk mail, anyone?) and giving me the option to opt out.

Unfortunately for me, the procedure to opt out is rarely optimal. In fact, I would suspect that these companies design these processes so the maximum number of people never reach the Holy Grail of Opt-Outedness. They probably have studies and everything.

1) Put opt-out option in tiny type in the back of a pamphlet or in a letter that looks like an ad for DHL.
2) Couch the opt-out option in convoluted language.
3) Direct customers to overloaded 1-800 number, include an address to write to (but no form or envelope) or require a tortuous trip through the company’s web site.
4) If by some miracle a customer does reach a customer service rep or actually mail off a letter, ignore them.

Not that I’m bitter, but I just spent a good hour last weekend writing letters to four credit card companies so I can “opt out” of their giant APR hikes. I know some opt outs are actually a good thing; if I no longer want to receive Cute Kitten of the Day emails, I can opt out. This is okay. This is a mutually beneficial relationship with escape hatches on both sides.

But in most instances, offering opt-outs is not an act of respect, consideration or cooperation. It’s a power move, a bullying tactic. Somebody wants to do something to you, such as sell your information or raise your APR. Because of legal or PR concerns, they have to give you the option of opting out. So they craft it in a way so the opting out is easy to miss, forcing you to be hyper-vigilant about every communication you get from them. They are betting you are too busy/tired/stressed or all three to meet their opting-out requirements. This is not operating in good faith.

I can only imagine what would happen if I tried such tactics in my own relationships. I suppose I could leave a message like this on Ron’s cell phone:

“Hi dear, I’m planning to serve raw meat and unwashed vegetables for dinner tonight. If you’d like a cooked dinner, please call 1-800-HUNGRYS before 3 P.M. today. Please have your 20-digit meal account number handy.”

Given Ron's frantically busy schedule, there’s only a 50 percent chance he’d have the time to call to request a cooked dinner. But if he balks at eating hard broccoli and raw hamburger, I can say, “You had the chance to opt out!”

Or maybe I could send my editor an email like this:

__________________________

Date: April 20 at 5:33 P.M.
Subject: Trivial email-not worth your time

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am scheduled to complete the 40-page, exhaustively researched project “The Bay Area’s Most Exciting Business Plans” by May 29. Upon consideration I feel the best professional action I could take at this time would be to refrain from any type of planning, researching, assigning or editing of the subsequent project and pursue other courses of action, namely, the writing of long, whiny blog posts. If you would prefer that I thoroughly and competently complete the project, including the marathon sessions with FileMaker Pro software, please write me at 1234 Befuddle St., San Francisco, CA, to be received by April 21 at 6:33 A.M.
__________________________

My supervisor only gets about 200,000 emails a day. If he dares complain when I blow the May 29 deadline, I can say triumphantly, “You had a chance to opt out of a uncompleted project! Let’s put pictures of cute kittens on the blank pages! I have a bunch in my email inbox!”

Sounds great.

Hiking California: Huckleberry Path Nature Trail

2009-04-27T12:26:00.004-05:00

In the manner of all good used bookstores, The Overland in the Sunset knows what I need better than I do. Last week I entered the store to find a good mystery and walked out with a $5 copy of "Best Hikes for Children: San Francisco Bay Area." It lists 90 interesting hikes ranging from easy (strolling among the ferns near Fish Ranch Road) to the difficult (climbing ladders on Steep Ravine Trail in the North Bay).

We, of course, went for the former. The Huckleberry Path Nature Trail is a short hop from the City into the East Bay. Its a botanical regional preserve, and its heavy moisture and fog supports lots of big ferns. As we started the winding path down the canyon, I felt like I was walking back in time to the Jurassic. Ron and I were wondering how Benny would handle his first 2-mile hike, but he did great, tripping along the path, occasionally stopping to unfold his map. We don't have a car, so he needs tough little legs to get around San Francisco's hills. On the trail, he was surprisingly surefooted, keeping up a steady stream of chatter for more than an hour. ("I think hyenas are bigger than whales and the biggest number is infinity and I don't like red grapes, I like green grapes. ...")

This trail has some unusual plants because the soil doesn't hold water well. The shale and chert rock formation underneath was originally laid down on the ocean floor and later pushed up. Little numbered signposts pointed out the difference between the sword ferns (dark leaves, needs cool, shady moist spots) and wood ferns (light and feathery and tolerates more dryness). Benny looked out for the next number and I would read the little geeky description. Pictured above is No. 15, a Pallid Manzanita, which is now almost wholly confined to the preserve.

One down, 89 more trails to go. We're looking forward to hiking more trails in this book, now that springtime is here, hopefully moving from easy to difficult as Benny grows bigger.

Happy César Chávez Day!

2009-03-30T22:15:00.000-05:00

Here are some photos of Benny out on the town on César Chávez Day — a school holiday. Holidays like this make me a little crazy, not just because I must take the day off and lose income, but because I think children would be better served by spending the day at school learning about César Chávez.*

Benny and I elected to celebrate by visiting his soon-to-be elementary school. There were no children there (see above), but we got to check out the student garden and play in the park nearby. Then we had lunch outside in the sun. I'm proud of how Benny has adapted to city life — he stops and takes my hand at every curb and identifies every bus. Some wild-eyed man came lurching by while we ate lunch, shouting about bicycles, and Benny didn't turn a hair, just sipped his lemonade.

* César Chávez, born March 31, 1927, was a Mexican-American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers. (Thank you, Wikepedia!)

Somebody's being a little unreasonable

2009-03-26T15:29:00.002-05:00

So I checked my online mother's group this morning for the first time in months and read this post:

Hi,

i am trying to figure out what options i have if i would like to start working part-time and am very curious to hear from moms who are doing the same, esp. if you are working from home, and started doing so AFTER you had your baby.

ideally, i would like a job that is VERY flexible, something i can do as i find time for it. i will still be taking care of my son full-time, at least for now...so the times i can work will most often be in the evenings after he goes to bed, with additional daytime hours during some weekends. it would be best if i can do the work at home, since otherwise, i may need to find a sitter...(my husband works long and unpredictable residency hours so it's difficult to depend on him) and jobs where someone else would depend on me/or ones with deadlines would be a bad fit, since my son will still be my first priority - and you know how that goes!

it would be great to find an option to help us bring home more income!!

all suggestions/input are welcome! thanks in advance!

best, Deena

Deena isn't asking for much here, is she? Just a job with no commute, no deadlines, no demands, nobody actually depending on her ... one that she can do only when she feels like it, and presumably requires no capitalization. She sounds like a great employee! Let's hire her!

We did it!

2009-03-15T17:20:00.004-05:00

Well, our long educational nightmare is over. Seven months, 20 school tours, 40 lost work hours, a dozen hissy fits and two parking tickets later, we have an elementary school for Benny. We have reached our Shangri-La.

The assignment process at the San Francisco Unified School District, is, of course, horrific. You spend your autumn touring every blinkin' public school in the stupid city and choose seven, which you rank in order of preference. The district's massive computer then processes everyone's requests according to some arcane criteria and spits out each child's assignment. The key is to find elementary schools that are good, yet not so terrifically popular that you have little chance of getting in. They call such schools "hidden gems," and sometimes those gems are hidden under layers of seedy neglect. (How about a little more school funding, Governor Terminator?).

This process is called, fittingly enough, "the lottery," and it does put me in mind of Shirley Jackson's famous short story, except in this case, 0-7 parents surround lucky Rooftop winners and pelt them with chalkboard erasers.

Because you can do all the tours, the applications, the documents, the whole thing, and STILL end up without one of your seven choices. Friday's post on a popular San Francisco blog, which is centered around the school assignment process, asks "Round one letters are out: what did you get?" As of 3 p.m. Sunday, there are over 500 comments from parents, many of whom are spitting mad. Blame and angst are thick in the air as parents who hate their school assignments face months of Round 2 and waitlist stress. According to statistics the district recently released, nearly 1,000 San Francisco families received none of their seven choices this year.

But back to us (cuz this is my blog, after all). The letter from SFUSD arrived Saturday, while Ron, Benny and I were at the St. Patrick's Day parade. I literally ran up the street from the bus stop, keys in hand, eager to see if we got our letter. Then I carried it upstairs like it was a paper time bomb, which in a way, it was. We have been in limbo for three months waiting for this letter, unable to plan anything. Everything depended on the school: Would we have to buy a car? Would we have to move? Would we have to go parochial and pay tuition? Would we have to do all three?

Well, Ron opened it and the news couldn't be better. Benny was assigned the Shangri-La school, our No. 1 choice, in Cole Valley. It's a short bus ride away, in a good neighborhood that actually shortens our commute to work. It's a very popular school (630 families requested it this year) and not too big. We'll probably move to Cole Valley next year to be even closer, but for now, we can stay put. And it's free!

Financially, this is a huge help. This means we can take the princely sum we've paid for Benny's preschool each month and put it towards debt. This means we can take a family vacation this May and visit our family in Michigan this June and put money into savings every month. As soon as the debt is paid off, we can start a college fund for Benny and save up to buy a car. All of this is possible because of Benny's school assignment, and so I feel we just won the lottery in every sense of the word.

The depths of despair in Indiana

2009-02-02T12:46:00.006-05:00

Work has been a little weird lately, with some strange, random management moves that do little to help morale. But hey, at least I don't work at the South Bend Tribune.

The blog "Ask a Manager" has posted a recent management memo to reporters that nearly stops the heart. Reporters must send a detailed, daily summary of their activities — every phone call, interview, research effort and email discussion — to five editors. That way the editors know every little thing their reporters are doing, which apparently helps them evaluate people's work, plan the paper's content and know "your accomplishments and your struggles."

Let's ignore the massive time suck this would be for reporters, who could be spending that 20-plus minutes (it's really that detailed) actually working on stories. Let's ignore the even bigger time suck for editors, who must wade through a dozen of such summaries a day. I assume all summaries will be forwarded on to the design department, which can develop cute pie charts and bar graphs displaying reporters' activities for everyone's edification.

Perhaps there's a value to this process that I am stubbornly overlooking. Perhaps my editors would be assisted (if not inspired) by such a daily summary from me. So here it is: an open memo to the Internet world about my Monday morning activities. Now go plan your next newspaper issue.

MONDAY, FEB. 2

Arrived at nine. Chugged Snapple. Consumed granola bar. Surfed the web and found appalling memo asking for detailed summaries from reporters. Forwarded memo to a dozen friends. Read emails. Flagged two emails I didn't understand and deleted three emails I hoped to ignore. Went into kitchen and told coworker amusing story about my morning bus ride. Returned to desk and hunted for vending machine change. Gave up. Started editing a real estate column. Reporter asked me to post an article on the web. Dug through my files for my two-month-old, hastily scrawled cheat sheet. Tried to read my writing. Decided to wing it. Posted article. Returned to real estate column. Giggled over punchy headline I wrote. Started thinking about article I posted. Should I add a reporter byline? Was the article too small for a byline? My notes were silent on this, or perhaps I just couldn't read them. Dithered some more. All the editors were in a Monday meeting so I had no one to ask. Added byline. Finished editing real estate column. Reporter emailed me and asked why his story now had a byline and requested I take it off. Took byline off. Indulged in self pity. Editors emerged from meeting and I asked about web story bylines. Was told that all stories must have them. Put bylines on seven stories, cursing softly. Attended editorial meeting. Suffered. Went to lunch early. I plan to return from lunch in April 2012.

Federal Reserve hides its mighty super powers

2009-01-13T11:24:00.004-05:00

Apparently it takes more than $800 billion to impress Ben Bernanke, who gave a speech in London saying, gosh, Obama's stimulus package is sweet and all, but won't do much good.

But fear not, because the Federal Reserve has mighty super powers in its arsenal, Bernanke says -- he calls them "powerful tools." Of course, the chairman won't share what those tools are, especially since the rate-cut well has run dry. Perhaps Bernanke will be happier if we give the whole $800 billion to the banks and ask them really nicely to lend out a little of it this time. He has a laundry list of solutions to the mess, solutions which require actions by other people.

Bernanke's word of the day is "stability," which apparently requires "stronger supervisory and regulatory systems" without squashing "financial innovation." Well, good heavens, we wouldn't want to discourage financial innovation, would we? Why, it was the financial innovators who brought us the Ponzi schemes and ARMs, after all. It's like me announcing that my family needs strict rules to keep Benny from eating Hostess cupcakes for dinner, but if Benny finds the cupcakes in the back of the cupboard himself, hey, that's innovation!

Benny hangs out in Michigan

2009-01-06T14:00:00.003-05:00

During our stay at my brother Andy's, Benny had a chance to play his new board game and attend his old playgroup.

Christmas on a Michigan beach

2009-01-06T13:56:00.003-05:00

Here are some pictures of Benny and his cousins on a cold, nasty, West Michigan beach in December. (Can you tell this was Ron's family and that I stayed in the car?) I'm glad that Benny isn't a wimp like his mother.

Christmas at Cindy's

2009-01-06T13:52:00.002-05:00

Here are a few pictures from our Christmas at Christine's sister's house in West Michigan.

Marley & Me & Benny

2008-12-31T16:26:00.003-05:00

The great thing about long visits to family are the occasional, unexpected pockets of free time. At home, if you have a spare 20 minutes, there are at least 30 to-dos backed up behind your eyeballs ("Oh, I have a chance to change the litter/change the sheets/vaccuum the carpet/fix that weird faucet drip/call the cable people....")

But when you're at a someone's house and lunch isn't for two more hours and it's 15 degrees outside and you're too scared to approach your sister-in-law's psycho 6,000-piece jigsaw puzzle (her latest was simply a pile of glittery and wooden beads with a single thread of blue yarn running through it), you suddenly have nothing to do. The dishes are wiped, the sleeping bags are rolled and you can't wash the stinky laundry in your suitcase because your poor hostess is busy washing the 500 towels her family is using. I suppose a superior guest would root around in the pantry and spontaneously bake up a key-lime pie (what is in key-lime pie anyway?), but I am not that sort.

Well, there's Benny, of course. But the last thing he wants while running around with his cousins getting into trouble is Mom. So I find myself reading kid's books from my neice's room or the region's sad little local newspaper. One family connection tried to get me to read his business book ("Overloaded" or "Overweirded" or something like that) but I'm still recovering from "Who Moved My Cheese?" and that was 10 years ago. So I chat with my relatives and eat another cookie and I'm happy.

Last Monday took the free time thing to a whole new level. I not only had a free 20 minutes, I had a free DAY. A bunch of guys turned up at my brother's house at 9 a.m. to replace the windows and we couldn't be there. So at 9:01 a.m., we were cruising Ann Arbor in our rented Chevy Aveo and life couldn't get any better.

It was still minus-10 or something and I was shivering in my thin San Francisco coat, so we decided to start the excitement at a Bob Evans. Benny brought along his new Army toys (a Christmas gift from Uncle Andy) and created an elaborate military compound on his side of the table, complete with sandbags and itty-bitty fuel drums.

"After this, let's go see a movie," I said.

That presented a problem. Benny doesn't really like kids' movies. "Shrek" freaks him out and a "Cinderella" video sends him hiding behind a chair. He enjoyed "Bolt" at a recent birthday outing for his best friend, I hear, but that was a big exception. Ron brought home "Toy Story II" last month and he refused to watch it. The only Disney movie he likes is "Bambi."

I put this down to the frenetic pace of most current kids' movies. Yeah, I know that "Cinderella" doesn't exactly start with a bang -- she's just getting out of bed, for Christ's sake -- but then there's all those mice running from the cat. Almost all kids' movies these days start with some frantic chase scene with constant camera cuts and pounding music. It just sets Benny off. Maybe he watches too much PBS. Maybe he needs some antidepressants. All I know is, don't get this kid near "Ratatouille."

So we decided to take Benny to the 11:35 showing of "Marley & Me," which is about a newspaper couple who adopt a very badly behaved dog. Benny happily accompanied us to Showcase Cinema, up to the ticket counter and into the theater himself. But when the first preview appeared on the screen, he realized he'd been had and would be forced to *gasp* see a movie.

"I want to go home," Benny said loudly.

"Look, it's a kids' movie preview. Maybe you'd like to see it," I said gamely. The screen showed an animated girl who lived in a weird house, then walked into another weird house and there was screaming.

"I want to go home!" Benny shouted.

"Look, if you stay through part of the movie, I'll buy you popcorn," I said desperately.

Benny tried to leave twice during the previews, but then blessedly "Marley & Me" began and it started with some nice scenery and a voiceover. We all calmed down.

"Is this the movie, Mommy?" Benny whispered.

"Yes," I said.

Silence. But I knew he was thinking, "I want to go home."

Benny liked the movie. The dog was nearly every scene and when he wasn't, Benny munched on his popcorn. There was a scary part when Owen Wilson finds a neighbor who was stabbed and I knew that was coming (I'd read the book), so I put Benny on my lap and asked him about other stuff and he was OK. The scene with Marley half-hanging out the car and walking on his front paws while Owen Wilson held on to his rear legs and Jennifer Aniston inched the car along the road cracked Benny up.

It was a nice, long movie as well (too long, really). So the window guys were finished at Andy's house by the closing credits.

I didn't think much about our outing until I visited my old Ann Arbor mother's group. They had a playdate the next day and it was fun and chaotic as usual. I mentioned the movie to the other mothers.

"You took Benny to that movie?" one mother asked in shocked tones. "I read that was unsuitablefor preschoolers .. you know ... the ending."

"The ending?" I asked. Then I remembered. The dog died. Actually the dog died for a good 30 minutes, since the movie's producers felt moved to milk every possible tear out of it, with flashbacks and pictures and little children's moving speeches beside a freshly dug grave. It didn't seem to bother Benny; we had talked before about how animals don't live as long as people.

I don't know, maybe we're courting childhood trauma here and recurring dead-dog nightmares, but at least he wasn't hiding under the theater seat. For really scary themes, you can't beat a kitchen scene with a French-cooking rat.

Night Night

2008-12-09T12:30:00.003-05:00

I just got my hands on a new digital camera. Couldn't wait for Benny to wake up to try it out. Can you believe that this picture was taken in a dimly lit room?