Trip Story: Merced

When I started planning our California road trip, my husband made only one request- he wanted to go to Sacramento. This may seem like an odd request, but he has a thing about visiting state capitols, and he was bothered by the fact that he hadn't seen ours. I agreed, even though Sacramento was quite a bit out of the way, given the rest of the itinerary I had in mind. The only place in the itinerary that it made any sense at all to go to Sacramento was between Sequoia and Monterey- but I also didn't really want to try to drive from Sequoia to Sacramento in one day. My goal on this road trip was to keep the driving to ~two hours per day- i.e., the length of Petunia's nap.

I pulled out my map, and looked for something that was approximately halfway between Three Rivers and Sacramento. Fresno wasn't far enough. Modesto was too far. But Merced- it was just right. So we decided that we'd stop in Merced for the night. The plan was to find a hotel with a decent looking pool, and spend the afternoon swimming. The problem was that none of the hotels on offer were particularly inspiring, so I dithered more on this hotel selection than any other on the trip, trying to decide which mediocre option was the best.

In the end, I went for room size- so we stayed in a place with two full bedrooms, which was nice. The pool was decent, but there was no spa. It turns out that my little girls are wimps and don't like to be cold when swimming (good luck to them when they decide they want to start swimming in the ocean!) so next time I pick a hotel solely for an afternoon's worth of swimming, I should make sure there is a spa.

But it all worked out OK, because the shorter than anticipated swim left us with time on our hands before dinner, and forced us to go out and explore the one place my pre-trip Google searching had identified as a sight to see in Merced: Applegate Park. It turned out to be worth the effort.

The drive to the park took us past the iconic theater that the literature in our room told us was in the process of being renovated.

But we didn't stop to explore Main Street. We headed straight to the park, which turned out to be a large, grassy expanse, shaded by mature trees. Petunia chased squirrels.

And the rest of us chased her. Then we all enjoyed a stroll along the really rather picturesque river.

Then the girls played on the good (but crowded) playground until it was time to go back to the hotel and get ready for dinner. We had dinner at Mi Casa Cafe, a Mexican restaurant across the street from our hotel. It was very good- my only complaint was that they didn't have margaritas, forcing me to "settle" for a Negro Modelo instead.

While I snuggled with Petunia that night, waiting for her to go to sleep, I thought about how Merced felt like a visit to an alternate universe, in which I had stayed strictly in science and gone for a tenure track job. I could see alternate universe me realizing at some point that she was unlikely to land at Harvard, or even a well known state school, and deciding to try for a position at a place like UC Merced, and (if I was lucky) landing it, and ending up living in a town like Merced. I don't think I would have been unhappy, although it is a far cry from San Diego in terms of things to do. But it would definitely have been a very different sort of life.

Then Petunia fell asleep, and I shook off thoughts of alternative life courses and headed into the second bedroom to have another beer with Hubby, and plan for the next day.

We needed something to do before lunch, and pretty much the only thing that was open and even moderately interesting to us was the Castle Air Museum. It is on a former air base, and has a large collection of planes, particularly from the WWII era. We thought there was a chance that Pumpkin might think it was sort of cool.

She didn't. But Hubby did- he ended up taking a lot of pictures, including this one, of a plane that made me glad that Pumpkin isn't really reading yet:

I'm not ready to explain the meaning of that airplane name to her.

If Pumpkin was unimpressed, Petunia was positively bored and annoyed. I ended up spending the majority of our visit sitting on a bench under the wings of the B-52, nursing her. And I got a mosquito bite on my back in the process, which annoyed me for the rest of the trip. Still, it was a cool place to sit and nurse.

Finally, as we were leaving, Pumpkin and Petunia found something they liked- some coin operated rides.

We hung out there while Hubby went over and looked at the stealth bomber.

We tried to explain its importance to Pumpkin, but failed miserably. I think it would have been easier to explain "Virgin's Delight."

We packed into the car and headed off in search of lunch. My pre-trip research had turned up some pizza places, but we weren't in the mood for that. We ended up at a Jamba Juice. Petunia loved her smoothie. Pumpkin said it wasn't as good as the ones I make, and wouldn't drink it. In retrospect, this was no big deal. One lunch of Pop Chips and Pirates Booty won't kill her. At the time, though, I was mightily annoyed with her.  Then Petunia started dancing in her chair to whatever top 40 music was playing. That was cute enough to break my bad mood, and we headed off towards Sacramento reasonably happy with our stop in the Merced area.

Weekend Reading: The Sexism is Everywhere Edition

I have lots of good links this week, all with a feminist slant.

First, an opinion piece on CNN about the popularity of the new "retro" shows, which show women in outdated roles- and how young women today see these as period pieces, much like we view Jane Austen novels. (I doubt the writing in these shows measures up to Austen, though!) Personally, I don't think the shows are worth getting worked up about, but I doubt they are just benign period pieces, either. I suspect there is a fair amount of male nostalgia been pandered to (and perhaps amplified) by these shows.

But I don't watch much TV, so I can't speak about these shows from personal experience.

Sticking with pop culture, here is a very funny piece in the New Yorker about the unrealistic nature of the female roles in Hollywood movies.  My favorite is the career woman stereotype:

"And since when does holding a job necessitate that a woman pull her hair back in a severe, tight bun? Do screenwriters think that loose hair makes it hard to concentrate?"

Of course, sexism is not just found on TV and in movies. @Rambleginger led me to an excellent funny-but-sad-because-its-true Jezebel post about the unwritten rules for women in America. I agree with the last line in the post- I read the post, recognized it was true, and was so sad for my little girls, who will largely have to navigate the same crap as I did. Someone please convince me that it is actually getting better...?

Oh well. Failing that, here is an awesome post that showed up on several blogs I read (including Nicoleandmaggie's) about the phrase "...like a girl" and so much more. Go read it. It is good.

I've also come across two pieces about research that tries to correct the myths about why there aren't more women at the top in business and why there aren't more women in tech. Hint: it isn't because we have babies or because we don't want these things.

I found that last link via a new Women in Tech blog, which I found because Anandi (who comments as ARC here) had a guest post up about how she negotiated her ideal work schedule. The same blog has a great post up from a Microsoft general manager about how she found work-life balance. The blog is off to a good start- I hope they keep it up.

The research pieces got me thinking about the conventional wisdom that tech is somehow a "bad" career for women, because of the sexism in the field. I certainly agree that there is sexism in the tech world, but I also believe (and have argued) that tech careers are great careers for women.

How do I square those two things? I guess I just don't think that the tech field is unusual for being sexist. That other research piece indicates that there women will face sexism in business careers, too, but I've never heard anyone argue that business careers are "bad" for women. I can't think of a single career that you can pursue and be untouched by sexism. You could argue that the female dominated fields are less sexist but (1) that isn't always true (often men are over-represented in the top ranks relative to their prevalence in the overall field) and (2) often, the field itself has been devalued and therefore suffers from low pay or low respect. Given the choice, I'd rather keep my high pay and respect, and just work through the sexism I encounter, particularly since my chosen career offers a lot of other benefits, such as the potential for a lot of flexibility in my work.

(Of course, some sexism is so egregious that you can't work through it. But again, I don't think the tech field has a monopoly on that.)

So I think we should continue to study the reasons why women are underrepresented in some fields, and we should work to fix those problems. But we should also remember that sexism extends beyond any one field or career path, and the solution does, too.

Now She's Just Messing With Me

Remember the post I wrote awhile back, about how Petunia wasn't going along with my plan for an after work run once a week, while her sister was at swim lesson with Hubby?

I eventually decided that I'd stop trying to go for a run, and come home and try to get some exercise in my backyard instead. I used to do Muay Thai kickboxing, and I still remember the moves for shadowboxing. I figured I could do a few rounds of shadowboxing, plus some jumping jacks and other similar things, while Petunia played happily with her backyard toys. I had a grand daydream about how this would eventually morph into me buying a heavy bag and getting to actually throw some punches and kicks.

Well, one thing after another kept me from implementing my plan. I got sick. Petunia got sick. A vendor meeting ran late. Etc., etc. But finally, today nothing was in my way. Except traffic- but even with bad traffic on the drive home, I was home in time to squeeze in a 30 minute workout before dinner.

I got changed while Petunia ate a snack, and then we went outside to "play". It all started out well enough. Petunia readily agreed to go "ai-ide" and insisted that I drag the plastic play gym out for her so she could slide.

I started some marching in place for a warm up. But then she didn't want to slide, she wanted her kitchen toys to play in her little house. So I marched into the garage and got them. She marched along with me, and thought that was pretty funny.

Then she wanted the timer I had brought out to time my rounds. So I gave it to her and went and got a clock to use.

And then she decided she wanted to go for a walk. I tried to ignore her and keep to my original plan, but shadowboxing around my yard while my toddler wailed at the garage door just didn't work for me. I caved, and let her in, expecting her to go find the umbrella stroller and ask for that. Instead, she went to the jogging stroller and asked to be put in.

So I went and got my house keys, and we set off for a run. My asthma has been bad these last two days since we have Santa Ana winds blowing a bunch of junk in from the desert (running is the hardest form of exercise for me when my asthma is acting up) and I felt a little silly running in my loose kickboxing shorts, but I figured I should just take what I could get.

But about 5 minutes in, Petunia announced that we should go back. When I said no and kept going, she actually figured out how to wriggle out of one of the shoulder straps in the stroller.

So I turned back, thinking that maybe I could get away with turning down one of the cross streets and going around the block. No dice. She screamed loudly when I did that.

I gave up and went home. We went inside and I tried to do some sit ups. Petunia helpfully added some resistance by sitting on my stomach.

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All of this will no doubt be very funny to me some day. But right now, it is just frustrating. My weight has inched up since my last post about running, and I now need to loose 8-10 pounds to get back down to the healthy range. My pants are too tight. I didn't like how I looked in roughly 90% of the pictures from our vacation. It is definitely time to do something about this. It is not going to get any easier as I start getting serious about weaning Petunia.

I recently came across a body weight simulator from the NIH. It is a little Java applet that lets you put in your current weight and height, etc., and then put in a target weight. You get to choose how active you are now and how active you plan to be while you try to lose weight, and it tells you how much you need to restrict your calories. I'm sure there are flashier simulators out there on some commercial sites, but this one gets the job done.

I hate restricting my food intake. I figured that I could restrict it enough to stop the weight gain, but that losing any weight would require more exercise. I ran some simulations and decided I needed to add one hardish workout per week and two easy ones. For the two easy ones, I'll walk. I can usually get a 20-30 minute walk around lunch time on Fridays. My current location is nowhere near as nice for walking as my previous one was, but there is a reasonable "out and back" route I can take. I have also started taking Petunia for a walk during her naptime once per weekend. I miss my "quiet time" (really time during which Pumpkin watches shows and I try to do some work or read), but it is actually quite nice to walk around my neighborhood, so I don't mind the trade off.

But I'm still stuck for the more vigorous workout. I'll have to do some more thinking and see what I can come up with to try next. I'm desperate enough that I have even considered trying to stitch together a workout from kids songs with actions. Petunia loves those right now. But I'm not sure I could stomach that many repetitions of "The Noble Duke of York" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes."

Trip Story: Sequoia National Park

The first real "destination" on our California road trip was Sequoia National Park. I can't really say why I picked this as something we had to see on this trip. I'd never seen it (although I have seen the redwoods). I thought my husband might like it, and hoped that Pumpkin would be impressed by the big trees. I figured Petunia would just be happy for a chance to take a spin in the hiking backpack- she loves that thing.

We stayed for two nights in the area, basing ourselves in Three Rivers. We had wonderful weather for our visit- we were even able to spend some time in the hotel's pool and spa, which delighted the girls.

But the main attraction was the big trees, so we headed to the park entrance fairly early on our first morning in town. The road into the park wound around quite a bit, so it took longer than we expected to get to the visitor's center, and Pumpkin had her first experience of feeling a little car sick. Thankfully, this was the one and only time she felt car sick on our trip- it was brought on, we think, by the fact that she was trying to color while we drove, so when we got to driving the coast road south from Monterey later in the vacation, we just told her not to color, and she didn't have any trouble. I, on the other hand, had to be the driver and drink a fizzy drink and eat pretzels almost continuously. So I guess the propensity towards carsickness is one bad trait of mine she doesn't seem to have inherited!

Anyway, back to the trees. They were tall.

I had picked out the "hike" to see the General Sherman Tree (really a stroll along an easy path) as our morning's activity. As predicted, Petunia liked riding in the hiking backpack. Pumpkin liked the walk down and was moderately impressed by the big trees.

We were all impressed by a sighting of a black bear.

Petunia said "rarrr" at it. Pumpkin was excited by the idea of telling her friends at day care about it. Hubby and I were glad that it was close enough to be impressive (despite the poor quality picture we managed to take) but not so close as to be scary.

The General Sherman tree is impressive more in thinking about how old and big it is than in the seeing of it, but it was still worth the trip. There was also a fallen tree with a tunnel through it nearby, which amused the girls.

The walk back up to our car required some quick parenting thinking- Pumpkin was whining that she was tired, and there was no way I wanted to carry her back up that hill. So I came up with the idea that we should count the stairs, and miraculously, that worked. I now know that there are 80 stairs on the path between the upper parking lot and the General Sherman tree.

We had thought that we might drive over to the other end of the park and have a picnic lunch, then take the scenic drive into King's Canyon for naptime, but given how long the drive into the park had taken, we decided that wasn't a good idea. (One of many examples on this trip where we decided to skip something because we couldn't realistically expect our girls to do well with the activity.)

So we drove down to the Giant Forest Museum and had out picnic lunch there. We walked around the museum a bit, then drove back into town while the girls napped. Our visit to Sequoia National Park had been fun, but woefully incomplete. We've mentally marked it as a place to return to when the girls are a bit older.

After nap, we played in the aforementioned pool, had a low key dinner at the local pizza place, and then went to bed early, happy with our day.

The next day, we drove to a nearby state recreation area, Slick Rock. There is easy access to the Kaweah River from the parking area, so we walked down and had our morning snack by the river. (Or is it already Lake Kaweah here? I can't tell from the maps I have.)

We admired some little frogs in a calm, shallow pool. Then we splashed out feet in the river water, watched the birds fly overhead, and just enjoyed the scenery and the nice day.

(I swear that Hubby didn't take a picture of the backs of our heads on purpose... but it is sort of convenient that he did, isn't it?)

Eventually, we decided it was time to climb back in the car, and we headed to a nearby town for another picnic lunch. We drove through farmland for awhile before connecting with CA-99 and heading north towards our next stop.

On Having Too Much to Do, Lists, and Stress Reduction

Ginger, over at Ramble Ramble, had a post up today asking for ideas for handling stress at work, and "switching off" when at home.

My husband can tell you that I still have some work to do in this regard, too. However, I've gotten a lot better at this over the years, and I do have some ideas about how to reduce stress caused by having to much to do, so I took some time on my lunch break to answer Ginger. Long time readers will not be surprised to find that my beloved lists feature in my answer. Here is what I said, expanded and edited to make it more clear, now that I have the time to do so:

For me, the only way to deal with "too much work to do" stress is to get the work organized and under control. I find that what stresses me out the most isn't a full to do list- it is the feeling that I might get surprised by some item on my to do list that needed to be done earlier than I thought. In other words, it is the feeling that I could open my email in the morning and find a five alarm fire. My method to minimize this stress is to make sure that I know what is actually urgent, and concentrate on that stuff first. If some other stuff comes up and I start to get distracted, I write that other stuff on my to do list, to worry about later. If I focus on the things that are actually urgent, I can usually clear them off my list and leave work for the day feeling free and clear. I don’t worry about the other things, because they are written down, so I won’t forget about them. I still have a full to do list, but I’m fairly confident that the things that had to get done are done. For this to work over the long term, though, the list of things that must get done can't just be set by external deadlines, but must also be set by the internal deadlines of my projects.

That is pretty wishy-washy, so I’ll try to explain. Right now, I’m revamping one of the key systems I manage. I have promised to deliver the updated system by the end of the month. I also have a complicated (but dull) tracking spreadsheet to complete for my boss, a report to write for my boss’s boss, an interview to schedule to allow me to hire some help, and a bunch of random little things that need doing.

I have a big list with all of these things on it, and more (I have a couple of other big projects running now, which I've left out for clarity). But I knew that TODAY I needed to finish that stupid spreadsheet (external deadline- the boss needs it tomorrow), complete some tasks and schedule some meetings to move my revamping project along (internal deadline- no one would notice if these slipped, but they'd put my project behind schedule), and get the interview scheduling process underway (another internal deadline- I just know that scheduling interviews takes a long time). I got all of those things done, so I walked out the door at my usual time, and have left the rest of the work in the office- mentally as well as physically.

The report needs to be written within a week, so it can wait until tomorrow or Wednesday. There are a lot of other tasks on my revamping project, but I know from my project plan that they aren’t gating anything, so they can wait, too.

The random little things on my to do list are the emails and in person requests from other people, trying to get their to do list items done. I have a two step process for deciding how to handle those. First, I ask myself: can I do this in less time than it takes to write it on my list? If the answer is yes, I do it. If the answer is no, I ask: is it more urgent than whatever I'm working on right now? If the answer is yes, I do it, if it is no, I write it on my list. Of course, the answer to this second question is sometimes hard to know- it depends not just on my priorities but also on the priorities of the other people at work. Sometimes I have to ask my boss for guidance, but this is also something that I've gotten better at gauging for myself as I've gotten more work experience. However, I do make a point of trying to help people out unless they are serial procrastinators who are always coming to me with requests that are urgent only because they failed to plan. If I can't get to their request immediately, I will at least tell them when I can do it, and will reconsider if that is going to make them miss a deadline. This is just the nice thing to do, and maybe it buys me some good deadline meeting karma.

I’m also pretty vicious with myself about procrastination. If I catch myself goofing off too much at work, I start writing daily to do lists, as I described in my post on working through a slump.

This system works really well for me, allowing me to switch off from work and focus on my family (and blog!) at home. This was true even at previous jobs that required me to carry a blackberry. I set boundaries about how often I'd check it, and told people that if something was really urgent, they should go ahead and call me at home. At first they don't believe me, but eventually, they realize that I'm serious. I'm not reading email, so if they truly need an answer right now, they had better call. I'm selective in who I give my home phone number to, so this has never led to a bunch of phone calls at night. People are far more willing to send emails during off hours than to make phone calls.

Of course, none of this helps if the stress is from general jerks playing politics, etc- then I find that yoga and beer help.

What about you? How do you keep work stress levels down and keep work out of your home time?