May 11

Fifteen years ago tonight, Jim and I had our first date. We went to the Acropolis, and no, it wasn't the one in Greece. But it was the restaurant on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. I was 18.  Fifteen years from today, I will be 48 and Annie will be in high school. If we lay out life in fifteen-year increments, it suddenly goes by very quickly. I shouldn't do that.

Tonight we had a very quick dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, La Paloma, in Wollaston. It was a quick dinner because Annika was tired.  Daycare thinks she's ready to only take one nap a day. I think she's ready too, but when she does take that one nap, it needs to be for more than 45 minutes. (I think there's too much activity at the daycare for her to be able to sleep longer than that, unless she's really super tired). Daycare doesn't seem to understand this, so by the time she comes home, she's exhausted. It's frustrating to not entirely be in control. I guess I need to get used to it.

Tomorrow is a day of swim lessons and grocery shopping and hopefully a nice walk with the stroller to a park with swings.

Odd things in the news

1) Later this month is the special election for the open Senate seat in Massachusetts. We have a Senate candidate named Joseph Kennedy. He is running for Ted Kennedy's seat. Except, he's a libertarian. And he's completely unrelated to Ted Kennedy or anyone else in his family. What a convenient name. How many people are going to vote for him because they think he's related to Ted?

2) Sarah Palin is joining Fox News. Perhaps she will be their Russia correspondent. She can look out her window and tell all the Fox viewers what those Russians are doing. I guess Tina Fey will be making more appearances on SNL.

3) The Attorney General just swore in Massachusetts' first female U.S. Attorney. Seriously? Why has it taken so long for a woman to get this position?

A couple of announcements

A couple of announcements:

1) This weekend is a "fee free" weekend for the National Parks. That means that the National Parks are FREE this weekend. Read about it more here: http://www.nps.gov/FINDAPARK/FEEFREEPARKS.HTM We are thinking of checking out the Longfellow House, near Harvard Square, if we have time. We could also check out the Adams House again. I love the gardens there.

2) There are more videos of Annie up at Flickr. Use the link I e-mailed out for "Annie's Videos."

3) We finally got a new mattress and are back in our old room! Yea! And it looks like we'll be able to get rid of the old mattress pretty easily. I've already had 4 e-mails back from my Craig's List posting.

4) We will be in Buffalo from Aug 21-26. Looking forward to seeing everyone!

Car

We bought a car! We picked it up this morning. Here are the pictures:




Pretty cool stuff!

Busy

What a day. It started at 10pm last night. Annie decided that she wanted to be held and would cry if we put her down. She was awake until 2am. Poor Jim was on duty last night and he got very little sleep. I was trying to figure out why she was like this. One guess is that my mom and I took her for a long walk in the stroller yesterday morning and she slept most of the rest of the day. So she was all rested for the night. But honestly, there really is no rhyme or reason as to why Annie stays awake one night and sleeps another night.

In the morning, we bought a car. No kidding. It's a black Mazda 6, manual transmission, power locks and windows. Jim is picking it up tomorrow morning. (He will blog separately about his very bad experience with Boch Honda, one of the dealerships he dealt with before we settled on the Mazda). He had been thinking about getting a new car for a while because our Corolla is getting old. It has 112,000 miles, and more egregious to Jim was its lack of power locks. A lack of power locks is challenging when you're traveling with a baby and all her gear. We had driven several Mazda 6 cars as rentals while on vacation, and last weekend, Jim test drove one (along with a Ford Fusion and an attempt at a Honda Accord). It looks like a beautiful car.

In the afternoon, I went out to lunch with my new moms' group, followed by the weekly meeting at Isis. Annie has been fussy most of the day, but she was actually pretty good through lunch and through the meeting. I fed and changed her right at the beginning of the meeting, and she slept all the way until we got home.

Tonight we had leftovers from Punjab Cafe. I'm going to go to bed soon because I'm on duty tonight and I'm worried that we might have a continuation of last night. We are going to try having Annie sleep in her own room and see if that works. I'm pretty nervous about it.

Tomorrow we have the gas company coming in the morning to replace our gas meter. In the afternoon, I might meet up with people from my new moms' group to go for a walk at Wellesley College, which is somewhat nearby. Hopefully the weather will cooperate!

Boy Band Reunion Tours

Lately, there have been many things that have made me want to vomit. But let's add one more to the pile:
The New Kids on the Block Reunion tour.

When I first heard the news that this was happening, I thought it was a joke. I mean, why would these five guys who had become successful doing their own things - acting, real estate, singing solo, etc. - feel the need to go on a new tour and sing silly songs from 15 years ago? They didn't even write those songs! They were a completely invented "boy-band," created strictly for a record company to make oodles of money.

Unfortunately, it was not a joke. Apparently, they just played a "reunion" concert in Boston, part of a national tour. And from the looks of the photos, it was complete with their old songs, stupid costumes (really - white scarves?), and an appearance by Paul Pierce of the Celtics. Ugh.

Are the New Kids on the Block out of money? But it seems like most of them have other careers. Do they just miss the adoration of pre-teen girls? But they've all got to be in their late 30's now. It just seems like that it would be easy to get tired to screaming girls. And it's even more pitiful now, since their audience now consists of screaming 30-year-olds who never got over their pre-teens, and those women's daughters. Yuck.

If anything, it seems like the reunion tour will make certain members of the group lose credibility. Take Donnie Wahlberg. He has actually had a pretty successful acting career. Can he really be taken seriously in that venue when he's practicing around in an all-white outfit with a matching scarf, singing "Hangin' Tough"? I don't think so.

In the end, it must be that they stand to make a boat load of money with this tour, and it must be more than they are making at their other careers.

Musings on the news

Here I am, waiting for my friend Jen to get out of work, so I thought I would write some musings about today's news.

First, Hillary Clinton. She lends her campaign several million dollars, except that she's not going to win the primary any more. Could she give me the million dollars instead? I can think at least a million better ways to spend it, and top on my list would be the poor souls in Myanmar/Burma who got hit by the cyclone.

Here in Boston, the mafia is in the news again. A man who calls himself "The Cheese Man" had a bail hearing today in federal court on charges that he bribed an undercover FBI agent who he thought was a state government official. It seems like if he truly wanted to protest his mafia connections, he would stop calling himself the Cheese Man, even if it's true that he owns a cheese shop in the North End.

And finally, I want to share a fabulous journal article about immigration judges from the Social Science Research Network: Crisis on the Immigration Bench: An Ethical Perspective, by Michele Benedetto. I'm just reading through it, but it is right on. Some of the anecdotes that you'll read in this article are almost unbelievable, except that I've seen similar situations in cases that I've had. From what I can tell, no First Circuit cases are included. Maybe that's because the First Circuit is blindly deferential!! I keep wondering when my firm is going to move to California.