Switch to Biking?

My running is better when I'm barefoot. My knees hold out for longer. This weekend I felt pretty great. My knees were doing well, and I did some good sprints at the end.

Then later that night I noticed a strange pain in the top of my foot, but I forgot about it and went to bed.

Then the next morning I walked to work, and a few minutes into my walk my foot started hurting a lot. By the time I got to work it was really bad. I googled "pain on top of foot" and a bunch of barefoot running sites came up. Hmmm.

Now it's 2 days after my run and my foot hurts just as much. I was about to walk in to work again today but given the pain I have decided to take the bus, because I imagine something needs to heal. And now I feel pissed off that I'm not getting my daily hour's walk to and from work. I don't know what on earth I did. My foot didn't hurt at all while I was actually running. I've never had foot pain from running before in my life.

If it's not my knee, it's my foot...am I just not cut out for running? Every year I get a little more frustrated and contemplate giving it up for something else, and then things get a little better and I stick it out, and it's this cycle of better, worse, better, worse. The cycle has beeng going on since 2003, so that's kind of a long time to stick with something that keeps aggravating various injuries. But it is so heartbreaking to think about giving something up that I love so much!

Maybe this stubbornness of mine is just dumb, and I can come to love biking just as much as running. Maybe this weekend I'll get on my bike and spend an hour doing that and see how it feels.

My graduate student and my post doc are training together for a marathon this May. I actually feel physically jealous when they talk about it. Like, my stomach hurts because I feel so bummed out that I can't do what they're doing. This is silly. It is time to let go, maybe. It's just running. It's not that big of a deal. I bet biking can be fun too, right?

Crack Up

Nora asked me to explain what happens to food after it's been in our stomach. So we were talking about that tonight at dinner, and of course the conversation wandered to waste products. And, the kids like to say the word "poop".

Me: You know, there's a grown-up term for poop.

Nora: What?

Me: Feces.

Jake: I prefer the term excrement.

Nora: I prefer the term kant.

Jake: Kant, as in, Immanuel Kant?

Nora: Yeah.

(We all contemplate that in silence for a moment, then Milo speaks up)

Milo: I prefer the term turd!

Our Bodies

Today was a day of sleeping in until almost 9, for me. The kids were quiet this morning with Jake, which was really something. They were already heading outside by the time I got up. It was a day of sunshine, shorts, bubbles, watering cans, basketball dribbling, and trips to the park.

This evening I went for a run while Jake made cold soba noodles with a peanut and spinach sauce. Cold noodles is a very refreshing, satisfying dish to eat after a run in the hot air.

Going to the gym twice a week in the evenings and running on the weekends means that my exercise habits are highly visible to the kids. And kids emulate their parents. Milo is has incredible balance and coordination; he can even do a hand stand. Both kids like to pretend to lift weights.

I feel like I need to be very careful about how I approach health and fitness when it comes to modeling something for the kids. Here is what I do do: When they ask why I go to the gym, I say that I do it because it is fun, makes me feel good, and I like to be strong. Here is what I don't do: I don't ever talk about my weight. I don't ever skip meals (even if I'm not hungry at the time; I want the kids to see that we all eat normal meals, every single time). I don't ever talk about how I shouldn't eat this or that, or engage in any kind of "oh, I shouldn't, but I guess one bite" kind of talk that women sometimes engage in when they indulge in treats. I don't ever talk in negative ways about my own body, or about anybody else's body. I don't ever, ever use the word diet, or fat.

This afternoon our cat, Caspian, lunged himself into a grocery bag as I was unloading the groceries. He always does this and then looks hilarious as his hind quarters and twitching tail sticks out of the bag. Caspian is a huge cat. He's big and tall and fat all at the same time. Jake starting laughing at him, and said, "Caspian, you're such a fat cat sticking out of that bag!" Milo immediately picked that up, saying "Fat cat! Fat cat! Ha ha ha, Caspian's a fat cat!"

Stuff like that is why I feel like we need to be very, very careful about how we talk about stuff. A shocking degree of 6-year old girls are on diets. At age six. What I want to model is healthy attitudes towards our bodies. Love and acceptance and pride in what our bodies can do. I compliment my own strength in front of the kids. I do handstands to entertain Milo and talk about how we need to practice to get better at things. This weekend he's been practicing and practicing at dribbling. I talk about how, when I was his age, I couldn't dribble a ball, but then I practiced a lot and learned how to dribble.

I don't want the kids to get the idea that I exercise to try to be thin, or look a certain way. I don't want to promote looking any sort of way. I want to promote having fun with athletics and celebrating the great things our bodies can do. I know that this isn't going to do much to stem the onslaught of harmful, degrading images and messages the kids are going to get about appearance and weight as they get older. Especially Nora. I hate thinking about that, about how that will infiltrate their current natural childlike state of simple acceptance of who they are. But at least that shit is not going to come from home.

Ides of March

Twelve days ago, on March 3, Jake took this picture:

Today, I took this one. A few days ago we were cleaning out our garage and I noticed something. Every fall I put many of our pots from the back patio into the garage so that the snow and ice doesn't crack them over the winter. Some of these pots have perennials. Then in April I take them back out again. But this week I noticed some of the plants were already growing, so I took some of the pots out of the dark garage and set them outside. And today, on March 15, this one is already blooming:

And our lilac bush has buds on it. In March!

Yesterday as the kids played outside I cleared away a lot of dead leaves and plant remains from some of our flower beds. Once I did this, I saw the tiniest bit of green poking out from the ground, wowed at how our perennials are coming up already. But then this afternoon I walked around and looked again, and there was literally an inch and a half of plants showing through the ground. They grew an inch overnight. Is that even possible? I feel like I could crouch down and stare, and if I watched closely enough, I'd see them wiggling their way towards the sun, like in a sped-up film.

Today I walked to gym class (16 minutes, my ipod told me) in shorts and a t-shirt. I walked back home an hour later, and it was still warm even though it was dinner time. As I reached my street I congratulated our neighbor, who just got tenure this afternoon. He was sitting on his front porch in bare feet, with a well-deserved beer in his hand.

I really love living here. Living with seasons suits my personality very well. A perverse part of me knows that I relish spring and summer so deeply because of its contrast to winter. By the time October comes, I'm ready for the romantic feeling of autumn. I enjoy feeling the highs and the lows, and the changing seasons is just one manifestation of that.

Sunny Wednesday

Well, it felt more like a June day than a March day. What a happy feeling. We spent the whole day outside. Morning in the park. After lunch riding bikes and shooting baskets. After nap at the zoo. After dinner outside in the back yard. Milo made 35 baskets after dinner alone!

In the afternoon it was shorts weather. I was sitting outside on the stoop and I looked at my calf and thought, what's the weird indentation and bulge on my leg? And then I realized, oh. That's a muscle. It's a clearly defined muscle that just never stood out like that before. I love my gym class so much because strength training has such noticeable results in terms of muscle definition.

The kids fought all day. Milo has been really aggressive lately. Not only with Nora but with other kids at school. I'm tired from all of the fighting.

But I LOVE the fact that we currently have all of the windows open.

Bad & Good

Good: I managed to get the kids to school by 8:15. I had to get them there early because today was a field trip day to see a children's play.

Bad: The theater got the date wrong, so entire busloads of preschool children arrived when actually the play is tomorrow! So I need to somehow get the kids to school early tomorrow as well.

Good: A symposium I'm part of was accepted, so now I'll be traveling to DC in mid June!

Bad: That's only going to be about a week after I'm in Savannah, which is a month after a trip to Philadelphia, so poor Jake! I always feel guilty when I travel a lot in a short time span. Not about the kids, who are fine, but about Jake because it places such a burden on him.

Bad and Good: An instructor we'd hired for a 2-year position is leaving after his 1st year because he got a tenure-track position. This is good for him. Bad for us. I'm happy for him, but it might mean not offering the courses we'd slated for next year for an important service program. This is especially troubling for me because I was scheduled to collect data in his class next year, and this messes that up. It's also a huge problem for my doctoral student, who was supposed to do his dissertation on data collected from participants in that program next year. I'm not sure what my doctoral student is going to do now.

Bad: Mentor and I had a pretty big fight. Fight is a bit too dramatic given how low-key he is, but he was really mad at me. And I was even more angry than he was. After 7 years of smooth sailing in our professional relationship and personal friendship, this year has been unexpectedly rocky. I wonder if some of that has to do with changing the equilibrium now that I'm tenured and he is no longer "mentor" so much as just friend and colleague.

Good: We made up, so now we're buds again, to use his term. This matters a great deal to me, not that I'm copping to having father issues that I subconsciously try to resolve with every older male authority figure in my life, but whatever.

Good: My office is completed and looks great!

Good: It's totally spring and it is super awesome! It's supposed to be 77 degrees on Wednesday! I can't even say how happy this makes me. And the kids. And Jake. Tonight the kids played basketball outside before dinner while I cooked.

Finally

Finally, after 90 minutes of half asleep constant coughing and suffering, Nora has managed to fall asleep and her room is silent. Finally.

Croup is such a drag.

Spring Day

This has been the BEST WINTER EVER. And now spring seems to be springing early, and it is so great! Usually I spend March (and the first half of April) incredibly jealous of everybody else enjoying spring while we're still slogging through snow. But today we spent the entire afternoon outside in the 60-degree, sunny weather. Every kid in the neighborhood was outside. Parents emerged, pale and blinking in the sun. Impromptu gatherings coalesced on the sidewalk and at the park.

Jake and I trimmed down our overgrown shrub in front of the house as the kids went into an orgy of spring-related excitement, rediscovering all of their outdoor toys. Look, the balance bikes! Bubbles! Balls! The sand table! Aaaaaa! They ran around like crazy people, and then our neighbors came by with their two kids and everybody blew bubbles and played in the sand and rode around on their bikes and we all talked about how great it is today.

Then we came in and as I made a spring vegetable risotto (leeks, broccoli, spinach, chives and parsley, with a finish of goat cheese, so good), we both said, huh. We don't want to leave this block. We don't want to leave the park. It's so nice here.

Then later as we were eating dinner Jake started sadly talking about the house we lost, and right in the middle of his reverie Milo interrupted him, saying, "We're all going to be gone when we die." And Jake stopped talking, and looked at Milo, and said, "You're right. None of that house stuff matters." And Milo hugged Jake's arm and said, "I like you, Daddy", and we smiled as we finished our risotto.

Drama Drama Drama!

Here are some pictures of that house. The stonework and the original front door and entry are so charming. I love houses with a vestibule, a place to take off your coat and boots. Having a double entry keeps a house warmer in our winters. This house still has the original 1920s tile in the vestibule.

And yet! The thing that makes it a dream house is the combination of old and new. It has the charm of an old 1920s house combined with a modern addition and a kitchen to die for. Cherry cabinets, a viking range, double oven, undermount sink...

And closets! Closets galore. Double closets in the master suite, which also has its own private deck, and a bathtub in a turret. A turret! This addition is so well done because it is a high-quality addition (brick), but also well designed architecturally. There are so many additions in this neighborhood that are basically just giant blocks added on to the back of a house. This one was an interesting architectural addition to the house, and nothing like a giant block.

And the closets!

So the house has closets, an open family room / dining room / kitchen area, 2.5 baths, but also an original portion with an office off the living room, the original fireplace, and period details. I just love this view from the living room into the vestibule towards the front door, for instance:

And then the open family area in the addition has nice details like tray ceilings:

So Wednesday I stayed home with the kids, and Milo was sick, and I spent 10 hours cleaning and decluttering our house. Then I cooked dinner, then after the kids went to bed I had several friends from the neighborhood over for wine and dessert. Two of them live on the same street as our dream house, so we talked about that.

The funniest thing is that I told them about how I have a nemesis who I didn't want to get the house. (I'll call her RT). And one of my friends immediately said, "is it RT?" This friend has never heard me say RT's name, I've never talked about RT with her, and yet she pulled that name out of thin air! I was flabbergasted. My friend isn't even a professor, how does she even know RT? She said, "I just thought of her for some reason because she's basically your opposite."

Yesterday morning I got up, rushed the kids to school, did some last-minute cleaning prep, then went and saw the house. Confirmed our decision to make an offer. Came home, showed our house to people. Then called Jake, we decided to meet up over lunch with our realtor to write up the offer. Then, Milo's school called. His teacher thought he was still sick. So I went and got him. Change of plans, Jake would come home to write the offer. Jake came home. Jake, Milo and I looked at the house again. Then we went back to our house and wrote the offer while Milo napped.

Then Jake and I hyperventilated a bit because it was sooooooo expensive. Like, 20K more than the top of our psychological barrier for how much we'd ever want to pay for a house. Also, financing is not straightforward, at least it wouldn't be until we sold our own house. I put all the pictures of our own house up onto a web page, and we prepared to advertise it once our offer was accepted. It was a full priced offer with no contingency, so they'd be crazy not to accept it.

I went to the gym.

Came home. Our realtor called. Another couple has also written an offer, and they knew that another offer (ours) was already submitted when they wrote it. Even though realtors aren't allowed to reveal the details of a competing offer, they are allowed to reveal that there does exist a competing offer. So the 2nd couple knew about our offer (even though they didn't know how much it was for), and were probably writing a better one. A couple of hours went by, the kids went to bed. Our realtor called. A THIRD couple has written an offer, with the knowledge of the first two offers!

Midnight -- the sellers picked the 3rd offer, so we lost the house. They must have gone above the asking price.

Although we are disappointed, a part of me is relieved too. It would have been a lot of money, maybe too much. It felt risky, and Jake and I are pretty conservative with our personal finances. There is something to be said for maintaining our nice small mortgage with only 18 years left on it. Also, the bright side is, we really do like so many things about our current house. Right now I'm sitting in our sunny kitchen (home again, of course, with sick kids, 5th day in a row) and appreciating the fact that our house gets so much sunlight.

So it has been a very dramatic week! I'll be glad when the kids are done being sick, when Jake and I start to feel better, when we can relax a little after all of this business and excitement. I'm looking forward to spring and replacing part of our fence and planting tomatoes (this time with chicken wire) and gardening and enjoying our park. It's all good.

Awkward

Two years and 1 week ago, I sent an email in response to Super Senior Professor's offer to go for coffee. I gave some dates and times, and he responded and we went for coffee. Two years ago.

Today, I received a response to that 2 year old email. He suggested we meet for coffee on the 24th at about 10 a.m. (The 24th is a Sunday, which would be an odd time to meet for coffee).

Did he send that 2 years ago and it just got to me now? Or was he going through his old emails and didn't look at the date and somehow thought I sent him this email just a week ago?

Or is this his way of initiating coffee again, two years later, in a really weird manner?

This super senior professor is at an age where it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that he might be a little confused. (He's about 15 years past the typical retirement age).

Very Very Very Fine House

In 2 days I'm going to look at a house at 9:15 a.m. and that day we're going to make an offer on it. (We've already decided to make an offer. This has always been Jake's dream house, for years.)

However! My nemesis is also trying to buy the house! What, you don't have a nemesis? Why not? She's the Newman to my Seinfeld. Has been for the past 7 years. And now she is trying to swoop in and buy our house.

Meanwhile! I'm looking at the house at 9:15 and then other people are looking at our house at 10:30. We haven't even listed it yet or anything. We haven't even made a webpage yet or even advertised on the listserve or on FB or anything. But what happened is that recently two different people wrote to our neighborhood listserve and asked if any of us was thinking of maybe selling our house, because they want to live in our neighborhood. So I wrote them both and said, yeah, actually, maybe. So family #1 is looking at it on Thursday morning and family #2 is looking at it on Saturday morning.

This has made for a busy week. On top of, like, working and taking care of sick kids and stuff, Jake has been talking to our realtor and trying to get a mortgage pre-approval letter and I've been cleaning everything and getting rid of the cluttering knick knacks.

One thing for me to remember if my nemesis gets our dream house is that we are actually very happy right where we are, so it's okay. And there's something to be said for maintaining a cheap mortgage. Just think of all the trips we could take!

The Worst of Winter

Milo is super sick. He currently has a fever of 104 and is drifting off on the couch next to me as we wait for the Tylenol to kick in. I think we'll be home most if not all of the week. I am just hoping against hope that Nora doesn't get it too. The poor guy feels miserable.

This week is crazy. Deadlines, office moving / painting, surprise high-drama house buying potential with an iffy at best chance of success, last-minute crazy house cleaning to show ours to some people, and of course no sleep because of Milo's croup. One thing I've noticed is that after a sleepless night (or three), bright sunlight really helps in feeling more cheerful and making it through the day. I did all right today because it was so nice and sunny.

p.s. Milo seems to be sleeping right now on the couch but he keeps moaning in his sleep. He'll be cruelly awoken in about 5 minutes when Jake returns from school with Nora.

Croup

Milo is okay, but he has croup. A long few nights ahead of us.

Milo woke up with a barking cough and wheezing, panicking because he couldn't breathe. Jake just rushed him to the hospital.

Bits and Pieces

-- Jake has discovered Pandora. (I know. Welcome to 2006). Now it's all 80s, Depeche Mode style, all the time. How much of that can I take? It remains to be seen.

-- I am getting new furniture for my work office on Tuesday! The movers are coming to take away the old furniture on Monday. Then I'm going to surreptitiously paint my office on Monday afternoon.

-- Nora says, "Mom, are you ready to see something truly amazing?" as she stands on one leg and spreads her arm wide to create a dance pose.

-- March is the cruelest month. You have spring on the mind, but then you get a giant snowstorm.

-- Tonight after the kids' bedtime we heard some doors opening and closing upstairs, but we also heard somebody going to the bathroom, so I chalked it up to that. But then 45 minutes later I heard a lot of cracking up coming from upstairs. So I crept up the stairs, tracing the laughter to Milo's room. Wait a sec...two kids are cracking up in there. I open the door and sure enough there's Nora on Milo's bed with him and they're laughing at some private joke.

-- Oh God. Jake's station is playing Send Me An Angel. I can't take this anymore.

Apprenticing the Manuscript Writing Process

Off-topic: Today Nora remarked that she wants to be the first astronaut. A little late for that, I guess (and time to teach her some history). The sad thing is that she'll probably never get a chance to even be an astronaut with the way things are going with our space program.

Anyway, I'm writing a paper right now from project data that we collected last year. It's on a kind of tight timeline (in fact it's due in 17 days). Last year I had 2 paid grad students on my project and 2 volunteer grad students who participated in the project as a research practicum. One of the paid students graduated and is now a professor elsewhere, and I'm currently employing the remaining 3. This week another new grad student asked if he could participate in my project on a volunteer basis. Hooray! I'm happy because he seems very competent and thoughtful.

So anyway, I'm writing this paper with all 3 of my current grad students and with the newly graduated professor. He's skyping into our meetings. The students are doing some analyses of the data for the paper and I've been writing a draft. I'm making all of them authors.

I decided to try to make the manuscript writing process as transparent as possible for my students. Only one of them has any experience with writing papers for publication. Dropbox has been so wonderful for this - what did we ever do without it?

There are lots of different ways to write a paper but I only know how I do it, so that's what I'm trying to share with my students. Since we're delving into a new content area for this paper, it required a decent lit review first. I read all of the relevant literature and then took notes on everything I read in one document. As I proceeded, the notes took on an organizational structure with different sub-headings that were relevant to the paper. I kept this on dropbox as I went, creating new versions as I changed it, so they could see its evolution.

When I write I usually need to start with a detailed outline. So in this case, I created an initial outline that I thought might work. Soon I figured out that it wasn't going to work, so I tried version 2, but kept the 1st version in the document so the students could see what I'd tried and rejected. I put all of the relevant notes from the lit review into my outline. Once I finished I could see it wasn't quite right, so I re-arranged things and re-organized into a 3rd version of the outline, which is what I've been using to write the paper.

Meanwhile we've been meeting to discuss this process and for me to solicit the students' input on the particular sets of results we should include. Together we decided on three specific results to go into the paper. Then I started writing the front half of the paper, saving versions as I went. Tonight one of my students remarked that it's been helpful to see how the paper has changed over the past few days, particularly the ways in which I decided to stray from the outline.

I'm having one of my students, the one who will be second author, take a crack at writing the analysis part of the methods section. I figured this would be the easiest part for her to draft because she has been taking a lead on the data analysis.

Tomorrow we meet to hammer out exactly what pieces of data we'll use in the results section for each of the three major results. I hope to create a detailed outline of that part together with them during the meeting, and then write a draft of the results over the next week. Each time I make a shift in my decision for the paper or create a new version of something, I save the old one so that the trace of the evolution of the paper is there for the students to see.

So far they say they've found this helpful. I'm not sure how helpful it truly is, but my reasoning is that at least making it all transparent for them as it's happening can provide one model of how somebody goes about framing and then writing a paper.

We Had a Trip

This past weekend I took Nora out west to surprise my mom for her birthday. It was a short trip (Fri - Mon) and a lot of fun (but too short). Nora had fun playing with her cousins and getting tons of Mommy attention. She got to feed some very interested/aggressive ducks and geese, build a snowman, decorate cupcakes, and play 82 games of candyland.

I noticed that from Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. until Monday night at bedtime Nora only cried once, and pretty briefly at that, and that was after she'd been up for 17 hours straight with no nap. I was amazed at how good she was. On Friday we took 2 planes and the whole trip took about 8 hours, then she whiled away the afternoon without napping, then she went to a grown-up party at a grown-up restaurant and behaved so well during all of that. I mean, Nora had opinions about things and she shared them loudly and repeatedly, mostly on the theme that waiting for stuff is unacceptable, but that's a very different way to handle things than having a tantrum. She was so good the whole time!

(My tricks for the airplane: Lots of snacks and videos that I don't normally allow. I let her eat crap for snacks, like chocolate-covered granola bars, and trail mix where she picked out all of the M&Ms, and I let her watch about a thousand episodes of Curious George. The rule at home is that the kids get to watch 2 episodes only on a home day, so that's 45 minutes on the 3 home days a week. The other 4 days, no videos. So, watching episode after episode after episode was a huge thrill for Nora and in my book totally acceptable to get through two plane rides. We haven't done this yet, but I might get to the point at which I'd instate this rule for grueling car trips as well.)

The whole trip was so peaceful, in a way, and why was that? Reason #1: Nora is 4. (Goodbye 3, I do not miss you at all.) Reason #2: Milo wasn't around.

Milo isn't the problem, of course, it's just them being together that causes all the ruckus. Milo had a similarly peaceful weekend at home with Jake. I think I just don't have any idea what it would be like to try to actually parent a kid without that kid constantly fighting with a sibling or battling for attention. Every time we separate them for a bit we get a sense of what that would be like. You know what it's like? It's peaceful. It's a piece of cake.

Well, anyway, we came back and immediately delved into the dramatic twists and turns of twinhood togetherness. Milo and Nora were clearly glad to see each other, and in typical fashion their evening went from uproarious laughter and play to fighting and screeching on the turn of a dime, and then back again.

It's gratifying to see them having fun together, and I'm glad they have each other, but having twins is just, well, loud. Fun, but definitely not peaceful!

On the Way to School

Milo: When I grow up, I'm going to be Spiderman!

Me: Spiderman, huh? Not a fire fighter?

Milo: No, Spiderman.

Me: What does Spiderman do?

Milo: ...I don't know.

(30 seconds of silence)

Milo: He kills spiders.

Brooms and Phones

Little kids create this chaos of mess that you then spend all day cleaning up. When I stay home with the kids on Wednesdays, I usually end up vacuuming or sweeping the dining room floor 3 times a day. I do dishes 3 or 4 times a day. I cook dinner, and most Wednesdays I try to bake as well. Yesterday it was lemon poppy seed scones.

My other goals for Wednesday are laundry, take the kids on an outing, and do a non-standard cleaning task on top of the normal daily cleaning tasks (dishes, counters, sweeping, vacuuming, make beds being the normal ones). So yesterday I got on my hands and knees and cleaned the wood floors with a cloth and vinegar; this was inspired by the fact that I'd let Milo wear his brand-new shoes in the house, and now I know what non-marking sole means (his soles made marks).

Pretty much every evening we clean and do laundry. And rest assured our house is far from pristine. Neither of us likes a lot of clutter, so you won't find big piles lying around, but still, it's like we live in a constant state of mild chaos. Before I had kids I never knew that housework could be so time consuming!

I am not comfortable with the idea of having a cleaning person or a cleaning service, so that's not an option we'll use.

I actually more or less enjoy all of these tasks, as restoring order to our little house gives me pleasure. They're time consuming and tiring, but satisfying. One thing I was thinking about was the technology we have available to assist with domestic tasks. The tools I use to cook and clean are pretty much the same tools my grandmothers used when they were raising their kids. I hang my laundry as they did, I use a broom as they did, I get down on my hands and knees to scrub the floors as they did. I chop vegetables as they did, I cook rice in a pan as they did. It doesn't seem like technology has changed the domestic sphere all that much.

What has changed in domestic technology? Stuff that's typically coded more male than female; audio technology, television technology, movie watching, computers, and phones. The way we watch movies now and the way I communicate on my fancy phones and computers are all beyond what my grandmothers could have imagined. When it comes to toys and entertainment, when it comes to stuff that helps us do our work, technology has changed everything. But when it comes to how we clean our houses, the tools are more or less the same.

It's kind of funny to imagine a futuristic world that my own grandchildren might be living in, one in which they'll be flying around with their jet packs and communicating to each other via the chips implanted in their brains, but when it comes time to clean up the crumbs from lunch, they'll still be breaking out the broom and dust pan.

That About Sums It Up

Jake, exasperated at endless whining: My God, can you hear me?!?

Nora: YES I CAN!!!