comments, complaints, quandries, curses
The Heart
“Blood is made up of red cells, white cells, and platelets, all floating in the clear pale gold liquid called plasma that makes up a little more than half of our blood. Plasma is mostly water.”
She copied this out from a book on the heart that she checked out from the library on her last class trip there. The drawings are, from left to right, a platelet, a red blood cell, and a white blood cell.
Amelia finally went back to school after over a week out with pneumonia. Since she’s coughed herself awake a couple times a night, every night for more than a week, and the only person you really want when you’re sick is your mommy, my sleep has been pretty abysmal lately. Work’s also been stressful, so I have been struggling with stress insomnia too.
This morning I woke up with a VERY sore throat, a VERY stuffy nose, and a VERY tired ache in my bones. Im going to borrow Baxter’s adorable finger-cross, pictured below, and fervently hope that this is just a passing dip in health that I can recover from quickly. No rest for the wicked, and no time for ailing when I have this much to do. Not sick!
I don’t know what “Skyland” is, but this is what Amelia says it looks like.
I keep homemade pizza dough and sauce in the freezer along with shredded mozzarella, so if I think of it soon enough on a Friday afternoon, I can defrost them all in time to make pizza for dinner.
Tonight’s oeuvre was half smoked turkey (you know, for kids) and half Genoese salami, smoked turkey, and fresh basil. Dunno what I did this time but it was unusually delicious! Trying to talk myself out of eating the cold leftovers now that the kids are asleep and Tom’s out. Willpower!
For a household with two parents who work “outside” the home and also care a lot about eating healthy, the freezer is a secret weapon in the fight against take out, processed food, aggravation, and starvation. The only problem is that sometimes food goes in the freezer and (practically) never comes back out again. (Software joke: this is a bug, not a feature.)
I’ve found that when I label freezer bags descriptively — pictured here are “Delish Mexican style chicken soup” and “Really terrific lentil soup” — we are much more likely to defrost and eat the food (again; I usually freeze leftovers because my kids crave variety) in a timely manner. I try to use words that remind me of how the food tasted, like “rich and meaty pasta sauce” for the slow-braised short ribs sauce I made last month, or “mild and savory enchilada sauce” to remind myself it’s kids friendly (or not, in the case of that braise).
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will propose to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISP) as a public utility under the classification of Title II. This classification would give the FCC the actual power to punish ISP’s if they tried putting forward corporate-friendly “fast lanes.”
The proposal is expected to be introduced by the FCC on Thursday. Following the introduction, the FCC is expected to hold a vote at an open meeting on February 26 where a majority of the FCC’s five commissioners must approve the rules for them to take effect.
from Android Authority
My friend Shannon asked for suggestions for videos that were funny but spot-on about racism/race, and I suggested Chris Rock’s but about his (current, wealthy) neighborhood:
While surfing around Chris Rock videos on YouTube (the above has some weird cuts that I thought might alienate her students), I listened to him talk about how much he admires Bill Cosby and Eddie Murphy, and now I’m watching 48 Hours while I enjoy my very classy evening snack.
There’s a lot of nudity and violence in this movie, in case you forgot. I had. 🙂
Now that I can a kid who writes, she can write me “honey-dos” like these. The first says “sew a dress of roses” and the second says “buy a rug.”
She specifies verbally that the dress should have buttons that look like roses — she’s never even seen me sew, ftr, and I’ve never sewed anything more complex than a pillowcase — and the rug is for the living room which does not have a rug at this time.
Anyway, I guess we should get on these. Also, I’m going to use one for a grocery list in a second, so I thought I ought to blog them quickly. Related: I am an amazing mom.
I work for Automattic, and it’s great. We all work from home, I set my own hours, I have an incredible amount of autonomy, and I get to do work that I deeply believe in.
Once a year, everyone in the company is gathered into one place for a weeklong, mandatory meeting that we call the Grand Meetup. It’s our chance to talk face-to-face, cementing relationships that might previously only have been based on online interaction. We all give a short presentation (seriously short — this year it’s 4 minutes) and do team projects or take classes with people not usually on our team. We eat lunch and dinner with people we don’t know well already, and get to know them. There are cool activities and excursions like photowalks, karting, and hot air balloon rides. This year we’re in Park City, Utah.
I won’t lie; it’s pretty fabulous. The resort is beautiful, my coworkers are uniformly interesting and friendly, and there’s lots of fun to be had. I have great conversations. I hug people and joke and laugh.
But I have a family at home, including a little boy who’s two-and-a-half and cries for 30 minutes every single morning when he wakes up to find me absent. My husband can only work 6 hours a day in his office because I’m not around to get the kids to and from preschool. Tom’s an amazing dad, but doing the single father thing with a 5yo and a 2yo while you work full time in an office is crazy-hard. My family misses me, really a lot, like “crying through my evening video calls” a lot, and it’s terribly painful.
This morning is the 3rd-to-last day of the Grand Meetup. I fly home on Monday, which means Bax will only cry “I want Mommy” from 6-6:30am three more times. (Well, this month, at least — because in October I have another weeklong trip as well.) I know it’s a tradeoff, I know he’ll grow out of it, and I know that the kids are learning important things about women’s roles and growing closer to their father.
But right now I am overwhelmed by grief that my baby has been crying for Mommy, over and over for days, pleading with Tom and the universe to send me home to him, and Mommy isn’t there.
The Thing With The Stuff 