Monthly Archives: March 2010

You know how my iPhone is missing? Well, I didn’t disconnect it, because I thought one of two things would happen:

• Someone would find it and return it to me
• I would find it wedged between a sofa cushion

Well, that didn’t happen. The last time I used my iPhone I was on my way to the Sheraton in Universal City, California. I called my friend Jeannie and we had a lovely discussion. Then I parked the car with the valet and ran into a lobby meeting with my friend MeMe. I had a great time meeting with MeMe, and it’s possible that I left my iPhone behind, or that it was stolen. I do not know if the phone was pick pocketed or lost. What I do know is what happened next.

Thursday morning I realized I had only one cellphone so I called my iPhone to see if it was working. It was. Next I checked with ATT.com to see if it had been used, it hadn’t. So I continued looking for it. I called security at the Sheraton in Universal City twice daily from Thursday until Tuesday. Of eight phone calls, one was returned, and I was barely acknowledged.  After a week I figured it wouldn’t show up at all.

Today, Thursday, a week and a day later I logged onto ATT.com to see if my cellphone had been used. Imagine my surprise when I saw this.

Not very interesting until you note that all of a sudden I’m calling Mexico? Well, naturally I started with the first number 818.399.6109 and dialed it. The conversation went like this.

ME: Hey man, I missed your call. You at work?

HIM: Yeah, I’m up here at the Sheraton Universal.

ME: [screaming] You sack of shit motherfucker what’s your name?

HIM: Andy

ME: Andy what?

HIM: Garcia.

Duh. Okay, so my temper isn’t helpful.

I called the hotel at 818.980.1212 and Ana answered the phone at the front desk. Ana told me that there is no Manager at the hotel. This is at 5pm. I spoke to someone at the executive offices who took my information, promised to “get to the bottom of this” and then had security call me. Security is named Marcos. Marcos was not helpful. Apparently he “did an investigation” and cannot help me.

I called the Sheriff’s department and they told me it’s a felony. An iPhone is more than $400 and they will take a report and (hopefully) make an arrest.

I called Sheraton’s corporate offices, they are nonplussed and say that they have five days to respond. If I was a hotel and had a thief in my employ I’d move much faster than five days. But I don’t work at the Sheraton do I.

I’m smart enough to not stay a Sheraton. Since the car incident I absolutely refuse. Unfortunately, I will also never park at a Sheraton again, nor meet a friend or business associate for drinks.

Ooh, and I almost forgot, when I called them to ask for their help. Rather than connecting me with a hotel manager, they searched for my blog.

Which didn’t really help me very much, but it did convince me that they probably don’t have my best interest at heart.

UPDATE:

I know this is being read at the Sheraton Universal. I’ll be there shortly to meet with y’all. If you know who has my iPhone and you can get it back to me please text or call 818.212.0681 there is a reward, no questions asked. My offices are located at 15030 Ventura Blvd. Suite 19356, Sherman Oaks, CA 91403. You can send it there. Again, no questions asked.  I know at least one of you knows who has it, I’m giving you a chance to do the right thing. He is probably from Querretaro. How many people working at the Sheraton last night are from Querretaro?

Last week I had a lunch that I didn’t tell y’all about. Deanna and Timothy Honeycutt, Cameron Mathison, Emily and I had an amazing two hour lunch in Hollywood. How does a lunch last for two hours?

See these guys? We all just hit it off.

From left to right you have Timothy Honeycutt, Deanna Honeycutt and Cameron Mathison. If you think you recognize Cameron, you do. First let me tell you about the Honeycutts.

Deanna Honeycutt won a contest with Cheer. They have a webisode called Brighten Bay that Cameron stars in. It is so clever I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll let you discover it on your own. In any event Deanna won a trip to Hollywood to meet her favorite Soap Opera star Cameron Mathison. I have no clue why, but I somehow got invited to the lunch too. I’m so glad I did. The Honeycutts are the loveliest couple I’ve met in ages. Deanna is a devoted mother and wife, and Timothy is a businessman who comes from a rural background (after seeing Food Inc I find this even more fascinating). We talked about everything under the sun. I got to see picture of their kids (such a handsome family) and their pigs, goats and chickens. They even had pictures of a white peacock, which I have never seen before.

Deanna is a belle, in the most positive way. She owns a tiara. My kind of woman. I was giggling so hard I couldn’t eat when she was telling me about how she’d wear the tiara to the High School Football games. She even has a prom queen wave to go with it.

When people ask me what it is I do, I have a bit of a hard time explaining it. “I’m a mommy blogger” usually leads to more questions, so I’m finding that it’s not much of an answer. Cameron was different. He totally gets this space, he told me about his kids and the recent sleep segments they’ve been doing on Good Morning America. He was telling me that he and his wife decided that the age of co-sleeping was over, but that they didn’t want to abruptly kick the kids out. Apparently they moved the kids into their own bedrooms over a time period (not quite sure if it was days or weeks) and they went so far as to sleep on the floor of the kids’ rooms the first night they were in them.

Dude is a Mommy Blogger, he just doesn’t know it yet. We’ll get him soon I’m sure.

A few really incredible things happened at lunch. Deanna mentioned that she had seen the first ever episode of All My Children and has been a loyal viewer ever since. We were literally slack jawed. How incredible is it that someone could keep up with a storyline for 40 years? As lunch progressed and we were all jabbering on about our kids, we realized we were all but forgetting to eat. Emily (from Cheer) and I just kept whispering to each other (tacky I know…) that we could not get over how nice the Honeycutts were. Lunch with strangers can go bad abruptly, and believe me we talked about totally inappropriate things.  When I publish next week’s Momversation I’ll give you more details, but really, I was not a good girl.

I know it was Deanna’s dream come true to spend an afternoon with Cameron Mathison, and I’m so grateful to you Deanna, because spending time with you and Timothy was my dream come true. You made me smile, and you reminded me just how wonderful family is.

At 3am the fire alarm went off. Not the fire alarm that tells you that there’s smoke, it’s the fire alarm that randomly beeps to remind you that your security system blows, and you should fire them soon. I ran around naked (yes I’m a naked sleeper) trying to figure out where the high pitched beeping was coming from and found that it was a hallway sensor.

I jumped to try and press the reset button. My breasts landed on my belly a few seconds after my feet returned to the floor. The alarm was still beeping. The kids were sound asleep.

Ever resourceful, I went into Jane’s room to get a chair to stand on. I rolled her desk chair to the hallway, still half asleep, and stood on it to turn off the incessant fire alarm. Of course the chair was on rollers, so I ended up naked, insulted and on the hallway floor.

My third attempt was successful, and by that time I was wide awake.

It took me approximately 45 minutes to fall back asleep, which is a shame because an earthquake woke me up at 4am. Maybe it’s not a faulty fire alarm, maybe it’s an earthquake detector. The earthquake was a small one, 4.4 on the Richter scale, and it moved north and south. It was like being rocked to sleep, except my husband is out of town, so I had to check on the kids. Alexander was snoring, Jane was a little bit awake and went right back to sleep after I checked in with her.

I went back to sleep by 4.30 and was up at 7 to get the kids up and ready for school.

Something under the sink smelled bad, rotten. I looked, and then I looked again, and I found this.

Yep, remember the rat? Gotcha!

Well, you might remember that yesterday was an 85 plus degree day. Um, the rat wasn’t fat, he was hot and bloated.

With a dead animal in the house and a husband out of town, I did what every Mommy Blogger worth her salt does. I started knocking on the neighbor’s doors.

I have the world’s best neighbor. Jerry came over with a shovel and scraped the hot rat out of my house. Well, most of it. After we both hyperventilated a little at the disgustingness of said rat, Jerry told me how to clean the area. You see, Jerry is a firefighter. After scraping decomposed rat from my kitchen, he ran to his truck and gave me face masks that are “filters appropriate for a WMD invasion”.  I ran to the market to buy bleach, gloves and a spray-bottle. I cleaned the pieces of tail and hunks of rat fur that were left behind.

I missed a morning Pho with my friend, and I need to tell you something that you will find remarkable. None of this was the worst part of my day.

I had a perfectly lovely rest of the day. A quick trip to the gym, pho with Lolita, I cleaned the house and did a few errands, and then I went to pick the kids up from school.

When I got there my dear friend Katherine was with her daughter, and as I asked her about carpooling on Thursday she turned to me with tears streaming down her cheeks. “We’re moving back to Australia.” she said.

And we stood there crying and hugging and sometimes kissing. Because I love their kids, and they love ours. Because their family has become like family for us, and my son. My son is crushed. The boys have been friends since their first day of kindergarten, four years ago. The girls are close, and they will miss each other too. I need my friends, and these are good friends.

So the day? Well? It’s a horrible day. There was a moment of sunshine in the middle, but basically it sucked.

Invisible People wins at sxsw

My friend George says that blogging is just a gateway drug. If that’s the case, then Twitter is heroin.

It’s entirely possible that you got an email from me last night that looked like this:

I need your help on twitter.

Can you ask everyone to put #RefreshGary in their stream once every two hours.

Mark H is a real life friend who is literally changing the landscape. He videos the homeless (he was once homeless) and gives them real faces. Because of what he does a lot of otherwise unknowing people give a lot to homeless shelters, including time.

The contest ends tonight at midnight and there’s $50K in grant money at stake. It’s pepsi and they suck, but money is good.

Mark’s work is at invisiblepeople.tv what’s he’s doing matters. He’s helping families.

It’s also possible that you got direct message on twitter that looked like this:

Can I get you to vote #refreshgary all you have to do it tweet the hashtag details at www.refreshsxsw.com Thank you so much

And so many of you did. I spammed my twitter followers like crazy last night, and I’d do it again. Mark won the Pepsi Refresh Challenge and now he’ll have a $50,000 grant to continue his good work helping the homeless.

I’d love to tell you more about what Mark has done, but I think InvisiblePeople.tv speaks for itself. Walking down Hollywood Boulevard is different now. I see faces I recognize. It’s easy to ignore the homeless, and I’m not an advocate of the easy way out.

So for all of you who supported Mark last night, to come from behind and beat Mashable, I thank you. I am wildly grateful, my children for the first time ever watched me use twitter and got to see the impact that Social Media can have. You’ve changed Mark’s mission, you’re changing the landscape of Los Angeles, and you’re changing my children.

Obviously, you are changing the world.

It’s devolved. I can’t even think about blogging. I haven’t gone to the gym today, and there’s very little hope that I will.

I’m in my bedroom wearing yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt. I’m not quite depressed, but I’m not exactly motivated. The weekend exhausted me.

Right now I should be washing down all the doors and doorframes. In my head I’d like to be organizing my home office, and maybe shredding a few old papers. I really want to write about how sick I am of products being wrapped in charities. It will have to wait.

The kids have new needs too. Jane wants to line up after school on Friday so that she can get New Moon at midnight. She’s already preordered it on itunes, so I’m not sure why we need to line up. I’m guessing we will. Alexander now taunts Jane by saying things like, “Jacob is so cool.” Jane dutifully responds and a fight ensues. Little League is three to four days a week with practices lasting two hours and games even longer.

The front seat back seat is becoming an issue. I love the car time before and after school. It’s the reason I refuse to carpool. Now that Jane is sitting in the front seat I’m no longer talking to two kids in the back seat, and all too often I realize I’m talking with Jane and Alexander will be sitting in the back reading a comic book. I try to be more aware.

All I want to do is eat cold pasta and watch Cinema Paradisio. First I have to call the Sheraton Universal, for the fifth time. Heaven help you if you need help from any Sheraton Hotel.

Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand was printed today at the New York Times. You don’t have to read it. It’s written with a self loathing pen. Jennifer Mendelson may understand writing, but she clearly doesn’t understand what a conference is. Bloggy Boot Camp is different from other conferences in that it’s attendees are a homogeneous group, but aside from that it offers a good mix of education and networking.

Ask me why I’d get a babysitter for my kids (my mother is the babysitter don’t froth), fly to Vegas at noon, keynote a small but important conference, and fly back in time to tuck my kids in?

Ask me. Because I’ll tell you.

Tiffany.

Tiffany is the reason why I’d drop everything and break my two biggest rules of blogging.

I don’t work free
Blogging doesn’t take away from family time

When Tiffany asks me if I can give up a day of my life, talk to a room full of my peers and not get paid I squee in delight. That woman gives more than she takes, and when I get a chance to give back, I do.

So, when an article hits the New York Times talking about the silliness of Mommy Blogging, and I’ll grant you there is silliness, I take great offense. I don’t take great offense because it’s so wholly inaccurate, truth can be found and manipulated anywhere. 24,000 hits to a single post on any website matters, it doesn’t matter if it’s for your tutu. Moms talk about tutu’s, when did that become a revelation?

I know the author is a blogger too, and there’s some self loathing that comes along with being a Mommy Blogger. I’m a Mommy Blogger, I get it. The pseudonyms in use are ridiculous, but that’s something we talk about inside our community, not outside.

If you’re a Mommy Blogger get used to small doses of ridicule. They will come from two sides, people who don’t have kids yet and think we are silly (trust me they mock us in real life too) and parents who don’t blog, and are a bit jealous. That’s all.

She’s right in that many of these women will never make “real money” with blogging, but when my kids were tiny a few boxes of diapers or an extra stroller would have helped us out quite a bit. The reality is that your blog can serve as a resume. When people ask me if I have one I just point them here. If you think you want to make money with your blog, or just create a place online to showcase your talents Bloggy Boot Camp will help you.

I resent the title. Since the New York Times has it’s very own Mommy Blogger in Lisa Belkin, I can’t help but wonder if she, too blanched a little.