P.W. Seared Pot Roast

I assure you that the P.W. in the title does not stand for a small child’s disgusted cry of “Peeeyoo!”

If you think it might stand for “Proven Winner” you’re also wrong.

If you guessed “Prize Winning” you’re getting closer! But only because somebody will give me some sarcastic Darwin-esque award when they’re done reading this blog entry.

I think I have a good track record of making mouth-watering pot roasts in the past. Today I decided to try something a little different. My Mom said she always takes them straight from the freezer, sears them a bit on each side to keep in the juices and lets them cook a little longer than usual. I thought, “Why not?” The Why Not was occasioned in part by the fact that I had no fresh meat to satisfy my inner carnivore.

I warmed up the stove (a lot, as it turns out, because I got distracted by the twins needing something) then unwrapped the pot roast. It looked a little shiny and icy on the outside, but otherwise quite cookable. I put a little oil in the pan, browned two sides of the pot roast and then turned it down to cook with some nice seasonings and water.

When I got home from church a couple hours later, I had the following conversation with my husband (who had stayed home with the sick twins):

Husband Man (laughing): I took the plastic wrap off your pot roast.

Me (blinking and furrowing my eyebrows): P—P—Plastic wrap?

Husband: Yeah. The whole roast was wrapped in plastic wrap.

Me (more blinking and furrowing): But, I didn’t…. I seared… It browned…

Husband (paling): You SEARED it?

Me: Seared.

Turns out the Society for Kindness to Plastic Wrap need not be too worried because the plastic wrap came through without any injuries. I’m not quite sure what physics were involved with the heat and the sizzling and browning of the meat and seeming lack of change in the plastic wrap.

So now you know what my special “P.W. Seared Pot Roast” is: Plastic Wrap-seared Pot Roast. I swear I had no way of knowing it was all covered in plastic wrap. I didn’t see the butcher wrapping it. And when I unwrapped it, it looked like a nice, solid sheen of ice on top but otherwise completely unnoticeable. Oh well. Perhaps it’ll turn out better this way and I’ll start preparing it this way every time. (Anxiety of carcinogens and plastic chemicals aside…)

N-A-Y-M-E-Z

I take names very seriously when I have a child. It seems some parents just pick a few consonants at random (close your eyes and point?) and then throw in a few vowels in to make it pronouncable.

dfj turns into Fajden or Fayjden or Dafej. I'm all for creativity, but seriously folks. I imagine school teachers saying, "Is that spelled R-O-B-E-R-T?" and the kid replies "R-A-H-B-U-H-R-T." Parents get creative in all the wrong ways, in my opinion. Children's hairstyles and names are not the way to express your individuality!

For example:

* I knew a grandmother a couple years back who was VERY proud to show pictures of her grandson, Anakin. I thought to myself, "That boy sure has a bright future ahead of him!"

* In junior high, my brother had a friend named Konden. He was lucky to be good looking, popular and very witty or he probably would have committed suicide by age 13. Teenagers can be brutal and a name like "KONDEN" isn't going to help, for heaven's sake. Who wouldn't slip up and say the wrong thing?

* My brother-in-law is named Mikle. Pronounced Michael. (He would say, "Pronounced MIKLE.") He told me a few weeks ago that one reason his dad chose that spelling was so it couldn't be turned into Michelle. Ironically, he told me this right after I called him Michelle. So much for that theory. Instead of becoming just Michelle, he is now Michelle, Mickel and Mickley.

So I go the boring route and I'm very happy with it. I like my kids to have a sort of heritage behind their names. I thought Thomas was a safe name for one of the twins until a few weeks back when he started mispronouncing his name.

The T sounds like a D.
The O sounds like a UH.

You put it together. I hope this self-inflicted nickname doesn't last.

Why Blogging is Dangerous

…and why my “true confessions” will never be more than superficial fluff.

The worse you make a fictional character, the better real people feel because they can feel superior by comparison. Readers can enjoy hating the evil man who is fictitious because they know they are meant to hate him. They can boo at the manipulative woman who beguiles those around her and feel that, if nothing else, they don’t act like she does. In other words, it’s enjoyable to hate a villain.

However, when you speak the ugly truth about those who are real to you, you probably come off as arrogant and judgmental. At the very least, you’re showing poor diplomatic skills by exposing others to criticism.

I often smile at the small hypocrisies, questionable intentions, inconsistencies and other subtle character flaws in those around me. It would be very simple to take these things and turn them into humorous slices of life, but I know the good of these people too much to laugh at them. And, of course, some human frailities are too serious to laugh at anyhow.

Benjamin Franklin stated, “Any fool can criticize, condemn andcomplain and most fools do.”

If I am to be a fool, give me the role of Fool from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: one who uses wit to entertain those around me, using the cover of a fool's mirth-filled laugh. (More on this another time, perhaps. And if you get a chance to travel down to Cedar City this summer, be sure to book tickets to Twelfth Night at the Shakespeare Festival. It is well done.)

The United States of Money

I was telling my son about the 4th of July a couple days ago. It must have stuck in his head because today he decided to make a U.S. flag. (Meaning: he decided that I was making him a U.S. flag.)

He brought me some green paper and a turquoise crayon and told me that he couldn’t find red, white and blue so this would be okay. I took the crayon and drew some stars and stripes for him and then we made a construction paper flag pole and taped it on.

As my son joyfully waved his flag a few minutes later, I was amused: our flag looked like a dollar bill perched on a pole. Somehow this seemed appropriate. Hasn’t our great country become a symbol of wealth, commerce, free trade—in a word: the American Dream?

My son decided to use his flag in place of the traditional torch and pretend to be the Statue of Liberty. My mental wanderings continued:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These words once called to those who sought freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom from oppression. As my son inexplicably holds aloft his “dollar bill” flag, I wonder if people are still attracted to America for the light of freedom—or the dollar bills waving in the wind?

Fiction: Flora

Flora

Virginia Marie Conrad sat alone in her parlor, peacefully dozing. Other than the faint intake of her breath, the room was silent. No neighborhood sounds penetrated her carefully crafted solitude. To glance at the room, a stranger might think they had stepped into Victorian England.

Miss Conrad—as she insisted forcefully on being called—was wrapped in a volumous dress from her ankles to the top of her neck. An antique brooch perched on her breast, slightly hidden by a meticulously detailed lace shawl. The knitting needles, crochet hooks and miscellaneous yarns and strings next to her chair hinted at the shawl’s origins. Her face was lined with wrinkles, a testament to the anguish and pain that had defined her past.

The “back parlor”—as Miss Conrad insisted forcefully on calling this room—looked out at green foliage on every side. A first impression might have labeled this view as a jungle, but closer scrutiny revealed careful cultivation of the flora. The huge ash tree was pruned into symmetrical perfection and led the eye to beautifully shaped antique roses, grapes crawling purposefully along a trellis, and masses of foxgloves reaching for the sky.

The faint rev of an engine nearby was the only hint that this paradise was, after all, in the middle of modern suburbia. Miss Conrad had always been a very light sleeper, and frowned vaguely at the reminder of the city that had grown up around her.

A louder sound abruptly pierced the air. This sound reverberated from within the Victorian incongruity. Miss Conrad, already partially aroused from her nap by the engine noise, opened her eyes immediately, suddenly animated into life. Her lips drew together into a thin, almost invisible line and her eyes were dark and sharply serious. Although blazing with fierce intensity, they admitted to a groggy confusion as her mind was expelled from the land of imaginings into the stark light of reality.

Miss Conrad noted her state of mental confusion and was annoyed by it. As the jarring sound invaded her serenity again, she pulled her eyebrows together in disgust. “Michael!” she screamed in an autocratic tone of voice. The power of the voice resonated in stark contrast with the frail frame that produced it. There was no answer.

The sound pierced her ears again. She looked at the originator of the sound—a small, wireless telephone—feeling offended and annoyed. It’s sleek design and modern contours contrasted sharply with the house surrounding it. Miss Conrad felt somehow affronted and tense as she looked at it.

“Michael!” she screamed again, “Answer the telephone!” She didn’t seem to consider the idea of picking it up herself. As it commanded her attention again, she covered her ears to dull the intrusion, leaning away from it. Her face weakened and she moaned softly, rocking back and forth. “Michael…?” she whispered, suddenly looking small and vulnerable. “Where are you, Michael?” The phone continued to ring.

Then she remembered. Michael was gone. “I’ll never see him again,” she gasped slightly. She choked softly as she repeated the word “never” in a barely audible whisper.

She felt shockingly alone, vulnerable and weak. Then, just as suddenly, her strength of character seemed to awake and revolt. She fought off the creeping depression. As the last echoes of the phone faded away, Miss Virginia Marie Conrad gingered picked up the offending item and hurled it forcefully across the room. Two things then happened.

In the heat of her emotion, she had misjudged rather badly her state of health and suddenly felt her arm burn with pain. She had no idea what she had done to herself, but felt a series of painful contractions in her arm and chest. She gasped loudly in unexpected pain as she watched the telephone descend. It flew in a picturesque arch and landed in the middle of Michael’s forehead. She screamed loudly now, absorbed in what she saw, not noticing until Michael’s head seemed to shatter into dozens of pieces that it was merely a framed photograph.

She wanted to run to where the picture had fallen to assess the damage, hoping only the glass had been broken, but the pain was too intense. Battling both physical and mental pain, she whispered, “I’m sorry, Michael. I lost my temper and I hurt you and I don’t know how much. But you know I didn’t mean to. I love you.” The words faded away as more sensations of pain ran through her body. The intensity left her breathless for a few moments and she leaned back and fainted.

Suburban Claustrophobia

Canada Red Choke Cherry. Small tree forming a rounded pyramidal crown. The leaves come out light green, then turn to reddish-purple later in the Summer. The flowers are white and bloom in April; fruits are dark purple. Easily grown and very cold hardy.

Newport Flowering Plum. Dark purple foliage holds its color well in full sun. This tree is more tolerant of changing temperatures than Thundercloud. Single, pink flowers in early spring followed by fruit.

Chanticleer Flowering Pear. This tree forms a narrow, upright, somewhat pyramidal crown with crisp, glossy green foliage that turns reddish in the Fall. The flowers are white and form in clusters.

For months now, I have been battling the slow onset of suburban claustrophobia. The neighbors' homes, which have always been too close for comfort, now seem to be expanding every day. Is it possible that they have foundations on wheels and once in a while, when nobody is looking, they push a little closer to me, boxing me in more and more? Perhaps not but it feels like it.

My crisis began when I contemplated a fix for my problem.

Problem: I feel that my yard has no privacy and I may as well be in a public park (which I despise greatly) when I step outside. (Note to self: is it reasonable to feel like I have to be dressed for public, hair combed, makeup on (ha ha... gotcha.. I never wear makeup except when I'm going out and even then, only rarely...) before I go through my back door? I say NO! Not reasonable!)

Proposed Solution: Line the backyard with trees, which will grow and fill in and make me feel less like my neighbors are holding binoculars up to see my movements. (Note to self: that is absurb on so many levels but I never claimed to be exempt from absurdity so ha! As if my neighbors would need binoculars to see ten feet away? and what would they be watching?)

Putting the plan into action: Look at map of yard. Problems emerge: It will take years for the trees to mature and fill in. If I were to plant them NOW for the privacy I want NOW, they would overrun each other and become tangled within two years. But I don't want to wait two years to go lie down in my backyard with tangled hair and holes in my clothes. I want to go stretch out in whatever I feel comfortable in--lying in some position that is completely ridiculous-looking but COMFORTABLE--and I want to do it NOW!

Perhaps I feel like a spoiled child who has been denied a piece of candy. Or that brat in "Willy Wonka" who screams, "But I want it NOW Daddy! Now Now Now!" Perhaps I need to chill. One feeling I couldn't deny, however, as I stood shyly in the shade of my french doors was the sense of unhappy claustrophia. I wanted to run and sing and act like a child in my back yard if the mood struck me. I didn't want to feel on display. As I mulled these things over, I waved to my neighbor who was jumping on the trampoline in her back yard. Each bounce reminded me that I am part of a larger community--like it or not.

When my husband got home from work yesterday, I told him I was feeling claustrophic in our neighborhood but I was trying to not think about it. I laughed it off, because he wasn't thrilled with my plans to buy a half acre in Lehi and get a house half the size for the same cost. I wasn't particularly thrilled with THAT aspect of it either, but I digress. I laughed it off but the feeling remained.

Long Story (even longer than what is posted) Short: The doorbell rang this morning and somebody from my landscaping company was at the door. "Where do you want these trees?" he asked. I stood there dumbly.

"Umm let me come look at them," I said. I walked all around my yard while the landscaper stood there (semi)patiently. First I chose one spot. Then another. Then another. Then after I'd finalized where I wanted everything I changed it all around. Two flowering pears in the front yard. The Canada Red Chokecherry and Flowering Plum (Newport) in the back yard. I had to face the facts: no amount of rearranging four small trees is going to turn my .19 into a 1.19 acre lot. Claustrophia set in again.

But now, as I look out my second story window to the neighbors down below, there is one more piece of humanity and nature planted below. Humanity because my two Flowering Pear trees are joining a whole procession of perfectly-proportioned, spring-blooming, autumn-coloring, not-too-small yet not-too-big, neighborhood-friendly trees that my neighbors would approve of. I resisted this variety at first because it is so popular in landscaping right now and I have that tendency to want to prove I think for myself rather than blindly following the pack. But facts are facts: these trees are gorgeous and no amount of rebellious, individualistic free thinking can change that fact. So now I have one more thing in common with those around me.

As I was driving away after the trees were planted, my neighbor called out, "Flowering Pears?" I nodded and we discussed them. My neighbor approved. And suddenly I felt protective of my little trees. They're like children when you get down to it: my trees may be smaller than my neighbors' or less perfectly oval or vaselike in their shape. But they are mine. And because they are mine they are beautiful. If they grow ill, I will worry and watch over them. And if they die, I will feel a real sense of sorrow as a piece of me is forcefully extracted from my being. And until then, I will have headaches over them but love them. And perhaps we'll add more to our family one day. I'm already thinking about a weeping cherry. Or a corkscrew willow. Or an ash. Or a braeburn apple to harvest each fall. Or a peach tree for my husband. Or apricot just to get those beautiful blossoms even though I can't stand the fruit....

YourTube MyTube, We All Cheer for YouTube

Here's something to cheer up your day. Legal/Copyright questions aside, I have enjoyed several "We really ought to get to sleep... Okay, just one more link" moments courtesy of YouTube this week. Quirky though they may be, here they are to waste some of your workday or sleeping hours. Bon appetit!

The One, The Only..... Weird Al!
White & Nerdy (final version) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mBGODdzzVw
White & Nerdy (take #1 for all you Donny fans) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWc6QQ9JlMc
The Saga Begins :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-gi4Nt_xxg
All About the Pentiums :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vaNeaWQoHI

Falco
Rock Me Amadeus! :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjBXK4CTtvM
Vienna Calling :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjRGVDD0Wk

New Site

I should mention, as a follow up to my earlier post titled "Fun Moms Would Do This Stuff," that I have reorganized my info, added more to the calendar, and purchased a dedicated domain name. You can find my cool new version of the site at:

http://www.funtodo.org

Thanks to the people who helped me with this project, including (but not limited to) Josh, Mike, Nick, Marianne, Mike (the other Mike), James, Josh (the other Josh), the friends who gave me feedback as I was developing it and my well-behaved kids who watched hours of Dora The Explorer and The Backyardigans while I coded and searched the internet.

Techie News

A local company made headlines today as the #2 fastest-growing tech company in America. (Read it here: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/b2fastestgrowing/2007/full_list/index.html) The company helps "mom and pop" businesses gain an online presence.

There is a certainly a huge market for this kind of service out there, so I'm not surprised. What did surprise me was the information available on their website. My first question, of course, was what kind of jobs they might have posted right now. (My husband's 50-minute commute each way is more than a little tiresome.)

I did not find any job listings online or even a link to job openings. Nor did I find a statement of "we do not currently have any jobs available." As I was mousing over their menus to see what kind of information they had available, I noticed that the menus were extremely straightforward. Then I moused over "Investor Relations" -- where a whole list of subitems was readily available.

So this business specializes in helping other people create an online presence... yet the seeming majority of their readily-available information is for investors. This brings up several questions as to their business model or, at a minimum, their public relations strategy. I do not feel compelled to critique in this area, since I have very limited information regarding the company. But it's something to keep an eye on. Best of luck to our local company as they "grow up"!

Crawl, baby, crawl

Yesterday I got inspired by my friend Mike adding "AdSense" to another blog I post to. (http://tni.geekuniverse.og) So I thought I'd give it a try here and see how it turned out. For those who don't know, AdSense is run by Google and it uses the Magic of Googleness to match up potential advertisers with participating websites. So it "crawls" your website regularly to figure out what it's about. Then it adds advertisements that will match the content of the site.

I was excited to see what kind of ads I would get matched up with, since my personal blog is rather random. At first I got a public service ad, which made me pretty happy. Then I started getting ice cream ads, which were also awesome. And that makes sense, since my entries titled "Sunny Side Down" and "Frozen Scrambled Eggs" were all about misadventures in ice-cream making.

But then I noticed an ad at the bottom advertising a site to discover your errr "lifestyle" preference. (If I say it outright, just imagine the kind of ads I'll get next time Google crawls through here!) I wondered what I might have written that matched my website up with an ad like that.

Other than that one, though, I was very pleased! I actually wanted to click through to see the ads, but that is against the policy when you sign up for AdSense. It makes sense that you shouldn't be paid for your own clicking. But who else is going to more interested in targeted ads than the person who wrote the content for the targeting?? Kind of a catch 22 in advertising terms--logic insists that advertisers must exclude their prime target!

So far I've earned 35 cents. As Mike put it: "It's gonna be a lot harder than I thought to become an internet tycoon."

FICTION: The Chameleon

Note to readers: when I write fiction, I like to take bits and
pieces of myself and twist them around to create a fictional character. It may
be tempting to interpret my lead characters as autobiographical but they are
not, which is why I rarely share my fictional writing with anybody else. So
please read on with the word of caution not to think that "Charlotte" is a
mirror image of the author, although we share some things in common.

When I was seven years old, my Mom took me to a baseball game. She said she wanted some time alone with her only daughter. The team we were cheering for wasn’t very good. At one point, my Mom took off her hat and threw it on the ground. I asked her why and she told me it was because our team was losing and they didn’t even seem to notice.

After the game we went to my Grandma’s house and she was serving hot dogs. She always served hot dogs when I came over because she thought that’s what little kids liked. But I hated hot dogs and I still do. So when Grandma put one on my plate I picked it up and threw it down on the ground. Mom went really pale and Grandma asked me just what I thought I was doing young lady. She didn’t sound angry but sometimes you can just tell.

I told her it was because I had never liked hot dogs and she had never even seemed to notice. I don’t really want to talk about the rest of the evening with Grandma because I like to remember her happy now that she’s passed on. But when Mom and I got back in the car later, I started to cry and asked why it was okay for her to throw her hat but it wasn’t okay for me to throw my hot dog.

Mom told me one of those little pieces of wisdom that has stuck with me to this day. She never thought it would stick but it just stuck anyway. She said, “Charlotte, you just need to learn how to act different places. Grandma’s house isn’t a ball field so we don’t treat it that way. We act different there.”

I was confused and furrowed my eyebrows at her. She didn’t seem to notice and started to talk as if she were talking to somebody else who wasn’t there. “You can’t treat everyone the same, either. Some people want to see one half of your face so you show it to them. Other people want to see the other half, so that’s what they see. There won’t be many people in this world that you can really look in the eye and feel like they see all of you.”

It made sense to me, young as I was, and I never forgot. I learned that there were really loud people who wanted you to be as loud as they were. And there were loud people who just wanted to hear themselves so they wanted you to be quiet. And there were quiet people who wanted nothing more than to listen to someone else so they wouldn’t have to do the talking. And then there were people like me, who were quiet most of the time, and just wanted to have quiet, peaceful people surrounding them.

But however much I liked my world to be quiet and controlled, I tried to play the part I needed to play when I was with other people. I just considered it good manners to try to show whichever side of my face the other person wanted to see. I tried to explain this philosophy to my best friend, Marcus, when I was 15. He looked at me as if I was a stranger.

He stared and stared at me and I felt more alone the longer he stared. He had always been one of those people who I could really look in the eye and I would just know that he knew all about me from every angle and he liked me anyway. Now as he stared me in the eye, I felt like maybe I was wrong and we didn’t know each other at all. He said to me eventually, “Do you know what a chameleon is?”

“Of course,” I answered, relieved that he was changing the subject.

“Do you think it’s wrong what they do? To change colors all the time?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said, confused. “Isn’t it some kind of defense thing? To protect themselves from predators and stuff?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But it sort of makes you wonder what color they really are. You think you know and then suddenly it changes. And then you realize it could change again any moment. Like there isn’t anything solid or real about them if they’re always changing.”

Suddenly I knew he hadn’t changed the subject at all and I felt embarrassed. One moment I felt like he didn’t understand what I was trying to say about how I acted different around different people—it was just my way of having good manners!—but then the next moment I wondered if he really maybe understood me better than I understood myself. I felt deeply uncomfortable and changed the subject. I can still feel that uncomfortable feeling when I think back to that conversation years ago—like there’s some little piece of truth aching to get free but you just can’t quite get to it and figure out what it is.

Ten years passed and I slowly started to realize my good intentions had gone wrong somewhere. Everybody who knew me loved me and wanted to spend time with me, but the more others adored me, the less I liked myself. With each passing year, I started to feel that there was nothing about me that was truly admirable. So I tried harder to reach out to others to soothe the fears circulating within me. I was more vivacious around my fun friends. I was more filled with wisdom and humility around my grandma. I tried harder to be serious around my boyfriend, Kirk, who disapproved of my loud friends.

Another ten years passed and I quietly accepted my way of life. I was a chameleon through and through and I knew there wasn’t a person in the world who could look me in the eye and even guess what was going on inside my head. I had married Kirk and we lived a peaceful life. We had two kids and were expecting one more and then things started to crumble.

It happened like this. I was talking to my oldest girl, Elizabeth, and I said to her on a whim, “Lizzie, what do you want to be when you grow up?” She immediately replied, “I’m gonna be a Mommy just like you but I’m gonna be a doctor too and when my kids get owies I’m gonna fix ‘em up but I won’t just be pretending ‘cause I’ll be a real doctor and not just pretend like I am right now when I play with Robbie.”

I laughed and patted her on the back. “That sounds really good, Lizzie!” And that’s when it hit me. One of those memories that suddenly comes out of nowhere and seems to smack you right in the face. I remembered when I was five years old and my kindergarten teacher asked us to draw pictures of what we would be when we grew up. I had drawn a picture of my mom down to the last detail. The dark green pants that weren’t really very stylish but were her favorites, the chunky orange necklace that I hated but really revered because it was part of who Mama was, the shoes that I said looked like old lady shoes. All those little things that made Mom who she was—that’s what I wanted to be.

Now I was 35 years old and realized I had no idea who I was. In a moment I started to wonder what sort of depths of human complexity lay deep inside me. I had never really wondered if I had talents—I’d just assumed I didn’t. I wondered if maybe I could paint if I tried it. Or sing. Or play the tuba. I’d never even thought about those things because life had always steered me along an okay path. I’d always reached out to try to be whatever other people wanted me to be.

I asked myself in that moment, “Who do I want myself to be? Who am I?” And answers flooded my mind, but only answers that I would give to other people. For my kids, I was a mother. To my husband, I was a wife. To my friends, I was a listening ear. But for myself—well, I’d never considered that. And I knew my kids loved me and my husband loved me and my friends loved me but I knew as a fact that I had never loved myself. It hit like an electric jolt through my entire body.

I felt tired. My head suddenly started to hurt and I felt nauseous. So many questions suddenly swirled around my head but I didn’t want them. I wanted them to go away because to confront them—well, who knew what would happen? Would I suddenly be unhappy in my life? Would I suddenly demand more? Is this how midlife crises were born? That made me feel normal again—this was just a midlife crisis. It happened to everyone so I just needed to get some sleep and the feeling would go away.

I made dinner for my kids and cut their food up just the way they liked and made different food for my husband who always complimented my good cooking when I made his favorite meals. I needed to hear that today because I felt weak. When he said casually, “You sure know how to cook lasagna,” I felt some of my pain rescind into the darker reaches of my mind. And when my friend Megan called me later, crying and confused, and ended up by saying, “Thanks, Charlotte. I knew I could count on you to cheer me up” I felt that I had rediscovered my identity.

I went to sleep that night content to discount my earlier revelations as a phase I was going through. I guessed that even adults went through “phases” but they were just more grown up than temper tantrums and playing in the mud. I figured that I had gone through a midlife crisis phase that afternoon and I should just be happy that it only lasted for a few minutes. I had escaped without buying a convertible, demanding a younger husband or any of the other garbage people went through during this phase. So I counted myself lucky to be able to move on and have that phase behind me.

The only problem was that when I woke up the next morning, the phase was still there. And as I tried to ignore it while my son demanded Mickey Mouse pancakes and my husband complained that I had packed him the same lunch the day before, it only seemed to intensify. Suddenly I didn’t think I was so different from my kids and I thought that maybe they were a whole lot smarter than I had ever been.

Fun Moms Would Do This Stuff

I put together some ideas for a church thing tonight. Then I put it online to share with the world. Please send me more ideas and I'll get them added to the list!

http://www.geekuniverse.org/KidFun

Frozen Scrambled Eggs

Who would have known you can scramble your custard to the point where it looks like breakfast food (stop laughing) and then stick it in the ice cream maker and it still turns out amazing?

I wouldn't have thunk it. But my husband did. And it turned out great!

After I ruined (correction: thought I ruined) my custard this morning, my husband went out of his way to try to comfort me. (Although his laughing didn't really improve the situation.) He made all the kids come and give me a hug and he said, "Don't worry. Everybody scrambles their custard sometimes."

So after he turned my mess into a lovely frozen custard yesterday evening, he started the pecans. (We were making butter pecan ice cream/frozen custard...) Well, apparently he let the pecans toast a bit too long and they got burned. I tried to comfort him, but I don't think it helped that I was laughing.

And the pecans tasted great anyway.

Sunny Side DOWN

Crud.

I have been psyching myself up for homemade ice cream for over a month and waiting until just the right time.

I bought the cream over a week ago.

I bought the milk two days ago.

I put the ice cream-making bowl in the freezer 24 hours ago.

Then I scrambled my custard this morning.

Then I cried.

Maybe another day.

Saturday Night Ferver

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine invited me to come with him and some other friends to the May 5th Real Salt Lake game. I have been excited about this for weeks. Not only is The Bruce going to be in town (and I loooove The Bruce), but this game marks The Return of Cletus. Definitely a must-attend game.

And to be able to attend with friends--just plain awesomeness. These particular friends are funny. No other way to say it. I couldn't wait to hear their snide remarks, sarcastic commentaries and general exclamations of disbelief as our team lost gloriously.

I mean, this is Real Salt Lake. Love 'em but I'm a sucker for punishment. To call them a winning team would not only be false, but outright laughable.

So Saturday morning came and we arranged a carpool to go up to the game together. That meant the game was only a few hours away after weeks of anticipation! Then two little words inserted themselves in the front of consciousness: Stake Conference.

Now if you're not Mormon like I am, this probably means nothing to you. But if you are LDS, you know that Stake Conference is a twice-yearly meeting for everyone in a regional group of congregations. Higher-ups from our church leadership attend and it is generally a good experience. (Unless, like me, you have three small children who don't want to sit quietly in a chair for two hours...)

Stake Conference is always on a Sunday, but there is an adults session the Saturday night before. This session is always painful for me because Saturday nights are always my time to socialize, relax or have fun. To summarize: soccer is a heck of a lot more fun than stake conference. (I'm sure I'll repent of these heretical statements one day. Maybe. Umm... maybe.)

I battled my conscience for over an hour. My husband was completely unhelpful, withholding his opinion and only giving me subtle hints as to his feelings. (This is his way of trying to be supportive, but it is often not helpful.)

In the end, my conscience won. I was extremely annoyed. EXTREMELY. So I went to stake conference. It was nice. I left early to go to my dad's house. We watched the RSL game together in high definition on a DVR where we fast forwarded all the commercials. It was fun and the result--well--amazing. No, my team didn't win, but that didn't matter. (For more, see http://coachkreis.blogspot.com where I wrote my feelings on the drama.)

In the end I knew the final scoreline and saw all the goals. But I will never--ever--be able to guess the exchanges between my friends during the drama. There is no commentator that I can DVR. No highlights reel to watch over and over. My brain and my conscience are still battling after the fact, trying to decide who was victorious.

So what is the moral to the story? The point? The general thesis? If you figure it out, let me know.

Barenaked Babies

Why fight it?

As I write, one of my two-year-old sons is behind me stark naked, playing with toys. I have attached his diaper five times in the last ten minutes. So now I will try putting on an undershirt with little snaps to hold it in place. Then a pair of pants over that. How long will it last? Ten minutes? Fifteen?

In the mornings, the twins wake up and either (a) start crying, (b) start pounding on the door with little sounds of “Mooooom” or (c) start playing independently. I am always excited for option (c) because that means I don’t have to rouse myself out of dreamland quite yet. When I finally do give in to the whisperings of “A good mother would actually let her children out of their bedrooms in the mornings….” I drowsily get out of bed and head to their room. When I open the door, two chipper and energetic boys come bolting out of their room in a blur. As I process what has just happened, I note the pile of clothing and diapers left in the room. I rub my eyes and look the other way. Two streaking naked bodies are careening away from me towards freedom.

Time to wake up.

Actual snippets of a conversation I recently endured between my husband and our friend.
Also known as "Geek Talk"

The multi-threaded design?

Yeah it is a bad design. Back in the day, it was a great design. … For the developer, the thread per request model is tons simpler. You’d say, “I’m gonna go fetch a file” and it was very sequential.

The big advantage to an event-driven database driver is that what if for this web request you have to query two databases… It lowers your latency, so you can process your request more quickly and make it more scalable.

There’s obviously a cost for every thread you have. But obviously there’s the latency and the time.

But the non-blocking approach is more scalable.

Do you have one disk and you’re constrained by this seek time? Or do you have this array … ?

How much more scalability are you gonna get? We need to throw these application servers out the window.

But the client application developers, who are making the client side of the application, don’t have to…

If you’re talking about a client that’s sending a web request, then yeah, they don’t change anything.

How much performance difference is there doing essentially the same task?

The nice thing is that is should be fairly easy to do comparisions because I just have to write really simple Java applications… It’s like comparing the traditional model with the event-driven model.

I wonder with how many layers there are, is there any constraint with the type of performance you’re getting.

They’re not doing a lot of disk I/O if you’re doing repetitive queries. When the bottleneck disappears, how much performance can be gained? This model can get much more scalable web servers.

They have a web server that’s able to scale about four times better than Apache because it’s using this different approach. It can handle 15,000 web requests and keep the pipe as full as it can. They can fully saturate both gigabit cards.

If I have time, I’m gonna use the Linux-specific calls and build a framework around that.

It might be worthwhile to get an operating system with good support for asynchronous file transfer.

I’d be really interested to see how Oracle works under the hood because it does tons of asynchronous I/O stuff. How can there be 16,000 requests? [What the heck?]

How in the heck is it scheduling everything to fetch some stuff asynchronously and other stuff not asynchronously? It must have a pool that handles it all.

You get signal call back, so it basically gets interrupted.

Put it in the queue to get called.

If you want a whole bunch of different file channels, you can do that.

You’re calling Java from C?

Yeah. Java calls C and then C calls Java back.

“Here’s an early look at what the API is probably going to look like.”

That's interesting.

Strange Locations From My Youth #1

Strange Place #1

When I was seven years old, my family moved to Baden bei Wien (near Vienna), Austria for six months as part of a travel study program. My parents gave my older brother and me a pretty long leash. I remember walking into town with Mike to go to the Rosarium (a beautiful park with rose gardens and a lake), up into the mountains where two old castles were crumbling into ruins and all around the walking part of town.

But the strangest place I was drawn to in Baden was the old cemetery that was nestled at the foot of the mountains. I remember asking a man who was part of our group if he would go walk there with me one day. He kindly agreed, and I can now only imagine what surprise he must have felt at such an odd request.

The cemetery was unlike anything you’d find in my childhood town of Orem, Utah. The tombstones demanded respect at first glance. Their age and history humbled me and made me see my own life in a larger perspective. The names fascinated me the most, since they were so unlike what I was familiar with in the United States.

Postscript: I just found this website that really "took me back." Please go look at the gallery of pictures of this beautiful little corner of the world: http://www.baden-bei-wien.at/english.htm

Silly Things I Have Done :: Installment #1

Prologue: Okay, most of the “silly things” I will admit to will probably involve my friend Alysa. Alysa and I had all kinds of fun times together when we were in high school and college. We went through a lot together and stuck together through thick and thin. Life was so intense for us that we did crazy, fun, quirky things whenever we could. That helped us survive everything else.

One of my absolute favorite memories involved an old, discarded motherboard that Alysa had. We decided to have a little fun at the expense of the male population. We noticed that many men have this perception that women and technology can’t really mesh. Alysa’s dad happened to be an engineer and we both hung out with the computer geek crowd in high school. We both knew more about programming, electronics and geekdom than your average person. (We’ll cover our obsession with prime numbers and pi in a future installment.)

So we decided to take the motherboard to our university one day. We went to the computer science building at Brigham Young University and walked to a very busy hallway. Here we began our experiment. It went like this. We lifted up the motherboard to around eye level and then both got affixed really confused, dazed looks on our faces. We stood still and wondered how long we would have to wait.

Within seconds our first “victim” arrived.

“Hello, ladies. Do you need some help with that?” he asked in a very superior, helpful voice.

“Yeah, we like don’t get it and stuff,” we said dumbly. “Like, what’s this thing here?”

“Oh, that’s a capacitor,” he told us incorrectly.

“Oh!” we exclaimed with looks of relief on our faces. “Thank you!” We watched him walk away, with looks of admiring adoration on our faces until he left.

“That’s not a capacitor!” Alysa said disgustedly, as soon as he was out of sight. She then proceeded to explain his mistake to me. We repeated the process and before a few minutes had passed, we were actually surrounded by a crowd of young men, eager to help explain things to us.

After a little bit of effort, we got rid of the eager crowd (women + motherboard = sexy!) and decided to make our experiment mobile. We thought we’d see how people felt about us treating a motherboard with reckless abandon, so we stepped out into the rainstorm outside and walked along, looking at the motherboard as it got soaked and talking animatedly to each other as if there was no trouble.

At first, people just glanced at us with furrowed brows. Eventually, somebody was shocked enough to speak. He had almost walked past us when he noticed what we were holding. He stopped dead in his tracks and said, “Excuse me, ladies.” He was excessively polite, I should add. “Did you know that’s a computer motherboard?” he asked.

With looks of shock, we looked down at the motherboard as if we’d never noticed it until that moment and said, “It is?”

“Yes,” he said with concern. “It’s not supposed to get wet.”

“Oh,” we said, with our faces clearly happily. “Thanks for telling us! We appreciate your help!” And walked away. The man watched us with surprise until we were out of view.

It was pointless. It was random. And it was just a touch sassy. Good times.

Mediocre Tribute to Harvard & Yale

Mediocre might perhaps be a generous assessment of the following poem. Maybe someday I'll get bored enough to invest more time and make it "clever." Here it is...

Started Calvin Hill when I was only three
Twenty years later I was swingin’ Calhoun’s tree
Old Eli Yale looked down on me with pride
That was back before I took my two-hour ride

I left home for five years and now I can’t get back
Ma won’t look on someone who went down that track
At the last annual game, my folks kept seein’ red
‘Cause I went to Boston and got a Ph.D. there instead

I used to eat at Pepe’s though some believe in Sal’s
Just got a ticket on Wooster Street from some of Pepe’s pals
No bones about my secret and the skulls are kinda mad
I’d go on and tell you more if this poem weren’t so bad