Something About Me, and Some Things About Others

I know it is really cheating to use this day's blog post simply to let everyone know that I have a piece running today on another blog, so I will get this sordid, self-aggrandizing business out of the way and then write something new too, because, after all that is the point of NaBloPoMo, and I want to play by all the rules.  I'm just that way.  My piece on using my food stamps card is on Brain Mother, the daily blog of Brain, Child Magazine.  This is the cute picture of the girls sitting in the tree out in front of our building that accompanies the post. (Photo credit: Aunt Sharon & Uncle Tim)

Since I am doing this post-a-day thing, I am reaching for topics to fill the space that don't just seem like filler.  I thought it would be appropriate, and in keeping with the spirit of a blog-centric moment, to point you in the direction of some of the blogs I read, and now you already know about Brain Mother because of the self-congratulatory squib above (and maybe also the Facebook post, the Pinterest pin, and the random e-mails I have been sending out...) 

I use Bloglovin' to corral most of the blogs in one place, because, otherwise my email inbox would always be full, and I would never want to look at anything.  Am I easy daunted?  Perhaps, when confronted with two hundred new emails on a weekday morning. Anyway, the Bloglovin' thing is cool, not just because it has "lovin'" in the title, but because you can get the new posts from the blogs you follow (and there are lots and lots to choose from) and you can go back and look at older ones, so you don't have to go Pinterest crazy while you're reading.  Here is a sampling of what comes in on my feed:

Shutterbean:  Tracy, the blogger here, is a photographer, cook and food stylist and seems like a cool chick you'd just want to hang out with.  Her recipes are always family friendly (she features her cute little son regularly), tasty (the ones I've tried are new favorites) and well-photographed (you can get a good idea of how the cooking will actually go down.) She also does fashion and weekly round-ups of fun stuff from the web.

Joy the Baker:  Joy is a friend of Tracy's (from Shutterbean).  She has delicious recipes, also easy to replicate at home.  Her cream cheese pound cake (from this book) is one of my favorite things to eat. Ever. She also has a cool, but sparkling, wit and doesn't take herself too seriously.  

smittenkitchen:  Yep, another fun foodie.  This website started as a documentation of what Deb could cook in her tiny kitchen in her NYC walk-up apartment.  She bakes, broils, roasts and toasts.  She tells about how things didn't go right, and what it took to fix them.  She's fun writer who happens to write really good recipes.

In case you think I only read about food (and there are about six more food blogs I look at, so don't be surprised to get "Even More Blogs I Follow" as the NaBlo thing winds down), I am also interested in all kinds of design and style stuff.  These are the equivalent of flipping through a virtual magazine-- perfect during a lunch break, or winding down to fall asleep.  Of course, that means you have to blithely ignore any DIY element, and think about how you would fix up your space if you had unlimited money, time, and trained and licensed help.

Design*Sponge: This has more than just home design.  There are fonts, foods, and fun little travel guides, all impeccably curated and beautifully presented.  I always find cool things to make, buy and do.

sfgirlbybay: Victoria, the "girl" of the title is a design maven, with an interior design/art buyer/stylist background.  She looks at houses, furniture, clothes and all kinds of products and places.  The blog makes me wish I lived in her town, because she often showcases local retailers and the shops always look like great places to hang out and browse while finding just the right gift for a special someone (or yourself).

Apartment Therapy:  I love this site, and the people there post a lot because, apparently, they are idea machines with limitless creativity and energy.  This has a lot of practical advice for redoing every home space and includes lots of product round-ups and ideas for DIY on a shoestring budget. They have a special section just about family and kids rooms which is really lovely.  

Finally, a site I really love to look at, because it has all kinds of internal links that lead you from article to article.  I always find it is all fascinating and thought-provoking, and somehow, I look up and 92 minutes have gone by.  The only thing I don't love about the site is the name, Brain Pickings, but could I have done better?  Not sure.  Maria, the woman who puts this together has got to be a genius, so who am I to quibble?  

Hope some of these appeal to you.  Let me know what you think.

More than Princesses: Hell, Yeah!

You have probably already seen this video, and you may think I am a little late jumping on the bandwagon, and a little half-assed using it as a prompt for a blog post.  And we all know that this is an advertisement-- a genius advertisement for a product whose time has come, but an advertisement nevertheless. But no matter.  I have two daughters who are right at the heart of the target demographic for this video and I am glad it is out there:

I also have to say that everyone I know who has seen it has told me that the little ballerina with the hammer bears a striking resemblance to my younger daughter, Fiona.  But that isn't the only reason I like it.  Like a few breakthrough ads before it, this video pushes not only a product or a reason to buy a product, but an idea.  The idea is that we need to radically alter our perception of half the planet's population.  No biggie, right?

The "more than a princess" tag is as important as the very notion of girls getting into building.  The idea that girls can do more than play house, decorate a house, or maintain a house has been part of our culture for a while now, but there has not been an accompanying shift in our expectations for generations of girls.  What I am really hoping for, in the not too distant future, is a much more fluid idea of what girls and boys are good at or suited to.  The best thing about this commercial is that it shows that you can wear a tiara and swing a hammer-- you don't have to choose.

Though I have noted in these very pages that the idea of "doing it all" has poisoned the well for generations of women, it is simply because such an unreasonable expectation increases pressure on women to try to be too many things at once. Over and over again, we see that trying to be everything to everyone is a plan doomed to failure because it doesn't allow women to feel comfortable making choices and setting priorities.  One of the beauties of this ad is that it pictures a much different kind of "doing it all."  The ballerina and the rock star have balance-- they have the tools and the tulle-- which will make for a well-rounded, high functioning life.  

Another key element of the ad is that it shows the girls building things their own way, not simply imitating things boys build.  I would argue that one of the reasons women have become so miserable in the workplace today is that we have tried to work like men-- to play their game, on their field, so to speak.  At first, of course, they were the only game and field in town, but by now, we should be developing our own models of what a workday looks like and how the workplace should function.  Maybe the girls who are encouraged to see the possibilities for many kinds activities and occupations will have an easier time setting their own terms for success in the occupations they choose.  It's a lot of pressure to put on one idea from one advertisement for one toy company, but marketing is all about dreams, right?  And for my girls, and all the others, I say, let's dream big!

When Sorry Seems to be the Easiest Word

Not long after I met my husband at the book store where we both worked, he asked me why I apologized constantly.  "You're always saying you're sorry, even when something couldn't possibly be your fault." No one else had really called me on that before, and it took me a minute to answer.

"Wow, sorry..." We both laughed, and obviously, the relationship worked out, but even then, I didn't wise up to the fact that my default reply was one of apology.  It wasn't just a verbal tic, either.  I always felt like I should be sorry for something.  For years, I had been a single mom, working at retail jobs while going to school.  My parents helped me and I felt bad about that, and I always seemed to be falling short at work, or with the kids, or at school.  I was late, or forgot something, or needed an extension or had to cancel something or missed something at school.  Disappointment was a constant theme, and I could think of no one to blame but myself.  

So, mea freaking culpa!

I think this was compounded by the work I did.  One of the main tasks for a retail manager is smoothing out customer service difficulties.  I apologized fifty to a hundred times a day, sometimes just because people had to wait in line for a minute before they had a chance to pay for their items.  Sometimes, because someone bought the wrong thing and wanted to return it.  That's right, I told people I was sorry because they had made a mistake.  Sheesh!  

This morning, my friend shared a link to this article from the New York Times website (thanks, Alex!) and I had a moment of thinking: "someone gets it."  I was glad to see that the someone, Katrina Alcorn, has written a book called Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink about the weight of the high expectations that are crushing many moms today.  The book came out in September, but of course, I haven't gotten to it yet.  Sor-- no I'm not going to say it.  Anyway, from what I've read, in the blurb and in the Times article by K. J. Dell'Antonia this morning, the book springs from Alcorn's own story.  She was a busy, successful mom who tried to have it all and found herself crumbling under the pressure.  Sounds kinda familiar, huh?

The New York Times article talks about how we women find ourselves "apologizing for failing to do the impossible," and how our impulse to do the impossible flows from the widely held, but genuinely misguided, belief that we can "have it all." All we need to do is plan, prioritize, lean in, focus, breathe, etc.  Alcorn contends that, because we are told we could do it all-- and do it all well, mind you-- if we just put our mind to it, we always feel that there is something that we are not doing right, so we apologize all the time.  

I think the point Alcorn is trying to make is that we need to think about the problem differently.  Instead of asking ourselves what we can do better, we need to question the myth of "work-life balance."  Maybe in a world full of princesses, unicorns and wand-wielding fairy godmothers, we could expect to live a fantasy life where we work at fascinating jobs that pay well and give us plenty of time off to spend with our families.  In reality, many women I know have jobs that are barely covering their expenses, mostly because the biggest chunk of those expenses goes to childcare.  And the irony gets uglier: we would like to spend more time with our kids, but by the time we get home, we're so tired and stressed out that all we can do is yell and wheedle until bedtime finally rolls around.  

Then, the cycle of apologies really sets in.  We're sorry about everything, especially when it seems that the choices we have made, the goals we have devised, have somehow set us up for failure.  Apparently, Alcorn understands that the circumstances of our culture contribute to our sorrow.  I think that's true, for the most part, but at some point, when we see that our own expectations are causing us trouble, we have to reconsider our lives and make some difficult choices.  If "having it all" is a pipe dream, a fantasy, a unicorn wearing a crown of diamond-studded daises, then we have to think about what not having it all might mean.  We have to think about opting out in some areas, so that we can improve, and maybe even enjoy, others.  

Most of us can't choose not to work, and we certainly can't decide to give back the kids, so we have to ease up on our expectation of what being a working mother-- and every mother is a working mother-- is supposed to be like.  If we can actually give ourselves a break, give ourselves permission to be less than perfect, permission to just be real, then maybe we can stop apologizing all the time. If we can't, then we are really going to be sorry.




Alphabet letters image from here, photo credit to Alexandra Bone.

Skin Game

I used to have good skin.  It was clear and smooth and soft.  I never really did anything to it-- you know, washed it with a little soap and water, put on some sunscreen, when I remembered.  Many of my friends and both of my sisters suffered with at least some acne, but I was already dealing with buck teeth, thick eyeglasses and a mop of mousy, frizzy hair, so I suspect the gods of puberty took pity on me and just let the skin thing slide by.  Did I mention that I grew up in Southern California?  In sunny, beachy Orange County, where the high school hallways featured surfer chicks and cheerleaders fit for the life-sized posters that junior high school boys had on the inside of their bedroom doors. Oh yeah, the rest of us were there too.

Back then, I was just glad that I didn't have to contend with dermatological woes on top of everything else.  I had a friend who went twice a week to get UV treatments where she lay on a table as pulses of purplish light were aimed at her already scarred cheeks. Another got steroid shots on the days she wasn't getting her braces tightened and restrung with fresh rubber bands.  Several of my friends started taking birth control pills as freshmen, ostensibly to stop the raging hormones that caused their tremendous acne, but really, who knew?  All of them also layered on copious amounts of concealer and foundation which gave the illusion of smooth skin until about the end of second period, when the makeup started to smear onto their cowl-neck sweaters (yep, it was the '80's), leaving an unsightly, but obvious line right along their chins.  I didn't wear make-up, because, by some cruel trick, make-up was the one thing that made my skin break out.  I didn't even wear mascara, because just when my mom would finally let me out of the house with it on, my parents also finally let me get contact lenses, and the ophthalmologist made swear I wouldn't wear eye make-up. The lenses did less than I thought they would to minimize the impact of my mouth full of impressive orthodontia and my still frizzy and uncontrollable hair.  On the upside, the dents that had been forming on the bridge of my nose from the heavy glasses I'd worn since seventh grade did start to disappear by the time my senior picture was taken.  

A year after high school, I had my oldest son, and two years later, my second.  I guess I can spin that little bit of personal history positively by noting that, with contacts and straightened teeth, my frizzy hair didn't keep me from finding a boy friend.  I don't think I thought much about my skin again until my boys were in high school, and I found out that teen-aged boys are as deeply invested in the smoothness of their skin teen-aged girls are. I still never really did anything to my skin, and even if I'd had beauty products, the boys were using the medicine chest shelves for face-wash and medicated acne pads, zit cream, and so forth.  They had to, because I don't recall anyone suggesting that the boys try birth control to improve their skin.  As their mother, I have to say they've both grown up to be very nice-looking men, basically unscathed, at least by the acne.  

Lately though, with grown-up children and age fifty on the horizon, I've noticed that my skin just isn't the same.  And by not the same, I mean not young.  Actually, I mean old. My skin is no longer fresh or smooth or even naturally blushed like it used to be.  It's wrinkled and seems thicker and kinda blotchy and just, you know, not the same.  The skin dial has spun from "low maintenance" to "shrieking cry for help" and I didn't even realize it was happening.  Of course, I know the answer to any personal problem like this is shopping, and this has lead me to stalk the skincare aisle of department and drug stores near my home.  

But here's a crazy thing I'm noticing as I peruse the well-stocked shelves at my local retailers.  It's not about maintenance anymore, it's all about repair.  Daytime repair, nighttime repair, hydrating repair, color-correcting repair. There are thirty or forty moisturizing creams, as well as freezing creams, sculpting creams, and firming creams.  And everything that comes as a cream is also available as a serum, whatever that is. The boxes and jars carry adjectives like intense, transformative, regenerative, and revitalizing.  Am I alone in feeling like a science project when I look at this stuff?  Or worse,  like a dilapidated house in need of remodeling.  There are fillers and sealers and resurfacers and restructurers.  Shouldn't these products should come with some kind of a tool kit? Or maybe a construction crew, because damn, I really need to get some serious work done.  Just thinking about it stresses me out and makes me tired.  And I know that's not good for my skin! 

I think I did notice something called "blur" cream on the shelf crowded with anti-aging lotions and potions.  That actually sounds like a friendly alternative to all the heavy artillery we've been talking about.  But I don't need a cream for that:  I'll just remove my current pair of thick glasses whenever I'm in front of the mirror:  Voila! instant anti-aging.  

Image is from this blog.

The Sadness of Sunday Afternoon

Another sick day here, another day of things not quite getting done-- hello, laundry, you know I'm looking at you, spilling out of the hamper, taunting me.

Image from this blog page

And it was Sunday, which starts out gloriously as a weekend day, but ends up as a lowly school night.  I find there is something particularly sad about this slide from frivolity into practicality.  Even if there are chores to be done,  errands to be run, a Sunday morning off work  is usually full of promise, with the whole day spread out before me like a fresh sheet of paper waiting to be filled with random doodles and, occasionally, a spark of genius. 

Today there was early coffee and the Sunday papers(best papers of the week): The Sunday New York Times, and, also,the local Arizona Republic, which can be read in its entirety in under an hour, but carries the store ads and, especially, the coupons.  I feel we got a good Sunday Republic if the total value of the coupons I clipped exceeds the cost of the paper.  By that humble standard, today was a winner.  The Times is always a winner, just because of the sheer luxury of getting a magazine inside the paper-- and every few weeks, two.  Another way today gets into the win column:  The "T" style magazine arrived, and even Delia enjoyed it.  She's at that age, with one foot firmly in childhood, and the other drifting  into the girly world of shoes and clothes and jewelry.  She spent as much time poring over the high end retail ads as she did looking at the Walmart Toy Guide which arrived in today's Republic.  It wasn't the real toy guide, the thick one that usually comes the weekend before Thanksgiving, but it was a good 16 to 20 pages of Holiday toy preview.  A bracing reminder that Halloween has officially passed and we have entered into the official shopping period.  

After the languid early paper-reading period, the day seems to speed up somehow, and before you know it, it's lunch time.  I make the first vague, sweeping announcement that there better be some homework done so that we don't get down to the wire on Thursday night at nine o'clock trying to complete worksheets and computer lessons.  But then, I'm still reading the paper, and thinking about how I can sprinkle the chores and errands I'd planned for today throughout the week so that I can hang on to the weekend and maybe fit in a nap.  Then it's suddenly three o'clock.  My homework reminder gets a little more strident, but remains unheeded, until I decide to start dinner around five, trying to clear some of the debris of the day on my way to the kitchen.  It's a big enough apartment, but somehow, the clutter piles up on days off, so that there are little projects in every room.  Then I hear, "I can't pick up now, I have to do my homework.  You tollllddd me I had to start it today, so I am.  And anyway, she was the one who left that there."  

The whining has begun, right on cue-- that's how we know it is officially a school night:  there is whining at dinner time and a trillion requests for assistance with bathing and reading and vocabulary and fractions-- all while I am trying to chop or brown or mix something.  Yep, the weekend is over.  Tomorrow will only be that much harder if the groundwork for the morning isn't laid tonight, so you have to go with it, be a responsible adult and supervise and assist and pick up-- because, seriously, no one will admit to having left the markers on your bedroom floor and the scissors and construction paper in the living room.  And no one will admit to setting up a picnic, complete with dishes and play food, for four favorite dollies and ten of their closest stuffed and furry friends, under the dinner table.  "I don't care who did it,"  I whine right back, "Just pick it up before dinner, or don't be surprised to find your toys in the trash."  Yeah, I'm that mom, the one who consistently threatens to just lose it and throw everything away.  There is a scramble, and most of it gets picked up, but I still find myself reaching for a toy croissant and bunch of plastic grapes when I clear the table after dinner.  

See what I mean about Sundays?  Some time between three and five, when you're not really looking-- because maybe you did go out and do those errands, or you finally dozed off there on the couch for a few minutes, or you watched a movie you've seen a hundred and eight times but always get sucked in by when you stumble across it-- some time in the late afternoon, the weekend is over and you're plunged back into the demands of the working week.  It's like looking around at a party and realizing someone you wanted to say good-bye to has already left.  You missed your chance, and so, even if it was a great party and you had an awesome time, it got stepped on a little, just there at the end.  That's the sadness of a Sunday afternoon.

The Week on a Page

I need to tell you I've got a cold.  It is a simple change of seasons affair, I suppose, but I take no comfort in that fact, because to me, any cold, even the slightest irritation of the throat or plugging of the nasal passages and sinuses is a personal assault to be received with a complete lack of grace and dignity.  having a cold makes me cranky:  Why me, Lord?  Why am I so accursed? Picture me, if you will, shaking my fist at the heavens with one hand, and clutching a used tissue in the other. 

I mention this, not as a play for sympathy, but as a point of information.  I started the blog post a day thingy yesterday, and today, my one day streak is threatened by a nasty virus.  I was actually coming down with this most of the week, but there was no time to try to fight it, so today I am really feeling sick, and yes, more than a tad sorry for my own self.  But,  I am soldiering on.  With just a few hours left on the clock, I've dragged myself from the sofa, still clutching a tissue, and stopped shaking my fist at the heavens long enough to write a quick post. 

My plan was to give an account of the week, so I'm going to dive in, letting you know that I worked three days, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, at my post office job, which you can read more about here. Those were also school days, of course, and Tuesday was our "early day" when I drag the kids out of slumber an hour early and Fiona and I hustle Delia to school for her chorus class, walk home again and then head back to school an hour later for Fiona to get to kindergarten. 

Speaking of kindergarten, my days off were spent helping with Fiona's class trip to a farm, and at the "Fall Party" which included pumpkin painting and a healthy snack.  The journey to the farm, which is about forty freeway minutes across town from the elementary school, was loud, but blessedly uneventful.  The farm visit included a chance to pick vegetables (we got some really nice cucumbers, zucchinis and radishes, which we have eaten several nights this week), a chance to feed and pet baby pigs, chicks, and lambs (though the goats, which are known to bite, are off-limits), a chance to find our way through a corn maze, (which finishes off in a "corn classroom" where we learned that corn is in everything and that each strand of corn silk corresponds to a kernel of corn on the ear) and, of course, a chance to bounce in a bouncy house-- so, all the regular farm activities you'd expect.  After lunch, a mandatory stop at a "porta-potty," and some more good old-fashioned running around, the kids each picked a pumpkin from the "patch" and re-boarded the bus for the forty minute ride back to school.  Some of it was fun, and the kids had a good, but smelly, time and all of them made it back, though several head counts were required.  On the whole, it could have been much, much worse.

The pumpkins were put to good use Friday, at the class shin-dig, where the kids applied paint and stickers to customize their farm-picked friends, then set them in the sun to dry while they (the kids, not the pumpkins) sucked juice from boxes and ate clementines cleverly decked out as mini jack-o-lanterns by the extremely efficient room mother.  I am a less efficient, some-time room helper, and this time I was tasked with "mummifying" the juice boxes with white duct tape and  applying "googly eyes" to give them a holiday feel, even though this was a "fall party," totally unrelated to that pagan celebration, Halloween.  Did I mention that there were 55 juice boxes to mummify and eyeball?  Did I mention that it took me the better part of three hours to open the industrial sized box of juice boxes, take off the straws so the kids wouldn't feel like we'd purposely frustrated them (though, for a moment, my inner evil twin considered leaving them on, under the duct tape, just to see what would happen to 55 frustrated, thirsty kindergartners) then wrap each box for the desired mummy-like effect? 

By the time I got to googly eyes, my fingers were sore and I had twenty minutes before I had to leave the house and transport said juice to the school.  To my credit, I was able to stick eyeballs on roughly half the boxes... I made sure that Mrs. Efficiency's little girl and her whole table got juice with eyeballs, so that she could claim to have had the full party experience.  The kids who got juice without eyes were told that they had "mystery juice," and it was their job to guess the flavor... that went over pretty well, I think.  Everyone had fun, got plenty to drink, and went home with a paint-covered pumpkin and hands that smelled nicely of clementine juice.  One little girl briefly got upset about paint dripping on her pumpkin and ruining the face, complete with eyelashes, that she had lovingly designed.  The kindergarten teacher (of whom I am a loyal fan) walked over, asked missy what the problem was and then told her to reel it in and stop being such a drama queen.  "We're moving on," she said, "wash up and join us."  My thought is that it's not a really good party unless someone winds up crying and splashing water on their face-- at least that's what I learned in college.

Thursday was Halloween, which entailed a quick change worthy of a big Broadway show.  It was a work day, so the girls were at the Boys and Girls Club until 5:45 and their brother was due to pick them up for trick or treating at six.  Fiona ran around in her underwear for a couple of minutes before getting her ballerina gear on and Delia got half-way into her owl costume, then sat down and started making a rubber band bracelet which she adamantly swore must be completed immediately so that she could give it to her brother's girl friend.  That night.  Really.  Tears ensued, threatening to ruin the owl mask I had cut out of construction paper and glued together.  Luckily for Delia, her brother had more patience than I did, and he talked her down, and into the rest of her costume.  For the record, he used all the soothing tricks I had used on him years before...

Of course, this would have been a spectacular post if I had taken pictures of any of these events (not work at the post office, maybe, but the stuff with the kids, for sure).  I have a picture of Fiona on the farm in my phone, but no idea how to get it into the computer and onto the page.  And I really wish I'd gotten a picture of those juice box mummies.  The rest of the week whirled by too quickly for me to capture it on film, though I'm beginning to wonder if things really happen if they're not posted on Facebook... But that's a topic for another post.

Na No... What Now?

This month (yeah, it's November-- for those of you still in a candy-induced haze from last night's Halloween festivities) is officially designated as National Novel Writing Month, known by those in the know as NaNoWriMo.  The idea is that, if you write a bit every day, you can produce a 50,000 word novel in the course of a month.  Why they have chosen the busiest shopping month of the year is beyond me-- perhaps as an antidote to the rampant commercialism that has pervaded our holiday season, perhaps as a distraction for those who are tired of NFL football, perhaps-- but I digress.  You get the idea:  write every day and you can finally stop whining that you have a story to tell, and not only would it be an awesome best-selling behemoth of a novel, it would be a kick-ass, yet romantic and hilarious movie as well.  I see Channing Tatum and Emma Stone as leads.

But don't think that this is an announcement that I am planning to write a novel-- not this year, at least.  No, the thing is, other writing forms are riding the NaNo coattails to encourage all sorts of artistic expression.   One of those hangers-on is the art form known as the blog, hence the even hipper, though more cryptic, NaBloPoMo-- National Blog Post Month.  To play this game, you sign up at BlogHer and pledge to post every day on your blog for the entire month.  "What's in it for me?" you might ask-- and well you should, because, do you even have a blog?  Should you blog?  Is now the time to start?  I'll leave those deeply personal questions up to you and get back to what's really important here: me. 

I have decided to try to push myself to be more productive with my writing and this NaBloPoMo thing, despite the ridiculous name and how hard it is to stop and capitalize every other letter as I type, seems like a good way to do it.  I have recently, somewhat to my own surprise, identified myself as a writer when I met new people who innocently asked, "What do you do?"  Of course they didn't ask, "what do you do for a living?" to which I would have had to answer, "Me? Why, I am a gosh-darned fine part time postal counter employee in a bike shop in a strip mall next to a mid-sized supermarket." When I say I'm a writer though, people immediately follow up with "Oh, what do you write?" And what do I say?  Well, I get all mealy-mouthed and mumbly, and I roll out a gem like:
"Oh, you know, essays... stuff about, you know, being a mom...like,being a person, you know, oh.. I have a blog."  Yikes.

So, ahead of the New Year's Resolution game, I'm going to commit to writing every day, and since the possibility of public shame is an effective motivational tool for me, I am going public with this NaNoBlo thing so that I will at least feel like someone will hold me to this.  I realize that my loyal fan base is comprised of my handful of tolerant and wonderful friends and family members, so I know, deep down, that the risk is low-- I mean really, the possibility that up to ten people will know that I slack off and fail sometime around November 5?  I shudder!  I really do. 

But seriously-- I need a kick in the butt, and I really do want to write beyond the confines of this blog, so I'm going to use the daily commitment as a way to make myself step over the mess in our apartment, ignore Bejeweled Blitz and Words With Friends, and restrain myself from checking Facebook, for at least an hour a day.  I want you, anyone out there reading, to call me on this if I don't follow through.  I think it's NaNoBloPo legal to take weekends off, but today, on this first day, I'm gonna say that I am going to post every day.  You don't have to read, but maybe you could just check in and see if I'm writing. 
Now, let's go through the kids' candy and see if we can skim off a few decent pieces before they notice!  See you tomorrow...