Entries in Life

From the outside, some things look really difficult and un-rewarding. Raising children is one of those things — if you don’t have children, or haven’t spent a lot of time with your own, you will likely resent children and the time that they demand. writes about how she’s seen my relationship with the kids change over the past year and a half. It was during that time that I really came to appreciate my own children. This is similar to what Terah writes about Unsolicited and Unintentional Gifts — but at the other end of life.

Here’s a lovely bit that ended up in my spambox. Looks like spammers are starting to use ascii art to attempt to get around filters. That, and a little Edgar Allen Poe.

   _     _   _   _____   _____   _____   _   __   _  | |   / / | | /  ___| /  _  \ |  _  \ | | |  \ | |  | |  / /  | | | |     | | | | | | | | | | |   \| |  | | / /   | | | |     | | | | | | | | | | | |\   |  | |/ /    | | | |___  | |_| | | |_| | | | | | \  |  |___/     |_| \_____| \_____/ |_____/ |_| |_|  \_|    just one click away  http://xxxxxxxxxxx/    For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore, Nameless here forevermore.  

recently read “The Myth of the Welfare Queen” and reminded me that we originally instituted welfare to help mothers stay at home to care for their children. However, in the past 40 years, as more and more middle-class mothers have given up the idea of staying at home to pursue their careers, our society had less and less sympathy for the mother who would like to stay at home to care for their children, but can’t afford to do so. As the number of two-earner middle-class families increased, the willingness to pay for government support for mother’s staying at home disappeared. Which made it possible for Clinton to completely reform the welfare system. That reform would have been impossible if moderate, middle-class workers had felt strongly that mothers should stay at home with their children (as they did earlier in the 20th century). Progressive Feminists successfully convinced mothers not only that they could have a career, but that they should (witness the discussions about whether or not motherhood is a worthy option for women in-and-of-itself). So moderates became convinced that mothers could work, support for welfare disappeared, and Clinton successfully eliminated a large amount of government obligation. This left the budget wide open for a conservative like Bush to create deficits supporting his pet projects. Things like “bringing democracy to the middle east“. This, as well as anything, demonstates why we should be cautious with policy changes. There are always unintended consequences.

These mortgage phishing scams are weird. Who is duped by the “mortgage” company that can’t even spell mortgage? But this one is better. A mortgage broker who has been handling my morgage for %CUSTOM_RND_DIGIT weeks? Yeah, I’m gonna use him.

Several Companies have been competing for your mortgage refinance application over the past %CUSTOM_RND_DIGIT weeks.

Victorian life continues to facinate me. The filth and everyday danger and inconvenience of city life is absolutely amazing. (I’ve not had a chance to read accounts of country life, but I’m sure it was no better.) So, I was delighted to come across Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Till now, the accounts I’ve read have focused mostly on the middle class or upper class. Others have found facinating tales of photographer cheats and rat wrestlers but the better stuff are these prints of various occupations available to the poor, most of which seem to have something to do with cleaning up the street, the sewer, carting away dust and refuse, or scavaging for what others have lost or thrown out.

If you’re going to have a nail in the head…

Finally! After moving North, after flying through Chicago at Thanksgiving and seeing miles of snow-covered ground, after hearing that it snowed in New Orleans on Christmas day, after a few false-start flurries … Well, you would expect that we wouldn’t have had almost 70° weather last week. It has finally snowed.

This is a reaction I’ve begun to see in the past year or so.

Julie Leung: words have power This is something that I’m struggling to grasp. Which is not that I don’t “know” it, but I do not practice this as much as I should. In effect, I don’t know it. I’m especially critical of those closest to me. Even more-so of myself (I think), but I have to be careful that I communicate a lot more of the approval I feel and a lot less of the criticism.

My co-workers threw a shower for Alexis last month. Surprised the heck out of her. Especially since my mother flew up to personally deliver a baby quilt she had made. The morning before the shower, my mother and I snuck out with the kids and went Christmas shopping. I had in mind to pick up a couple of gifts for the kids — things that I remembered were fun when I was a kid. My mother had the same idea (we don’t just look the same…), and so when she showed up at the cash register right after me, I had to point out that I had already purchased UNO and Sorry!. These games are simple and relatively popular. They’re good games to play with the kids and probably a better introduction to board games than Monopoly (which is the first game I played with them) because they don’t require so much addition, calculation, and strategy. My four-year-old can have fun with with the almost-eight-year-old. Basil’s favorite game remains Chess, of course, and I hope that this means well be able to move on more complex (not to mention esoteric) games like these.