from the nytimes:
In a sense, the candidates’ chosen pronouns reflect their varied messages. Mrs. Clinton’s “I” is a proxy for her message of experience. She is thorough in conveying her litany of accomplishments — all the things “I’ve worked for” — even smaller-bore issues, like helping victims of traumatic brain injuries, broadening access to mental health care and helping apple farmers in New York, one of whom, Mark Nicholson, introduced her in Guthrie Center.
…
Mr. Obama’s “us’” and “we” reflect his unity campaign, the so-called new kind of politics. His “we” constitutes a prospective coalition of anyone bent on changing the political system — as opposed to “playing the game” within it, a tacit reference to the Clintons and their political mastery.
“Instead of sending someone to Washington to play the game, we need someone to change the game plan,” Mr. Obama said. “We are not a nation divided as our politics suggests.”
…
Mr. Edwards vows to forge a winning, bipartisan coalition united against the evil forces of “them”: purveyors of “corporate greed,” “Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs,” and big bonus-reaping executives from “oil companies, drug companies and insurance companies.”
high up on the list of small talk questions everyone asks new parents because they don’t know what else to talk about is, “is your baby sleeping through the night?”
for a while, the answer was unequivocally, YES!
well, mostly. at the behest of our sleep-training-obsessed pediatrician, we had started some rudimentary steps at sleep training even before snapper had hit three months. most of which we didn’t think would actually work, and when it did, we were AMAZED. things like putting her down when she’s a little drowsy but not actually sleeping so she could fall asleep on her own. and moving her to her own room and crib and out of the bed. through gentle persistence, we had got it down so that she would sleep for at least 6-7 hours every night, between midnight and 6am, which coincidentally are hmc’s favorite sleeping hours. man, i tell you, once you stop having to get up at 3am, your life becomes SO much better.
alas.
at our 3 month doctor’s appointment, our sleep-training-obsessed pediatrician warned us that 1. it was going to get worse again before it got better, and 2. we should stop swaddling her, as it’s a crutch that will be easier to break now than at 6 months.
dutifully (naively) we stopped the swaddles, and started establishing a 7:30ish bed time. [although really: how are we supposed to all go out to the movies?! none of this is very activity-conducive.] suddenly we were back her her waking up at 3 or 4, flailing her arms about, and we were dragging ourselves in there to repacify, repacify, repacify.
after a week of that, she actually seemed to be ok with it, so maybe we’re in the clear?
then comes XMAS.
i don’t know if it’s because we’ve all been out more during her new bedtime during the holidays, that we’re sleeping away from home, or if it’s just too cold here where we’re staying, but suddenly it’s like we’re back to square one: constant fussing, short short sleeps, and waking up to cry or feed every three hours. it’s like the first couple of weeks again.
at least we haven’t resorted to the zacky infant pillow yet.
If you’ve ever wished for a “hand” to leave behind so that your baby would feel as if you’ve never left the room, your prayers have been answered with the Zaky.
The Zaky is an ergonomic infant pillow designed by a mom to mimic the size, weight, touch, and feel of her hand and forearm to help her baby with comfort, support, protection, and development. The Zaky can help calm your baby and help your baby sleep better through the night.
ah, finally got everything working again, after the unexpected webhost sub-move. what a pain in the arses. more soon. in the meantime, here’s your prerequisite snapper jones picture:
from nytimes:
Published: December 19, 2007
WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to spare millions more Americans who do not consider themselves “rich” from being ensnared in a tax device originally designed for people who really are.
By 352 to 64, the House voted to shield about 21 million or so Americans from being hit by the alternative minimum tax when they file their returns for 2007. The measure providing for a one-year stay on the A.M.T. now goes to President Bush, who has said he will sign it.
…
Passage of the A.M.T. legislation is good news to those taxpayers who would have had to pay an extra $2,000 or so a person. It is safe to say that no politician, Republican or Democrat, wanted to adjourn for the holiday season without doing something about the A.M.T., which already affects several million taxpayers.
…
The alternative minimum tax was enacted in 1969, to keep wealthy Americans from being able to avoid taxes altogether by using various loopholes and deductions available to the rich.
But back then, a family with an income of, say, $150,000 a year could truly be considered “rich.” That amount back then would be equivalent to more than $850,000 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To turn things around, $26,000 in 1969 would equal about $150,000 today.
But since the A.M.T. has not been adjusted for inflation, it has affected more and more people who see themselves as middle-class, or at most upper middle-class.
it’s the roast leg of lamb FROM HELL.
suddenly there’s only a week before xmas, and we’re trying not to think of the impending doom that is the “prepare for the trip and pack and clean the house and get all the presents WHILE working and doing all of your usual stuff that leaves you dead tired AND DON’T FORGET THERE’S A TINY LITTLE POOPY HUNGRY PERSON TOO”.
so we decide that one of the things we’ll do to make our week simpler is to maybe make a nice big easy meal, like a simple leg of lamb roast at the beginning of the week, and then just eat through it with side dishes through the week, finishing it up about when we drive down to lost angels for the holidays.
“simpler.”
heh.
first we didn’t manage to get any of the ingredients on sunday because some tiny little poopy hungry person was very fussy. then monday was tiny little poopy hungry person + trying to go and last-minute mail presents.
tuesday hmc and snapper trek to the berkeley bowl and get all the ingredients. the idea is that they’ll get the stuff, and i’ll prep it and it’ll cook the next day, since we’re opting for the naked chef’s yummy five-hour slow roast. which would have worked out fine if the berkeley bowl hadn’t FORGOTTEN TO GIVE US THE LAMB.
i trek back out the berkeley bowl to get the bag of groceries they forgot to give us (and they couldn’t have tracked hmc down in the parking lot? really? i find that people with tiny little poopy hungry persons are 1. not hard to spot and 2. don’t move that quickly in the first place). so by the time i get around to prepping it after dinner, it’s already 10:30pm.
i prep all the ingredients, and start to do the pre-cooking: browning the leg, cooking the bacon (!!! hell yeah. that’s right, i said bacon. with my leg of lamb roast.) and the onions. and at this point i finally realize: i don’t own a proper roasting pan. this whole time i’ve been making roasts in smaller pans, and wondering why i keep not being able to fit everything in the pot. IT’S BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE A BIG ENOUGH POT, MORON. ok, great, i finally figured it out, but now i’m stuck because i can’t get a roasting pot at 11:30pm.
hmc says that instead of trying some crappy pot from slaveway, she’ll go to BBB the next day and just get a quality pot and finish the recipe.
remember the simple part?
hmc goes to BBB today (actual sequence being get tiny little poopy hungry person dressed and ready to go, notice that tiny little poopy hungry person is upset more than normal, notice that tiny little poopy hungry person is WET IN HER CARSEAT BECAUSE GODDAMNNED gDIAPERS ARE FROM HELL (but will save the earth), remove tiny little poopy hungry person and change her and all of her clothes, and then go to BBB) and buys a roasting pot. when she finally gets home and tries to finish the easy recipe, she takes the roasting pot out of the box and notices that not only is it NOT NEW but it is CLEARLY USED AND DIRTY and even has SPOTS WHERE THE NON-STICK COATING IS COMING OFF SPEWING CARCINOGENS at you and any tiny little poopy hungry people nearby.
this now necessitates me taking said “defective” pot back to BBB for a different one.
which means we’re not cooking it until tomorrow.
see how easy this was?
meanwhile, we’re going to have a huge ass roast leg of lamb FROM HELL. tomorrow. you (yes yetra, i’m talking about you.) should come over and eat some. because we’ve got a lot of HELL to eat.
holy crap. the incredible edward tufte is going around giving a one-day course on presenting information.
Topics covered in one-day course
so let me get this straight. i can either spend $400 to buy amazon’s kindle e-book reader, which is both ugly and costs you to read your own documents:
or i can spend about as much and get playboy’s “the complete centerfolds”:
With the first Centerfold, who just happened to be the radiant Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner masterminded a cultural icon: Playboy’s Playmate of the Month. Now, for the first time ever, Playboy has gathered together every Centerfold from every issue into one luxurious collector’s edition. That’s over 600 beauties. We’ve reproduced these Centerfolds exactly as they appeared in the magazine to create a full-size, deluxe volume. Paging through this colossal, chronological collection provides a breathtaking view of our evolving appreciation of the female form: from the fifties fantasy of voluptuous blondes to the tawny beach girls of the seventies to the groomed and toned women of today. Housed in a handsome leather briefcase lined with velvet, this impressive tome is the ultimate indulgence for every passionate collector.
hmm, what do you think i’m going to choose?
i remember before we had snapper and we were researching whether to do cloth or disposable diapers, we found out about gdiapers: the flushable disposable diaper. what a great solution: the convenience of a disposable, but ecologically conscious so you aren’t contributing to landfills. the per-diaper cost is higher, but it’s worth it for the environment, right? just like me getting a prius instead of a mini. not that i still think about that EVERY DAY or anything.
alas, we never really got around to trying it out, but then someone was selling their gdiapers stuff on bpn for super cheap since their kid had outgrown the small size before they really had a chance to use them. and snapper is nothing if not small. so here’s our chance to give it a go.
WHAT A PAIN IN THE ARSE.
the idea is that you have these little gdiaper pants and inside there’s a plastic liner, and then inside that there’s the little gdiaper that gets wet or poopy, and which you can tear open into a toilet and flush away. however, what you really don’t think about until you’re in it is that this requires a process change: instead of dealing with all your diapering at the changing table and putting your used ones in a diaper pail, now you have to 1: figure out where to put the used gdiaper until you can bring it to the toilet, 2: deal with the tearing and flushing at the toilet, and 3: figure out where you’re supposed to put your squiggly baby WHILE you’re flushing that gdiaper in the toilet.
not only that, but if it’s a poopy diaper, the plastic removable liner is guaranteed to be poopy, so now you have to deal with that, either by having somewhere to stash them so you can toss them in the laundry,
or by handwashing them right there. did i mention the squiggly now crying baby?
it’s not for the squeamish. surely you’ve gotten over diapering and poopiness by now, but gdiapers ENSURES that you directly handle wet and/or poopy diapers several times a day. in case you missed that
part.
i keep trying to come up with some new witty tagline they can use, like “gdiapers: bringing the messiness of diapers back into your home!” or “gdiapers: it’s like washing cloth diapers, but much more expensive!”
and not to mention the fact that since we’ve been trying gdiapers snapper has leaked through and wet her bed at night TWICE already. as opposed to NEVER with disposables.
“gdiapers: more laundry, but good for the environment!”
for those of you keeping score at home: 10lb, 3oz, 22 3/4”. plus a polio shot, to which snapper’s response was “DO NOT LIKE.”
this is fantastic: a letter from bill clinton consoling chris webber after the timeout:
i don’t know if i will ever need a nativity scene EVER, but if i did, i HAVE to have this one from alessi:
dear snapper,
happy three month birthday!
this month you survived your first nights alone first with just mommy, and then with just daddy. of course you were fine. perhaps i really mean to say that we survived our first nights alone with just you.
this is the month that you finally seemed to call off the poop strike. instead of having a HUGE BLOWOUT POOP once every three or four days, you’ve called it off and now instead have HUGE BLOWOUT POOPS several times a day. given that you are still very little, we’re still not sure where all this poop is coming from, but we’re happy that you seem to be working again. also, this is a clear sign (yes, we’re very sloooow now, but some of that is your fault) that you are now growing, as we finally realized that the frequent HUGE BLOWOUT POOPS meant that your newborn diapers were actually too small to contain your new level of, uh, output. now that we’ve switched to size 1 diapers, you can poop at will with less clothes staining. as much as we love you, we love you a little more if we don’t have to hand wash your onesies every day.
this is also the month where you started laughing! not content to just smile and smile for us (although less so for other people— i know, they’re suspicious-looking!), you’ve now started to laugh and even broken out in baby talk in just the past week. suddenly there are all sorts of noises and fake coughs now coming out of you. and don’t think we haven’t noticed the cry/yell combo you’ve added to your repertoire. you even survived the tire blowout brush with doom, thanks to heroic driving by mommy, and you now think that bouncing back and forth in the car is a big time fun ride! wheee!
we all back to lost angels for your very first thanksgiving, where you charmed grandma, grandpa, oma, and opa, and yet avoided eating any turkey. i think you’ve somehow figured it all out in ways that we haven’t been able to. we also went to your first museum to see the murakami exhibit. remember this when you’re filling out your art school application. although you might want to skip the part where you screamed and screamed during the screening of the kiki and kaikai show.
all in all, you’re definitely getting bigger. you can barely fit into all those itzy-bitzy baby clothes that we started you out in, and you’re even at the limits of most of your pajamas and your 0-3 clothes. and yet you’re so tiny and cute! if you get any cuter you may collapse under your own cuteness, in some sort of cuteness black dwarf. don’t let this happen. we’ve got things for you to do yet.
they released my dad from the hospital today.
the doctor felt that he had progressed enough that he could go home and continue recovery there. which in some ways makes sense, because being in the hospital is disorienting enough by itself; at least if you’re home in familiar surroundings, you’ve got things to remind you who you are and what you’re doing. there was still some disagreement as to what the final diagnosis is: the internal medicine specialists and one of the other neurologists seemed to lean towards tumor, while our neurologist is thinking stroke and clot. this is leading to more visits and second opinions, which is good, i suppose, but the uncertainty isn’t reassuring.
we all went out to have dinner after he was released, and after we ordered, my dad said, “where’s the food? how come it isn’t here already?” while he understood that he wasn’t in the hospital anymore, he was still confusing the ordering of your meals the day before in the hospital with ordering your meals before you eat in a restaurant.
but at least today he could remember what day i was born.
