Weekend Reading: The 100 Days Edition

I had such a nice rollerblade today! It was a bit windy, so I got more of a workout than usual, but the temperature was perfect and it was just a nice day to be out by the bay.

I also have some nice news to share: this week I signed a contract for my next children's book! In fact, I signed a three book contract. These will be easy readers with a science-y theme. The first one is about dinosaurs. I have no info on publication schedule yet. I'll keep you posted! I should probably also start paying attention to my children's books author site again!

Moving on to less happy topics...

David Remnick wrote a brutal survey of Trump's first 100 days at The New Yorker. I can't really argue with any of it.

Michelle Goldberg argues that we've gotten to the point where there's one standard for Republicans and one for Democrats, and that the only way out is for Democrats to promise to investigate every sleazy thing Trump does. I have a hard time finding anything to argue with there, either, although I wonder if the double standard is a function of Republicans vs. Democrats or just one party controlling the legislature and executive vs. not.

One thing we need to investigate as soon as we get a Congress willing to actually investigate: the use of official State Department websites to promote Trump's private club.

I was glad to see the second attempt at repealing the ACA fail. As I tweeted earlier (in response to this article from Greg Sargent), I wish the Republicans would face some facts on healthcare, take a deep breath, and try to actually fix things. Actually, I wish they'd do that on anything. The GOP leadership is living in a fantasyland, and that is not good for our country.

From the standpoint of politics, though, I think Josh Marshall is right that this second attempt provides some hefty ammunition against Republicans in 2018, even though it did not even get to a vote.

So, moving on from politics but staying at TPM: I also agree with Josh Marshall's assessment of the problem facing Fox News right now.

I like this article from Caitlin Fitzsimmons about how rest improves work.

I do not like the reason why larger sized clothes fit so poorly.

Hee hee:

Like my sister's bumper sticker says: Midwives: They help people out.

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) April 26, 2017

This is fun: the same sentence, in English, going back through the years.

And here's your BUNNIES!!!

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— うさぎ島の写真bot (@rabbit_isle_bot) April 25, 2017

Happy weekend, everyone! Thanks to a sleepover for Pumpkin and my sister's kind offer to take Petunia for a night, we get a kid-free night tomorrow. We're going to go mattress shopping. We're so much fun! (We'll probably have a nice dinner out, too.)

Trip Story: Malibu and Santa Barbara

I'd better finish writing about our spring break vacation before I forget the details!

Earlier, I wrote about the two days we spent in Santa Monica. Since it only takes a couple of hours to drive from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara, we had time to take the scenic route. We headed up the coast, and stopped for morning snack in Malibu.

The kids were excited about Malibu because Mr. Snarky got them hooked on a ridiculous YouTube show called Barbie in the Dreamhouse, which is exactly what you think it is from that name. It is an animated version of Barbie and her friends, and it is set in "Malibu."

But of course, Barbie's "Malibu" is nothing like real Malibu, or at least not the part of real Malibu that nobodies like us can see.

Still, there is a nice lagoon/bird sanctuary.

The Malibu lagoon

Fun story: as we pulled into the parking lot to check out this lagoon, we saw a school group heading in. Then, in the parking lot, there was a fancy catered lunch, with tables with tableclothes and a couple of food trucks. I am ashamed to admit that my first thought was "damn, school field trips are different here!" In fact, it was a film shoot, and the fancy lunch was for the film crew, not the school kids.

(We couldn't tell what they were filming. It was a surf scene, but the surf was lame, so we're pretty sure it was a generic surf scene for a film/show not about surfing. We didn't recognize anyone, but I would not recognize anyone from even the most famous shows, because I only watch ancient Midsommer Murders, cheesy Dutch mystery shows (Heer & Meester), and delightful New Zealand mystery shows (Brokenwood Mysteries), none of which would be filming in Malibu.)

Anyhow, after admiring the view and the grounds of the old house from which we could see the view (the Adamson house), we headed to a nearby mall I'd chosen as a likely snack stop. There isn't any reason to dwell on that, unless you're into $400 sneakers. (I am not.)

From Malibu, we drove to Ventura for lunch. Ventura is a nice town, but all we did there was eat lunch and take some time to play on the playground. Then we headed on to Santa Barbara.

We were too early to get into our vacation rental, so we sat on the beach. That was nice.

Also nice: the view from our vacation rental once we got in:

Not a bad view

My parents arrived in Santa Barbara at about the same time we did (having had lunch with us in Ventura). My sister arrived by train a little later, and a good family friend arrived by plane later still. Most of our time in Santa Barbara was about being with family and our friend, but we did do a little sightseeing.

Pumpkin is a 4th grader this year, and in California, 4th graders do a project about the missions. She did her project on Mission Santa Barbara, and so she was keen to go check it out. We did so, but could not go in the actual church, because it is still a church and there was a funeral that day.

Still, Pumpkin was happy to at least see the Mission, and she liked seeing some of the exhibits in the museum.

Mission Santa Barbara

The next day, we gave Petunia her wish for the trip, and took her to see the Santa Barbara Zoo, It is much smaller than our zoo, but it has its own charms, such as a dinosaur show.

Dino show at the zoo!

The penguin exhibit was also a hit, as was the train. Honestly, a train ride and dinosaurs in one stop is enough to make Petunia a very happy kid.

The real highlight of Santa Barbara for the kids, though, was being just a block and a half from the beach. It wasn't really swimming weather, but it was fine "play on the beach in the sand" weather, and they had a blast.

On Sunday, we had to pack up and head home. We drove home in a single day. We broke up the drive with a stop in Santa Ana for lunch at Polly's Pies (pretty good!) and a visit to the "cube"- the Orange County Discovery Cube, which is a kids' science museum. My kids had seen the big black cube from the freeway a few times, and so were interested to see what was inside.

The Cube

Inside is a decent science museum, but it was packed the day we were there. Still, the kids had enough fun that they didn't mind getting back in the car for the remainder of the drive home.

All in all, it was a really great spring break. Sadly, the rest of April has not been so idyllic. There's been a lot of fun, but a little too much hecticness (yeah, I know, that's not a word, but it describes April perfectly, so it stays). Here's hoping I can catch my breath in May, before the end of school year rush sets in.

Weekend Reading: The Trying to Rally Edition

I'm planning to go to my local science march tomorrow. I'm sure I'll be glad once I get there, but right now, my main emotion about this is resentment. I don't want to have to march to defend science. It is my wedding anniversary, and instead of doing something nice with my husband, I am sticking him with the Saturday gymnastics classes so that I can go march. It seems ridiculous to have to march to say "we should let facts inform our opinions, not the other way around," but here we are.

I also don't want to have to make phone calls and send faxes to insist that the people in power take the conflicts of interest in this administration and the Russian interference in our election seriously. Some seriously sketchy and not at all normal stuff is going on, and I don't know if its goal is to make the Trump family money or to advance Putin's interests or both. It seems I shouldn't have to exert so much pressure to get this investigated.

I don't want to have to make another round of phone calls against the latest disaster of a health care "plan" from the Republicans. I don't want to have to make phone calls against the stupid wall. I hate that I worry about sending a letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security protesting the deportation of a young man with DACA protection. I'll probably do it, but my husband's renewed green card hasn't come in the mail yet, so maybe I should just avoid drawing attention to us, instead. I hate that this thought even crosses my mind.

And I am well and truly tired of being sanctimoniously exhorted to feel empathy for the voters who put us in this mess. My empathy store is a little depleted right now.

I know I need to get over myself and keep working for what is right. And I will. I will rally and go to the march tomorrow. I will rally and make my phone calls/send my faxes next Wednesday. I will keep going. But every now and then, I will feel some resentment that I have to spend my time on this.

All of which has nothing to do with today's links.

I think Jamelle Bouie's take on the recent special elections is good.

David Fahrenthold talks about three ways in which what he learned from reporting on Donald Trump's charity giving foreshadowed Trump's behavior as president.

Here's an alternative vision for the border region just east of Otay Mesa. I know there must be some people in San Diego who support the wall, but I haven't run into them. Even the people who want stronger border enforcement think the wall won't work, and want the money spent in other ways.

Caroline Criado-Perez has a good post about Fearless Girl and the reaction of the guy who created the charging bull statue. No, really, read it even if you're sick of that whole discussion.

The Handmaid's Tale is a warning for conservative women. This article got shared out by Margaret Atwood herself, which was pretty cool. It touches on one of the issues I've long had with women who lead campaigns in defense of "traditional values" like women being housewives. They have a career: they speak and write and have a space outside their home. But they would deny it to me. Sarah Jones, the author of the article, comes from a conservative Christian background, and she understands and explains it better than I do. If for no other reason, this article is worth your time.

(I have one point of disagreement: I do think it is possible to be anti-abortion and a feminist, but I think the people who claim to be rarely follow through on what would be required to truly be a feminist. To me, a feminist has to want women to have the same chance at self-fulfillment as men. That is only possible if a reproductive accident will not derail our lives. Access to abortion is one way to make that possible. But there are other ways. Better maternity leave, more cultural support for and less discrimination against mothers in the workplace, better child care subsidies for people who need them.... If you are opposed abortion but still consider yourself a feminist, I think you need to spend some time thinking about how to make a world in which abortion would not feel so necessary to so many women. I don't see a lot of that work being done, to be honest, but then again, I haven't gone in search of it. I suspect there are pockets of people thinking like this in the anti-abortion movement, but right now, they are utterly drowned out by the "a woman's place is in the home" crowd.)

Moving on from the contentious issues....

This is an interesting history of the pursuit of happiness.

Speaking of happiness... We have a lot of stuff, and it seems to be stressing us out, not making us happy, particularly if we are women. This is probably why that Kondo method was popular: it promised a way to get rid of stuff.

And here's something that did make me happy: A nice post from Margaret Redlich, the author of Don't Call It Bollywood, about the history of dancing in films (US and Indian).

Kelly J. Baker wrote a really nice essay about quitting.

Warning: this language guessing game is a huge time sink.

BUNNY!

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— うさぎ島の写真bot (@rabbit_isle_bot) April 22, 2017

That's it for this week. If you're marching tomorrow, I hope you have a good time!

Working around the Barriers

I had lunch with an old grad school friend today. It was great to see her, and as always, lunch with a friend did me good.

But there was an undertone of... I don't know what. Sadness? Anger? Frustration?... too. Every time I meet up with a woman friend who is in my generation, I hear about how sexism and gender bias are blocking her progress. This is not because my friends are whiners, or prone to looking for something external to blame for their problems. In fact, the stories usually come out as an aside, to explain a change in course. She was working her way around a barrier, and that barrier was usually a man. If it wasn't a man, it was multiple men.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I've heard a variation of this story at least 10 times in the last year. It is demoralizing to think about this in the aggregate. So much talent being thwarted.

But I'll say this for us: we're all finding a way around. A lot of us won't get what we originally set our sights on, but we're all getting pretty good lives. So that's something.

The other heartening thing is that we're helping each other find our new paths. On my more optimistic days, I think that in another 10 years, I'll look at what my group of friends has accomplished and be amazed. We will have built an alternate universe of success.

On my less optimistic days, I think we are doomed to achieve less than our potential. We will salvage good lives from the wreckage of our ambitions, but we will always know we could have done more.

Probably, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I see signs of hope. Not in millennial men. Sorry, some of them are awesome. So are some GenX men. So are some Boomer men. But my own experience has shown me that younger men can be just as sexist as their elders. In fact, sometimes they are more sexist because they haven't met the woman who will teach them to be better yet. Seriously, just look at Silicon Valley.

No, I see signs of hope in women. Just as we are individually finding our ways around the barriers in our careers, we are collectively looking for ways around the barriers. I hope that we remember to go back and dismantle those barriers where we can. Because my daughters and their friends are coming behind us. When I sit and watch my daughters' gymnastics class, I am in awe of the joy and strength of the girls out on that floor. I want a world where that joy and strength—and joy in strength—can continue into adulthood. When I went to watch my daughter's spelling bee, I was thrilled to see the kids supporting each other, cheering for each other. Boys and girls cheered for and high-fived their classmates, even when they were clearly disappointed not to be the one still in the running. I see my friends working to raise their sons to be just as feminist as their daughters, and I think, maybe we can fix this. Not for our generation, but for the next one.

I think my generation will be a generation of women who mostly had to find their way around the barriers. What keeps me going is the thought that maybe I can help bring some of those barriers down for my daughters.

So, here's to lunch with friends. And here's to finding our way around the barriers. But also: here's to finding a way to break those damn barriers down.

Trip Story: Santa Monica

We took a little trip up the coast for spring break this year, stopping for a couple of nights in Santa Monica and then three nights in Santa Barbara. Neither location was new to us, but our kids had never been to Santa Monica, and neither really remembers our last visit to Santa Barbara. I thought I'd write about the entire trip in one post, but I ran out of steam, so this is just about Santa Monica.

We set out mid-morning on Tuesday, and stopped for lunch at Irvine Spectrum and some play time at Heritage Park in Irvine. Then we got back in the car and drove to the first real stop of our trip: Randy's Donuts!

The doughnut promised land.

For those who aren't familiar with this SoCal landmark, I'll just say that it is so famous that one of the kids at our school built a model of it for his "California Landmarks" project.

The doughnuts were pretty good. They have all three types of doughnuts: cake, glazed, and (my favorite) old-fashioned. I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to visit again, but I'm more of an ice cream person than a doughnut person.

After our pit stop, we drove on to our hotel in Santa Monica, which was a surprisingly quirky Days Inn. It had a bit of an art deco vibe and a rooftop sun deck with plaques naming US presidents. It also had a comfortable room and an OK free breakfast, so I have no complaints.

For the first evening, we headed down to Venice. We wanted to show our kids the canals. It happened that my parents (who were meeting up with us in Santa Barbara) were in Santa Monica that night, too, in a hotel just a few blocks from ours. So we all headed to Venice. We parked near Mother's Beach in Marina del Rey, and let the kids have a short play on the playground. Then we walked into Venice and strolled the canals.

Unfortunately, we happened to be there during one of the times in which they drain the canals (to keep the water from getting stagnant), so the canals weren't quite as impressive as we remembered from earlier visits. But they were still a nice place to stroll, and the kids liked looking at the different houses along the paths.

Usually, there is more water.

We had dinner at C&O Trattoria, which is a very family friendly place noted for an unlimited supply of garlic knots (which, to our surprise, both of our kids liked) and for the sing along to That's Amore. We managed to hang on just long enough to see the sing along (some of us even participated), and then we walked back to our car.

The next day, my parents headed to The Getty. We had considered going there, too, but decided our kids would enjoy it more in a few years. Instead, we headed to the Santa Monica pier to be stereotypical tourists.

We got to the pier waaaay too early. Our kids start their days at 7 a.m., if we're lucky enough to get a little bit of a sleep in. So we were down to the pier not long after 9. Nothing much was open there until 10, and the amusement park wasn't open until 11.... so we walked a short way to the original muscle beach location. Petunia liked the tall swings, and Pumpkin had fun climbing the ropes and trying her hand at the rings. 

Harder than it looks

Between muscle beach, the arcade, and just strolling the pier, we killed enough time to be able to go on a couple of rides at the amusement park. The kids chose the Ferris wheel and the bungee/trampoline thing. 

The view from the Ferris wheel. We had lunch at the place with the yellow roof.

They'd have done more, but we didn't want to spend that much, and anyways, it was time for lunch. The Mexican place at the end of the pier was not bad at all, which is surprising for a restaurant that can rely on its location for a constant stream of customers. After lunch, we walked out to the waves and the kids had fun getting their feet wet. We only pulled them away from the beach with a promise of more beach time once we got to Santa Barbara. 

Happy children. And a bear. Petunia wore her bear a lot this trip.

We also strolled Colorado Street. Petunia was impressed with the dinosaur fountains. Pumpkin wanted to get a treat, but I held her off with a promise of ice cream at a really good place I remembered in Santa Monica Place mall. But that ice cream shop was gone, so we had frozen yogurt at a pretty average place instead. Then we walked over to Tongva Park because we wanted to see it and because we thought the kids could use some playground time.  It is a nice park, but I didn't take any nice pictures there, so you'll just have to take my word for it..

After some park time, we went back to our hotel for a bit, then headed out again in the car. We were meeting friends in Encino for dinner. Although Encino is quite close to Santa Monica, there is no good route there at rush hour. (Really: go to Google Maps and check how long it takes to drive between Santa Monica and Encino at 5 p.m. on a weekday, and then check it again at 10 p.m.. If you've never understood why people complain about LA traffic, this will probably make it clear.)

Our plan was to leave early and drive over to Westwood and then up to Mulholland Drive. We'd then drive along Mulholland and down into Encino. This worked... sort of. There was a lot of traffic along Wiltshire until we got past the 405 and the kids got impatient in the back seat. Then Google Traffic showed an accident on our route up to Mulholland, so I rerouted us on the fly... right into Bel Air. I half expected to be blocked by a gate, but we were not. And to my surprise, the kids LOVED this detour. They were really impressed with the big fancy houses, and happily pointed out which ones they'd like to own as we worked our way through Bel Air and Beverly Glen up to Mulholland. Then we managed to miss every single scenic pullout on Mulholland, and just drove along it and then down into Encino, again through a neighborhood of very nice houses. 

Dinner in Encino was delightful. It was great to catch up with our friends. And by the time we were done with dinner, traffic had cleared, and we could take the direct route back to the hotel. 

All in all, it was a nice short visit to one of the most tourist-friendly parts of LA. The next day, we got up and headed north to Malibu... but I'll pick that up some other time. 

Weekend Reading: The Catching Up Edition

I've had a pretty good week, work-wise, and am almost caught up again. If I get a good Sunday morning work session, I should be set. (For those who don't know: I "trade" some work time on Sunday mornings for a Friday afternoon rollerblade, which I am just back from. The bay path is less crowded on Friday afternoons, and if I schedule writing work for Sunday mornings I rather enjoy settling in with my tea to do some work while the kids have a lazy morning, so this is a win-win arrangement for me.)

I am over the cold I caught on spring break, but still sniffly because there are wildflowers everywhere. I cannot remember another year like this for wildflowers. All open space is awash in color, mostly yellow, but with some splashes of pink/purple and orange. It is really pretty, but my allergies are going berserk. Then yesterday, I made them worse by pulling out a bunch of wild grass that was growing in our native landscaped front yard. There is more to pull, but I think I'll leave that for Mr. Snarky. He doesn't have a grass allergy!

Anyhow, let's get to the links.

I didn't save many links about politics. I'm still following what is going on, but maybe I have a bit of fatigue on the topic. I will re-up my recommendation of Talking Points Memo for a good round up of the most important stories of the day, along with some smart analysis (with a left of center tilt). I've found Josh Marshall's analysis of the Russia story particularly helpful. He's not prone to exaggeration, and is good and pulling together the strands from the reporting at the "big" places. Here is his latest on that topic, so you can see what I mean.

This story about the closing of hospitals in rural Tennessee highlights one of my problems with running health care as a for profit enterprise: just because there isn't a profit to be made in some location, that doesn't mean there isn't a need there.

The different standard women who run for office must meet.

Sesame Street has introduced a muppet with autism, Julia. Vox reporter Dylan Matthews, who has autism, wrote a really good piece about why this matters and why the particular way in which they introduced Julia is so important.

GoGoGrandparent sounds like a promising idea, really poorly implemented.

Sady Doyle considers that maybe women don't need to apologize less. Maybe men need to apologize more. Really, this one is worth reading just for the phrase "critical apology failure."

Read about Pauli Murray, the Civil Rights and women's rights activist who gets left out of a lot of our stories about those movements.

Kameron Hurley's post about trying to be a pro writer while also having a full time day job really resonated with me, even though I'm not trying to be a pro writer. One of the things that my current work arrangement makes possible is for me to focus on multiple career interests without courting burnout. I'm very grateful for that.

Jenna Price's 60th birthday note to her 30 year old self is wonderful.

Women surgeons are replicating a New Yorker cover and it is awesome.

This bunny reminds me of the pet bunny I had for the longest period of time.

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— うさぎ島の写真bot (@rabbit_isle_bot) April 9, 2017

Happy weekend, everyone!

Sunday Night Existential Whimper

I swear I'll write up our spring break trip, because it was a fun trip and I like to write trip story posts, dammit.

But it isn't going to happen tonight. Nor am I going to write a glowing ode to my oldest child, who somehow is now 10 years old, although she deserves one.

Instead, I'm going to whine about how this week just kicked my butt. Re-entry from a vacation is always hard. Re-entry from a vacation when you've caught a cold at the tail end of that vacation is especially hard. Add in a kid's birthday, a spelling bee, and a birthday party you've foolishly agreed to host at your house instead of one of the many locations that will run the damn party for you, and you have a recipe for exhaustion.

Plus, I had a fun little tax-related panic that ate up a significant amount of work time on Friday.

So, what I'm saying is: I am behind on EVERYTHING. I am considering, for the first time in my life, sending out a blanket "yes, I owe you a response on something but it won't come for another week" sort of email.

We'll see how long it takes me to finish unwinding the tax panic tomorrow. (The panic, for anyone who is curious, stemmed from me putting my SEP-IRA contributions in the wrong place on the questionnaire I filled out for my accountant, who thought I'd paid them as a person and not as a business, which was therefore going to require classifying some of my income as "self employment income," thereby necessitating payment of the self-employment tax on said income, rather than having all my income be either salary I paid myself (and therefore paid social security taxes on) or profit. This may seem like a small thing to you, but this was going to add a lot of money to our tax bill and for the period of time in which I thought the problem was the SEP-IRA that I'd opened and not my putting it on the wrong questionnaire I felt like an absolute idiot and thought that maybe I shouldn't be trying to run a company at all if I couldn't even get a retirement account opened without screwing things up.)

Anyhow, that's all sorted now, but we still owe an alarming sum in taxes. We sat down tonight to figure out why, and it is because my husband got a raise and my business made more money in 2016 vs. 2015 and we withheld/paid estimated taxes assuming the 2015 amount. OOPS. But not really something to complain about. We're going to adjust our withholding this year, and hopefully not face another big bill next year.

I will say, though, that for the first time ever, I sort of resent paying my taxes. I don't want to pay for a stupid border wall or security for Melania Trump so she can live in NYC and avoid her husband or, for that matter, for that husband to keep jetting off to the private club he owns in Florida. I will happily pay my taxes to fund Meals on Wheels and the EPA and the NIH and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Happily. But the graft and waste going on in this administration is making the tax bill hurt more.

Speak of stupid border walls... Mr. Snarky took Pumpkin to pick out a piñata for her birthday party. He went to a local store that specializes in piñatas instead of just going to Party City or the like. She picked out a nice big music note, but she came home and told me about another piñata she saw: it was made to look like a big, brick wall and it had Trump's face on it. Clever.

And speaking of Pumpkin: it is a delight to watch her grow up. She stepped in to help smooth things over during Saturday's party when there was a kerfuffle between the big kids (her friends) and the little kids (Petunia and her friends) about time in the jumpy. In the end, I think all of the kids had a great time at the party, and this is the first year where Pumpkin really helped make that happen. She came in third at the 4th grade spelling bee. She went out because she didn't understand the word as the pronouncer said it (and I won't go into details, but he did mispronounce it), but she took this without drama. She loves to read, so much so that most of her friends gave her either books or Barnes and Noble gift cards for her birthday and she was thrilled by that. I could go on and on, but I said I wasn't going to write a glowing ode to her. I will just say that getting to watch you children turn into people you don't just love but are proud of is one of the great joys of parenthood.

Petunia is pretty great, too. She and her little friends decided to do a science experiment during the party. She got out her beakers and set up to do an experiment to find out which things float and which things sink in water. She wrote up the design and was ready to record the data, but they got distracted by the discovery that some types of beads float and others sink, and ended up just filling lots of bowls with water to play with beads. I couldn't even be mad about the mess, really, because it was ridiculously cute to watch them.

So, in summary: vacations are great, but re-entry is hard. Taxes are a pain, but all things considered, I'd rather make the money and owe the taxes than not make the money. And kids are delightful, but birthday parties are exhausting.

I'll write more once I'm caught up on things!

Weekend Reading: The Trying Not to Hate Everything Edition

I'm super stressed out right now because I'm behind on everything. I'm behind on everything because I caught a little cold at the tail end of our vacation and have therefore been operating at low efficiency. Also, Wednesday was Pumpkin's birthday (OMG. She is 10. How did that happen?) AND she was in the 4th grade spelling bee (she came in 3rd!) AND we are having a party for her tomorrow. GAH. So much to do!

So, of course, I was thrilled to lose a couple of hours today to dealing with our taxes. First, the drive to our accountant's office took twice as long because I had to do it during the first part of rush hour. Before that, I was trapped at home waiting for a DHL delivery. On the bright side, the delivery was my kids' NZ passports and citizenship certificates.  It makes me happy to have those.

Then, I suffered extreme shock at the amount we owed. Some of that may turn out to be wrong. There is confusion about the retirement account I opened last year. So I spent almost an hour on the phone with Vanguard trying to understand that, then had to call my accountant back... and GAH. Why can't we make saving for retirement simpler?!?!?!

Anyhow, here I am, at the end of my workday, with several things I "had" to do today not done, but needing to go get the kids because they are going to a parent's night out thing so that Mr. Snarky and I can go finish the party shopping. GAH. Why must work and life always gang up on me?

So... here are the links.

This Noah Smith column kind of dovetails with my general crankiness about retirement savings. I know I'm doing a lot better than a lot of my fellow Gen-Xers, but honestly, I look ahead and don't see how we'll ever get to retire. (OK, that is mainly an emotional response. We're saving and doing what we're supposed to, but we have two kids who hit college when we're mid-50s, and what we most want to do in retirement is travel, and that is expensive. So... It just feels unattainable, even if maybe we will actually get to some place good. In fact, part of what I was trying to do by starting my own company was free up flexibility to travel more now, at the expense of probably working longer... This is getting too long for a parenthetical. Maybe it will be the topic of this month's Founding Chaos newsletter.)

Why the Gorsuch filibuster was worth it, even though Gorsuch is now confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. I know my Republican friends will disagree with a lot (or maybe all) of what E.J. Dionne wrote there, but I'd recommend reading it if for no other reason that to try to understand why Democrats are so very mad right now.

And while we're talking about things that make Democrats angry: The failure of the ACA repeal bill is good news, but also infuriating.

Rebecca Traister's article about Trump and O'Reilly captures a lot of what I'm feeling looking at the situation as a woman. Frankly, I feel like a really large chunk of Republican men don't view me as a full human being, with my own goals and desires. They only see me (and other women) in terms of how we impact men. (And to continue to be frank: I think there is a non-negligible group of Democrat men who basically have the same problem, but just express it in different ways.)

This is a really thought-provoking post about the problem with autodidacts. I'm still thinking about it, in fact, since I'm someone who believes in "never stop learning." I guess I also believe in the value of formal training to give that learning a solid foundation.

In happier news:

Matt Yglesias makes the case for immigration.

Giving out naloxone to let addicts live to have another chance.

Vaccinating pregnant women for pertussis (whooping cough) protects the baby. This is HUGE, because there have been some really heartbreaking stories of brand new babies getting infected and dying.

This story is part nice and part infuriating, and all the way interesting: what happened when two Lisa S. Davises got tangled up in the DMV records.


Flamingos!

This is a real picture of flamingoes flying over the Andes https://t.co/KA9ZJ8862s pic.twitter.com/lAyabKCM6v

— Ross Andersen (@andersen) April 6, 2017

Bunnies!

pic.twitter.com/jVXr7rZXpx

— うさぎ島の写真bot (@rabbit_isle_bot) April 7, 2017

And in amongst that, there was a pause to go get my kids, and now it is time to take them to the parent's night out and go have our romantic grocery shopping date.

Happy weekend everyone! I hope your tax returns are coming together more easily than mine are.

Spring Break

I'm just back from a short spring break vacation to Santa Monica and Santa Barbara. I'll do a trip story post about it soon, because I like to write up my vacations so that I can remember them better.

I wrote up a long post about some of the things I thought about during the driving part of the trip, when I wasn't quizzing Pumpkin on her spelling bee words. But when I reread it, it struck me as sort of boring, so I'll set it aside and come back to it later.

For now, I'll just say: vacations are a good thing. Seeing friends you haven't seen in awhile is a good thing. Sitting on the beach watching your kids play in the sand is a good thing.

Back when I first started thinking about changing my work arrangements to get more flexibility, one of the things I wanted was the freedom to travel more now, when I'm healthy enough to be able to do most things and when my kids are young enough to still want to go places with me. I wrote a post about it, but I can't find it right now. Regardless, I haven't really made that happen yet. As I drove the last leg of our trip home yesterday, I thought about that wish again. I'd still like to figure out how to make it happen. My kids are great travelers (mostly: there was a little bit of whining about being stuck in LA traffic, but a lot of people whine about being stuck in LA traffic) and getting out and seeing new things with them is a lot of fun. 

Anyone else have fun spring break plans? Do share.