Weekend Notes

Cloudy! Crummy weather! But enough non-rain times yesterday for me and Jake to put together some wood planters, do yard work, and prep our patio for summer.

Dinner: Milo at strawberries wrapped in spinach, cherry tomatoes, rice noodles, a wonton, and cheese. Nora ate...strawberries. And the teeniest tiniest bite of one rice noodle (approximately 0.5 mm thick). LE SIGH.

Jake and I ate homemade hot and sour soup with rice noodles, tomatoes, and spinach. Super awesome recipe. Yum.

But! I successfully made granola bars. I have been struggling with this for a long time because it is hard to get the consistency right. Sometimes it won't set up, and it's granola mush. Other times, it breaks apart and just becomes granola. But now I have succeeded in making actual bars, and the recipe I have is really delicious while still being decent for you (includes stuff like wheat germ, oats, dried cherries, and only has honey for a sweetener!). This is a big score for me because the kids love granola bars but I dislike feeding them what you can buy in the store. Even the healthy organic ones have about 30 ingredients.

Last weekend I went for a run in normal shoes and before the second mile was done my knees were dust. So frustrating. But this weekend I went for a run barefoot style and did 4.5 miles without trouble, so hooray! Part of it might have had to do with the fact that I was going up and down more hills, so it was giving me some relief from relentless flat foot pounding. But then again, this has become the kind of thing where there are about 80 different variables and I always attribute the latest change to whether my knees do well or poorly. It's totally non logical and superstitious and stuff.

More bad work stuff! Last year our chancellor, who has since departed for greener, private pastures, set up a private company to consult with some administrators to come up with a new HR design. They've now released their recommendations, one of them being no more cost of living raises. I mean, not that we've had any since 2006, but that's because there was no money rather than it not being built into the pay structure. Also, compensation would be determined by market analysis. Which means...what? (And how do you do that for everybody on campus, including janitors, secretaries, academic staff, medical personnel, food service workers, science professors, English professors, etc., etc., etc.?) So any raises would be determined by this non-defined market analysis, and by merit as determined by one's peers (which I'm sure would involve no favoritism whatsoever). In addition, these adjustments are supposed to enable a decrease in one's compensation as well as a possible increase. Also, the recommendations include eliminating the separate categories of classified vs. academic staff, which means classified staff (like secretaries and janitors) will lose a bunch of benefits that they've accrued separately due to collective bargaining action in the past.

How much will it take until faculty vote with their feet en masse? Things are really out of control!

Adventurous and Picky

When Milo came downstairs after his nap, I asked if he was ready for a snack. He said, "Yes. I'd like a bunch of spinach with a strawberry on top, please."

??? Where did this kid come from? I didn't happen to have either spinach or strawberries. I offered him some arugula but he wasn't interested. Instead, Milo ate about 3/4 of a red bell pepper. As he ate it, he said, "How are these so good?"

Lest this is too annoying to read about, I have the other child. Things she used to eat have now switched camps into the "cannot be eaten" category. This includes french toast, sausage, and applesauce. Seriously, applesauce? What has applesauce ever done to you, Nora? So now Nora will basically eat pancakes, peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and fruit. I exaggerate, but not by much.

Land of Milk and Honey

1. Last night I was walking home from the gym and marveling at how fabulous everything is when the weather warms up. It was after 6 when I left and now I can walk home on the bike path again, instead of through the neighborhood streets, because it's still plenty light out. It was warm. I could smell the lingering scent of lilacs. Everything is blooming. The birds are loud. Everything about our little spot on the planet is just completely pleasant right now.

I know I wouldn't be enjoying it this much if I weren't contrasting it with other walks home from the gym, walks that happen in the pitch black, boots crunching on snow, hood pulled over my head, gloves on. But, is it worth it? I mean, yes, the sweetness of the warm months is all the more sweet thanks to winter, but I suspect that at this point in my life I could definitely enjoy this kind of weather year round.

2. In my continued "don't be a slob" life campaign, I'm tackling one new cleaning / organizing project a week on top of the normal maintenance stuff. Today it was the hall linen closet. Now our towels, sheets, and blankets are all organized, take that, closet! I subsequently discovered about 200 little packets of alcohol wipes and about a hundred packets of gauze. I think our alcohol wipe / gauze needs are fulfilled at least until the kids go to college.

3. This is a sign of how bad things are with my brain: I have started a "where things are" file on my computer. Every time I put something somewhere special or weird, I add it to the file. So maybe in 6 months when I can't figure out what happened to my white gloves or the Halloween decorations, I'll be able to find it thanks to the file.

4. This morning we went to the children's museum and spent 45 minutes building a giant house out of giant building materials. The kids could stand up in it. I figured out how to make a window and a door. It was definitely super fun.

5. I have an angry screed to share, but I'll save it for later since the great weather and organizing projects are making me so content. Somebody once said something about how I'm always angry, or something like that, based on this blog. Hopefully that isn't how everybody sees me, but I think my writing can skew that way at times because I use the space to work out issues or to communicate more passionately than I would actually feel allowed to do in real life. Mostly I go around pretty happy.

6. When the firefighters ask for donations I always give. I think I'll be doing this for life after what they did for all of the other state workers last year.

7. We launched rockets and played in the sand today. Welcome back, spring!

Transitive Property

Logic begins to develop:

Kids: Are trees taller than people?
Me: Yes, usually.
Milo: And skyscrapers are taller than trees. Are skyscrapers taller than trees?
Me: For the most part, yes, skyscrapers are taller than trees.
Nora: So that means skyscrapers are taller than people!

Odds and Ends

This afternoon we went on a family bike ride on the bike path in the 40 degree weather. 40 degrees! Brrrr! It was cloudy and had rained all morning, so the bright side is that there weren't many people on the bike path to potentially run into the kids, who are still learning the concept of the right lane. They went on their balance bikes and Jake walked and I practiced the art of riding my bike so slowly that I was almost standing still. The kids aren't in love with their balance bikes, and keep asking us for bikes with pedals. I want to get a couple of tagalongs so we can go on real bike rides together as a family.

Tonight at dinner:

Me: Look behind you Milo, there's a chipmunk on the deck!
Milo: Look, it's trying to eat that little shovel. Stupid chipmunk! I like to call it a "shitmunk".

No. That's not really an appropriate thing to call a chipmunk...

Milo has a giant goose egg on his temple, and a cut in the center of it. It looks pretty bad. When I was out of town, a classmate of his bashed him on the head with a rock. Actually, Milo clarified that it was maybe an old piece of cement. Anyway, his friend bashed him on the side of the head with a rock or a piece of cement. The school was very solicitous of Jake. I think they were worried about how Jake would handle it. The kid who did it is actually one of Milo's best friends and it's not clear to me whether this was a game gone wrong or not. I think it's more a sign that their after-school teachers aren't as good as their normal school-day teachers at closely monitoring them and distracting the kids when things get a little too riled up.

I have to say, in absence of a really serious injury requiring a doctor, that I'm much more comfortable with my kids being the bashee than the basher. It stinks to get bashed with a rock, but I'd probably feel a lot worse if my kids were going around bashing other people with rocks.

Nora actually ate a piece of chicken tonight! And liked it! That's because it was breaded, basically the fancy version of a chicken nugget. Still. Little steps. Meanwhile Milo was happily eating his chicken, his black bean chili, and his raw strips of red pepper, one of his favorite snacks.

Speaking of meat, did you know there's a place in Philly that makes vegan cheesesteaks? It didn't taste like a cheesesteak, but whatever they used for the "cheese" tasted amazingly like cheese. It was actually pretty darn good, as long as you didn't expect it to be a cheesesteak. It's been 3 months without meat now for us, and it's fine except occasionally a little inconvenient at restaurants.

Conference

So why do I do things like stay up until 2 a.m. when I know I have to get up at 6:30? Ugh...

I have had a super packed conference and it's been really fun and stimulating, like conferences are supposed to be - it's got me energized for returning to certain intellectual endeavors. I was also pulled in a lot of directions because in addition to trying to fit in seeing friends and meeting up with colleagues to talk about work and attend sessions I also had a number of non-field people to see: a friend who lives in Philly, my sister, my Dad, my cousin and his family, and a bunch of my Dad's old friends. Which was fun, for the most part (other than the old family friend who kept trying to badger me into a political conversation that I didn't want to have -- if you're a millionaire from a lifetime of private business enterprises don't try to mask your conservative agenda to enact top-down accountability measures onto teachers through some faux "concern" about their work opportunities when really, you just hate the idea of unions. I was rolling my eyes so hard I thought they'd lodge in the back of my head). But other than that, fun if hectic.

Two sweet things. One was this other old friend who knew my mom when she was expecting me and knew me as a baby. He really wanted to try to explain that I mattered to them and was a big part of their lives. That touched me. It is cool to have an alternate perspective from the one I'm more accustomed to having.

The other is something I observed in a talk. I was sitting behind Very Famous Guy who is one of my idols (and who I turned down a job with last year, which is still a little hard/awkward), and he was sitting next to Extremely Famous Guy, who was his advisor waaaaaaaaaaay back in the day. And during the talk, the speaker referred to VFG as somebody whose ideas informed his thinking and sparked what became the research project he was reporting on. And then I saw VFG's old advisor, EFG, write a note on the back of his program book to VFG. EFG wrote, "You did a good job!" I don't know. I just thought it was so cool that VFG, who is super senior and established and stuff, still get that kind of affirmation from his advisor.

It's Fixed Now

Wow, I just had a giant tantrum over my iPhone screwing up. I updated it to iOS 5.1, which was a huge mistake. First because it took 3 hours to download and update, so that was really really annoying, and second because then it caused my phone to think it had no SIM card. So the update basically broke my phone. Then, when I followed the online advice to restore the phone to factory settings, that just made it even worse because it wouldn't restore properly due to thinking it had no SIM card. So I no longer even had my home screen or anything, I just had a phone with no data on it and a repeating error message that it couldn't complete the restore because it had no SIM card. And I was freaking out because I need to get on a plane tomorrow and somehow, the idea of traveling without my phone is absolutely fucking unthinkable, despite the fact that I did it regularly, like, a year ago.

So I called the Apple help line and had to talk to the automated computer guy, who really wasn't helping at all because after I'd given him my name and the type of phone I have, he wanted my phone's serial number. And for this to make sense you need to know that I was already in a state of being really, really mad by the time I called the help line.

Automated computer guy: What is your phone's serial number?

Me: Uh, I don't know! God!

Automated computer guy: You can say, "I don't have one", or "Tell me how to find it."

Me: Tell me how to find it.

Automated computer guy: You can say, "Find it on my home screen" or "Find it in iTunes."

Me: Uh...(home screen won't work, I don't have a home screen anymore)...find it in iTunes.

Automated compter guy: At any time you can say, "repeat", or "continue". Open itunes.

Me: ...

Automated computer guy: ...

Me: Continue.

Automated computer guy: Look on the sidebar under devices. Click on your iPhone device.

Me: Continue.

Automated computer guy: At the top of the device screen --

Me: No. That's not going to work. My device screen just has an error message because my phone thinks it has no SIM card.

Automated computer guy: I didn't catch that. Please state your request again.

Me: That's not going to work. I CAN'T GET MY SERIAL NUMBER.

Automated computer guy: I didn't catch that. Please state your request again.

Me: SERIOUSLY OMG DON'T MAKE ME GIVE YOU MY SERIAL NUMBER JUST TO TALK TO A REAL PERSON. GIVE ME A REAL PERSON GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. GOD DAMN IT! FUCK!

Automated computer guy: I --

Me: OH NO YOU DON'T JUST GIVE ME A GOD DAMN HELP PERSON! AAAAUGGGHHHHHHHH!

Automated computer guy: I am transferring you to our next available agent.

And then while the help music was playing I took an old plastic drumstick of the kids that belongs to a now-gone drum, one I've been meaning to throw out, and I took that thing and bent it over my knee so I could snap that motherfucker in half. Except it was fucking plastic, so it didn't snap at all. It just bent. So then I had an L-shaped plastic drumstick, which is way less satisfying than snapping it in half, so I threw it down the stairs. Because that's the mature way to handle things.

Seriously, when it comes to phone problems, computer glitches, and help lines, I can really lose my shit.

Alles Neu

The whole family is obsessed with this song by Peter Fox and the Cold Steel Drumline (it's worth watching all the way through to the end to see some shots of the drumline):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD0A2plMSVA

Last night the kids made me play it about 16 times in a row. Tonight Milo wanted to do the same thing, but we cut him off after about 5. Then he wanted to watch the video over and over again.

But Milo isn't the only one. I love all of the contrasts in this song. To my ear, German is a challenging-to-hear language (sorry, German speakers). It sounds harsh and guttural, bordering on but not quite reaching ugly. It is a very masculine language. So here is this guy singing in an aggressive way in this masculine, staccato language, but his voice and tone are melodic. This mirrors the contrast I hear between the heart-thumping drum beat and the strings, both which provide an ongoing wall of sound behind the lyrics. It's just the sexiest song.

It's like the song itself is a juxtaposition of flowing and hair-raising. This song reminds me of Jake, who double-majored in German and spent a year in Austria as an exchange student. But it's not Jake as a German speaker that I think of, it's Jake the person, who is also a study in contrasts. Jake's voice, angularity, jaw line, and movements through space are so strongly masculine, but his slight frame, gentle tones, and mild-mannered nature are not. It is these inherent contrasts that continue to fascinate me about Jake, and watching him walk, sit, and move is like watching a perfectly orchestrated dance. I guess I mean to say that the way this song fascinates me is a minor reflection of the way that Jake fascinates me.

Nora's Photo Story

Nora took some photos one day when I was out of the house. Based on her series, my guess is that she watched Milo goofing around on the stairs, and then some sort of accident occurred, culminating in Milo needing some comfort.

Guilt is this traveling mom's drink of choice

Here's a story about moms who have to travel for work.

It's pretty relevant to my life right now because next week I'll be out of town and tonight the twin whisperer kinda screwed us over. Ages ago we'd arranged for her to watch the kids on Wednesday next week when I'm out of town, but she's taken a better gig for next week which leaves Jake in the lurch. He'll have to take a vacation day to watch the kids. And I feel bad for Jake because I know this is going to be exhausting. He'll have to take the kids to school (and getting them fed, dressed, and out the door each morning is a major hassle), he'll have to pick them up every afternoon, he'll have to take a day off to watch them on Wednesday, and he'll have to basically do everything by himself for 4 days which I know is going to be tiring. Poor guy!

When the kids were first born I turned down all travel requests. I traveled the first time when they were 10.5 months old. For the first few years I accepted about half of the travel requests I got. Last year, I tried to accept most of them, as I was gearing up for tenure and trying to be visible and stuff like that. Not that it mattered in the end. (My letter writers didn't care if I'd gone to whatever conference, or given some invited talk or whatnot). I probably accept about 2/3 of my travel opportunities now.

I enjoy traveling for work and would do more if I didn't have a family. There are two big conferences in our field that usually happen about a week apart and I used to always go to both. Now I never go to both. I do miss it, especially when everybody else in the world is posting about how awesome it is.

I feel guilty when I travel. I think the kids are largely fine at this point, but I know it burdens Jake. It is hard to deal with them both alone for several days. Lots of times my parents or his parents will help out when I'm gone. But sometimes, like for next week's trip, Jake is on his own and I know how much work it'll be.

Also, I miss them when I'm gone.

It's kind of an interesting set of choices that I'm reflecting on now that I have these choices to make. I choose to work less than I could or naturally want to. When I am engrossed in something I would prefer to stay at the office and stay engrossed in it. But I stop it and go home. I would love to travel to some of the international conferences to work with some researchers who I've been reading for years. But that's too long to be gone. So basically I'm making a deliberate set of decisions to be less influential in my career and less well known so that I can spend more time with my family.

I mostly feel okay about this. The times when I feel weird are when I observe my colleagues making different choices and it makes me second-guess myself. I have other colleagues with preschool-aged kids who work around the clock and travel all the time. I mean, like, 3 times as much as I do. So then I worry about how I'm deliberately relegating myself to being kind of podunk and small time, because I'm unwilling to put in the hours and the miles to make it big.

I think the key is to just try to be purposely okay with that. I mean, this is a choice. I could be choosing the other way, and I'm not. I like being around my family. I want to keep Jake happy. I want to be a big part of M&N's lives. I didn't go ahead and have kids so I could work around the clock, right? And the bigger issue is that I'm just not that important. I mean, I have a colleague who commutes between here and DC, so she sees her kids only on weekends, but frankly, she's, like, way way more important than I'll ever be. Her decision makes sense for her life because what she's doing really matters. What I'm doing is not in that league.

This is all pretty gendered, of course. Lots of men don't worry much when they travel. They know their wives will take care of things. They don't think of turning down opportunities. I do, and I constantly think about what's fair to Jake and how much he can handle. But, it is pretty encouraging to see signs of change, too. There's a former student of ours who is now a professor and we skype each week to collaborate on a project. Last week I asked him if he was going to the upcoming conference, and he said, "No, I'd like to stay married." They have a new baby. It's cool to see men taking on more responsibility at home like that, and it'll make things more even at work, too.

Once upon a time Milo and Nora would cry and cry every time I left the house. Now, thank God, they give a cheerful wave and chirp, "Goodbye!" and everything is just fine. So I know they'll be okay, but man, I feel for Jake.

Milo

Milo did well with his tubes procedure. It was really fast (like 10 minutes). When he woke up, he felt sick from the anesthesia, so that was a bit rough but an hour later he was mostly back to normal.

Milo was so stoic at the hospital. He'd barely talk to anybody, and he had a strange frown on his face, but that was the extent to which Milo would reveal his discomfort. Then a few hours later at lunch, I could barely shut him up.

This morning I took the kids to the library to pick out a new crop of books, and then we walked next door to the coffee shop for our morning snack. It was quite a special treat. It's pretty cool that now I can take the kids to the coffee shop, by myself, and they can both sit in normal chairs and eat a snack, and remark on the artwork in the coffee shop, and it's all generally pleasant rather than stressful. My conclusion: babies and toddlers are hard, especially in pairs. But once they get to be actual kids, they rock.

Outpatient

Milo has to be at the hospital tomorrow morning at 6:15 a.m. for a 7:15 a.m. tubes surgery. Why so early, ugh. Worse, it interferes with taking Nora to school so one of us has to stay and take Nora to school, and the other can be with Milo. I was so sure Milo would want Jake with him, but no. He wants me. Must be because of the 6:15 a.m. thing. He knows what a great morning person I am.

April Sunday

Thunderstorms. Why do they happen at night 90% of the time? You know what happens when there's thunder at night? We end up with two kids in our bed and a certain mother gets no sleep.

This evening Nora decided that she wanted to write a card to Grandmom Lee & Papa Greg. We got a card out for her and she carefully wrote her name in it. Then she dictated to me precisely the things she wanted me to write down in the card on her behalf. We'll send it off tomorrow.

It always makes me wary when Jake declares, "I think I'll use the drill." But today he finally fixed our non-latching door, so I'm happy about the outcome.

Milo brought home the mystery box from school. He gets to choose something to put into it, and then share 3 clues with the other kids who try to guess what is in the box. His clues are:

1) We use these to work outside in the dirt.

2) We need two of them.

3) They keep our hands clean.

There are 12 chicks in the kids' room at school. A week ago, there were 12 eggs. Now there are 12 chicks. Sometimes it boggles my mind that school starts off with chicks and finger painting and somehow ends up a decade later with tediously dull worksheets.

Slugger

Here's Milo at the plate! It's so cute how he takes off running whenever he gets a hit, and doesn't exactly know where to go.

Milo spent all morning playing baseball and soccer. I realized we should, like, find some baseball games on you tube so he can see what they actually look like. Then this afternoon Milo and Jake went back out to the park to hit some more balls, and the neighborhood kid and his friend joined in. These kids were 7 and 8, and they were so nice to Milo. It was so cute. They were totally patient with him, letting him bat and pitch and Milo did an amazing job. Even though he's half their age he had just as many hits as they did. Then he'd just take off like a shot towards the outfield, since he doesn't really get the concept of going to 1st base. It was also so cute to watch Milo playing with these bigger kids, using a lower voice with them, trying to fit in.

I have a feeling that if we can all get together this summer, Milo is going to have a blast playing ball with his cousins!

Highs and Lows

What a week! It started with my chair reprimanding me on behalf of the dean for carrying out a plan that my own faculty suggested that I do in a faculty meeting. The dean disapproved of the recommended action and because she is too important to talk to me directly, she instead called my chair and told him to have a talk with me to convey her disapproval. The whole situation is a long and messy story but I have learned some important management lessons here about how not to behave when in a position of power. Not that I'll ever likely be a chair or a dean, but I can still make use of these lessons in terms of the people I do direct who work on my projects (grad students, post docs, secretaries).

And then at the end of the week, I found a vase of fresh flowers on my desk, courtesy of one of my grad students. I haven't really done anything to merit something like that from her, but she said "think of it as the world (and me, as a complicated grad student), saying 'thanks for being you'." OMG. How sweet is that? I almost feel guilty because I don't want any grad students on our paltry stipends ever spending any money on me! It should be the other way around, as often as possible.

Anyway, this has been an interesting contrast in the things that are bad and good about my job. The bad stuff (budget problems, departmental politics, bad management practices on behalf of my dean and chair) is mostly stuff that doesn't directly intersect with my day-to-day life. The good stuff? The faculty with whom I directly work in my area and on my cross-disciplinary grants. They're all great people. The students. All of our grad students - I like every one of them and I love our Friday seminar discussions together. The students on my projects are really outstanding. The post docs on my projects are also super awesome. Basically, the people I directly interact with on a daily basis are all wonderful colleagues; smart, dedicated, thoughtful, open minded. It's good to step back and be grateful for those things that matter a lot.

Tonight I sat down with the kids and wrote down words for them to try to read: Bat, Dog, Fun, Nod, Sit, etc. And Nora was able to sound out each and every one and figure out what they were. It's like something has just started to click with her. It's amazing to watch. Reading has been such an incredible pleasure and joy throughout my life that I'm excited to see it beginning for her. Milo isn't there at all at this point. He's in a different place, focusing on different skills right now, which is just fine. Over spring break he practiced learning his head stand and now he can hold a bona fide head stand for 30 seconds.

On Tuesday Milo is getting tubes put into his ears. The hope is that this will solve his hearing problem.

Now of course the thing I'd really like them to learn is to how to co-exist for more than 5 minutes without bickering...

War on Women

Hilary Rosen got in a mess of hot water when she said about Ann Romney "His wife has actually never worked a day in her life." Now Romney and his wife are looking sympathetic, because she can defend her choice to stay home and raise her kids, a choice that tons of families really relate to.

The issue, though, is that her wealth gave her that choice. That's how Hilary Rosen should have framed it. Romney was using his wife to show that he knows about the economic situations of women. When in reality, they are an uber-wealthy family who has never, ever had to face the kinds of situations that middle class and working class families grapple with every day. The thing is, Ann Romney had a choice. And that's great, making a choice that was probably a good one for their family, and can be great for many families. The point is, though, that many American women do not have that choice. They must raise their children and work for pay, or else their kids won't eat.

I want our national conversation to focus on what we can do for people who don't get to choose.

It has been a super rough time at work, like, wake up at 4 and never go back to sleep type of rough. So I'm thinking a little bit about ways to focus on more positive things in life and let go of stuff, like work, that ultimately doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Things like:

• Bike riding! I hope I'll continue to enjoy that as summer approaches. One thing that's pleasant about riding around here is that it is easy to get out of the city quickly and then ride on dedicated bike paths through beautiful countryside. I like being on a separate path rather than on the road.
• Gardening! I've found that there's nothing more enjoyable and conducive to flow than activities that use your hands and your body as well as your mind. It's always satisfying to get pots ready for summer, to plant, to weed, and otherwise take care of our little plot of land in the city.
• Home improvement! Sadly I'm not the fix-the-plumbing / put-up-tile kind of person, although I'd like to be some day and learn those skills, but I do get a lot of satisfaction out of the little things I can do to maintain our surroundings through my own work. This spring I need to paint the trim in our bedroom, and I've got a fence to stain. The time just flies by when I'm engaged in those types of projects.
• Cooking! Always a good activity, and it's something I seldom tire of. I'm looking forward to fresh vegetable season. I wonder how many vegan meals I can make this summer?
• Outings with the kids! Now that the weather is nicer and we don't have to put on 18 layers of stuff to leave the house, it feels like less of a production to get out. I'm looking forward to more trips to the zoo, the children's museum, the library, the capitol, and this summer let's not forget the pool and the splash park. A good lesson for me on our morning outings is to slow down and enjoy the experience at their pace, not mine.

It's great to think that in just a month, the semester will be over.

Sausage

I have a troll on G+! What a drag.

Milo kept opening his mouth to reveal the disgusting half-chewed sausage he was eating, basically to annoy Nora. So she ran around complaining, "Milo keeps showing me his sausage! Milo's showing me his sausage!"

Nora is sick and last night at the end of dinner she coughed so hard that she threw up. Milo was so disgusted at the sight that he immediately threw up as well.

Next up: I think I'll write a defense of the 40-hour (or less) work week. I think it's inaccurate one-up-manship when people brag about working 60 or 80 hours a week. I mean, yes, some people do that. But it doesn't appear to be a good idea for anybody, not even for job productivity, and something is really wrong if you're bragging about voluntarily working 80 hours a week and never seeing your family. Is that really something we want to promote and foster?

Time and Flexibility

Things are getting a little weird blogging wise because I'm shifting over a fair amount of what I say, at least professionally, to G+. Most of it's limited to my circles but I'm starting to share some things publicly here and there. Here's a draft of something I'm going to put on Google+ soon.

Recently a colleague of mine wrote a post on Facebook expressing some exasperation with the fact that her department was nearly empty at 4:15 on a weekday. This led to a fairly long series of comments, and I decided to write about it in a more extended manner here rather than clutter up her wall with my opinions.

So, the exasperation was born of the belief that appearances matter, that public perception is important, and that there is a need for expensive university building to look open on weekdays. My colleague remarked "being present more often on campus is likely a coming requirement if we want more compensation."

Now that I have tenure I'm going to go ahead and be honest and open about my working hours and my beliefs about how much we professors are working and should be working.

The exasperation was perhaps born of a belief that the university building should be filled with professors in their offices during the normal working hours of 9 to 5, or something like that. This colleague is not in my own department. But in my department, things do look somewhat different. For instance:

-- Many of us are in our offices up until 7, 8, and 9 p.m. because we teach afternoon and evening courses that working graduate students can take after their normal work day is completed.

-- Many of us are in our offices on the weekend. I go in every Sunday, which I will talk about more in a moment, but the place isn't deserted on those Sundays. I have one colleague who I hear walking down the hall to and from her office each Sunday. I have another colleague in my own area who is often in our shared suite on Sunday.

-- Many of us are also in our offices before the typical work day starts. The head of my area is often in the office before 8. He comes in after he drops his son off from school, and on certain days he leaves early (around 2:30) to pick his son up from school.

-- Many of my departmental colleagues are not in the offices much because they are off giving talks, keynotes, and plenaries, going to conferences, serving on review panels and advisory panel meetings, receiving honorary doctorates, and otherwise engaging in very public forms of scholarship around the country and the world. This does not appear to have harmed our department's reputation. In fact, it seems to have helped it.

I feel lucky that my department has always been supportive of the work we do, caring much more about our productivity rather than the appearance of productivity, or face time. We have a huge amount of autonomy in terms of when and where we work. All of us work long hours. I don't personally happen to know anybody in my department who works fewer than 40 hours a week. But many of those hours do not necessarily occur in our offices. They occur in the classroom, in the field when we're collecting data, on the airplane, and, yes, at our homes. Sometimes at 10 p.m., or midnight, or 5 a.m.

I am facebook friends with some of my departmental colleagues who have tenure, who voted on my own tenure case. If one of them had posted something in exasperation about not seeing more faculty in the office at 4:15 p.m. on a Wednesday, that would have had a chilling effect on me pre-tenure. It would have scared me, and made me worry that I need to be showing up at the office more, regardless of how much actual work I would have been getting done. It would have suggested to me that it's more important to physically be in my office (maybe even goofing off and surfing the web) than to be at home writing a paper or analyzing data.

So, I have to say, I'm really glad my departmental culture is different. Because let me be honest here. As a professor, I have worked a lot of hours, more hours than were healthy or appropriate leading up to tenure. I did it for a salary that is quite low considering my education and background. I did it for benefits that have been slashed, and take-home pay that has been reduced dramatically each month. I'm in a state where professors in particular and state workers in general have been attacked and denigrated. I don't get prestige, I don't get respect, I don't get a fabulous salary, but what I do get is an amazing degree of autonomy in how I do my work. And this autonomy, this flexibility, is what makes this job worth it for me.

I love my work. I love the research I do and I love teaching and interacting with students at all levels. The thing that makes my type of job a dream job is that I get to work on what I choose, and I get to do it how and when I choose. This is the one major perk of my profession. I'm lucky enough to be in a department that strongly believes in the autonomy of its faculty members. Our culture is such that we believe we are a group of talented, committed people, so it is important to allow us the freedom to do our work as we see fit. What matters to my departmental colleagues is what we produce. The work we do. Nobody cares when or where we do it. If there was some rule about me having to be on campus until 5 p.m. every weekday, that would be incredibly limiting. It would also be insulting. It wouldn't take into account the work I do every Sunday, the work I do in the evenings, the work I do when I fly to and from conferences.

Why do I go into work every Sunday? I do this because I stay at home with my kids every Wednesday. At first, I did this because I could not afford to have my kids in full-time, 5-day a week care. I am the primary wage earner in my family. My salary wasn't high enough to cover the cost of full-time care when we are already paying more per year to send our kids to preschool than we'd be paying to send them both to U.W.

In the past year my income went up and now, although it wouldn't be easy, I could afford to send my kids to preschool and after-school care, full time, 5 days a week. But you know what? This wouldn't be as good for my kids. They are 4, and they get exhausted from being in school. They really relish that day off in the middle of the week. It lets them recharge. It is good for them, and it is good for me to provide it for them. In a year and a half they'll be in kindergarten. This time I have when they are small is so fleeting, so I enjoy spending Wednesdays with them. In exchange, I go into work every Sunday while they stay home with my husband. The fact that I am able to do this is what makes my low salary and diminished benefits worth it.

I am really grateful that the head of my area set a precedent for this type of flexible schedule by leaving early to pick his son up from school. This sent the message that our families matter, our outside lives matter, and it's okay to be more than just a brain on a stick. I'm glad nobody in my department has communicated the attitude that it's face time in the office that matters more than other things, things like the quality of work I produce.

Because the thing is, as soon as you start chastising people for not being in at a certain time of day, that means we all have to agree on what those acceptable times are. Is it going to be M-F, 9-5? M-F, 7-3? What about those teaching evening classes? What about those who run weekend workshops? What about those who have labs with experiments that need to be checked 24/7? What about winter break or spring break? Technically, we faculty do not get any vacation days during our 9-month contract. So anybody who is going to chastise people for not being in the office at 4:15 on a Wednesday had better not take a vacation during spring break. If public perception matters, that perception shouldn't be of us off drinking wine in Napa when we should be on campus earning our keep. Are we really willing to go down that road? I'm not.

Socks

This morning Milo put on some very nice argyle socks and was proud to show them off. Then later, he realized that Grandmom Lee & Papa Greg aren't coming today, they're coming tomorrow. I just heard him tell Jake, "Tomorrow, I want to wear nice socks for Grandmom Lee & Papa Greg." Ah, so those socks this morning weren't just for the heck of it. Come to think of it, his nice argyle socks do complement his sweatpants and pirate shirt.