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.

pic.twitter.com/sqSMxTkzNQ

— 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.

Dinner during Dora: Easy Pizza

Long time readers may or may not remember that I was looking for a good pizza dough recipe. I have been meaning to post the pizza dough recipe I eventually settled on for a long time, but I kept forgetting to take pictures of the final product. I have finally assembled all of the pictures I need and I have a somewhat lazy Sunday morning going: I am sitting at my computer drinking tea while my kids play, but I don't really need to do any work.

So, I'll tell you about the pizza dough.

The recipe below is derived from the Smitten Kitchen Lazy Pizza dough that Today Wendy recommended. I made some changes because Pumpkin didn't care for the dough I made by following the original recipe. The rest of us liked it, but I was determined to find something everyone would like. My additions are a little whole wheat flour and some "green can cheese" (Kraft Parmesan in the can—I would have used cheese powder as recommended in one of the other recipes I found, but I didn't have any and my grocery store doesn't stock that and the whole point was for this to be easy.)

Easy Pizza Dough

2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp sea salt
1 1/2 cup water, plus more as needed to make a "craggy" dough that sticks together. I was using less water than needed at first, and the dough wasn't rising as much as it should have. The crust still tasted good, but it was a little dense and chewy. Live and learn.

Yeast, based on how long you're going to let the dough sit on the counter:
1/8 tsp for overnight + the next day
1/4 tsp for just the day
1/2 tsp for a half day (~6 hrs)

1/3 cup "green can" Kraft Parmesan cheese

Mix everything but the Parmesan cheese together in a big bowl, cover loosely with a tea towel, and let it stand for the desired amount of time. This is really quick, which is why I don't mind doing it in the morning. It takes five minutes to throw together, at most.

Dough, ready to rise

When you're ready to make your pizza, preheat your oven to 500 degrees F. Then add the Parmesan cheese and work it into the dough. I add about a third, fold the dough over, add another bit, fold the dough over, then add the rest and fold the dough over again. Then I fold and squeeze the dough until the cheese is worked in.

Dough, having risen.

Then shape your crust. I can't add anything to the instructions in the original Smitten Kitchen recipe here, so go read that. I do follow those instructions and spray cooking spray on my cookie sheets and then coat with cornmeal.

I may need to work on my crust shaping skills.

Top with your desired toppings. I make three pizzas: one for the grown ups, one with just sauce and cheese for Petunia, and one with just cheese for Pumpkin.

Bake at 500 degrees F for ~15 minutes. Then let it stand about 5 minutes so that you don't burn yourself cutting it.

The finished products.

Eat and enjoy!

Source: derived from the awesome Smitten Kitchen Lazy Pizza recipe.

Who eats it: Everyone!