By Julie

1. Thursday I watched a live webcast of J. K. Rowling at Harvard's commencement. Her speech was so good that when Kevin got home I made him listen to the archived recording with me. He thought Rowling would make a good motivational speaker. I agree.

2. This week I signed up for the drink pouch recycling program at TerraCycle. I designated Alex's school as the beneficiary of the 2 cents per pouch that my efforts will net.

3. Prior to Angie's arrival my only me time consisted of half hour soaks in the jacuzzi tub 2 or 3 times a week - not that I'm complaining, it really was all the me time I needed. But lately I haven't even had that because Angie refuses to be held by anyone else for more than 5 minutes at a time before she starts crying. I miss my soaks. It's not something I can outsource.

4. Legally Blonde: The Musical is looking for their next Elle Woods! Can't wait to watch this show on stage next August at the Pantages.

5. According to this doggy daycare employee, about half of all dogs eat their own poo. Good to know Daisy isn't such a freak after all. Now, if only she weren't incontinent.

6. My 6 week postpartum checkup went well. I'm still carrying 10 extra pounds, but at least my clothes are starting to fit again. I've started exercising to help speed up the process, mainly sit ups and push ups. Here are some desk friendly exercises that I plan to do when I go back to work in September.

7. These awesome travel tips make it seem like anyone can travel with small children. Even so, I don't plan on going anywhere until Angie is a year old.

Labels: books, environment, movies, music, parenting, pets, pregnancy, travel

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By Julie

To Do List:

1. Pack for hospital, including admittance paperwork.
2. Finish remodeling the nursery and move all furniture back in.
3. Wash and put away all 0-3 month baby clothes.
4. Buy car seat and two bases.
5. Early bird registration for Alex's after school care and Ana's preschool.
6. Bring home all work stuff I'll need during my leave.
7. Miscellaneous other work projects.

Things we just crossed off the list:

1. Buy size 1 diapers.
2. Test the breast pump to see if it still works.
3. Take Ana on a tour of the preschool she'll be attending in the fall.
4. Talk to kids about baby proofing the living room.

In addition to the baby proofing talk, we also cleaned the entire living room. It took all four of us over an hour, maybe almost two, to pick up and put away every piece of kid debris off the sofa and the floor so that we could vacuum without sucking up something that would break the machine. I did not take before/after photos because it would scare childless folks into never having kids.

I just finished reading Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone, by Beth Lisick. I almost didn't make it past the first chapter because I found her writing lacking compared to some of the bloggers I read daily. Plus I didn't like her personality. By the end of her year-long odyssey, I felt like I could almost enjoy her as a casual acquaintance, but her relentless cynicism would probably keep us from becoming close friends.

Labels: books, home improvement, parenting, pregnancy

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By Julie

Yesterday I finally opened The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl and ended up inhaling it in one sitting. It was a fun read. The reason I was home wasn't so fun though. I woke up feeling awful, tried to drive to work, almost passed out on the way there, and barely got myself home before blacking out on the sofa. I didn't wake up until 2pm!!!

3 days of sleeplessness + horrid back pain + killer allergies + taking pills on an empty stomach + pregnancy in the 3rd trimester = wanting to barf and black out

I was already planning on taking tomorrow off, but I guess my body couldn't wait 2 days. Today I'm completely back to normal though, knock on wood.

Labels: allergies, books, meds, pregnancy

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By Julie

Even though Alex gets his school picture taken in October and we receive his portraits only a couple of months later, every year it takes forever for the class portrait to get delivered. This year we finally got it on Friday. I've been pondering it curiously ever since. There are 17 kids shown. Alex says there are actually 19 kids in his class, one having enrolled later in the year, so I think the last one must have missed picture day.

The racial breakdown of the class is hard to miss. Kevin chuckled over the fact that there's only one obviously white kid in Alex's entire class. Counting Alex and a few other mixed kids, I guess you can say there are 3.0 white kids in the class. The rest are about 1/3 Hispanic and 2/3 Asian or Pacific Islander. This year there are no black kids in his class.

What I noticed though was the gender breakdown. It's about 50/50 male-female, and as I learned back in January, if you invite all your 2nd grade classmates to your birthday party, you can safely assume no one of the opposite sex will show up. Even though Alex sometimes mentions the girls in his class when he recounts his day, for the most part he plays only with the boys. At age 7 or 8 these kids are already self segregating by gender.

The reason this is on my mind is because they're only 6 months away from becoming 3rd graders. That was the age I found out many of my classmates already knew about the birds and the bees. Here's how it happened: I asked my mom for a box to take to school to turn into a mailbox for my Valentine's Day cards, and when I took the empty tampon box she gave me, several of the kids laughed and made interesting gestures. Despite both knowing very little English and nothing about sex until that point, I quickly figured out what they were talking about.

Kevin thinks there must have been an extraordinarily large number of younger siblings in my 3rd grade class as the only reason he first heard about sex at about the same time was because of his same-aged cousin who had an 11-year-old brother. Either way, time is of the essence. We've got an 8-year-old son whose closest friends all have older siblings, and we want to take advantage of the fact that he's still willing to talk to us about anything, including stories about stuff the girls at school keep doing that have way more subtext than he realizes.

Back when I was a kid I would have loved a book about sex, love, and relationships as I knew no adult was going to tell me anything worth knowing, and fortunately there are plenty of kid-friendly books on these topics now. But frankly, now that I'm a parent, I think it's going to take more than a book to do this right.

For starters, Kevin is wondering whether he should stop skipping over certain parts of the Piers Anthony book he's been reading to Alex at bedtime, stuff like his eyes lingered on her alluring curves -- excuse me while I giggle madly... okay, I'm done -- because including them might draw out questions from Alex. Hmmm.

In other news, I discovered to my great annoyance that someone has stolen our code and posted it on this website: http://senibudaya.blogspot.com. From clues in the source code I'm guessing it's a guy, and he seems to have done it sometime ago as the stolen code resembles Juvin.com circa 2005. So I sent the following message to Blogger, hoping they would contact the user:

Subj: Blogspot user stole our content

The blogger at http://senibudaya.blogspot.com/ is hosting our content on his site without our permission. This includes the Flickr badge as well as other files referenced in his source code.

We have always had a clear copyright notice posted on our site http://juvin.com, i.e. (copyright symbol) 1998-2008. We have allowed individuals to republish our content twice in the past. This was not one of them.

We request that our content be taken off this site immediately.

Blogger replied with a very long and tedious message that began with

Hi there,

Thank you for your note. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office website: http://lcWeb.loc.gov/copyright/ ) and other applicable intellectual property laws, which may include removing or disabling access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity.

To file a notice of infringement with us, you must provide a written communication (by fax or regular mail, not by email) that sets forth the items specified below. Please note that pursuant to that Act, you may be liable to the alleged infringer for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees) if you materially misrepresent that you own an item when you in fact do not. Indeed, in a recent case (please see
http://www.onlinepolicy.org/action/legpolicy/opg_v_diebold/ for more information), a company that sent an infringement notification seeking removal of online materials that were protected by the fair use doctrine was ordered to pay such costs and attorneys fees. The company agreed to pay over $100,000. Accordingly, if you are not sure whether material available online infringes your copyright, we suggest that you first contact an attorney.

So the burden of proof is on us, and if we can't adequately prove it, we might have to pay the loser attorney fees??? What the hell?!

Incidentally, the two people that I had allowed to use content off our website were both authors. One wrote a book on fortune cookies and cited my fortune cookies page (it's no longer up), and another was writing a college textbook about the Internet with a chapter about blogs. They even showed me how they were going to use the content so that I knew they were going to present it in a professional way.

I guess what bothers me other than the fact that this loser didn't bother asking for permission is that he's totally mangling our content by presenting it on that hideous page. It's as if he was trying to learn HTML and failing very badly. Someone get this guy an HTML for Dummies book, please!

Labels: books, kids, lusers, parenting

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By Julie

My latest read is A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. I'm about halfway through it. The writing is not exemplary, which is too bad, since it does make some good arguments against our society's illogical bias towards over-organization. I'm still not fond of my crammed drawers or messy desks, both at home and at work, but I'm pretty sure spending more time alphabetizing, labeling, and container-izing is not going to solve anything. If anything has helped it's Scaling Down: Living Large in a Smaller Space, which I'd read last year. I came away from that book convinced that less really is more, and I've been slowly but surely making headway against my packrat tendencies.

The best weapon I've found so far is to avoid shopping and bringing more things into the house. Whenever I do go shopping, I tend to buy too many things, whether it's the jumbo bag of onions or yet another V-neck T that I do not need, just because it's on sale. When I give a shopping list to Kevin and ask him to go to the store, on the other hand, he tends to come home with only what was on the list. Judging by our credit card bills, this strategy has already kept a few hundred dollars worth of stuff out of our house this year, so I think it's one worth continuing. Since I do not actually like shopping, it won't even feel like I'm depriving myself of anything.

Labels: books, shopping

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By Julie

Last night I finished reading Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, a chronological series of essays on consumer culture, globalization, and their environmental costs, coupled with the author's personal challenge of not buying anything beyond the necessities for an entire year. I didn't necessarily agree with everything she said in her analyses, but I found her personal journey inspirational. While archiving our blog entries from last year, I came across an entry in which I asked whether it was possible to live within a culture without totally buying into it. I feel like this book is helping me answer that question, at least for myself.


Monday I attended the first awards assembly of the year at Alex's school. This one was just for the Kindergarteners, 1st graders, and 2nd graders. Each teacher picked a handful of students from his/her class, and as the child went up, the teacher would explain which one of three reasons they were receiving the award: high academic achievement, most improvement, or good citizenship.

When Alex went up, his teacher said that she chose him for his award not only because he's a good student, but also because he's always helping classmates when they're working in the computer lab. I was really proud of him. (But I didn't cry!!!)

The assembly also included a presentation about the philanthropic project everyone at Alex's school is undertaking for the next few months -- collecting pennies to help a tiny school in Kenya build a library. I've always wondered about the six degrees aspects of these projects, and this time I wasn't left hanging. Apparently, the son of the school's founder works for our school district!

I appreciate these projects because while I agree parents should have primary responsibility for teaching their kids about morality, kids do spend an awful lot of time at school, and I like the tone they set for how the kids should behave towards each other. I also like the emphasis on pennies vs. checks with lots of zeros because it makes kids feel like no good deed is too small.


That night, Ana took on the herculean task of picking all of the pennies out of Kevin's change bucket. She managed to fill up that entire pickle jar with pennies! But I doubt that would be enough to buy a single book for this library, let alone dry wall and roofing material. I think we'll have to supplement with nickels.

Labels: books, kids, parenting

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By Kevin

1. Where My Time Goes

The kind clerk in the jury room gave me some things to think about when she discussed the way Los Angeles County maintains its juror master list. Essentially, they merge the DMV and voter records for the county and the unique combination of your name and address is used to determine when someone is on the list twice. The problem is that if the DMV shows a John Q. Public at 123 Main St. and the voter roll lists a John Quincy Public at the same address, Jury Services considers this to be two different people. If you're on the list twice, you get called, on average, twice as often.

Thank you, kind Jury Services lady, for finally explaining to me why I had more jury experience than any of the 34 other potential jurors in the courtroom today. Seriously, some of these people are old enough that they could have witnessed the LA Superior Court system being founded in 1851 and they've only been called once before. I have been summoned no less than seven times to participate in the fine tradition of ensuring justice for my fellow man and have ended up on three juries. Now should I try to get my middle name added to my voter registration or get it removed from my driver's license?

2. I Speed, You Speed, We (don't) All Speed

My assigned court was a relatively small one for LA, but it's not like there's any empty space around here. There are probably around half-a-million people who would indicate that this courthouse is closer to them than any other. So why do all the people in line to deal with traffic citations know each other? I kid you not, I walked past this line six times over two days and three of those times I got to witness a mini reunion of long-lost pals. Hey Joe, they caught you?! Hah, they're always on me, it can't be stopped! Nothin' to do for it, eh?? Nah man, you know... so how's the wife?

3. The Shopping Factor

These days it's quite difficult to get excused from jury service altogether. What is relatively easy (for those of us who pick up the kids from childcare at least) is getting your service moved to a more convenient location. I got the courthouse with a shopping mall across the street. I wish I could say that I planned this, but fate can be a wonderful companion.

It turns out that the judge doesn't rearrange his schedule just because there are 34 people waiting around for a particular case so that they can find out which twenty get to go home and which fourteen don't. He spends a couple hours in the morning with his "normal case load" which is followed by a fifteen minute break. After the break he'll either finish up the last batch or just chill with the Deputy DA and the defense counsel for a while. We, the potential jurors, the mass of humanity clogging up the hallway for a couple hours, don't get invited in until, oh, about 40 minutes before the hour-and-a-half lunch break. After lunch it improves somewhat with a little over two hours of jury selection action peppered with breaks and a few leftover morning cases. Then the court closes at 4:15 and ends the milling around until the next day.

The major benefit of all this is that I finally caught up on some of my shopping, and the next time you get a summons, I expect you to do the same!

4. Why Our Government Shouldn't Meddle In The Market

Did you know that more or less the first time the up-and-coming industrialists of England stood up to the landed gents in Parliament it was over protective corn tariffs? 1813 or thereabouts, if my information is correct. Well, the landowners were a tad pissed because the whole war with Napoleon and some bad weather made for a pretty lousy harvest and some entrepreneurial chaps decided to run a little import business to take advantage of the high corn prices. The Parliament naturally went along with the idea of massive corn import tariffs because they'd rolled over for the landowners for hundreds of years (think feudalism) and it would have all gone swimmingly except for one thing. The price of corn directly impacted what the industrialists had to pay their labor - hard to run the cogs of industry when you're dead of starvation apparently. This cut into their bottom line and they weren't having it any more.

It would all sound remarkably like today except for the fact that now industry is in bed with the legislators and the land owners and the only bottom line suffering is mine and yours. ADM gets to buy subsidized fake sugar and ethanol that takes more fossil fuel to produce than it saves at the pump. Corn growers get fat subsidies. We The People pay for it, come April 15.

What does this have to do with Jury Duty you may well ask? Well, aside from shopping I got a chance to catch up on some of my long overdue reading. Any activity that carries the side benefit of hours of reading time is a good one.

5. They Aren't My Peers

I'm not sure who started this mis-quoting of the Sixth Amendment as a "jury of your peers" because I just looked it up and it doesn't say anything about your peers. It says you get an "impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed". This has been said before, and I'm not generally one to beat a dead horse (is that saying correct? why would anybody do that?) but these people are definitely not my peers.

When it was time for the defense council to have a chat with the first twenty potential jurors, he tried to get off to a good start by asking some leading questions. Questions which could only be answered in the affirmative by any US citizen. Or so he thought.

Defense: So, juror number... four. Would you say that it's a good idea that we have here in this country that the defendant doesn't have the burden of proof? Do you think that's a good thing?

Four: No.

Defense: ???

Four: I think that if he's arrested and all, he better have a pretty good excuse for why he shouldn't go to jail, right?

Defense: Okay, honest opinion. That's good. (maybe they didn't understand, lets go back to the start...) Juror number... eight. Do you think the way it is here, with the defendant assumed to be innocent, is a good system? Or do you think it would be better if we just believed what the arresting officer says and assume them to be guilty?

Eight: I trust police.

Defense: Okaaay. Right. But, isn't it plausible that an officer might make a mistake?

Eight: I guess that's possible.

Defense: Right. So we assume that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty so th

Eight: But I trust police more than criminals.

And so on.

Honestly I could write pages and pages of this crap except that by this point I was trying so damn hard not to laugh because I was right in front of the judge and he was looking all grim at the state of society and wondering why he bothered coming to work anyway and it wouldn't do to laugh and... well, I sort of tuned the rest out.

6. What You Absolutely Should Not Say If You Want To Serve

I really didn't have an opinion one way or the other about serving, honestly. The case was only expected to last a week at the outside and I already mentioned the shopping and reading benefits. That was until the lawyers and the judge made nice and agreed on The Twelve. I was number thirteen.

Allow me a short digression here on why thirteen is bad. I show up for a week. Pretend I'm a real juror. Listen to everything the boring people say. Take notes. Form opinions about the credibility of witnesses. Get all the information I need in order to decide the case. Then I sit in the hall for as long as it takes the real jurors to decide what to do with the guy. I'm against completely pointless effort on principle and this passed all obvious tests for qualification as such.

Even given all that, I wasn't exactly trying to sabotage my chances when they started questioning the group of eight potential alternate jurors. I was actually thinking about my (non) peers back in the previous point when he asked me the ridiculous question.

Defense: Juror number thirteen. How do you feel about the burden of proof?

Me: I'm sorry, what was the question?

Defense: Do you think it's good that [the Deputy DA] must prove my client's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before a guilty verdict can be returned?

Me: I'm in favor of The Constitution, yes.

That was his last question. Immediately afterwards I was excused by the Deputy DA.

Labels: books, politics, shopping

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By Julie

Is age 3 too young to experience unrequited love? Today Ana burst into tears because Daisy refused to come when called. She sobbed uncontrollably into my shoulder until I made her laugh, I don't even remember how, just one of those things that desperate parents do when they see their child unhappy.

Later Ana played with Daisy while I kept watch, occasionally glaring at the dog, daring her to break Ana's heart again, not that Daisy would even notice my glaring as something out of the ordinary. She already sees me as The Enforcer and tries to stay out of my way, except when I'm cooking. Then she can't help herself but come sniffing around my ankles, looking hopeful.

Other than making Ana cry, Daisy's second day home was uneventful. Kevin took her out for a couple of short walks, and she seems to be reacting well to them. If you've watched The Dog Whisperer or read any of Cesar's books you'd know that taking your dog for regular walks is his prescription for just about everything. During the morning walk Kevin was accompanied by Ana. During the evening walk he was accompanied by Alex, who took along a golf club at my insistence. Alex got a big kick out of that.

Today I did five loads of laundry. At one point I asked Kevin to hang up the stuff that needed to be line dried, and I went back inside to put away some clothes. I found a stray hanger and asked Ana to take it to Kevin.

Ana: Daddy, I have something for you!

Kevin: Oh yeah? What is it?

Ana: (holding up hanger) It's a hooker!

I also cooked a ton of chicken today, with enough garlic to drive away vampires from the entire neighborhood. This family is NOT getting sick this winter.

Labels: books, food, kids, nablopomo, parenting, pets

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By Julie

Since discovering Elizabeth George I've been devouring volumes of her work, so much that I've been neglecting to watch the BBC show based on her books, the DVDs for which I keep renewing from the library. Don't get me wrong, the show is superb, but there's only so much you can crowd into an hour, and besides they always show the crime scene too many times for my taste. The books are just a lot richer in other kinds of details.

I got some news today that made Kevin want to celebrate, even though I didn't really consider it good news, more the lesser of two evils, like if the doctor said your extremely sore back was not a slipped disk, but Kevin said it was worth celebrating anyway because it could have been much, much worse, which was the honest to goodness truth, so we had a lovely meal to commemorate the event, and it all made me smile despite myself, so it was a good day after all.

Labels: books, food, nablopomo

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