Geeky Mom

I spent the day entirely off-screen (mostly). There was a bit of George Stephanopolis watching while folding laundry. One thing I realize when I have days like this and throw myself into household management is that this household management thing is hard work. The day began at 9:00 a.m. and didn’t end until 9 p.m. A 12 hour day. I suspect that’s typical of most at-home parents with perhaps some late-night duty as well.

The thing with managing the house is that it’s never done. I can look in any room and name 3 things that need to be done, many of them major projects. And of course, there’s the daily crap like laundry, dishes, and cooking. Never ending.

In my GTD system, Home is a major category under which are many projects, two of them are the kids. Raising kids is a major project and the most difficult one you’ll ever do. Sure, household management is long and tedious, but you aren’t usually confronted with anything more difficult that a nasty-looking stain. With the kids, there are bigger issues. Constant worry. Lots of stuff you can’t quantify and put in your GTD system. Like, happiness, well-being, intelligence. Am I doing enough to support those? And what tasks would I put on my list to ensure that these things happen? I don’t think “Make kids happy” is going to cut it. And, of course, that’s the rub.

The thing is, I sometimes see people far too caught up in household management with its never-ending but nevertheless discrete tasks. Maybe this is what bugs me about Caitlin Flanagan? (I say without having read much of her work.) I see that sometimes the two are connected. It’s certainly easier to deal with larger emotional issues when you’re not fight back a pile of laundry the size of Mt. Kilimanjaro, but maintaining that balance seems important to me somehow. And working out of the home definitely throws that balance off most of the time. Unless you have the perfectly balanced partnership where your spouse or partner fills in the gap. I’ve never met one of these, though most I know are close to this ideal. Their houses tend to be a bit on the messy side.

I’ve been blogging now for almost two years. I began in fits and starts here, moving to a professional blog over the summer of 2004 (which is now completely gone) and then deciding I could handle both a professional and a personal blog.

I am ever so glad I started doing this. It’s really amazing that I’ve kept this up as a daily routine for this long. If you glance back over the blog, you can see lots of projects I started and never finished, resolutions not kept, etc. But I’ve found this blog to be such a positive experience for me, I’m not sure I could live without it. Kind of a scary thought, I guess.

I started listing some of my favorite posts in the sidebar below the blogroll, mostly for myself.* If you’d like to suggest one, yay! It’s interesting to go back and see what I was writing and thinking about 2 years ago. A lot of it hasn’t changed. The issues I feel strongly about now I felt strongly about then. I’ve been somewhat of a broken record on certain issues.

I’ve made tomorrow a no screens day because I felt like the kids and I spent way too much time over the last couple of days in front of one screen or another. I’ll probably log on later in the evening, after the kids are in bed.

*These are the things you do on a Saturday night when your husband is off preparing for this.

I got the kids new toothbrushes last night. These.

Geeky Girl has brushed her teeth at least 3 times already today.

I should probably start the next dissertation chapter, but I’m tired; we’re all running on fumes here. It’s a beautiful day. I’m taking Geeky Boy to a lacrosse game in a couple of hours. I want to do some gardening. And did I’m mention that I’m tired?

I will probably tinker, but I just don’t feel like doing a should today. I did a bunch of shoulds yesterday.

I should really get out of the house anyway, right?

Harry at Crooked Timber, writes about a book on parenting. I would say, a controversial book on parenting. It’s worth reading the comments as well. I don’t have time for a reasoned response.

I love it when someone else does my work for me. Barbara Ganley has a wonderful post about “these kids today.” This is what my presentation was about yesterday. Barbara says a lot of what I said yesterday. After listening to two people lament how the online world was harmful, I began by saying, “What kids are doing online is a positive force in their lives and we, as older people, need to recognize that and help them through the negative aspects without being fearful of it and rejecting it out of hand.” Go read Barbara; she and I are really on the same plane today.

Okay, so two random links. Sue me. I need a shower.

Phantom has, of course, blogged the whole thing already. But she didn’t explain how wonderful her kids are. I mean, the walk *was* pretty long and up hills. She also didn’t tell you that LG and Baby Blue held hands much of the time, which was the cutest thing ever.

Her kids are as articulate as she depicts them on her blog. Hmmm. Wonder where that comes from? We briefly discussed our storage issues in saving up for the apocolypse. Here, we have gone through all of our water, using it instead for soccer games and such. I freely admitted, too, that I was somewhat lazy and sometimes didn’t feel like hauling water from the grocery store. Phantom admitted that her storage area is her guest room which can be problematic in terms of having guests.

I can’t even think about what else we talked about. I tried to get information out of LG when Phantom was retrieving napkins, but he kind of looked sideways at me. You could tell he wanted to talk but also felt he needed Mama there to make sure it was okay.

Phantom is wonderful and nice and kind and I felt right at home immediately. I recognized her immediately too. I do hope she and the family might be able to make it to my neck of the woods sometime.

It was touch and go as to whether I’d make it home. My ride to the airport was late. Traffic was bad. Then, the security people wouldn’t let me through. My driver’s license was expired. Which I knew and have sent in the paper work for a new one, but had completely forgotten about. I had to walk back down to the ticket area and get “reprocessed.” My flight was supposed to leave in 35 minutes. The nice airline agents walked me through security themselves. They had to vouch for me. I offered to be searched, but instead they let me skip to the front of the line. So it worked out in the end. Here’s a hint though: make sure your id is up to date before you leave. I could have brought my passport (which isn’t expired) and I wouldn’t have had to go through all that.

It was a nice trip and I’m so glad I got to mix a little fun into the whole thing by hanging out with Phantom, et. al.

I’m traveling somewhere, where I will be participating in a panel presentation, but more importantly, I will be meeting the Housewife of the Universe and her offspring. I’m very excited. I’m flying in just for the day, which just seems so extravagant to me.

In front of me is a family, granparents, mom, dad and two small children. The grandma is sitting way far away from everyone else and must yell to be heard. So annoying.

Speaking of annoying, I’ve gotten a fair amount of spam lately. I’ve been banning and deleting like crazy. If you find yourself accidently banned or deleted, let me know.

Though things have settled down a little, I still just feel like there’s a lot going on. Mr. Geeky has some projects finishing up this week, in addition to it being exam week and grading and all that. The kids have end of the year events and there will be elementary school graduation (eek!). I have a summer program that starts in a few weeks and there’s been enough little stuff coming in in dribs and drabs that I just feel like I haven’t been able to take a breather. August, I’m holding out for August.

Geeky Girl is explaining a playground mystery to us. She points out where she found the mystery objects. A more detailed view of the map is below. Click to see a larger view.

Note the dodge ball players in the top right corner. And I don’t know who the people down below are. Geeky Girl and her friend are by the tree. Their theory is that the purple piece was used to kill a squirrel. Cause there’s red on it. Geeky Girl took her magnifying glass to school with her to investigate further.

And now here’s a gaggle of kids playing online together but they’re all in the same room–with the lights out.

Last night, I was working on my Works Cited section for Chapter 1 when I realized I had an old xeroxed copy of an article on which I had no source information. No problem, I thought. I’ll just look it up in the library database. It’s a famous article. I’ll find it. Unfortunately, the copy I have is a reprint in some collection of work on composition and rhetoric. The library record was for the original version. I didn’t want to repaginate my quotes, so instead I went on a journey of discovery. And while I never did find the right citation, I did find some other cool sources and I learned a thing or two about searching for stuff.

My first stop was Google Scholar. I’ve used this before a few times and find it especially helpful for recent material particularly if it’s technology related. Doing a search on part of the article title (in quotes) and the author’s name yielded me both the original source and a reprint (one more source than the MLA database yielded, but the same two sources I found in WorldCat). The reprint wasn’t the same one as I had because the pagination was completely different. Also, I had received the article around 1997 and the reprint seemed too late. Digging through some of the other results on that search yielded some interesting material, but not the reprint I was looking for.

So, I switched to Amazon. There’s a title on the top left of the pages which might have been a book title so I searched for that. Because it was a really general and commonly-used phrase, I got a bunch of junk. So I thought, hmm, maybe I’ll try A9. I have to say, it was pretty cool and I made far more serendipitous discoveries there. Still didn’t find what I wanted, but it was like being lost in the library. You know how you go retrieve your book off the shelf and you glance at all the surrounding books and next thing you know, you’re sitting in the floor of the aisle, thumbing through a stack of books.* That’s how I felt. With A9, you can search the web, Amazon’s “Inside the Book” feature, blogs, Flickr, and so much more. I mean, it’s pretty damn cool. I mean, I love Google and all, but I admit to be taken in by the sheer grandness of it all. I mean, I found out that Lisa Ede has a blog.

I never did find my source and even put out a desperate plea on the other blog (New Kid kindly attempted to help me). I ended up repaginating my quotes to go with the original source. But boy, what a fun trip I had trying to find it.

*Okay, maybe this only applies to book geeks.

I was redirected by Pharyngula to Dean Dad‘s post at Bitch, Ph.D’s on “Giving Something Back” focused primarily on people who retire and then want to “give back” by teaching a class or two at the college (usually getting paid to so; how is that giving back again?) Anyway, what PZ was redirected me to was the comments. Very interesting conversation going on there. Buried about halfway in the comments was the questions: “Are professors underpaid?” I wanted to comment there, but the thread is so long, I didn’t even see if someone else had responded. So maybe they did but I’m responding anyway.

Inside Higher Ed ran a story last week about the decline in faculty salaries, particularly the fact that they’re not keeping up with inflation. At our institution, in fact, there’s an attempt to “catch up” after a couple of years of small increases (I should note that in those couple of years, staff received no increase one year and a pittance the next while faculty at least received near cost of living). Also, the whole salary thing is relative; it very much depends on where you live. In the rural area where we came from, Mr. Geeky’s salary commanded a fair amount of buying power and put him in league with other professionals. Here, however, he makes less than the plumber. When we moved, we negotiated hard for him to keep his current salary. The cost of living here is 3 times what it was where we were coming from, so that even at his current salary, he was essentially taking a pay cut to work at our institution. And what about those people who make less than he does (there are some who make more, of course). How do they manage in this high cost of living area. They live far away. Increasingly, faculty have to live further away from campus because they can’t afford housing nearby, a problem noted in this post I was perusing last night.

In this area, in fact, elementary school teachers often make more than college professors. Not that they shouldn’t, but the school system compares salaries locally while colleges often compare nationally or with “peer institutions.” I find that problematic because the cost of living in an area can be a huge factor in determining whether you feel underpaid or not. If you’re a college professor, and your salary puts you in the same ballpark as the deli counter person, how do you feel about all that education you paid for? Yeah, there are intangibles that might make up for it, but not necessarily.

And don’t get me started on the cost of health insurance. So far, we haven’t been asked to eat any increases in health insurance costs, but if we do, that will likely negate any pay increases. I know this has happened at other places.

I think the perception that faculty get paid a lot comes from the few stars who do and who are often visible to the general public. They may get tv time, for instance. And there’s, of course, the perception that faculty get summers off. Why does no one complain about this for teachers? Is it because they’re mostly women and so people figure they’re taking care of the kids? That’s always baffled me. No one said to my mom in that snotty tone we all know, “How nice you get your summers off.” I also think that people don’t perceive what faculty do as work. They often question what it is that professors do. Again, the stars may be in the position of only teaching one class (with the grading done by grad students), but most people teach many classes and are expected to do research and plenty of service. For anyone who thinks that that’s not work, I’d suggest taking a gander at some of the blogs on the blogroll.