Here's a free Obama sticker to celebrate the presidential election. MoveOn's giving them away:
http://pol.moveon.org/shepstickers/?id=-3879753-9WDz.Wx&rc=

Laid off

Well it happened, my department has just been gutted and in 5 1/2 weeks I will no longer be a Seattle Times employee. This makes me sad. But bear in mind:
* Months ago we were told we would receive a raise, the first in two years.
* Then we were told our health benefit costs would also be raised. Now I'd make even less than I had been.
* In my check envelope last Friday was a pink slip, announcing breast cancer awareness. We all joked that pink was not a good choice given the economic outlook for newspapers.
* Monday I was called in and given a real pink slip.
* Election Day followed and gave me hope. We threw a party and went through more wine than I ever expected.
* The next day I had a hangover. And I cried.
So, that's been my week. It's sucked big time.
Obama had a press conference today, the first since he was elected on Tuesday by an electoral college landslide. I spent my lunch hour in my car listening to him speak.

"National Wired Family, 2008"

I THOUGHT ABOUT JUST ENTERING (oops, caps on) ... savvy text abbreviations and "emonics" here. But it would take me too much flip'n time to look them up on a site somewhere. So just read:

CBS DID show up at our door yesterday. At 5:45 a.m. Good thing I didn't sleep much the night before! Check it out here:

Watch CBS Videos Online

News family freak out

OK, this is weird, but I agreed to have CBS Early Show come into our house and shadow our family for an entire day.
They arrive at 6:15 a.m. on Monday morning.
Am I insane? They are NOT EVEN PAYING us.

They have an idea to run a story on families who use technology to keep in touch. We do have cell phones and we do know how to text as well as "speak" using our "voices." But other than that, we have:
* A five-year-old computer with only 23% memory available after gobble-hound files and software such as Mp3Rocket, iTunes and my husband's photographs
* A six-year-old laptop coined (say aloud in quivering lilt) "Ol' Molasses"
* Relic sound system with five CD disk changer which no longer opens so we pulled off the top and now manually place CDs inside (defeats purpose of snappy automatic feature)
* An ancient VHS machine
* Land-line phones and matching answering machine

On the other hand, we do have two DVD machines, two Xboxes (one is newer with XBox Live), WiFi hookups, four separate cell phones, two of which are music phones and blue tooth devices that we don't use partly because they look so groovy perched on ears, anyone's ears, mind you. And multiple iPods and MP3s.

Even with all that crap, we are not early adopters.
Because we have NO money.
Also because I can't stand how some people get so wrapped up in technology that they become addicted and lose touch with things like "people" and stuff like "talking," and even "touching a book." Let alone reading a book. The other day, my son did something to our computer that resulted in passwords changing and a momentary Mommy freak-out when I discovered an entire e-mail account had been lost. But after a couple minutes of screaming into my fist, I solved the problem. No thanks to the Xbox service guy who had walked him through his password change in the first place, affecting my entire MSN Live profile. Roar. I ended up nicely hanging up on the man mid-way through all his ridiculous questions about how-I-found-their-service during my frantic call for help.
A struggle for survival.
Nope, I figured it out myself by hitting as many buttons as quickly and furiously as possible. I couldn't repeat to you what I did, I just know it worked.

In the end, the thing about technology is this: it will rule your life if you're willing to click through everything a screen tells you to do. I refuse to be a mouse-led sheep, the sun was shining and I had other stuff I wanted to do that day.

So, what is CBS going to see on Monday? I'm hoping a decently adjusted family. I did tell the kids not to swear or scream insults at each other, too much. And I told David to play his Xbox like he always does, just try not playing the most violent game in the house, please. Do us proud, little man. I'm trying to raise lovers and not virtual fighters in this home.

A new idea, that I actually complete!

Golly, I have a lot of ideas.
Don't we all?
But it's often the mediocre, the mainline, the hard-working toiling regular folk who get stuff finished. And by that I mean, the people who put their nose to the grindstone and get from point A to point B. No fussing about it. These are the people who get their stuff published, their songs sung, their inventions patented (or inventions they steal from someone else who doesn't have the initiative to patent). I personally know one girl from my home town who went to Mexico and saw that some guy on the street was making simple hair clasps out of shells. She stole his idea and now is living on an easier street.
This got me thinking: I need to complete something and I need to do it NOW!

So here's what this blog will become: the blog of ideas.
If it's a blog of ideas, then I really don't have to complete it. It can be a work in progress, and then that way it will be complete all the time at whatever stage you find it.

And I feel like this is something we can share. With the whole world! You can add to this blog with your own ideas. Every week I will post an idea. It will have a theme, it will have ingredients, materials or stuff that might be needed to complete. This week, the idea will be projects involving concrete. Go!

Will write

I've decided to commit a theme to this blog. I'm still trying to decide what that will be.

Win, lose

My girlfriends and I came in second for the annual Figgy Pudding Street Caroling competition this year. We took the We Three Kings tune from the Roaches, changed the lyrics to We Three Queens and wrote a fun roast about our two senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantrell — and our gov, Christine Gregoire. We had a friend hold up huge posters of our elected officials' heads and then we kicked ass! Unfortunately, we lost the applause-a-thon to a troupe of tap dancers who, you guessed it (or maybe you didn’t) tap danced during their applause thereby winning, even though they basically sucked in a Lawrence Welk kind of way. Lame-e-oh.