FABOO MAMA

Wanna be a prop in an inauguration? Here’s your chance!

At 4:28pm I received an email from the Office of the Mayor. It’s a request for Angelenos to name their top Angels. That is, who is the most awesomest volunteer you can think of? The Mayor cares. Really. He wants to lavish the top 5 winners with the opportunity to be on stage with him for a few moments next Wednesday when he’s inaugurated for his second term.

There are True Angels in this city. They are the people who devote untold hours each day to building their communities and lifting up those less fortunate than themselves.

Whether painting a mural, planting a tree, or serving food to seniors, True Angels realize we are all in this together, and that social change only comes with active, committed engagement. These True Angels come together from all different backgrounds and from all across Los Angeles to lay the foundations of stronger communities for future generations.

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Women — Comments
08
Jun 09

Look at me too! or Why women drive me nuts…

: Image via Wikipedia

There has to be a term for those women, the ones who when they see you flirting with someone immediately start flirting with that person too. Loser? Insecure prat? Pain the in ass? Leech? Sure I’ve noticed it before, but rarely paid it any mind. But now there is one particular person doing it and it’s just mind blowing. I actually would not have noticed, but in the course of a week, 3 different people who do not interact with her pointed it out to me.

So, in the interest of “science” and our sad need for amusement, 5 particular guys were chosen for me to flirt with. Bets were taken on how long it would take this woman to glom on to them. Now, you have to keep in mind one thing: this person made it abundantly clear that these 5 dudes were not her type in any way. We started the “experiment” in late March. The findings were astonishing: With the exception of Dude #3, it took her at least 3 days to start flirting with the guy. Dude #3 took ONE day.

What I find most fascinating is that she only does it me. Other women can flirt and she doesn’t react at all. It’s like we’re in this strange weird contest no one told me about. It makes interactions difficult only because I am forced to hold my tongue and not publiclly mock her desperate need for attention. And y’all know how I can get when it comes to a public mocking.

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Me / Parenthood — Comments
25
May 09

So long baby stuff; or I better not be pregnant

Tomorrow, my plan is go to Out of the The Closet and donate the baby stuff cluttering the garage and closets. Our youngest is 3 and everyone who knows me knows that I am not interested in making our family larger. Everyone who knows me has no interest in being around me when I’m pregnant.

What’s taken so long? Fear. I’m scared that I will get rid of the baby stuff and find out I’m pregnant again. Fear to make a decision is pretty paralyzing, I’ve learned. When we found out where were pregnant with the boy, we were broke. We also had to buy a lot of new stuff because I gave things away to friends who needed them. Thankfully, midway through that pregnancy we got more work and were able to afford to buy the things. Things don’t look so rosy now, so I’m paralyzed. What if I give away everything only to find out in a few months that I’ll need them again? Two years is a long time to live with that fear. It’s better to be optimistic, to think that maybe I can just buy the items back from Out of The Closet.

So, I bid farewell to the 2 diaper bags, 2 highchair seats, baby tub, toy mats, 2 carseats, 3 infant slings, the diaper pail, the potty seat, the 2 potty inserts and all those baby clothes I’ve never managed to unload.

But…maybe I’ll buy some pregnancy tests first.

Social Media — Comments
12
May 09

Twitter just made FriendFeed more valuable for me

In a rather strange and silent move, the Twitter honchos decided to tell you how to use Twitter. They’ve turned off the ability for you to see @replies to people you’re not following. So say for instance @shayera says something and I reply to her. Well, my handful of followers also following @shayera will see my response, but say @kspidel will not. Why? Because Twitter decided that was confusing for him.

Up until today, we had the option to see no @replies, only see @replies to yourself or see all @replies from your friends. The guys at Twitter thinks that made you all addlepated and shit:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

Confused? That’s understandable and exactly why we made the update.

Now, it’s one thing to remove a serviice without announcing it. It’s yet another to pull a service without soliciting any feedback from users, but when you post a half-assed vague blog entry like that, it just makes you look like an asshole.

Luckily, for me FriendFeed does show the @replies of your friends. So I’ve been seeing @shayera’s replies to people I don’t know. This is good because not only do I get to meet new people via her interaction with them, I just may even start following them. What’s more, I may even add them as friends on FriendFeed and see even more @replies.

UPDATE from Twitter on this mess.

Spotting new folks in tweets is an interesting way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow. For example, you’ll continue to see, “Ev meeting with @biz about work stuff” even if you don’t follow @biz. We’ll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space.

In other words, you will still now know how your friends interact with someone else. You’ll see their name in an entry, but if your friend is directly talking to that person, you will not see it. Call me crazy, but a lot of cues on how we interact with each other are based on how our friends perceive someone. If I can’t see how my friend deals with a person how will I know if I want to follow them or not? It’s one thing to go to someone’s Twitter page and read their stream, but it’s an entirely different response to see how someone you trust interacts with that person.

Twitter would do best to put back our settings, forget about more useless features unless they’re giving us threading and groups and let allow us to modify our Twitter streams as we see fit.

Me — Comments
28
Apr 09

Why my husband rocks

There’s really nothing more to add. Just read this thread from FriendFeed:

GOP / Government / Republicans — Comments
28
Apr 09

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) to become a Democrat

: Image via Wikipedia

Senator Arlen Specter, a longtime Republican Senator announced today that he was switching parties. He stated that he will be running for his seat in 2010 as a Democrat.

Here’s part of Specter’s release, excerpted from the Wall Street Journal:

I have been a Republican since 1966. I have been working extremely hard for the Party, for its candidates and for the ideals of a Republican Party whose tent is big enough to welcome diverse points of view. While I have been comfortable being a Republican, my Party has not defined who I am. I have taken each issue one at a time and have exercised independent judgment to do what I thought was best for Pennsylvania and the nation.

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans. (WSJ)

While this is a major boon to the Democrats in the Senate, giving them a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority (if Al Franken ever gets sworn in), we rank-and-file Democrats will do well to remember Specter’s actual voting record and how that rarely matches the speeches and statements he has made. Too many times in the past has Sen. Specter step outside party lines to make announcements that he’s unhappy with the Republican goal, how he doesn’t think the people he represent would like him to adhere to party lines. Yet, when it was time to vote, Specter more than ofter, voted along party lines. Sen. Specter has crafter faux-outrage into an art form.

Happy Birthday, Ilia

Entertainment / Internet / Video — Comments
19
Apr 09

Time to cancel cable, thanks to Hulu & YouTube

Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Last summer when I was first introduced to Hulu, I thought it was a nice service. There were a few movies on there that my kids enjoyed, some clips of TV shows I had once found amusing, but for my taste it was definitely lacking.

I’ve been a Netflix customer since 2001 (You can add me as a friend here). Naturally, the service is more appealing to me; the DVDs come and they go back when I feel like it. But Netflix changed the game when they offered up Watch Instantly. Suddenly, we were hooking up our laptop to the TV so we could watch the available movies & TV shows. Last fall, when Microsoft enabled Netflix on our Xbox 360, we saw no reason to keep our bloated cable package. We still have our basic cable +HD tier, but we’ve scaled back our other packages losing HBO, Starz, IFC and Encore; the movie channels we’d watch on those rare times we turned on the TV to zone out. But since the only show we actively watch on TV is LOST, anything else flies under the radar. (Sidenote, we never actually sit down to watch LOST when it’s on, instead we watch it on the DVR about 30 minutes to an hour after air time. Even if we didn’t do that, we could still watch LOST on ABC.com the next day.)

These past few days, I’ve had the pleasure of checking out Hulu. If you’re subscribed to me on FriendFeed or have clicked the FriendFeed tab above, you’ve seen the recent Hulu clips I’ve posted. (You can also subscribe to me on Hulu if you’re in the US and have an account.) Yes, the site is still a headache to navigate, but if you take the time to go through the genres available, you’ll find a lot of gems. One feature I’m in love with on Hulu is the embed feature. On Friday, I took the movie Jesus Christ Superstar, narrowed down to the song I wanted and embedded that clip into my Tumbler blog.

I used to rely heavily on YouTube to show my kids clips of old TV shows I used to watch. On YouTube, the quality of these old show clips are usually quite horrible. Last night, I pulled up several Sesame Street clips that I’ve watched on YouTube and was amazed at the high-quality of the clips. Even comparing movies available on Hulu versus movies available on Netflix Watch Instantly, Hulu wins out with the better quality video watching on the same computer. Piping Netflix through the Xbox 360 as a Time Warner Cable customer leaves a lot to be desired. The video quality is on par with watching an old VHS cassette on a VCR taking its last breath.

With Netflix you’re paying monthly, naturally that means no ads. On Hulu, short ads (30 seconds) are interspersed throughout the episodes or you have an option of watching all the ads at once and then have uninterrupted play. You can also vote on the ads, which makes viewing them a little more tolerable. The ads you rate down, don’t get shown any more. The ads are so non-invasive that I’ve never even bothered to count how many times you get interrupted during a show. Unlike say, watching ABC.com, where the ads are way too long, and you have that 15 second – 30 second buffer at the end of each 1 minute bank of ads. I can not speak to YouTube’s ad policy on their Shows page, as I haven’t witnessed any ads during the short test periods.

YouTube recently announced its Shows page. The genre breakdowns mirror Hulu’s and most of the content available on YouTube is also available on Hulu. Running on my netbook, where a Hulu show can take about 13 seconds to load, YouTube shows take about 2 minutes. The only appealing thing YouTube has that Hulu doesn’t is a Foreign movie section, with automatic subtitles. That means, for me several full-length Bollywood classics. This works for me because I often rent them from the local Indian markets and the quality of the DVDs are often bad. Some of the same Bollywood movies are available via Netflix Watch Instantly, but then we’re back to the quality, and yes YouTube offers better quality than Netflix in this case too.

Between Netflix, YouTube and Hulu, I’m hard pressed to find a valid reason to keep my cable. It seems the only reason I have it, is so that the kids can watch their shows and my husband can watch the HD channels in the wee hours of the morning. Sure, there are bonuses of cable, such as the ability to let the kids watch OnDemand in our bedroom, streaming music from MusicChoice, even though we use Last.fm or Pandora more often than we play our physical albums. Right now, having cable is the only thing keeping our internet bill low, but that’s becoming more and more less valid as a reason. After all, why pay for something we’re not using?

Me — Comments
19
Apr 09

Let’s Hear it For the Boy!

As much as I bitch about my husband, he does rock. He cooks 90% of our meals. Since I hurt my back in 2000 he’s been doing the dishes. He bathes the kids because he knows that stresses my back too. And yesterday, he’s (almost) redeemed himself.

Since he does dishes, my chore is laundry. Yesterday, he did all the laundry that I planted as land mines in the hallway. They’ve been sorted since Wednesday and ready to go, but the back thing made it impossible to get to. Now, all of us have clean clothes. Yay! He also finally watered the backyard plants. So, they’re not completely shriveled in this heat.

So, I’m happier today than I was yesterday and that’s not just the drugs talking.

Health — Comments
18
Apr 09

In sickness and in health?

I’m in pain. A lot of it. Something happened to my back on Wednesday and now I’m barely able to walk. The pain is unbelievable sending me through bouts of nausea and tears. For those that know of my previous back issues, this is definitely worse. I’ve hurt before, but nothing like this.

What makes it a little more unbearable is the near unconcern my husband has. He said, “But you’re always hurting.” True and he mocks me saying my body should be condemn, but when a slight turn of my back to the left send the most horrible muscle spasm up to my head, I’d expect a little more caring. I don’t think I’m asking to much.

On Thursday, I asked him to take the girl to school. He didn’t even wake, leaving me to get the kids ready in the morning. I drove her school and cried all the way home as the need to shift gears sent pain throughout my right side.

Friday, he did take her to school. When he got back home, I asked him to water the plants. This means, reaching under the potting bench and turning on the spigot so the drip irrigation can work its magic. It didn’t get done. In the meantime, I got ready to go because he said he was going to take me to the clinic. Little did I know that I’d have to wait for almost 4 hours for that to actually happen.

I wound up at the overcrowded ER at LAC-USC. Nearly 4 hours of sitting in a painful chair as the guy behind me kept jostling our shared back rest. Speaking to other people who had been waiting over 24 hours to see a doctor, I got a sense of dread. Wave after wave of nausea came over me, from the ridiculous amounts of pain spreading from my back to other parts of my body. I asked for some nausea medicine only to be blown off. Getting up to puke, made me lose my seat; my options were to either stand along the wall or sit outside, possibly missing them call my name. I called him to come get me.

Seeing as how we live 7 minutes away from the hospital, even taking into account getting the kid’s shoes on, I didn’t expect that when I called him 20 minutes later he’d claim that they were almost ready to leave. Almost. He got me nearly 45 minutes after my first request. No one will ever accuse him of punctuality, but since I was in pain, my delirium made me assume he’d act on some urgency.

Now we’re at this morning. The kids are awake, I’m starving and want coffee. When I asked for breakfast and coffee he moaned. In fairness, he did give me the skillet, but I wept as I made the coffee and breakfast for me and the kids. My daughter has been helpful. She got stuff from the fridge for me. But the most painful thing of all, as she watched me make breakfast she said, “I didn’t know parents could cry, mama.”

FABOO MAMAInside the mind of an opinionated mama…