Seeing Love and Prima Donna

Before she had four kids, my neighbor trained to be an opera singer. Lisa is a soprano. Her kids range in age from late elementary school to one in diapers. Her husband regularly travels internationally for work. Lisa's mom lives nearby and helps her out a lot.

Unlike her first three children, the youngest babe doesn't sleep. Lisa is a loving and attentive mother, but not nearly a helicopter mom. Mothers of four can't be helicopters -- they don't have that many eyes in their heads. Pictures posted on Facebook of her youngest kid the past three weeks showed Lily digging up carrots, spilling flour and coffee in the kitchen. I could see Lisa was about to lose it.

Then we heard the singing. Last week, my family eating dinner on our back porch when we heard Lisa sing. She would sing until 9:00 or 10:00. Each night, she'd sing again. At one point, a tenor joined her with a piano and some strings. It was lovely to have a little concert in our neighborhood each night. This "racket" was the opposite of a teenage rock band practicing in a garage. This was a professionally training musician honing her craft.

"Lisa must be losing it," Jack said.

"I hope she is okay," I said, wondering if she was singing because she was going berserk. "Maybe she is getting ready for a concert or a recording."

My aunt came to town, so I didn't have time to stop by and ask Lisa herself. This Sunday I was working in the yard, and Lisa's oldest daughter stopped by to invite us to a concert at 7:30. "Please come!" her daughter said. I told Betsy that we would be happy to be there.

"I bet Lisa planned this to get Paul to clean up the yard!" Jack said. "He is out there arranging the patio and a setting up outdoor lights."

We arrive at Lisa's a few minutes early. A tray with flutes of pink champagne greeted us at the door. Her piano was moved to a different corner of her living room. The furniture was in the backyard, and there were two dozen wooden folding chairs in the living room. If the chairs were white, I'd feel like I was going to a wedding. Lisa was wearing a green formal dress and bare feet. Lisa's mom had catered the event with a dozen cheeses and desserts. Several large flower arrangements were in each room.

Lisa's second youngest daughter came up and gave her a hug. The dress had a little schmutz on it afterward, but that was okay. While Lisa knows how to throw an elegant party, she is one of the least fussy people I know. She isn't the type to not let her kids not touch her.

"Can you believe this?" Lisa said with a look of sincere wonder. "I told Paul I wanted to sing again and I thought we could have something small with a few neighbors and friends."

"What do you mean?" Jack asked.

"Paul planned the whole thing," Lisa said. "He ordered the chairs, the flowers, the food. He brought in people this week to work on the garden." So much for this being Lisa's plan to get her husband to clean up the yard.

The concert was lovely. I had heard Lisa sing lullabies to her kids now and then. Any mom can sing a lullaby, but not every woman can belt out O Mio Babbino Caro. Her friends and neighbors--half of whom had never heard her sing before--got to see the full range of her vocal capabilities. It was impressive. Lisa got a standing ovation from this appreciative audience. Unlike a real opera singer, Lisa thanked each of us for coming to her concert.

"You were beautiful!" I said. "Betsy was beaming when you sang. She was so proud of you." Lisa went off to be the prima donna, the first lady of the evening.

At the end of the night, Jack and I said good night to Paul. For most of the night, he was in the background, making sure things were running smoothly for his wife's day on the stage.

"It must be nice for Lisa to celebrate who she was before she had kids," I said.

"That was the point of this evening," Paul said. "That was the point." The woman he married loved to sing, and she didn't to sing very often. Here he was, giving her a forum to be the prima donna, the first lady, to be seen by her family, friends, and neighbors as something more than a mother and wife. In the concert, the tenor sang a song about the ideal, how in our lives we capture for a bit and then it is gone. Lisa had her week and evening of ideal, and now she is back to taking care of her unsleeping daughter. Still, I am sure all of Lisa's life--and her family's and neighbors' lives--will be richer after the concert.

Paul's gift to his wife was the most beautiful I have ever seen. I saw love.

Background and Foreground

The Boy is off to a Summer Ski Camp on Mt. Hood this week. He is not a racer, but a Freestyle skier which means he likes to jump off and on to things. We watched an old, old video on the website of the camp and kids come from all over the country and the world to ski on this Oregon glacier in the summer. We figured this was better than the Boy sitting on his bed for the entire summer looking at his phone. Neither Jack or I can ski off or on to things, so someone else needs to teach him. Better for the Boy to get some professional coaching on how to switch (ski backwards), do a 540 (spin around one and a half times off a jump), or do rails (ski on a rail). Why do they ski on rails? I have no clue. Maybe it's a skateboarding thing that became a ski thing.

I told Evan, my physical therapist, the Boy is going to Mt. Hood this week.

"I wanted to do that when I was a kid," he said.

"Does that make me the coolest mom in the world?"

"Yes," he said laughing. "That makes you the coolest mom in the world."

With other camps, Jack and I could guess what kinds of kids would be there, mainly because most of them were local. We know that Orkila kids tend to be outdoorsy. Kids at the Seattle Public Schools Summer Music camp tend to be musical, and he knows at least a handful of kids from band there. This camp, we have no idea who will be there. The Boy, coming from Seattle to Oregon, will almost be a local compared to kids from Vermont, Colorado or Belgium. Or, most of the kids at the camp could be from suburban Portland and he might be the only one who doesn't know someone already. Some of the parents might make large sacrifices to send their kids there. Some kids might be idle rich kids whose parents are looking for offload their offspring while they are in Provence for the summer.

Here are samples of two conversations Jack and I had with the Boy.

Mom: I bet there will be lots of nice kids there who are like-minded and love to ski. Kids would want to want to go there, versus parents forcing their kids to go there.

Dad: There might be some arrogant douchebags at this camp who are way better than you and have skied all over the world. Don't let them get you down.

I started thinking more about his camp. I have been stalking my son's Instagram account and the camp's Facebook page for pictures, but so far I've got nothing. I saw pictures from last week at camp, and the racers look like they have good form. I don't know from my own experience, but they look like skiers I've seen on television. I wonder how many of these kids might make the Olympics. While the odds are low that any one person makes the Olympics, the odds are in your favor if you ski in the offseason. 

I am feeling old this week. Jack and I did a five-mile hike with 1,100 feet of elevation at Rattlesnake Ledge. This is the first major uphill hike I've done since my surgery last year. My knee was fine, but it took a lot of concentration to make it to the top of the hill on the rocky trail. Yesterday, I met a woman for coffee who is considering applying to the Apprenti program that I am in. She is about my age, and we talked about our experience. She has worked in several fields like someone my age likely has.

To compare, I am talking to friends about our backgrounds and complaining about my knee, and my son is meeting people whose story isn't yet told. Will one of these kids he meets this week be standing on a podium in Beijing in 2022? Someplace TBD in 2026? These kids lives are all yet to be determined, all future and foreground. At my age, you wonder where people have been. At his age, you wonder where they'll go.

"Lucky"

I think the Russian hackers have stopped reading my blog as my stats have dropped down to the level where they should be, reflecting the four people who know about my blog.

Anyhow, here is my complaint du jour...

As I am returning to work in a field similar to the one I had left before I had kids, I am thinking to myself, "Good God, why didn't I do this sooner?" I am learning about databases and how to manage them, which to a regular person might sound boring, but to me it is like an engineering puzzle except instead of with electrical currents and metal, it is with columns and rows and tables. Instead of getting air conditioning or a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B, my results are data. Yay!

The main test for me is when I am in my training classes, I ask myself, "Would I rather be here or at home quilting, doing laundry or helping the kids with their homework?" Haha! This is a trick question. When I am in training, I am not thinking about home at all!

It sounds like I am happy with my new situation, so what is my grand complaint? When I express my relief at going back to work, Jack says, "You were lucky you got to stay at home with the kids."

Why do I want to kick him in the nuts when he says this?

Since Hillary has lost the election, I have a new litmus test for potentially sexist comments. Take any comment, and ask yourself, "Would someone say this to a dude?" If the answer is no and it is a not a gender specific question like a doctor asking when your last menstrual cycle was, then it is probably sexist.

Would you ever tell a guy he was lucky he got to stay at home with kids instead of working? I doubt it. Would you tell Hillary Clinton she was unlucky because she worked when she had a kid? Elizabeth Warren? RBG? I'll throw in a Republican to be fair here: Lisa Murkowski, the Senator from Alaska? Maybe these women did a quick stint as stay-at-home moms, but they got right back on the work horse as soon as possible.

Why didn't I go back sooner? There are so many reasons. Jack works lots of nights and weekends, which meant for the past seventeen years I have been in charge of childcare, much more so than the typical stay-at-home mom whose husband might take the kids camping or mountain biking on the weekends. He doesn't do much yard work or other stuff around the house because he is working.

Let me give you a financial comparison. One of Jack's colleagues is married to a surgeon. They have two nannies and an au pere to take care of their kids. They spend nearly a $100K a year on childcare when three small kids, but they can afford it. Basically, I wars providing Jack $100K of free childcare--including evenings, overnight and weekend coverage--while he worked.

"But I am working," he replies. "I am not laying on the beach drining mimosas." Jack would never lie on the beach and drink mimosas on vacation. He'd be doing some crazy adrenaline junkie activity like white water rafting or mountain biking or the Grouse Grind instead of sitting on a beach, which further proves the point I am going to make: Jack likes to work. He loves to work. This is fine. I am glad I married a smart, ambitious man. But somewhere along the line, he forget he married a smart ambitious woman.

Let's go back to my "Is it sexist?" question and give it a tweak. Let's pretend back in 2000 when Claire-Adele was born, I was making more money than Jack. He had just finished his fellowship and started as an attending physician. At the time, I was earning about 2/3 of what he was making. But let's pretend I was making more. Would he have quit his job as a new physician to stay home and take care of the baby? Would he consider himself "lucky" after his years of training and student debt that he didn't have to work? No. Would he have stayed at home himself? When I asked him the question, he was confused: What you do mean stay at home? his expression read. He didn't get it.

SO WHY SHOULD HE THINK I WAS LUCKY?  ARGH.

It wasn't like I was working in a coal mine or as a servant in a large house. I wasn't picking fruit or doing tedious labor. I have two degrees and was fortunate to work in my field. Sure, any job has its boring moments, its hard moments, its working with irrational people moments. That is part of life. In my volunteer work, I met some of the coolest, nicest people. I've also met some of the biggest loons I've ever encountered in my time on the planet.

So where is this rant heading? I am not sure, but I'll guess. First, I believe the Mommy Wars are really between a husband and a wife, not women against women. I make no judgement on what other women choose to do. I will, however, defend their right to work if they want to. Second, I believe the new theory that estrogen causes women to live in a haze of nurturing hormones. As Sandra Tsing Loh writes in "The Bitch is Back" in the Atlantic, she thinks the "Change" is fertility, not menopause. Maybe I am coming out of my haze, and it ain't pretty.

Some of my anger is directed at our culture and society that forces mothers to choose working or motherhood. Why can't we have both? Why does my husband's workplace have such a demanding schedule that his colleagues need such extravagent childcare arrangements? Coming out of a long stint as a stay-at-home mom, it has been very hard to re-enter the workforce. In my training program, I am learning along side a group of veterans. They are invited to the program because after they served their country, it is hard for them to find good jobs. Their training isn't transferable to a corporate workspace. I feel like I served my country, along with millions of other women who raise their kids. Is there a GI bill for us? Are re-entry programs for women looking to re-enter the work force after having kids? I was incredibly lucky to find one, but there aren't many programs like the one I am in. What about the other millions of moms? Will they be so lucky?

Finally, I beg all fathers on this Father's Day to look at their spouses and wonder how much they achieve as dads comes from moms.

Commuting

My bias against driving started in high school. Mr. Elwood, my European history teacher, said the two biggest wastes of time are driving places and sleeping. I disagree about sleeping, but I am 100% with him on driving. I started my training program a few weeks ago, and I am now commuting to south Bellevue five days a week.

I hate commuting.

It sucks.

I was reading The Enlightened Cyclist by Bike Snob NYC where Eben Weiss discusses the perils and inherent dangers of daily commutes. We are taking our lives into our hands when we travel from one place to another. I feel this when I am trying to merge on to 520 at 8:34 a.m. A friend of mine does a similar commute to Redmond. When I told her where and when I go, she immediately felt sorry for me. "I carpool with my husband so we pass all of the crazy traffic waiting to get on the highway."

Of the ten people in my training class, I live the second closest to the training location, and I bitch the most about the drive. On my drive home, I pass a sign that tells how many minutes it is to Everett. I've already been in the car for forty minutes, and I am one exit away from home when I see the sign. I think about the two people in my class who live near Everett who have 77 more minutes to go. I can't imagine.

Until I started commuting, I had also been incredibly naive about the traffic in Seattle. I know it was bad, but I didn't realize how much time it can shave off a person's life. I spend almost two hours each day driving less than nine miles. During non-rush hour times, the same drive takes about twenty-five minutes. And this is a reverse commute. The people coming in from the suburbs into the city are parked on the highway. The traffic I am in moves slowly, but at least it moves. Today, I was crawling, which means my car was moving forward, but my speedometer was reading 0 miles per hour.

I never did like driving, even schlepping my kids around. I had a short radius of how far I would drive my kids for an activity. One summer when Claire Adele was five and the Boy two, I signed Claire Adele up for a half day class at the Pacific Science Center in the summer. I would drive her down there around 9:00, and I would pick her up around noon. In rush hour, it took about a half and hour to get there and about twenty minutes to get home. Round trip, that was about 110 minutes with a toddler in the car. Instead of driving home, I'd find a park nearby for the Boy and I to hang out at, and then I'd get Claire Adele.

I hated it. If I only had one kid, it might have been fine, but with two, it was a disaster. Claire Adele has a friend who is an only child. This mother would sign her daughter up for classes on Mountlake Terrace (10.9 miles) after school and on Mercer Island (12.7 miles) in the summer. This woman wanted her daughter to have a friend in the class. Even though I was a stay-at-home mom, I couldn't afford the drive time to get Claire Adele back and forth. This mother agreed to take on the heavy lifting of the carpooling. Her daughter was going anyway--what was the big deal of bringing along another kiddo?

Which brings me to my theory about how far families are willing to drive their kids around based on the number of children in the family:

I am looking forward to starting my real job, which I can commute to by public transportation. There will be a three-quarters mile walk from the bus tunnel to the office, but I don't think I'll mind the exercise.

The team that I am going to join allows people to work from home one or two days a week to avoid the commute. I can see why people would want to re-claim those extra hours.

As I was driving, I thought about the people in my class who I have gotten to know over the past two weeks. A few weeks ago, I took a webinar where I was in the classroom, but the other students were streaming the class over the internet. I missed interacting with the other students. Here, I talk to people over break and during lunch. We work on group projects, all of which would have been missed had this class been taught online.

Social scientists and economists evaluate decision-making of citizens consumers. Why do I do this drive even though I loathe it so? Even though I hate it, I do it anyway. One might argue that the more I hate the drive means the more I like the class, as I am willing to put up with something I hate to do something I enjoy or get benefit from.

I am so glad the training ends in July. I think I can survive it until then.

Les Ballets De Trockodero

This weekend, Jack bought tickets for us to see Les Ballets de Trockadero de Monte Carlo at Meany Hall at UW. The company is an all-male comic ballet. All of the dancers are professionally trained, and they each have a fake male and female persona. All of the men learn to dance en pointe, which is unheard of in professional dance. While women dancers dance en pointe, they have been dancing in toe shoes since they were ten or twelve. These men had to learn after their dance training. One of the dancers from the Pacific Northwest Ballet used to dance there. I want to ask him how he liked Trockadero and was it hard to learn at a relatively late stage in his career.

The first act as a spoof of Swan Lake. Men with hairy chests and drag queen make-up wear white tutus and dance en pointe. These guys camp around the stage to Tchaikovsky. As the evening progressed, the program became more serious. There were still jokes and gags, like an extra dancer on the stage sat eating an apple while watching the pas de Deux.

After the Swan Lake satire, they tackled some other major ballets with lead prima ballerina roles. One guy was Esmerelda a version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the other was Kitri from Don Quixote. At times, I forgot these were men on stage. They were amazing.

The whole ballet was provacative and at times I was confused. First, I didn't have a problem with men taking on women's roles. I am supportive of the rights of the transgendered. What it begged in my mind was the whole question of gender equity. Why did I think it was so great than a man could do what a woman could do? For centuries, men have been upstaging women left and right. Why are they taking one of hte few things in the world where women are on equal footing, or even are better? Why, men, why? Maybe I wouldn't be so bitter if we had a woman president, more women in congress, more women in leadership positions everywhere.

I asked Jack about it. I want to be happy for these guys. I really do.

"Maybe the whole idea is to turn all gender norms on their heads," he said. "Maybe men can be prima ballerinas and women can do men things."

Maybe, but then why wasn't I watching a women's rugby team, or an all female contruction crew?

I can't be mad at these guys, though, and throw rocks at them and call them anti-feminist. These are men in tutus and blue eyeshadow, for pete's sake. What could make a man more vulnerable than dressing up as not only a chick, but a learning all of the chick dance moves? Any guy can put on a skirt. It takes some real cojones to spend years learning how to dance en pointe when no other men do. But why don't men learn pointe? What's the reason not to? Because women do? That is kind of bullshit, too. Is pointe women's work? Maybe then women's work will become less genderized and just become work. Where does it say that men can't raise kids, do laundry and cook a fabluous meal? No place.

I am still confused, but I welcome it. There are times when we need more discussion and debate, more conversations that are filled with gray than absolutes. How often do we get that, and how refreshing to find it from men in tights with false eyelashes.

Seattle's Future Displaced People

As those of you who live in the Seattle region know, the housing market here is out of control. My friend Carla moved out of town four years ago and moved back to Seattle this winter. She and her husband sold their house when they left and bought a new one this spring. When they moved back, there were seven or eight houses on the market in Northeast Seattle. Total. To compare, when we moved to Seattle in August 2004, we saw at least thirty houses in one weekend. There were more available, but we ruled them out because they were either too smaller or too expensive. Carla and her husband bid on a handful of houses, and each house had twenty competing bids. Finally, they got a house. They paid significantly more for a home that was smaller than their previous place and in worse condition. But they got a house.

And that's is not even the rental market, which is just as bad.

My husband and I own a house that has significantly increased in value since we bought it in 2004. We should be happy, right?

If I needed to move to another part of the country where real estate prices are much less than Seattle, I'd be in excellent shape. Other than that, it's not all that great. First, my house is where I live. If I want to tap into that money, I would need to sell the house and then I would need to find a new place to live, which, if Carla's story is an indicator, would be a nightmare. I could sell my house, not find anyplace else to live nearby and then pay more for a house in a worse location in worse condition.

Why is the market out of control? Two hundred and fifty people a day are moving into King County. Amazon is hiring a bazillion people and they need a place to live. Having lots of good, high-paying jobs is a good problem to have, isn't it? It is better than the alternative of having a depressed economy, no jobs and people leaving, right?

There are upsides and downsides to everything. In one sense, I am a winner in this scenario. We bought a house years ago when the housing market was robust but not out of control. But this does have a negative impact on me. The volatile housing market means my kids might not be able to afford to live here, and it will be expensive to move my parents or in-laws out here (from Ohio and Atlanta, respectively) if they can't live independently.

Right now, (knock on wood) three out of four of my parents/in-laws are healthy. My dad is an able-bodied man of sound mind in his seventies. He has lots of mileage left, but you never know if he might have a heart attack or stroke and need to move to an assisted living situation. My in-laws are also healthy; the odds of all three of them dying quietly in their sleep without needing some kind of elder care is pretty small. They will likely need to live near family, and right now Jack and I are the prime candidates out of all of our siblings who could take in our folks. Years ago, we assumed Jacks' sister was going to take Jack's parents and Jack and I would take mine. Last month, we visited Jack's sister and her family. Jack's sister has a son with a disability. When I returned from the trip, I realized Jack's sister doesn't have the bandwidth to care for elderly parents and a child with special needs. Which leaves us, and yet Seattle is too expensive for us to afford a second place for them to live.

It is great that Jack and I can live here, but it is sad to think our kids and parents might not be able to live here with us. My parents and kids are displaced before they are even thinking of moving here.

Friday!!!

When I got off the 74 bus downtown this morning, and I was walking up the massive hill to where my training was held, I thought, "Thank God it's Friday!" I don't think I've had that thought since I quit my job before Claire-Adele was born.

I finished my first full-time week of training this afternoon. This was the first week of nine-to-five* that I have completed in ages. When I ran for School Board, that was a 24/7 gig, so there was no celebration of the end of the week because it was one continuous flow of work. There were breaks here and there, but weekends were just as busy as weekdays, sometimes more so.

My friend Mary sent me a meme with a smiling woman that read "That moment when you realize that being a stay-at-home-mom means you never actually leave work." When I was** a stay-at-home-mom, I was always a stay-at-home-mom. Weekends meant the kids were home. While it might have been a break for them, it wasn't a break for me. To be honest, sometimes I looked forward to Mondays.

This week was a hard week, but a good week. My brain was crammed full of information. I thought it would be overload, but the opposite happened. It was like I was taking an SQL and Business Intelligence immersion class. The more I was there, the more everything made sense. I was feeling better when I left on this afternoon, but my brain was ready for a break.

Jack seems to be okay with me working so far. I thought this would be a bigger adjustment for him than me. He is used to me picking up all of the slack around the house and with the kids. This week, Jack shuttled kids to and from various lessons and appointments. This evening, Claire-Adele had to be someplace by 6:00 p.m. I told Jack I'd be home in time to take her.

"No," he said. "I need to take her. I told people at work I have to drive Claire-Adele and I need to leave by 5:00." Jack now has a legitimate reason to say no to extra work, and he is using it.

I even had good luck with buses today. The 74 buses run twenty minutes apart in the afternoon. I thought I was going to miss the 4:11, but it was running a few minutes late. I saw it coming and ran to catch it. Evan, my physical therapist, would have been proud of me! When I got off the bus in my neighborhood, I was smiling. I survived.

Maybe even thrived.


* Some days this week were 8:00 to 4:00. Same difference.
** That was the first time I used "was" in a sentence with "stay-at-home-mom."

Moms: Helping Humans Navigate the World Since the Beginning of Time

Earlier this week, I was at training for my new job. At lunch, I headed to the mall and stopped at a Panera where I waited in line for ten minutes behind a flock of moms with their toddler children. This was ironic since I was returning to the workforce after years of being a mom and then I was surrounded by stay-at-home moms getting kids' meals.

I watched one of the moms in particular. She had short dark hair like me, was wearing jeans, sneakers and a shirt that was not "Dry Clean Only." Her daughter was about three years old. She seemed like a regular mom, like the hundreds I've known since Claire Adele was born.

"You can pick out a cookie, but not the one with the candy," said the mom to her daughter. "What do you want to eat for lunch? Here are your choices....  You want to say hi to Hannah? You can go say hi but come right back." The girl tripped and fell, and the mom waited a second to see if her daughter was okay before jumping in for the rescue. The mom gave the girl her hand and helped her up.

The woman was constantly teaching her kid in the ten minutes I saw her even though it looked like a low-key interaction. The mother didn't seem to be pedantic, fussy or high-strung. She wasn't teaching her kid to read, to math, draw or play the piano. Instead, she was teaching her daughter to navigate the world.

It took me getting a day job and watching someone else do exactly what I did for so many years to realize how much work is involved in being a mother, how it is a constant flow of nurturing. At times, the flow of motherhood is a gentle trickle and other times it is catching the violent end of a firehose. I remember the crises and the tantrums where I was drinking from the firehose, but I forgot how much goes into the other 98.9% of managing the tiny everyday drops the come so slowly that we don't even notice what we are instilling in our kids.

I think about the Boy and Claire-Adele. When I was running for School Board two years ago, we had something new in our family: money for dinner. I would give each kid twenty bucks and tell them to walk to Kidd Valley and get something to eat. What did they have to learn in the course of their lives to be able to do this? They needed to know how to

-- Determine when they are hungry without throwing a tantrum,*
-- How to safely cross the street,

-- Read a menu to decide what they want to eat,

-- Stand in line at a fast food place,
-- Communicate so they can place their order,
-- Calculate how much the food will cost, pay and get change,
-- Say please and thank you to the people serving their food,
-- Wait patiently while their food was being prepared, and
-- Have decent table manners so as not to offend everyone in the establishment.

I never sat down with my kids and had a "How to Navigate a Restaurant" lesson, but along the way, they figured it out over through repetition and my guidance. That is pretty amazing, not only for the kids but for the moms of the world.

Now that my kids are older, they need me less in their grille. They are out and about on their own, as they should be. I have other friends with disabled kids who are as old as mine, but their kids still need help navigating the world. My kids still need help, just less than they did when they were toddlers.

Moms need better PR. Here is slogan with enough gravitas to be worthy of a bank ("We make money the old fashioned way. We earn it.") or the armed services ("The few. The Proud. The Marines.") Here it is: "Moms: Helping Humans Navigate the World Since the Beginning of Time." Imagine James Earl Jones or Catherine Zeta-Jones saying it. Moms would become the most respected job in the world,

I wish every mother a Happy Mother's Day!

* We are still working with the Boy on this one.

Beer v. Clean Water

I was at Alpental yesterday afternoon. The Boy was skiing—he wanted to hit the last day of the season. It was a warm and sunny afternoon. All of the other area ski resorts were closed, and Alpental was packed.

“I’ve never seen lift lines here so long,” he said as he examined the crowds.

I was hoping for a quiet afternoon to look out at the mountain and get some work done. I brought along my laptop and planned to catch up on some writing and balancing the checkbook. I was met with a party on the patio, lots of people eating and drinking, as the B-52’s Rock Lobster played on the outdoor speakers. Since I wasn't skiing myself, I didn't feel like I earned a beer or would be fully welcomed in this impromptu Margaritaville celebrating the last day of the ski season. This environment inspired people watching, not heads-down work.

I noticed a large number of people drinking beer. I saw a bearded man with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other dancing with a toddler. The toddler was drinking something, and I hoped it wasn’t beer. The toddler was stumbling around, but most toddlers do. Maybe two hundred years ago, people would let toddlers drink beer instead of risking water-borne diseases like dysentery and cholera.

Hundreds of years ago, most water wasn’t safe to drink. Instead, people would drink beer, wine, and spirits which were at times safer than drinking water. This got me wondering: Did clean water make our world smarter because people weren’t drunk all of the time? Did society’s collective cognitive abilities increase with clean water? Would Alexander Graham Bell have invented the telephone if he were hammered all of the time? Would Thomas Edison have invented the light bulb if he drank every night? Maybe they were drunks, but I doubt it. Ernest Hemingway drank excessively, and that didn’t seem to limit his talents. Writers seem to be the categorical exception to the drunks aren't geniuses rule. 

Claire Adele is a strong student of U.S History, and we often hear obscure facts about our country’s past during dinner. I’ll ask her to correlate the timing of invention of clean water with the timing of major industrial and economic developments. Having studied history myself, I know there are other causes of the Industrial Revolution(s). Still, this idea of the collective sobering up creating technological advances could make an interesting thesis for a paper.

Time Traveling, or Brigadoon?

I started my Apprenti training for my new job two weeks ago. The schedule has been kind of light, as I am in a class by myself. Ha! Seriously, my position is a one-off, where I am not part of a larger cohort of a dozen people all taking the same classes. I am fine being a solo student--it just means my class schedule has gaps in it here and there.

Last week and this week, I dipped my toes into Business Intelligence and using relational databases. I had poked around relational databases on my own while I was looking for a job, but I lacked the context of how and why a company would use the information aside from tracking sales and marketing data, and cataloging Brittany Spears albums. I would do exercises on my own and sometimes the system would crash. Now when I am in a class, and the system crashes, I either learn

• what I did wrong, or 
• learn that I did nothing wrong and the system has a glitch. 

The classes keep me from getting stuck in an infinite glitch limbo, which is good.

Last night, the Apprenti program had a reception for the new apprentices. I was talking to one of the program sponsors about my career prior to this program. Before I was a stay-at-home-mom, I worked in consulting where we would use proprietary software to create our flat file databases and do the analysis. The strategic marketing consulting firm I worked for had two programmers who designed the number crunching tools, which then the analysts like me would use to program to crunch the numbers.

"That's not transferable," said one of the leaders of the organization. I had never thought of it that way. When I was working in a small and nimble firm, we didn't have time to wait for Tableau to be invented. If we wanted to do that kind of analysis, the firm created its own program to do exactly what it needed -- no more or no less.

Now, I feel like I entered a time machine, flying from 2000 when my daughter was born to 2017. I look at the tools now and think of useful they would have been back when I started working in 1991. Even looking at my volunteer work and the number crunching I did -- it would have been useful to have some of these business information tools available then.

The inverse side of time travel is the coma. I try not to think of myself as if I were in a Brigadoon like sleep for seventeen years and am waking up in a brand new world.

Dear Rain

Dear Rain,

I thought I was clear the other day when I broke up with you, but apparently, you didn't get the message. When I said we could hang out once a week or so, I didn't mean right away. I meant give me a few weeks to compose myself, and then we could see where we stand.

You must be familiar with the expression "Into each life a little rain must fall." You missed the part about "a little," not a lot. I'll admit you did a lovely job with our neighbor's rhododendrons. They are spectacular.

(Sorry the focus is a little off. It was raining when I took the picture this morning.)

You did a great job with the rhodies, but look at what you did to the other flowering trees. You worked so hard to give them gorgeous blooms, and then you knock them all off like a preschooler who builds a cool Lego set and then smashes it five minutes later.

Don't think there is sunshine in the background. A streetlight is reflecting off the wet pavement, creating the illusion that there is sunshine there. If you need further proof, you can the headlights of the car in the background also reflecting off the wet pavement. Cars that drive in sunshine don't need headlights.

And when you leave, take the clouds with you. They need to go, too.

Sincerely,
Lauren

Dear Rain

Dear Rain,

I want to start seeing other weather. It isn't you. It's me. Thank you so much for the awesome cherry blossoms this spring. They were awesome, but it is time for us to go our own ways. I am feeling suffocated by your daily presence and could use a little space, like 'til November. Breaking the 122-inch record this year is something to be proud of, but do you need to be such an overachiever? We certainly don't need to go back to 2005 when you skipped winter entirely. That wasn't cool, either. There are times when being average is good. Think about that in the future.

We can still be friends, maybe see each other once a week or so. In the meantime, if you see the sun, let him know I am available.

All the best,
Lauren