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Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. As days go, Sundays are pretty packed for us (day of rest? Hah! Not between hubby’s deacon duty, my Sunday school teaching, church service, evening service…), so I’m neither expecting to do much for my mom nor to be getting much pampering myself. For my husband to pull anything off, he’d have to try to cram one more thing in the day, and try to make it fit around the nap schedule of a toddler to boot.

But I’ve been daydreaming – what would the perfect Mother’s Day be like? I think I found an article out there that expresses it wonderfully:
“What mothers need on Mother’s Day is to have their family honor all those parts of themselves that aren’t about mothering. We want tap dancing lessons and purple bras from Victoria’s Secret. We want leather mini skirts. We want instruction in race car driving or playing the saxophone. We want our husbands to rent us a Harley Davidson for the weekend and take off with us to some little motel without the children. We want the part of us recognized that made us mothers in the first place. ” – from an article on Family Fun

Every day of my life, since February 17, 2002, I’ve been a mom. My daughter looks at me that way; much of my day revolves around that fact and its impacts upon my life. (My husband’s life is impacted much the same, to be fair.) I love being a mom, so this isn’t a moan session about that impact. But the perfect way to celebrate Mother’s Day is to celebrate the person who’s the mom, rather than the mom role. Celebrate how she’s unique, recognize that she’s a _person_ who has stretched (and may have the marks to prove it) tremendously beyond her image of who she is handle the needs of her family.

I don’t recall ever talking with my mom about whether she’d dreamed as a kid that she’d have kids of her own. I know that at the age of nineteen (almost twenty), she was married and having her first of three kids. Our mother’s day gifts to her were of the normal variety – the breakfast in bed, promise to clean our rooms and behave for the WHOLE day set. Even this year, I went with the traditional flower delivery, though I did pick to send her a live plant, recognizing that she’s got a green thumb that might appreciate seeing her azalea grow. Truth is, until she took up the hobby of painting after we kids left home, I could have told you very little about what my mom dreamed of doing or what her talents were, beyond raising us kids. Kids think of their moms as moms, not people like them. In the same way that it’s weird to run into your teacher in a department store, your mom is just your mom, even if she’s really good at being your mom. And that’s why, for this one day a year, mothers ought to be given a chance to celebrate the parts of them that aren’t tied to being a mom, and even to expose their kids to the idea that mom isn’t only confined to the role of their mother. For that matter, moms need that one day a year to remind it to themselves!

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My husband’s had to work a lot of late hours lately. His software project is on a tight schedule, and so the whole development team has been putting in a lot of extra time. We work for the same company, and I even have a minor part of his project, so I’m getting to see the situation from lots of angles. There’s the go-team angle: I’m a fellow employee who knows what the guys are going through, and wants them to succeed. There’s the sympathetic wife angle: my poor guy’s had to give up most of his evenings and his weekend time the past two weeks, and has come dragging in the door 9:00 or later in the evening. And then there’s the ticked-off wife angle: it’s been two weeks of mostly eating dinners by myself, taking care of our home and daughter by myself, and handling anything that comes up by myself. Not that it’s fault, but as each day passes where the workload doesn’t end (for him or me), I lose my patience more and more easily. And that minor work I’m supposed to be doing for the same project is getting ignored, because I don’t have any extra time to put in since I’m doing parental/home front double duty.

Theoretically, the deadline for the work to be done was yesterday. So, I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, hubby would be able to take the afternoon off and enjoy the fruit of some of those extra hours he put in early in the pay period by soaking up some sunshine today. And I had lined up a few activities for me for this weekend and next week, now that I’d have a little breathing room on the home front. But it’s 10:45 at night with my husband still at work. His intent is to work horrendously late tonight (he promised me he’d be home by the time I wake up tomorrow), if need be, so that he doesn’t go in for the rest of the weekend and can actually spend some time with our daughter. Getting home so late at night, she’s been in bed before he’s gotten home every night this week.

Cora and I are doing fine, though I’ve gotten lax on meal preparation: cereal, some cheese and a hot dog make a reasonably well-balanced diet for a toddler, right? And mom will just have a bowl of cereal and maybe a frozen burrito. There just doesn’t seem to be much point to making a real meal – dealing with a fussy toddler, making a mess in the kitchen, cleaning up that mess – all for the sake of eating by yourself (unless you count the food smearer and dropper known as Cora as great dinner company). I’m not sure what Jason’s eating – some combination of canned soups, PopTarts from the vending machine, and whatever else is easily available. Makes fewer dishes to clean this way, anyway.

I came home really mad tonight, but I think I’ve cooled off. Now I’m just tired. Going to bed to recharge for my software widow day tomorrow.

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I’m cleaning up my computer area, which also serves as the finance center for our household. All receipts go through this area, to get entered into Quicken so that we can reconcile them against our credit card statements. I had a very large of receipts that had been filed, but hadn’t yet been discarded, so I set to work. You can’t just throw out receipts, particularly credit card receipts. As I’m discovering, too many companies put your full credit card number on the receipt. That makes that slip of paper a handy way for someone to snag your credit card number and charge whatever they’d like to your account. (Folks worry about electronic credit card fraud, but the fraud caused by folks just snagging credit card numbers is much greater!)

Why is it that they need my whole credit card number to be printed on the receipt? I don’t need it. I much prefer the receipts that show the last four digits – gives me enough to verify the charge account, without giving anyone else enough to buy themselves a nice stack of stuff at Amazon. Restaurants seem to be the worst offenders here, even though they run credit cards through the same Point of Sale (POS) system as someone at Walmart. Maybe the deal is that that POS system isn’t integrated into their records, so they don’t have a way to cross-reference against any reports they get from the credit card company. So buy a better system! Stop exposing me to the risk of fraud to balance out your protection against fraud/mistakes/communication failure with the credit card company. Someone’s got to have a cost-effective solution out there for businesses. And if there isn’t one, I say let’s create a market for such a solution by lobbying somebody to make it illegal to print out that whole credit card number on a receipt.

(Done my rant… ripping up the rest of my receipts.)

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Why is it that my toddler’s pants usually have pockets, but my maternity pants never have pockets? Anything my daughter could put in her pants’ pockets would be so small as to be a choking hazard for her, while I can’t find a place to put my keys!

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In January I posted an entry that’s gotten a fair amount of interest, at least as far as entries on this blog go. The entry was entitled “Girly-Girl”, and had to do with my reactions to my daughter’s newfound love of a babydoll. Two young ladies have responded to my entry, with concerns that I be able to accept that my daughter is different than me (me being about as non-girly as they get, though the maternity clothes might hint at otherwise).

So, I wanted to briefly revisit that entry, and explain something. I love that my daughter is a girly-girl! It just reinforces that this little person that I had the privilege of carrying for nine months (OK, longer, since she decided mommy’s tummy was very comfortable, thank you very much) is a creation unto herself, with her opinions, own attitudes about things, and own outlook on life. It’s wonderful to get to see that developing. She’s now almost 15 months old and able to express herself in more and more ways. She’s not yet talking much, but she usually manages to get her point across anyway. She has a ferocious hug that she lavishes on her stuffed animals and on mommy, daddy, and grandma. Even cuter, that hug involves her patting our backs, I guess in an imitation of how we hug her. She loves the outdoors, and will spend hours wandering around, particularly if there are dandelions to be picked. She’s somewhat shy, but manages to still pull off flirting with lots of folks per day.

Cora’s going to be a big sister in about five months. We don’t yet know if her sibling will be a boy or a girl. We do know our little girl’s world is going to change, and that there’re good odds she’s not going to like it much at first. She’s had mommy and daddy all to herself, and as she’s expressed when we’ve picked up other babies, she thinks all to herself is the way it’s supposed to be! But she’ll have to get used to a new person, a person that’ll have grow to have their own set of opinions and ideas of how the world is supposed to work. Much in the same way that we’re adjusting to Cora’s opinions and ideas of how the world is supposed to work.

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Had a moment the other day that I can only describe as Jenga coding. Having spent the day working on a difficult problem, designing, coding and testing the first part of the newest feature of my behemoth, I still had an hour to go on the day. I pondered: what could I do, what could I test further, what further step could I accomplish in the time remaining? I suddenly had a vision of a Jenga tower. Rather than the typical beer-drinking game version of writing various drinks on the sides, my Jenga blocks had class and method names, the classes and methods of the solution I’d built so far. That tower was looking mighty precarious. So, I went home. No sense breaking something just before heading out the door.

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Waiting at the doctor’s office yesterday, one of the nurse’s daughters came in. Turns out she’s 17 and her mom had made her come in for this appointment. While she was waiting her turn, she went back to the office area to show one of the receptionists her new tattoo. Apparently she had just had it done this weekend, and it was still very tender.

Curious, I asked her at what studio she had gotten it done. To my surprise, she said she hadn’t gotten it done at a studio, she had gotten it done at her aunt’s house. Her aunt had had a tattoo party, and she was one of ten people who had been tattooed that evening. If the other tattooes were as large as hers was (hers was on the base of her back and was probably 10 inches wide by 6 inches tall), then that tattoo artist was busy for quite a while!

Now, I’m both a fan of tattooes and a fan of “buy stuff” parties (think Pampered Chef kitchen ware, PartyLite candles, Longaberger baskets – all of which have sucked me into buying something at least once), I’m trying to imagine which of my various friends and associates would attend a tattoo party. How do you decide the guest list?? Who’s your target customer? And then the time-honored munchies at a “buy stuff” party – how do you adjust them for folks who might be squeamish at the little bit of blood you might see as someone else’s tattoo is getting inked? I assume the beverages end up being a little bit stronger than Coke…

Somehow this seems quite the Martha-Stewartish suburbanite twist on the typical group of girls/guys getting themselves psyched up some weekend evening and daring each other to get a tattoo. This is something you put in your DayTimer and leave yourself a reminder to bring a casserole. Too weird! (But worth an experiment if I have enough like-minded friends! Kel, Miche, Vanessa, Sheri, Denice… want to try a different kind of party??)

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Yesterday my brother-in-law, Brad, presented me with an assortment of Korean foods that he purchased during his travels. Feeling somewhat adventurous, I brought one of the soup-bowl-looking things to work for lunch today. The packaging is reminiscent of something we’d buy here, with a pretty picture on the front, bold colors to attract your eye, a bar code, and what looks like an ingredient list, cooking directions, and even an evaluation of its nutrition. None of that is useful to me, though, as all of the text is in Korean. I do get the idea that I’m not supposed to microwave the packaging (its a Styrofoam bowl), and that I shouldn’t spill it on myself due to hot liquid contents, based on some icons that seem to transcend cultural boundaries.

The packaging did provide me with one useful clue, though – a web address for the company that makes the product. Luckily, they even provide an English version of the site (Russian, too, apparently, though that’d help me about as much as Korean). Doing some hunting, I think my lunch is the Spicy Soya Ramen, as I do have two packets included with my ramen noodles.

And now the taste test: I’m afraid of their description of “spicy”. In past foreign food adventures, I’ve discovered that one culture’s idea of spicy may be magnitudes greater than my threshold for spicy, even though I generally like spicy foods. This stuff is pretty good, though. It’s got a bite to it, but nothing that leaves me fearing that I’m searing my tastebuds.

Neat change of pace for my day, between the food itself, and the wondering what exactly it was I was going to end up with. Can’t wait to try some of the other goodies Brad brought back… I remember seeing seasoning paste for kimchee (salted spicy cabbage), as well as some other spicy sauces. I’m going to have me some fun in the kitchen!

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I’m a services software developer, which means that my company makes money by building custom systems for organizations that need systems’ solutions. These projects are typically priced based on man-hours required to build the system, so the billable hour is king in a company like ours. The philosophical problem is determining what value a non-billable activity brings to the company and/or the employee performing that activity, and how (and whether) the company should incentivize or dissuade employees from performing those activities. (I was an economics major among other things in college, so this philosophical question holds particular interest for me.)

Three somewhat concrete examples: taking training, writing proposals, and participating in technical leadership communities. No client is interested in paying for these activities, as they don’t benefit them directly, so any hours spent here are non-billable. In each of those cases, the company receives some benefit from its employees spending time in these non-billable activities. In each of those cases, the employee receives some benefit from spending time in these non-billable activities. In the case of training, I’d say the benefit lays most heavily on the employee’s side; for proposal writing, more heavily on the company’s side; and for technical leadership, it’s more of a mix.

Our company’s policy, given its reliance on billable hours for cash flow and profitability, is that non-billable activities occur above and beyond billable hour activities. For an employee that’s fully tasked (e.g., 40 hours a week are billable), that means any of these other non-billable activities occur “on their own time”. The company retains the maximum revenue benefits of the employee’s time. Since employees are salaried, there’s little additional cost incurred by having an employee work beyond their regulated work week.

The problem I see here is that any individual employee believes that their “own time” is valuable. Whilst I’ve heard of companies where the pursuit of geek nirvana rules (Microsoft), ours isn’t one of them. We are all, for the most part, very interested in being great developers/architects/project leaders/managers. We are also interested in being great parents, great friends, great volunteers, great people who spend time pursuing their various interests. The presumed rewards for doing these non-billable tasks, and thus taking away from our own time, are opportunities for professional advancement and challenges. But those opportunities and challenges aren’t guaranteed: they’re our visions of a probable future. As any little kid can tell you, though, a pleasure enjoyed today usually beats out some promise of a potential unknown reward in the future.

So, weighing the balance, the employee chooses to avoid the non-billable work, knowing that its load takes away from his or her current enjoyment of things outside work. But that non-billable work benefits the company, and so if the non-billable work doesn’t occur, the company doesn’t get those benefits. The employee hasn’t really lost anything – they’ve enjoyed today, and there was no guarantee of tomorrow’s reward – but the company has lost. In the short term, the company benefited from the single-minded focus on billable hours, but at the expense of the benefits brought by an investment in non-billable hours. (Those were also future benefits, so not as tangible as current benefits, but presumably a company managing their investments in non-billable can presume to be getting a good return on that investment.)

I need to learn more about financial models. It seems to me that there should be some way of figuring out the best mix of billable/non-billable activities, and the necessary incentives to accomplish that mix. Presumably, activities that benefit the employee more would need to be incentivized less than activities that benefitted the company more. But I haven’t figured out how to express all of that in a business case – all I’ve been able to do so far is comment that I don’t think we’ve got the mix quite right. Not nearly so constructive as “and here’s what I think a better mix would be, and here’s why”. Boy, wouldn’t I be the cheese if I could solve that problem!

Hmmm…. muenster or cheddar or swiss – which should be on my business card??

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From an interview with Nia Vardalos (of My Big Fat Greek Wedding) fame in Border’s bookstore’s “see-all-of-the-stuff-you-can-buy” magazine:

What’s your take on romance and weddings in general? Are you a romantic at heart?
NV: I am. I think the only thing that I caution is, don’t get married before you’re ready because there’s this life clock that everyone else seems to think we should all live our lives by. We all have that aunt saying to us, “When are you going to get married?” and as soon as you get married, “When are you going to have kids?” and you have kids and they go, “When are you going to have another one?” And in terms of that life clock, you want to turn to that aunt and say, “When are you going to die?”

I haven’t yet seen MBFGW (though I have seen the TV show spin-off and enjoyed it), but it’s definitely on my gotta-rent-it list now.

(BTW, the answer to the set of questions is, “we are”, “we have”, and “very soon”. As far as the question for the aunt, I wish I were the type of person who had the guts to say something like that, were it warranted, though I also hope that I’d have the restraint to clamp down on that impulse in the spirit of kindness. Those strangely opposed wishes probably deserve an entry of their own, but I’ll let that pass for now.)