A year in the life

So one year ago today I was laid off from my full-time job. Since then...

1) I enjoyed a true-blue summer at home with the kids.
2) I did part-time contract work for a local magazine, which included not only writing but editing, layout, photography and production work as well. Fantastic experience.
3) I took the kids to their dance recitals, dress rehearsals, football practices and games, and their grandmother's house... all without the worry of how I'd make up the hours I missed at the office.
4) The family and I traveled with my husband on a couple of his business trips.
5) I had time to actually make/shop for and wrap holiday presents.
6) I took a yoga-pilates class.
7) Oh yeah... I BREATHED.

We've got less money. We buy less stuff. I clip coupons every week and shop around for the best price on toilet paper. We almost never go out to dinner, and when we do it's with coupons and/or gift cards. We'd love to take a vacation - nothing extravagant, just a getaway to a beach or a cool city - but we know it's just not in the cards anytime soon.

And yet, we love life more. We spend more time together, we are more patient with each other. The house is cleaner and runs more smoothly. The kids are happier. And so am I.

Bad events can lead to better things. They happen for a reason, whether we want to believe it or not.

Random Thoughts

Hey, you know that idiot in the parking lot who mashes the "unlock" button on her keyfob several times to unlock her door because it's not working properly, when she's standing right next to the car and could easily just stick the key in the door and turn it? Yep, that's me.

Every time I hear Gregg Allman's "I'm No Angel" all I can think about is a very pregnant Amy Poehler dancing/grinding on Josh Brolin in an SNL skit set in a dive bar. It shouldn't be funny at all, but most anything with Amy Poehler manages to overachieve. I still giggle a little bit in the car when that song comes on the radio and my children think I'm nuts.

I can't decide which are scarier, fast zombies or the slow, lumbering kind. I think it depends on the scenario. If you're in a large field or clearing, the speedier zombies are worse because it's harder to escape (whereas you can dodge or kill the slow zombies pretty easily). But if you're in a small room with no way out, that's got to suck having the lurching zombies slowly close in on you, prolonging the horror and dread.

Remind me to never again let my son get Burger King for dinner before football practice. And no, 45 minutes is not enough time from the end of such a meal to the start of physical activity.

Wow, so it's been a year, huh?

So I haven't been the most dedicated of bloggers. Very true. But a lot has changed in the past 12 months.

You see, I lost my full-time technical writing job to mass company layoffs just about a year ago. While shocking at first, it turned out to be one of the best things to ever happen to me professionally. Losing my job allowed me to pursue freelance writing as my sole occupation, which was liberating beyond anything I could have imagined. It gave me more chances to be creative with my writing, but I also had more time with my family.

Last summer was the first ever that my kids actually spent at home. Not in daycare, not in full-time camp, but a true summer where they could sleep in if they wanted and played with neighborhood friends until dusk every day. Plus I had the time to juggle dance recital duties, trips for my husband's work and, once the school year started, my son's football practices and helping the kids with homework. It has been heaven, I tell you, and something I never thought would happen.

So between my new creative outlets and the joyous time suck that is being with my children, I just haven't been inspired to blog until now. But that will be changing, as life has become more settled after the adjustment from the full-time rat race (it seriously takes a while to come down from it all!). Stay tuned, my friends... it won't be long before you're once again subject to my random missives. :-)

Why I Heart Meghan McCain

From CNN.com:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/29/limbaugh-to-specter-please-take-mccain-with-you-2/

If nothing else, Rush Limbaugh is great entertainment. Never in my life have I witnessed such self-importance, such bombastic psychobabble as what comes out of this man's mouth. If I ignore the fact that millions of people nod their heads in agreement while he spews, I can actually enjoy the show. This is what he said on Tuesday regarding Sen. Arlen Specter's move to the Democratic party:

"A lot of people say, 'Well, Specter, take [Sen. John] McCain with you. And his daughter [Meghan]. Take McCain and his daughter with you if you're gonna... It's ultimately good. You're weeding out people who aren't really Republicans."

Later in the day, Meghan McCain filed this on her Twitter:

"RED TIL I'M DEAD BABY!!! I love the republican party enough to give it constructive criticism, I love my party and sure as hell not leavin!"

So why do I like this?

1) The whole point of the Republican Party is supposed to be less government interference. And yet they're trying to dictate what we can do in our private lives to an extent that we've never seen before. If anything, in my opinion the religious/conservative right members are the "people who aren't really Republicans."

2) Meghan McCain is not a genius, but she's not an idiot either. She's a young adult who views the world in much the same way that we all do - not as politicians but as people. We might not be running for office or have advanced degrees in economics, but we are invested in and concerned about our country's success. And we're not afraid to talk about it.

You know, she already had me with her Ann Coulter smackdown and her Tyra Banks "kiss my fat ass" moment with Laura Ingraham. But this? This officially puts her on my "public figures I'd like to have a beer with" list. Keep talking, Meghan!

Really, is this normal now?

My daughter's favorite joke:

Her: Knock, knock!
Me: Who's there?
Her: Interrupting cow.
Me: Interrupting c-
Her: MOOOOOOOO!!!!!

It's cute with a five year old, in the context of a joke. But has interrupting become the norm now? I can't watch an interview, reality show or anything without escaping the rudeness. Celebrity Apprentice reinforced it with Melissa Rivers not letting anyone get a word in edgewise. But it's far more rampant than that. Watch Jon Stewart or Bill O'Reilly conduct an "interview" - Stewart especially. Which is a shame, because he's such a smart and observant guy. But LET YOUR GUESTS TALK, PEOPLE. Why have them on the show if they aren't allowed to say a damn word?

Sic my mother on them. You could buy stock in Ivory Soap for that.

The United States of America, Inc.

I'm an idealist. A polyanna. I'm one of those annoying people who hope that somehow things like "logic" and "the goodness of people" will prevail over everything else in this world.

I should know better.

I've worked in large corporations in several industries - entertainment , retail, software, food - and they all have one thing in common... the larger a company gets, the dumber it gets. People in charge find more convoluted ways to get a simple thing done. A phone call turns into a teleconference. A brainstorming session leads to three hours of tangents and bullshit. What starts out as a simple letter to ask a question becomes something that has to be reviewed by five departments with legal language that makes me wonder if we've just sold our building.

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in The United States of America, Inc.

I know that government inefficiency is nothing new. But I've never seen it more prominently displayed on a national level than I have this week. What brings this on, you ask?

THIS:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/19/bonus.bill/index.html

"House Passes Bill Taxing Wall Street Bonuses"

Okay, let's get this straight. Our government gave a bunch of money to companies with crappy business practices. In doing so, the Senate and the White House approved the loophole allowing the bonuses - which they all at first denied, until Dodd and Geithner were confronted and forced to admit this was a conscious effort. Their explanation? They worried about lawsuits if the bonus clause didn't have the loophole. Their solution? Slap a 90% tax on it - which, of course, will also be subject to scrutiny and might possibly be illegal. And now Pelosi stands proudly at the podium once again with that smug "Look what I did! I'm fighting for the LITTLE PEOPLE! ME! ME! ME!" expression like she's some kind of genius.

Sigh... they make it so complicated.

My husband took all of ten minutes to come up with a solution - if this was such a freaking concern when hammering out the bill's terms, why didn't they just ask what the bonuses would be and then deduct that from the total amount of the bailout? The companies can honor their executives' contracts but they lose bailout money (ooooh - consequences!). My husband thought of this and he's never even run for public office, although that decision alone probably makes him smarter than anyone in Washington.

Why must government take the roundabout way to fix things? Is it too much to ask for these people to just THINK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHAT THEY'RE DOING? WHY MUST THEY MAKE ME GET ALL SHOUTY WITH THE CAPS LOCK?

You know, years ago at one of my jobs we were submitting a proposal that needed to include documentation, so the potential customer could see how we write our product docs (content, style, etc.). The potential client wanted us to snail-mail everything on paper. In rushing the proposal, our company's project manager/marketing deptartment asked for five copies of nine different user documents.

Aside from a little overkill it sounds reasonable, right? Except that several of those docs run over 200 pages (double-sided, no less). When printed, this results in about 6,715 pages of hard-copy docs. To give you a visual, a ream of paper that you'd put in the tray of a copier is 500 pages; an entire box of that paper contains 10 reams. This much documentation would equal more than 13 reams of paper. In the mail. Not only would that have cost a bunch of money to send, but what does that say about your company? If you were reviewing proposals for someone to work for you, how would you feel if you got two boxes of paper in the mail? In today's electronic age?

Being my pollyanna self I figured that I could let them know in advance just how much paper it would be. Surely if they heard it from me, the tech writer who actually sees the documents every day, logic would prevail. But their reply was "Print them out anyway and we'll decide from there." So it wasn't enough to give them numbers or even verbally draw them a picture. They had to see the mountain of waste, because there's no way they could have been wrong. And no company I was with before or since is any different, no matter how well-intentioned they are.

This is what has happened to our goverment. They've gone corporate. They don't listen to the everyday people that might not be specialists but have, oh, I don't know, a bit more insight. Nope, we have to take a knee-jerk reaction to public outcry and get it done NOW.

News flash - the economy didn't tank right away; it didn't even take eight years to do it. This recession has been in the work for decades, a combination of natural economic cycles, the wrong kinds of government intervention and terrible greed and stupidity in the business sector. And it's going to take years to improve. If cancer creeps through your body slowly for years and you ignore the symptoms or your habits that might contribute to it, would you expect a doctor to be able to remove it with one surgery? Nope. You'd start with surgery if it were possible, but you've also got chemo, radiation, lifestyle changes, all sorts of treatment. You can't rid your body of it overnight.

Patience, people. And logic. Unless they start taxing that, too.

Thoughts on last night's speeches

I admit, I was happier than I thought I would be. Obama always delivers a great speech so that's nothing new, but he said some things I can agree with (and a few that I cannot). But I don't have an all-encompassing opinion of it beyond that. Instead I have a bunch of random thoughts about his speech and the Republican response - many of which I expressed verbally in real time last night, in what my husband described as "Mystery Political Theater 3000." Of course I can't remember all of them, and I'm too inefficient (read: didn't think of it ahead of time) to blog while watching. So here goes:

Will Nancy Pelosi sit the hell down? I'm not a fan of her and her smarmy, unprofessional demeanor as it is, but was she at mass? I know she's Catholic - actually more like a revisionist Catholic, since she sees fit to rewrite doctrine to suit her views. But even a lapsed Catholic like myself knows the difference between Capitol Hill and a church. I stopped counting the Pelosi-led ovations when I ran out of fingers and toes from my entire family. (Including the dog.) Joe Biden looked downright annoyed. "Oh my GOD, woman, will you cut it out? Look at these chairs. We have the best seats in the house. The COMFY SEATS! Really, have you seen these things? The President doesn't get to sit down at all, but we can luxuriate in fine Corinthian leather - and you're wasting it by hauling your bony ass up every time Obama says a word with more than three letters. Not to mention that if you stand up, then I have to stand up or I look like a schmuck. So for the love of peaches, stop contributing to the devaluation of the Standing O and sit down. Or next time I'm putting a laxative in your coffee and I'll get Jilly to sit in for you. If nothing else, I can stare at her legs for an hour. Sheesh..."

Michelle Obama is made of awesome. I liked her enough on the campaign trail - and really, the "first time I'm proud" thing was insanely blown out of proportion - but I think I love her now. She's dedicated without being a Stepford wife, ambitious without overstepping her bounds. She has a seemingly solid and fun marriage (stuff like that is pretty hard to fake, even for politicians) and sets a great example for her daughters. And when a size-10 woman can rock a dress on national TV and nobody bats an eye, I'm the first to step up and say THANK YOU FOR EATING A SANDWICH. My only complaint - if you choose to speak out and be an active part of your husband's campaign/presidency, be prepared for media scrutiny of your words and don't hide behind your husband's chivalry. Take the heat along with the kudos, Michelle, and I'm totally yours.

It's Henny Penny Light. After weeks of The Sky Is Falling, we now have The Sky Is Falling But We Have A Very Flimsy Umbrella So It's Really Not All That Bad. We're still kind of screwed right now, but I think they might have caught on to the rule of self-fulfilling prophecy; times will get even worse if we are constantly told that they will. I'm not sure that putting us into unheard of debt is the way out of this mess, and I'd like to see some sunset provisions to end such measures when times aren't so dire. But since Obama started behind the bookkeeping 8-ball thanks to what he inherited, I'm willing to cut him a little slack and see if it works. With the sunset.

Bobby Jindal's presidential run is done. I'm truly impressed with what he's been doing in Louisiana, and aside from his social conservatism I agree with a lot of his views. But that was completely overshadowed by his goofy demeanor while giving the Republican response. I don't know what was worse - the gosh-golly-gee cadence to his voice, the extra long anectdote used as an opener, the completely scripted chuckle-shoulder shrug combinations ("oh, those silly Democrats..."), or the almost complete lack of anything new to say. The whole thing was just completely odd. Picture Jack McBrayer as re-imagined in an SNL skit working at the Magic Kingdom's Hall of Presidents and you pretty much get the idea on his delivery. He settled down about halfway through and it became tolerable, but the damage was done. Seriously, who in the GOP thought this guy would be a good follow-up to the King of Speeches?? He's following Barack Obama, for God's sake. You could have had Will Smith up there and it'd be a letdown. No, you don't put someone who has had no national audience up there, you get your best speaking guns out to take the next turn. As someone on CNN said after Jindal's speech, "This was a great night for Sarah Palin."

I really need to write my views on stuff like this as it happens. This is way too much work.