I spent the morning about a week ago dropping very obvious hints that I wanted the Superman LEGO Dimensions action figure.  As Josh made the ChickieNob’s lunch, I loudly told her all about how much I loved Superman.  She kept saying, “I know.”  Which only made me say it more emphatically.  Did she know that the Superman can swim AND fly in the game?  And melt gold and ice with his eyes?  And see through green walls?  And fixed cracked walls?

Did she know all these things PLUS how much I love Superman?

(Aside: I love Superman.  Josh and I like to play a game called “You Can Only Save One” where two items are on fire and you can only save… well… one of them. (I’m fairly certain you were able to get there on your own based on the title of the game, but just in case.)  One old favourite is DC Comics vs. Marvel.  As much as we both love X-Men, we both save DC.  Josh saves DC for historical reasons, but I save DC because Superman is such a great character.  And he’s cute.

Did I mention that Josh is a good person and I am shallow?)

Anyway, one of the reasons I felt that Josh should get me Superman is that I could keep Superman on my desk when not in use with the game, and he would keep me company.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on molded plastic, but I don’t have co-workers.  Or, I do, but they don’t work in my office.  It’s just me and Truman, and Truman likes to nap.  When he’s awake, he’s attacking the water bottle or begging for cookies.  Whereas LEGO figures are really good at keeping people company and being very quiet and respectful of my work time.

Like there are days when I work with Harry, Ron and Hermione.

They make me feel good.  They make me think about happy things (like Harry Potter!) while I’m plugging away at work.  I ask them their opinion when Truman is too busy fighting his water bottle to listen.  Yes, they may be inanimate plastic, but when I put on my Ravenclaw robes, it looks like we’re all in uniform.  And that is important, too.

Anyway, Josh bought me Superman.  And he is so freakin’ awesome.  Except that he swims really slowly in the game, so I have to use Aquaman to get wherever I’m going and then switch to Superman to solve the puzzle.  But moreover, during the day, Superman gives me his opinion on comma placement as he hangs out on my desk.  Best co-worker ever.

P.S. I’ve now set my sights on Wonder Woman.  If Josh won’t let me bring stray cats into the house, the least he can do is buy me plastic toys.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Today is Twitter’s 10th anniversary.  You go, Twitter!  In honour of their 10th anniversary, they’ve made it easy to find your first Tweet.  Just click on that link and it will tell you the first thing you wrote.

I wrote:

11/15/07 9 p.m. EST for Grey’s Anatomy

— stirrupqueen (@stirrupqueen) November 15, 2007

Sort of an odd choice, and I don’t really know what I meant by that. Was I trying to remember to watch Grey’s Anatomy the next night?

Anyway, what was your first Tweet?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

1.	Jessica	11.	* Our Wish*	21.	Jess
2.	Persnickety	12.	Traci York, Writer	22.	Virginia
3.	Middle Girl	13.	Lori@ Laughing IS Conceivable	23.	Sara @My Infertile Confessions
4.	Unpregnant Chicken	14.	Shail	24.	Tedi @ Running with Infertility
5.	Lori Lavender Luz	15.	Chocolate Week on Thorough and Unkempt	25.	Kechara
6.	Non Sequitur Chica	16.	Anks	26.	deathstar
7.	Cyn K	17.	Just Heather	27.	Mary Francis
8.	Cynthia Samuels	18.	Mali (No Kidding)	28.	Stephanie (Travelcraft Journal)
9.	The bespectacled mother	19.	Mali (A Separate Life)	29.	Cristy
10.	Isabelle	20.	Loribeth (The Road Less Travelled)

 

The video of the woman disappearing on live television?  She’s on the left side of the screen.  I must have watched it 50 times by now trying to figure it out.

View post on imgur.com

Where does she go? And if you watch everyone else, there is no skip in the feed.  Spooky.

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Have you heard of the brand Cotton On?  I think it’s Australian.  I can’t even remember how I heard about it this week, but it brought back memories of the brand Au Coton, which intense Googling has informed me is now defunct.  I am so sad for Generation Z and their lack of Au Coton memories.

Do you remember those clothes?  The oversized sweatshirts (damn, I wish sweatshirts that covered half your body were still in style) and the sweatpants you pegged and rolled up so they rested over your scrunch socks?  One of my happiest memories ever was the day my dad let my sister and I go shopping in Au Coton by ourselves.  The store was in Inner Harbour, and while I was a little nervous to make my own decisions because I was pretty crap at dressing myself, it was a heady rush to be around all of that sexy cotton.  Just yards and yards and yards of super soft sweat clothes.

I really miss Au Coton.  I get the sense that Cotton On is closer to being the Australian Old Navy than a reincarnation of 80s baggy clothing.  Anyone else with me?  Au Coton, great clothing store or greatest clothing store ever?

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Josh and I have been talking about Adam LaRoche and his decision to retire from baseball and leave $13 million on his contract rather than “dial back” having his 14 year old son come to his workplace.  LaRoche is a former National, now a White Sox.  But once you are one of my boys, you are always one of my boys.

I get that it sounds sensible in theory from the point of view of the Executive Vice President, Ken Williams.  For instance, a lawyer would not bring her child to work every single day.  If she did, she probably wouldn’t be very productive, and her child would probably be bored.

But this assumes that all jobs are alike.  And they’re not.  Some jobs lend themselves better to having kids at the workplace.  Baseball seems like one of those jobs.

I’m biased because I often bring the kids with me to work things.  I’ve even pulled them out of school if I’m going somewhere special so they can be in that space, too.  I think they get a lot out of the experience, and they learn from observation.  My kids are naturally pretty quiet in public, so it works out well.  If my kids acted differently in public, I would rethink taking them.

But I think my kids act the way they do BECAUSE we’ve always included them in adult experiences such a theater events or dinners with authors.  They’ve learned how to comport themselves through observation and stated expectations and the excitement of being included in the adult world.

If LaRoche’s son was not bothering anyone — and it has been stated that no one but management had a problem with the boy being there, and their problem came from the fact that they just didn’t think it was right for the child to spend so much time with his parent — then I don’t see the point in making a new rule.  It’s not Williams’s job to tell LaRoche how to parent, especially when LaRoche was upfront during contract negotiations on how he parents.

So, yeah, I totally respect LaRoche for saying family is more important than his job, and if he can’t be the dad he wants to be while being a baseball player, he just won’t be a baseball player.

I am in a bad mood after a baking disaster, and I’m taking a break to write this and think.  My two choices are to start over completely — I can see everything that was wrong with this recipe and can correct it with a second attempt — or to try to salvage what I have.  Currently I am leaning toward salvaging what I have because it took me hours to make, and re-making the cookies throws me off schedule.  Plus… you know… I hate waste.  But I’m really cranky about it.

I went with a recipe from the Kitchn.  The recipe was simple enough — a bar cookie — and the picture was beautiful.  With the exception of correcting an amount (I was fairly certain the author wanted me to put a teaspoon of vanilla into the cookie and not a tablespoon), I followed the recipe to a T.  My batch looked lovely… up until the point when I tried to cut it.  And then the various layers fell apart, and I was left with a crumbly mess on the cutting board.

Here’s the thing: A few times, I got my cookies to look like the picture.  And it made me realize that the author of that article probably made several batches to get that one perfect picture.  The rest of her cookies were probably also in pieces.  She just wasn’t showing me those.

And that is the point of this rant.  As much as there are a lot of fantastic recipes on the Internet, there are also a lot of shitty, you-probably-shouldn’t-make-this recipes being churned out to fill site content.  This recipe should have been edited until the results were consistent.  Or the author should have been honest and explained that the reason you can only get 12 enormous bars out of a 9 x 9 pan is that if you try to cut the cookies any smaller, they’ll fall apart.

But moreover, what cooking sites need to realize is that they do not need to produce content at a frantic pace.  I would rather they take their time and put up one cookbook-worthy recipe per week than throw up 6 half-baked recipes in a single day.  In fact, I am suspicious of any cook or baker who posts too frequently because doing so means that they aren’t taking the time to truly test and perfect their recipes.

That’s the end of my rant.  I went through my feed reader this morning and unsubscribed from about 8 blogs that post unusable recipes, and added 2 that feel a lot like Cooks Illustrated in that they point out all the ways they have failed when making the current recipe.  I need more bloggers like that in my feed.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Helping Ourselves” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Our Wish has a post responding to a song her husband sent her, a sweet moment except that it contained a line that gave her pause.  They are doing a donor egg cycle, so she knows that her “beautiful baby” will not look just like her.  But it’s an interesting post about how her mindset has changed since they’ve made the decision to proceed with another woman’s eggs.  And I especially love this line: “It’s just our reality and my heart accepted it long before my brain did.”

Notes from the Ninth Circle points out that while some people want to banish the “shoulds,” there are actually a lot of places where “should” defines the moment.  She should have her baby with her.  She should be able to conceive again.  It’s a tiny post that makes you think.

Lastly, Infertilityhonesty has a post about a moment that came up in her yoga teacher training.  She explains: “There’s always that question, at least for big mouths like me, when embarking on new social situations, of how and when I’m going to initiate people into my reality.”  She comes out to her classmates about her loss and her grief, and as she says, “I get to be here, participating in life truthfully, just like everybody else.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Cranky with dishonest food photography.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 11th and 18th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I was once sitting with a senior staffer at the White House before an event, and she admitted that despite seeing the President every day for her job, it still took her breath away every single time she saw him in the hallway or he walked into a meeting. She said the day that doesn’t happen is the day when you know there is something wrong with you. That it means you’re taking it for granted that you are in this amazing place with amazing people, taking part in making history.

I think about that every time I’m in the White House.

I do a self-check and make sure that I appreciate how lucky I am to be inside that building, interacting with the people who work within its walls.

I got to go to the White House for the Let’s Move event on Tuesday morning. It was a magical day. Hanging out with super smart women, listening to other super smart women speak: Seriously, so lucky.

Every single person speaking not only inspired me to make a big salad for dinner but to continue doing the work of making sure that healthy options are the easy, go-to options for the next generation. When you hear the statistics on kids and obesity, there isn’t another sane decision.  (1 in 3 kids!)

As Dominique Dawes pointed out, we don’t wait until kids are 13 to start teaching them to brush their teeth or wash their face, but for some reason, we think it’s okay to have kids eat overly processed junk food when they’re young and think that we can teach them differently when they’re older.

Probably my favourite part of the day was learning about FNV. Have you heard about this yet? It hasn’t officially been rolled out, but Partnership for a Healthier America put together a brand campaign for… fruits and veggies. Get it?  They’re combatting advertising for junk food on its own terms, making equally enticing, celebrity-hawked, a little cheeky ads for broccoli and carrots. My favourite so far has been for Wolverbean.

Okay, and my other favourite part of the day was the First Lady. She rocks so hard. I will forever be grateful that she took on healthy living and making sure that kids find the same message (instead of conflicting messages) in as many places as possible as her cause at the White House. Thank you for your work in getting better food in schools. Thank you for your work in getting rid of food deserts. Thank you for getting spaces built and programs in place that get kids moving. Thank you, FLOTUS. Please know how much your efforts are appreciated.

The day ended in the White House garden, squatting in the aisles, photographing kale and lettuce. And yes, I took a moment to check in and make sure that I appreciated where I was and what I was doing. I did. I appreciate it so much.

A few more pictures from the day:

Can you find the Arnebya?  It was so good to get to sit with her vs just talk via email.

Flowers under Nancy Reagan’s portrait

The magnolia trees were in bloom.  It was so pretty.

The White House garden makes you want a big salad.

Squinting on the White House lawn.  Is that the… sun?

Thank you, BlogHer and SheKnows (especially Jenny Lauck), for making this day possible.