Friday, April 03, 2015

Weekend Reading: The A Little Bit Rushed Edition

It is spring break, and Pumpkin's birthday is on Sunday. We're having a party for her on Saturday. I told her she could invite a handful of her friends, but by the time you add in siblings, somehow we have 14 kids coming to our place tomorrow. Yikes! Pumpkin requested a pirate theme and a jumpy. So I ordered a jumpy with palm trees (the pirate ship was too big for our yard), printed out a "pin the tail on Tic-Toc Croc" game from Disney Jr. (Pumpkin still loves Jake and the Neverland Pirates, even though the boys she knows tease her calling it a "baby" show. She actually stands up to their nonsense on this pretty well.) And we're having a treasure hunt, which Mr. Snarky and I planned out last night.

Fridays are work from home days. I usually avoid putting "home" tasks on my "work day" to do list, but today I made an exception, and my to do list included a shopping trip to get treats for the party and baking the oatmeal-chocolate chip bars Pumpkin wants at the party. They're in the oven now.

My parents are here to entertain and watch Pumpkin while I work, but even so, this has been a hectic feeling week. I suspect this had something to do with the fact that we had a birthday gift to buy, a party to finish planning, and Easter baskets to think about (we don't do big baskets, but we do get a chocolate bunny and a couple of small things for each kid).

But, neither snow (did you, California has no snow pack?), nor rain (not recently), nor ridiculously busy weeks will keep me from accumulating links for you, so here they are:

I'm still not ready much about the Ellen Pao case, but I liked this Annie Lowrey article about the sexism you can't quite prove, and  Nitasha Tiku's wrap up of the case is very good.

Susan Decker's reflections on the trial (posted prior to the verdict) are interesting, too.

After reading those links and getting a little depressed, go read Cate Burlington's Things My Male Tech Colleagues Have Actually Said To Me, Annotated, and have a good LOLSOB at it all.  A lot of women I follow were tweeting their "score"- i.e., the number of items on the list they've essentially heard, too. My score is 6.

But hey! Did you know that if you're in a position of authority at a work place, you can do some things to make it less sexist and racist? It is true. This actually quite good article discusses how.

Warning: this letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Star might make something get in your eye.

Here's a post from a 10 year old about attending a disability pride event given by an autistic woman.

Mr. Snarky heard about this study about how babies respond to objects that seem to disobey the laws of physics and liked it so much he came home and told me about it. It does sound pretty cool. And studies with babies are always cute.

A medieval potion seems to be effective against MRSA. I'm going to have to find the paper describing the studies when it comes out, if only to read the methods section.

What's it like having kids?

And in me-centric news: I had a guest post at the blog for the Diversity Journal Club, about how I keep career anxiety at bay amidst all the uncertainty.

1 comment:

  1. Industry physicist5:07 PM

    Surprisingly (to me), my score for the "things my male coworkers have said to me" is zero. 80-90% of my coworkers are men. I'm in my late 20's.

    I don't know why. Just wanted to share--because it's not equally bad everywhere.

    I work in a large, well-established tech (but not software) company and work with a lot of older white dudes. A few of my friends from college work at software startups and I have spent some time hanging out with their coworkers, who are mostly white and asian dudes in their 20's and 30's. Despite the fact that these dudes are all pretty respectful towards me individually when I talk to them about what I do, I think I would feel much less comfortable working at one of those startups than where I work now.

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