Almostgotit.com

Our kids all go to the same high school, and we meet for lunch once a week at the Gourmet Market Café. That is, those of us who can get away from work that week do so. It’s been a different group each time.

However, as we are all highly trained professionals, our conversation is always on-track as well as brilliant. 

Today’s topics, to wit:

(1) How John likes Harvard. 

(2) What it’s like volunteering in the High School Guidance Office (and) when you are supposed to call 9-1-1.

(3) How excited Hannah is to be going to Japan.

(4) Whether the middle school should even bother staying open after state testing is over in April.

(5) Whether a knitting club will EVER work at the High School. Particularly in a room that smells funny.

(6) What will happen to Gourmet Market Café’s soup menu now that their regular chef has left.

(7) Touch Therapy: Should a Nurse Seriously Study This, or Not?

(8) How many of us could move to Seattle to become potters and writers and other wild and interesting things before this city (and our families) would even notice.

(9) Whether, if you let your lawn grow so tall that your 11 y-o daughter starts to take daily “how far over the city codes you are” measurements, the neighbors will think you are going through a divorce, will call you with their very kind concerns, and then report you to the authorities.

(10) How hard it should be raining before you leave the Café patio and move to an inside table.

While this particular model that I own, by BonJour, seems no longer to be available,  there are dozens of other insulated French press pots now on the market.  And no wonder!   They are easy to use, easy to clean, and make to-die-for-coffee.  As a comes-from-Seattle-girl, I know.

Many coffee connoisseurs recommend press pots for the best coffee flavor, but the glass ones don’t keep coffee hot for more than a few minutes.  Problem solved with this insulated version,  which I can set right next to my computer, where it provides me with hours of refills! 

I’d buy this pot over and over again, too, except that the one we have will never wear out. We’ve used it daily for years now. 

I would like to add that not a single company or person is paying me to write about insulated French-Press Coffee Pots,  though I certainly think it is an excellent idea to send nice things to bloggers and ask them for endorsements (money is always a nice thing to send to bloggers, too.) 

After all.  If the Johnson & Johnson marketing people  learned anything from their recent Camp Baby experience, they may now realize they’d have been much better off showering their target mom bloggers with products (to keep and to use as blog give-aways) instead of paying their way to a conference where all the neuroscientists, nurses and marketing professionals who dominate the momosphere  were treated to scintillating sessions about hair-braiding.

I’m just saying.  And for the record, my contact information is right up there, at the top of this screen.

I posted yesterday about the Mother-Daughter Book Club  my daughter and I have been part of for the past four years.  Here are the books we read during the last two of them:

5th Grade

• Ruby Holler by Sharon Creech
• Worst Enemies/Best Friends (Beacon Street Girls, volume 1) by Annie Bryant
• Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
• Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
• The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Witches by Roald Dahl
• Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
• Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

6th Grade

• Catherine Called Birdie by Karen Cushman
• The First Horse I See by Sally Keehn
• Hatchet Gary Paulsen
• Rachel’s Journal: the Story of a Pioneer Girl by Marissa Moss
• The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread by Kate Dicamillo
• The Doll People by Ann M. M. Martin, Laura Godwin, Brian Selznick, and Ann M. Martin
• Sahara Special by Esmé Raji Codell
• Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

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Related Posts:

Mother-Daughter Book Club List, Part 1
International Women’s Day: Toasting Pink

Smart, strong women read books.

This is the lesson I hope the daughters in our mother-daughter book club are learning.  We’ve just finished our 4th year together, and even though our daughters are growing taller than we are, we hope to continue.  We meet about once a month, and the girls take turns hosting and leading the discussion.  Moms help out by providing an activity and food. 

We’ve visited one author in her home and heard another one lecture about being a writer; we’ve marvelled over a local grandmother’s WWII rationing coupons while trying to bake without sugar; we’ve built tiny “Borrower” houses and been teased by our daughters when the books made us cry. 

These are the books we’ve read thus far.  You may recognize some old friends, but we discovered some really wonderful new ones, as well. 

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Creative Commons Photo, “Little Red”  by Flickr.com’s Aussie Patches, aka Ali J
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3rd Grade

• From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
• Felicity (American Girls Collection Books) by assorted authors
• The Gadget Wars by Betsy Duffey
• The Magic Treehouse book #16. Hour of the Olympics by Mary Pope Osborne
• Molly (American Girls Collection Books) by assorted authors
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
• Emmy by Connie Jordan Green

4th Grade

• Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson
• The other side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
• Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
• Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Joey Pigza Loses Control by Jack Gantos
• The Borrowers by Mary Norton
• Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry

 - To see rest of list, click here -

The story, in brief:  Johnson & Johnson co. marketers decide to be hip, and so they invite 50 of the biggest names in mom-blogging to an all-expenses-paid “Camp Baby” event   in early April.   They handle the invitations very badly.  Then they start disinviting people.   J&J has received lots of blog time in the aftermath, all right!  Don’t miss Susan Getgood’s hilarious “Camp Baby” post mortem!

Written especially for the web, the (very) short-form comedy series, “In the Motherhood,” is just begining its second season. Scripted by Hollywood professionals and with an all star cast featuring Leah Remini (”The King of Queens”), Jenny McCarthy and Chelsea Handler, the hilarious and edgy story ideas for each episode are submitted by real-life mothers from across the country. It’s a terrific concept.

And the episodes are FUNNY.

In the Motherhood hopes to become a major destination site, and so far it seems to be succeeding. I love the boldness of pairing the collaborative nature of the web with the professional production values already used by the television and movie industry. And all of this effort is aimed not at the still-highly-male-IT-industry, but at mothers. Hurray!

Oh sure — it’s still a marketing ploy. Nevertheless, it is also truly entertaining while managing to avoid the condescension and banality that still plagues so many “mommy” websites.

So hats off to ‘em, is what I say.

* The “Invisible Woman* essay was, indeed, written by Nicole Johnson, is fully subject to copyright, and her publicist tells me they were “deeply sad” when it “went global” without Nicole’s name on it.

* The Mommy Monk is one of several blogs which posted Nicole’s “Invisible Woman” piece without her name on it. That blog’s tagline is “MommyMonk: A woman attempting to find inner solitude in the daily self-denial of motherhood.” However, the blog’s author also claims to be a speaker/writer/teacher in addition to being a wife/mother. Not really the MOST solitary or anonymous person, then..

* Julie, who was very kind to comment here a couple of days ago, also posted Nicole’s piece without attribution. She claims this is not plagiarism as she doesn’t claim to have written it herself. Nevertheless, she also cites it as the central premise of her “Building Cathedrals” series of telecourses , for which she charges $20 per hour ($80 for the series). Which she markets under her own name. Nor does Julie seem quite so sanguine about folks resyndicating her own material: at the bottom of each page of her website it says © 2008 Julie L. Ford, All rights reserved

* It took me about 20 minutes to find the author of “Invisible Woman,” and 24 hours to contact and hear back from the author’s publicist. And I was just writing a post, not setting up a business. I’m just saying.

* My history-professor-husband tells me that we do, in fact, know many of the names of the artists, architects and builders who worked on medieval cathedrals. I am not done with this topic yet!

But I can talk about other things, too…

* I went out to lunch today. Why do waiters ask if you want “lettuce and tomato” but never if you want “tomato and lettuce?”

* It’s very funny to accidentally fall in step behind a man heading towards an adult bookstore. I did that today on my way home, and he kept turning around to look at me, nervously, almost as if *he* were the woman and *I* was a large, threatening man. When I realized where he was going, though, it all made sense. I should have followed him right into the store to see what he would do. Some day I’m going to do that, have been wanting to ever since that place opened a few blocks from my house. I think I’ll get all dressed up like a nice church lady, with a cardigan and hand bag, wander in as if by mistake, and start poking around, asking all sorts of questions, like “what is THIS is for?”

You may already have read “Invisible Mother,” (text below). As best as I can tell it’s been circulating online since at least 2005, via email, message boards, and dozens and dozens of blogs — but it is always credited to a nameless author.

Because she’s invisible. Get it?

I do not like to post things without an artist’s permission, much less without attribution. That’s called “plagiarism,” and is a form of theft.

Nevertheless, the hundreds of postings by hundreds of women all happily conspiring with the invisible author to keep her that way is wonderfully ironic, quite aside from the funny loveliness of the piece itself.
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Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident—all those epithets that strike right at our femininity.

So begins an article on Women in Leadership, in which eleven women from different backgrounds tell their own stories about how they arrived at the place we call “success.”   Read it!  
Creative Commons  photo by Meretsoleil2

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Related Posts:

“Fixing the Women:” not enough to overcome pay inequity
The Tyranny of Petty Coercion

Last Satuday, March 8, was International Woman’s Day (IWD).  One hundred years ago, in 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter working hours, better pay, and the right to vote.

One hundred years later, IWD’s 2008 global theme is ‘Shaping Progress,’ in honor and celebration of all that women have accomplished in the past century, and with the hope that women around the world will continue to see advancements in their working and living conditions.

I celebrated International Women’s Day largely in the company of other women.   I blew off several afternoon errands to have tea with a friend instead, and later I dined with seven other fabulous chicks in my moms-only supper club, where we enjoyed several items from Cooking Light’s Tapas party menu and drank Cosmopolitans. 

Oh my.  Almostgotit LIKES Cosmopolitans. 

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Cosmopolitan Photo by “No Prawns” (Creative Commons Licence)
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However, she doesn’t like traditional Spanish tapas (the kinds involving lots of squid ink,  tentacles, and sea urchin roe), and as I was too late in signing up for what to bring,  the other fabulous chicks had already divvied up the good stuff from the Cooking Light menu.  So I googled tapas recipes until I found this spinach and chickpea recipe which sounded good.  It also turned out to be coincidentally-perfect for International Women’s Day as it is credited to Padma Lakshmi, the Indian supermodel-actress-author-cook who also happens to be Salman Rushdie’s latest Ex. 

Well.  Fabulous chick though Padma may be, hers turned out to be a pretty blah recipe, so below is fabulous-chick-Almostgotit’s new-and-improved version.