Monthly Archives: June 2010

I’m really excited, it looks like we’ll have a book club here. I’m still working out the details, but so many of you have emailed me that I’d like to pick a book within the next 24 hours.

Here are some of the criteria we will have for picking the book:

• Must be available in libraries (ie not a book released last week)
• Must be available in paperback
• We would prefer it’s available on Kindle
• We would prefer it’s available as an audiobook
• It should be read easily within 2-3 weeks
• It must pair nicely with an inexpensive to moderately priced wine

As for the actual book club meeting. Whomever suggests the book and I will come up with a few questions that could jump start a post if you’re a blogger. If you aren’t a blogger don’t worry one bit. We’ll have a discussion right here, and I’m pretty sure I have a widget that can help us. We can also do a videochat with Skype or U Stream, whichever is easiest for larger groups. I’ll also pick an evening and we can try our wine and live chat.  This way there will be something for everyone.

Each month I’ll give you three member selections and open up voting for 24 hours. This month the first three books are:

Angle of Repose (Contemporary American Fiction) This was suggested by @bsletten and seconded by my mother. It appears to deal with the Western Frontier, here’s the back cover:

Angle of Repose is available for as little as a penny used on Amazon, and it is on Kindle. We will have to choose a suitable wine if this ends up being the selection.

When I asked The Virgin for a suggestion she gave me this:

What about reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library)? Everyone loves the Audrey Hepburn movie, and the book is terrific too but much racier than old Hollywood would allow. Capote’s dialogue is really excellent, and you’ll recognize parts the movie plays verbatim. But it’s very interesting to see how Capote really characterized the lovable whore, Holly. Plus, it’s short and should be available at everyone’s local library.

This is really a book for bourbon or gin, but recently I liked a Kenneth Volk chardonnay (the 2004, I think). I’m not a chardonnay person normally but it was very good for the $20 range.

This book is NOT available for the Kindle. You can pick up Breakfast at Tiffany’s solo, so you aren’t getting the short stories with it. Completely up to you.

Our third selection is The Saturday Wife. This is available in a Kindle edition. Cirian suggested it with Manischewitz, however my only use for Manischewitz is to make Charoset. I will not be drinking that, but we could pair it with a nice red from Baron Herzog. Here is the back cover:

During the next 24 hours I’ll need y’all to vote on our book/wine club so please vote now, and we can get started.

HP announced today that the Mini 100e Education Edition will be available in July for schools.

The Mini 100e will be sold at a price point not to exceed $300, but each deal will be unique. I’m assuming that a school might buy 20-30 at a time to equip a computer lab (or a mobile computer lab) and spend $6,000 to $9,000, or perhaps a middle school would require that each of it’s 500 students buy a computer, and perhaps they’d get a lower price?

Here’s what excites me about the HP Mini 100e, a spill resistant keyboard. We all know that classrooms are food and drink free zones, but in real life kids sneak stuff in. In real life kids have sticky gross hands, and sand practically drips out of their shirt sleeves. Here are the specs straight from their press release:

Created to seamlessly integrate into education environments, the HP Mini 100e features a practical clamshell design starting at only 3.19 pounds. Its 10.1-inch diagonal LED-backlit WSVGA display, 92 percent of full size QWERTY keyboard and an integrated carrying handle allow for maximized comfort and efficiency in the classroom and on the go.

It also includes separate headphone and MIC ports to allow the Mini 100e to easily connect to other devices, along with a VGA webcam⁽⁴⁾ that offers enhanced sound quality and reduced echo in virtual conferencing, language courses and interactive multimedia classroom sessions.

Built with added durability features for the classroom environment, the HP Mini 100e includes strong metal alloy hinges with steel pin axles. The Mini 100e also features a customizable back panel, keyboard deck and bottom case – exclusive to HP Minis – allowing customers to personalize their units with their school logo, motto or a picture for added security and personalization.

The HP Mini 100e boasts a wide array of technologies in a tiny package, including a low-power Intel® Atom N455 processor⁽⁵⁾ and Intel NM10 Express chipset, enabling the unit to run cooler, use less power and help improve battery life compared to its predecessor. It offers 1 gigabyte (GB) of DDR3 memory for faster data transfer, along with optional flexible battery solutions, including three or six-cell battery options.⁽⁶⁾

Catering to varying education environments, the HP Mini 100e offers Windows® XP Home, Windows 7 Starter⁽⁷⁾ or SuSE Linux (SLED 11) operating systems.

A variety of accessories are also available for the HP Mini 100e, to further improve the productivity of students in the classroom and on the go, including:

• HP Slip Case
• HP Optical Mouse
• HP Combo Lock
• HP Student Edition Youth Backpack
• HP External USB Optical Drive

I don’t get excited specifically because this is HP, but I am excited that someone besides Apple is trying to get computers into the classroom. My kids are at a school where Apple is in the classroom from Kindergarten to 8th grade, but I feel like they’re missing out on an awful lot of learning because they aren’t using PCs.

I mean Apple is great if you’re a film maker, a musician, or a child. I have three Apple computers right here in the room, but most of the world uses PCs, and PCs are much less expensive.

I’ll be watching HP’s new launch. I find this fascinating.

I know I spend a lot of time telling y’all how my husband is a great father, a generous husband, and really good man.

I don’t spend enough time telling you how Mr. G. is narrow minded and cruel. What you don’t know is that he is a dream killer. Not just any old dreams, but my dreams. You know… the dreams that matter.

As our 13th anniversary approaches, I had one simple request. I wanted him to buy me a $1.2 million fixer upper. It’s not enough that he got ridiculous and sensible and denied me himself a Porsche (we only have a Jaguar now), but on top of all the other deprivations, my husband will not buy me the fixer upper.

Because he feels like it’s too expensive for a house that has a giant pipe poking through and into the Olympic Sized Swimming Pool.

I am deeply deprived.

Does anyone have any interest in a book club? Currently I’m reading Franny and Zooey, I read it about 25 years ago, and I loved it as a teen, but as an adult it’s a delicious read.

Would you be interested in joinging me in reading a new book each month? And by new, what I mean is new to you. I’m all about books that can be checked out of the library.

Let me know, leave me some comments, even if it’s a shut up and go back to your weirdly suburban lifestyle of book clubs and wine. (Yeah, I totally threw wine into the mix just to make you smile)

Last month I was on the phone with one of my friends from FlooiD Design, and I said, “Don’t you think my blog looks great?”

And then something wacky happened with the phone because I’m pretty sure he said, “Yes it’s beautiful in it’s austerity!”, but I couldn’t actually hear anything.

“Hello! Hello! Is this damn thing working?” I yelled into the phone, and then I thunked it on the counter a few times just to be sure.

Then the really nice guys from FlooiD said, “Um…. Jessica…. we think you have a wonderful site, and we totally agree you are the best Mom Blogger in the whole wide world. Now, with that being said, we think that skinning your existing Thesis template could push you into the stratosphere, and then you could get busy being the best Mom Blogger in the whole entire universe.”

And they said it just like that. I am a blogger, I never make up conversations.

We had a short talk about how I’m not a very visual person, about how I seldom use images, but text only isn’t very appealing for everyone. I showed them a few sites that I thought had pleasing layouts, and then we hung up the phone.

A week later they asked me if I could upload some stuff to my FTP site. I wisely know my limits, and decided instead to give them FTP access. A week after that my site was live, and I think it’s lovely. The feedback I’m getting from my community is positive, and more than a few of you have asked if FlooiD is good to work with.

No, Flooid is not good to work with. Flooid is great to work with. Thanks guys.

This morning I looked at a house. Tomorrow morning Mr. G. will tour the very same house. We will likely make an offer on it.

I might pee the bed tonight, and I’m not kidding.

This is our third house. It’s a big house, it’s a dramatic house, and it’s a great family house, but it’s not my dream house. The night before we moved here I almost wet the bed. I was 35.

My daughter was born during the first week of November in 1998. When she and I returned home from the hospital the weekend immediately after was Veteran’s Day Weekend. A three day holiday. The Friday before the weekend began our toilet plugged up, and I called the apartment manger.

ME: Hi there, our toilet seems to be backed up. Could you call a plumber?

MANAGER: I can come over with a plunger, but I can’t call a plumber until Tuesday, it’s a long weekend and this isn’t an emergency.

ME: How is a backed up toilet not an emergency?

MANAGER: You live in a two bathroom apartment. So long as you have a working toilet, this isn’t considered an emergency.

Five weeks later, my stitches had healed, and we bought our first house. The house was tiny, but I loved it. We were in Van Nuys, because it’s what we could afford. Jane learned to crawl and to walk in that house. We didn’t love the neighborhood. It was safe, but the car dealers would test drive up and down our street. I petitioned the city for speed humps, and got them, a year after we sold the house.

We lived in that tiny house for a year and half. After bumping into one another like keystone cops one too many times, we decided it was time to move. Our next house was a three bedroom, two bath. It wasn’t quite tiny, but at 1,800 square feet it wasn’t huge. The back garden was huge, and the kids and I tended to it like crazy. I had nine foot borders that overflowed with geranium, roses, fruit trees and jasmine. The house was a fixer upper to be sure. When we bought it there was a jacuzzi in the back yard that was full of black water, and had so many mosquitoes in it that it resembled an anthill. We took eleven trees out of the front yard, and it was still shady, but the most important tree that we removed was the one growing through the roof. The flooring and sub flooring had to be replaced, because the previous tenant had a Great Dane that peed in the living room.

With both the first and second houses we bought what we could afford. We bought the cheapest houses is the best neighborhoods. We sold each of them for a nice profit. I worked day and night to make those houses gleam. I purged the houses of everything but the basics, set the table, and fluffed the linens. We got good money for those houses, and we were tired.

The third house (the one we are currently looking to sell) was back to back with our last house. It was a big, ugly smelly house, that had been twice reduced after sitting on the market for ninety days (in the height of the housing frenzy), even though it was uglier than the rest, this house required less work than the others. Fresh paint, carpets and plantation shutters gave a clean, almost regal look. We were very happy here for several years.

And then we wanted a pool. (more…)