Apt. 11D

Notes on a Holiday Week

May I never see another fondue pot again.

Too many parties this week. Too much shopping. Too much family. Too much of everything. Good things should be parselled out in small chunks throughout the year rather than melted together into one pot of bubbling chocolate. I have a sore belly from this week and am positively dreading one more night of festivities. When it's all over, I am planning on closing myself up in my office and enjoying solitude.

Let me just take a moment to brag about the bargains that I found on the 26th.

I come from a long line of bargain braggers. When we exchange gifts on the holidays, my family leaves the price tags on the gifts. Not only because it makes returns easier, but because it enables the giver to crow about the sales that were found. At first, this practice mistified and frightened my mid-western husband who was unused to shameless shopping. But now he shops with the zeal of the newly converted.

After Christmas, we each took separate trips to the mall. I was badly need of clothes for teaching, because my Old Navy t-shirts won't do. J. Crew was having a 40% sale on their already marked down kelly green sweaters and other preppy goodness. I elbowed the crowd aside for a cashmere sweater for $35 dollars and cashmere gloves for $9. Half off some tailored pants from Banana Republic, because they have developed a line of pants that are sensibly labeled a size smaller than I usually get. Lets me feel forever skinny.

Steve went to Macy's for his yearly purchase of socks, underwear, shirts, and pants. He won't shop again for another year. Guys have it so easy. Very pleased with his bargains, he showed me the receipts when he came home.

Still, I overdid the bargain delights, like everything else this week, and I hope to not step foot in a store for another month or two.

5 Things Meme

Dan Drezner has tagged me for the latest meme -- 5 Things You Don't Know About Me.

1. I was the smallest kid in high school, until I hit my growth spurt sometime in my sophomore year. One gym teacher gave me the knick-name "peanut." One of many scars that came out of gym class.

2. I entered college in 1983 with the plans of being a computer science major. The first program I wrote was a bubble sort on punch cards. Even though I recieved As, I decided to not be one of the only female computer science majors at my school and start off at a company like Microsoft on the ground floor. No, I decided to be an anthropology major. That lasted for a year or so and then I switched again and again, finally settling on political science.

3. During summer break, I wrote a database program organizing their entire year's sales using Lotus 1-2-3 (eyes rolling) for a solenoid valve computer. On top of the minimum wage salary, they gave me a $100 saving bond.

4. After college, I was an editor for the computer book division at Simon & Schuster. My boss encouraged me to flirt with the writers for PC Magazine in order to get them to sign book contracts with us. One columnist agreed to write a book with us after we solved the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle on an airplane going to COMDEX in Las Vegas.

5. While I was a computer book editor, someone tried to fix me up with Bill Gates. I said, no way, man. At that time, I was into poor poetry-type guys.

I tag Russell Arben Fox, Scott Lemieux, Allison Kaplan Sommer, Melissa Summers, and Heather Armstrong.

Last Post about Christmas

My kids totally owe me. When their stupid wives decide to evict me from their family rooms and move me to the nursing home, I'm going to remind my sons of this week, and it will yield enough guilt to keep me in their homes for another year. This week bought me one year out of the nursing home.

Today we took them into Manhattan for Steve's company holiday party. It's a big deal, and well worth a missing a day of school. The kids rode the train into Manhattan and played on the computers on the desks next to Steve. The firm also handed out free Build a Bears, had face painters, story reading, three rooms of food, balloon twisters, craft rooms, cupcakes everywhere. But the kids really liked the train trip and sitting next to Daddy, as he made some last minute phone calls.

After the party, Jonah really wanted to see the "big tree," so we waded through Times Square and went to Rockefeller Center. Obligatory, boring pictures in front of the tree.

Then a schlep back to New Jersey with two boys who were so tired that they could only walk very, very slowly.

All the while in the city, I was shooting calls back to my mom. Last night right before Jonah went to bed, he sighed and said, "all I really want for Christmas is the Lego airport set." I knew he wanted the Lego City Airport; it was on my list, but I just hadn't had a chance to pick it up yet. I suddenly became worried that it might be sold out. I immediately called my mom to see if she could get it for me while we were in the city. She called the Lego store to see if they had it. She called back. It was sold out. She called the Lego store in Rockland County. Sold out. She called to tell me about. At 10:00, she learned that might be a couple left at the Target in Hackensack, and she resolved to head out there at 8:00am the next morning. When she got there, the airports were gone. She made some more calls and heard a rumor that FAO Schwartz in Manhattan had it, but there was no freakin' way I was going to wait on that line, so we decided that Jonah might have to get an IOU from Santa this year.

When I got back from the city marathon this afternoon, the IOU thing was really bothering me. I called some places in Westchester to see if they had it. Nada. I checked out ebay, which was selling them for double the price. Not. On a whim, I called the local Lego store one more time. They had it! Well, not quite the same thing, but they got a shipment last night of a new and improved airport. So, I zoomed over the mall and got it. It's more expensive then I planned, so Jonah is going to get a couple of things removed from his pile and reserved for his birthday.

My mom might have bought herself an extra year in our guest room.

I'm signing off here. I'm busy preparing for our Italian Christmas Eve (scallops wrapped in bacon, shrimp scampi, stuffed clams, tuna sauce over pasta, salmon spread, mussels in tomato sauce and garlic, crab cakes, lobster in phillo triangles), wrapping presents, and getting some last minute stocking stuffers (Dora Band-Aids for Ian). I'll mostly be gone until after the new year. Have an excellent holiday everyone! Laura

Pictures below:

Blog Bashing

There's been quite a bit of blog bashing lately. Scott McLemee scoffed at the notion of a blog implosion last week. Today, my conservative daddy sent me a link to a post from Power Line where they respond to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Joseph Rago. Rago writes,

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

Question of the Day -- Holiday Chores

Who does the majority of work around the holidays? By work, I mean food shopping, card writing, present shopping, UPS waiting, stocking stuffing, Menorrah lighting, tree trimming, latke frying, yadda yadda. You, your spouse, or your mom?

Hevesi Hubris

God has cursed me with Italian eyebrows. Big hairy catepillars that if they had their way would merge into one. I don't have the will power to pluck each hair out by the roots by myself, so once a month a get a burly Eastern European woman to rip them off with hot wax. Yeah, that's much better.

When I went to the salon today, somebody had forgotten to turn on the wax machine, so I had a half hour to kill until the wax became hot and runny. I didn't mind too much, because I got to catch up on some important reading, like an interview with Sandra Bullock in Glamour. Later I turned to this article on Alan Hevesi in New York Magazine. Anybody outside of the area following this one?

It's a sad tale. 35 years of public service. On the eve of a landslide election for State Controller, he was undone by scandal. The papers learned that he had a state employee chauffeur his sick wife around to doctor's appointments and to keep her company for four years all on the public tab. He repaid some of the money just weeks before the election. He claims to have just forgotten. Now, he's friendless and in danger of getting impeached.

And so Hevesi’s banishment is particularly excruciating. “It’s horrible,” says Hevesi’s son Andy. “This is a Democratic sweep, a landslide, something a Democratic pol who’s been in the game for 35 years has been waiting for forever. And now he’s on the outside.” His impressive career has been reduced to a single unseemly question: Did he get away with something? As one county official said, “It’s like he didn’t exist in the press until the scandal.”

Holiday Cards

After you have kids, the holiday cards take on new meaning. You pose your kid under the Christmas tree in prim little dresses and suits. You enclose happy little notes about their progress in school and trophies from football. It's one of the rites of passage for middle-class parents along with the carseat and the sippy cups.

Before I had kids, I always thought I would be too cool to engage in such cliches, but here I am printing out labels for our happy little kid cards and inserting our happy little notes. And it was fun looking for the best picture of the year (the boys were wearing grubby t-shirts and sitting on a rock in the woods). It was fun thinking through the highlights of the year and laughing at our missteps.

I also love the other kid cards that we've received from our family and friends. Everybody's grown and smiling. The cards are hanging from a string on the bookcases in the dining room.

Here's our effort:

Tis The Season To...

get annoyed at your neighbors, who have wisely chosen to park their car on the lawn behind the inflatable Santa Sponge Bob.

Tis the Season To...

covet footwear.

Spreadin' Love

Robert Putnam comments on the latest census data:

“The large master trend here is that over the last hundred years, technology has privatized our leisure time,” said Robert D. Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard and author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”

“The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone,” Mr. Putnam said. “That is from many points of view very efficient. I also think it’s fundamentally bad because the lack of social contact, the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlook that we should.”

Putnam's pessimism is a nice splash of cold water that you'll need after reading about Time's Person of The Year (via Dan):

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

A good article the use of experimental drugs for dying patients. A nice link for a public policy class.

Kristoff tells the same sad tale over and over. But I'm glad he's doing it.

Great post by Elizabeth on the boringness of hip parents.

Must read Jane Galt's jaw-dropping description of working for PIRG.