wringing the last drops of joy out of my vacation

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  I certainly did: good food, good company.  It was lovely.

Today is my last day of several I've had off from work.  I feel genuinely refreshed and content, and I'm trying to focus on strategies that will allow me to maintain that for as long as possible.  Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

For now, I'm going to spend a couple hours knitting the sweater-to-be above while watching Sunday morning political shows and sipping a mug of hot coffee.

Happy Sunday, everyone!

Feminism ain't easy: standing up to double standards

"Girls aren't good at math."

The overwhelming majority of people I interact with would find that to be a ridiculous and inappropriate statement. Some girls and women excel at all things mathematical while others struggle with varying success, just like other endeavors. The assumption that because a person is female, she must not have the mathematical aptitude of her male peers is, thankfully, not something I encounter often from people I talk to on a regular basis.

It's interesting, then, that I do hear things like these:

"Guys don't have feelings."

"Boys are slobs."

"Pfft, men only half listen when you talk to them."

And nobody really bats an eye. Except for a couple weeks ago, when I did. I tried to be polite about it, but it still felt a little awkward.

Why is it socially acceptable for women to make disparaging generalizations about men, when the reverse -- which, yes, also happens -- usually causes an uproar? It's a double standard, and that's not fair.

More importantly (because sometimes "that's not fair, so do the right thing" can be a tough message to internalize) disparaging men based on stereotypes won't fix anything. If statements like "men only half listen" stem from women's frustration about behavior of men that they've encountered -- and I suspect that's the case -- I fail to see how generalizations like that do anything to fix it. Chalking frustrating behavior to up "oh, that's just how they are" only perpetuates the problem, right?

Sure, there are plenty of men who aren't good listeners. There are lots of women in that category, too. But if it's generally accepted that men aren't good listeners, because oh, you know, that's just how they are... well, guess what? Men who don't listen well will just keep on keepin' on not listening well. That can't be the end goal for women who get upset when the men around them don't pay attention. If there's a wish for men to be better listeners, partners, husbands, and parents (and really, such a wish would be integral to ensuring equal opportunities for men and women, no?) maybe a better way to achieve that goal would be to expect more from them and assume capability, rather than setting bar at the lowest common denominator.

our street is ready for thanksgiving

No, this isn't the Thinking Post.  I'm still mulling.

I'm also enjoying the wonderfully incongruous place where we live.  500 yards away is a busy road, three gas stations, and an access point to the highway. But 15 yards away? Turkeys. Eleven of them.  We've seen them several times this week, so clearly they live around here.

As long as they don't leave beak-shaped dents in our cars, I'm psyched to have them as neighbors.

Mulling

You ever notice how sometimes a common thread or idea or topic will present itself in various unconnected corners of your life at very nearly the same time?  Or perhaps the various corners of one's life aren't unconnected at all, but that's beside the point (I do love to get sidetracked and express that via parentheses, as you know).

Anyway. I'm taking the universe's hint and mulling over a Thinking Post for later this week.  No yarn or flowers or cute animals.  

I mean, just for the one post.

Soggy Cecil

He hates the rain, but it just might make him cuter.

It's only cute because I know it isn't poisonous.

Category: "Blog Post Titles I Never Thought I'd Use"
Items: 1


This'll be the last garden post of 2011. I think so, anyway. We still have leeks growing, but those will show up in a cooking post, not a gardening post. A garden version would involve some truly boring pictures. Snoozefest.

Anyway, I had my camera with me in the yard a couple months ago because I'd been taking pictures of whatever flowers were in bloom that day. The universe completely enabled my tendency to be lazy very efficient when making trips back in the house, and rewarded me for still having the camera in the pocket of my jacket when I'd moved on to the weeding of the overgrown vegetable garden* -- I spied a visitor next to one of the raised beds, and it was kind enough to model for me.

Have a good winter, my friend. Please stick around and eat more of our bugs next year -- I suspect there will be plenty to offer.


*For those of you who don't garden or didn't pick up on the context clues here: weeding an overgrown vegetable garden is decidedly not a photographically important pursuit.

56 Weeks of Cecil

I missed the opportunity for a post with any real fanfare and will thusly have to resort to the anticlimactic: Mr. Cecil's been with us for... more than a year. See, a drumroll would have been ridiculous there. According to the meet-our-new-dog post from last year, we officially got him on October 8th. Oh well. It's not like we would have baked him a cake or anything had we been more on top of things.

One of the absolute best new skills he's learned lately is the ability to go to off-leash dog parks and not run off into the sunset/after a squirrel/into traffic. Well, honestly, I suspect he's had this skill for a while now, but what's happened recently is that we've had the courage to let him go off-leash and trust him to be a good puppy. Fueled by our own paranoia, we've spent the past year carting around a 50-foot leash on all his adventures to give him the feeling of freedom while still giving us humans a sense of security. Couple that with a plastic baggie full of scraps of american cheese and salami, to be meticulously and consistently deployed when someone's little canine legs carry him back to us, and we've managed to hoodwink him into thinking that it's the best thing EVER to stick with us.

That's him. The fact that he somehow gets the concept of trails mystifies and amuses me.

There's also the convenient part about him being a teensy bit afraid of the whole world, which I suspect keeps him from wandering too far. But also the salami.

Anyway. Being able to let him run and explore and smell the smells and meet other puppies (see? they're not scary!) has been such a turning point. He's gaining confidence, which makes him less likely to have a meltdown on a structured walk when he sees a cat or another dog, and we're feeling better by seeing him make a lot of great progress. All that, PLUS, we don't have to do any fancy double-dutch footwork to keep from being taken out at the ankles by a bright orange leash if he starts running at full tilt. Win, win, win.

His favorite part is always smelling the smells.

This weekend, we spent an hour wandering around a dog park a couple miles from our house. No fences, no leashes. Just acres and acres of trails and fields and a pond. So much to sniff.

One of my other favorite things about Mr. Cecil? He had no interest whatsoever in swimming in that pond. We are so. darn. lucky.