Apt. 11D

BlogHer

I'm part of the BlogHer advertising network. It provides a little income to this blog and other blogs that are written by women. 

They highlighted the post that I wrote on Monday about Steve's fabulous lunches and asked if I could send a little traffic their way. 

More Vintage Paper Stuff

My mom dropped off another load of unsorted papers from old Aunt Theresa's house yesterday. Most of her papers went into a dumpster, because they were moldy and unorganized. This parsel of papers was rescued for some reason and ended up on my living table. 

What was in it? Mostly garbage. Her teaching certification from the 1940s. Scribbled notes from a vacation. Old thank you notes. Here are a few of things that I saved. 

Vintage cruise menus. Apparently they are worth some money.

Tons and tons of Catholic prayer cards that date back to the turn of the century. Lots of dead Italian immigrants. I'll sell them as a lot. Someone will make an art project of them. 

An old Pan Am baggage brochure. I guess that's worth $20 or so. 

I have about 60 postcards from the 40s and the 50s. I want to sell them as a lot and get rid of them. It's too much work to photograph each one to sell individually. 

 

 

Can't Escape the Cubicle

Marissa Mayer's decision to cut back on Yahoo employees working from home has created quite a stir. This morning, Maureen Dowd pointed out the hypocrisy of Mayer putting in a nursery in the office for herself, while she made it more difficult for other parents who are lower down on the corporate ladder to juggle parenting responsibilities and work. 

Dowd is right. Mayer isn't the only hypocrite. Sheryl Sandberg who exhorts women to stay in the office, also doesn't recognize that her huge salary and boss-like perks enables her to manage a job and still be home for dinner at 5:30. I don't want to hear any work-family advice from people like Mayer and Sandberg. 

Now, let's talk about working from home. The basic issue is trust. Do you trust your workers to really work when they are at home? If your workers have to process 50 reams of paperwork in one day and they get it done while wearing their PJs at home, it should be fine, right? But it doesn't work that way. 

When Steve first started working his Wall Street job, there was a lot of talk about workplace flexibility. He attended training sessions on workplace flexibility. A few of his co-workers negotiated arrangements where they were at home for three days a week. Steve only worked from home one or two times a year, but it was a nice arrangement for emergencies. He said that he got more work done at home, because there were less distractions. 

And then the recession happened. The workers who worked from home regularly were fired first. When Steve asked if he could work from home one day (the first request in two years), he was actually yelled at. The trust was gone. Fewer workers were doing twice the work, and their bosses felt that they needed to be monitored at all times. 

Truly, this move by Mayer has nothing to do with creating incubators of ideas or the particular needs of Yahoo. It has everything to do with the erosion of trust between workers and management in a crappy economy. This move is one of hostility towards working parents, no question about that. But it is also a hostile move towards ALL workers. Terribly disgusted. 

 

UPDATE FROM THE COMMENT SECTION: 

I come from the academic world, where working from home is the norm. People go to the university three days a week and then work from home two days. They have plenty of flexibility. Some work better in the morning; others work better in the evening. Everybody gets their shit done eventually. There is still plenty of face to face time to network and all that. It is totally weird for me to see workplaces that expect that a butt is glued to one chair for 40 to 60 hours a week.

As I said in my last blog post, my kids have been sick on and off for two and half weeks. Plus, they had a whole week off from school. This is the first day in ages that I haven't had a kid in the house. This is why I'm slogging away at the freelance writing career, when I could be making better money elsewhere. I am unemployable in a Marissa Mayer world.

 

Trapped with Winter Bugs

We've been passing around various winter bugs for 2-1/2 weeks now. Jonah has been the most sick. His immunity system has totally crashed, so he keeps getting new awful things every three days. 

He started projectile vomiting on Saturday night. He said that half chewed ravioli shot out of his nose. We were up the whole night with him. I cleaned vomit off the carpeting at 2 am. He was so dehydrated yesterday that I thought we were going to have to go to the emergency room. A couple hours ago, I drove him to school even though he was still very sick, because I thought that moving around might be good for him. 

Twenty minutes until his bus pulls up. I hope I did the right thing. 

Gotta get back to cloroxing the kitchen and bathrooms again. 

No Working From Home for Mayer

A lot has been written about Marissa Mayer's decision to end the practice of letting Yahoo! workers work from home. I'll write about it tomorrow, but here are some links: Wired, Forbes, Buzzfeed, and Lisa Belkin. 

Seasons

I'm craving spring. I need spring. I need to start planting things. So, I loved this. More info at Wired.

 

Applying Behavioral Economics to Lunchroom Policy

In Choices Magazine, behavior economists tackle the lunchroom cafeteria. (Via the Monkey Cage.)

In general, when schools require students to take vegetables, only about 35% of the students actually consume the vegetables, resulting in substantial waste of food and resources (see, for example, Price and Just, 2009). In fact, a recent study suggests that requiring students to take vegetables rather than allowing them to control this choice by selecting or rejecting vegetables has virtually no impact on vegetable consumption, while nearly doubling the waste from vegetables (Price and Just, 2009). Alternatively, consider what might happen if students were given the choice between carrots and celery. In a recent experiment we conducted at Cornell, 120 junior high participants in a summer 4H program were told they must take carrots with their lunch, while another 120 were given the choice of carrots or of celery (103 of 120 selected the carrots). Of those required to take the carrots, 69% (83 of 120) consumed the carrots, while 91% (94 of 103) of those choosing between carrots or celery consumed their vegetable. Such results suggest that requiring a vegetable, while offering an active choice between at least two options substantially reduces the waste from vegetables, and increases the nutritional content of the foods consumed.

Tight Spaces

100,000 people live in 40 square foot apartments in Hong Kong. 

Food is the New Art. Or Maybe the New Religion. Or Maybe It's Just Food.

William Deresiewicz writes eloquently, but he pushes his critiques of foodism too far. Is food the new art or the new religion or both or neither?

Still, I like this paragraph:

Art has become a kind of DIY affair that’s felt to be in anybody’s reach. Think of the number of people who fancy themselves to be writers or visual artists in these days of technologically assisted narcissism—all those would-be novelists and memoirists, those photographers and videographers. How easy it is to reach an audience now, or to think you’re reaching one. How easy to receive approval for your work, since friends will never tell you what they really believe. And in the case of the visual arts, with all the new technology, how easy to create a beautiful image. I’m reminded of something I heard a music teacher say about electric guitars: that he tries to keep his students away from them until they know how to play, because they make it too easy to produce a sound, to feel as if you’re making music. The new digital cameras are the electric guitars of the visual media; they give you the impression that this art thing really is no sweat.

The Olive Garden v. Italian Food

Italian-Americans don't really eat a proper Mediterranean Diet. They do eat lots of vegetables and olive oil, but the diet has too much cheese and pasta. A big plate of baked ziti with a side of iceberg lettuce is not proper Italian food. Over the years, we've tossed out some bad habits from the Bronx Italian days and gone back to old school cooking.

Here are some tips: 

 1. In order to concentrate on cooking lots of vegetables, I simplify the meat dish. I make something that takes ten minutes to heat up, like sausage, some ham or a piece of fish that only needs salt and pepper. Or I'll buy a rotisserie chicken. 

2. Buy the gallons of olive oil and store it in a dispenser like this one. Do not get one of those mister oil dispensers. They get all gummed up and you really need more oil than a mist. Never use vegetable oil or butter. 

3. Always have garlic at home and store it in a special jar in your cabinet, like this one. Own a garlic press, but don't be afraid to simply slice up the garlic in slabs and fry them up before you add your vegetables. 

4. An essential pantry: dried red pepper flakes, cumin, curry, oregano, bay leaves, various pre-mixed FRESH spice combos (not McCormick crap), garlic powder, tons of cans of Italian (not Hunt's) tomatoes, jars of red peppers, jars of artichoke hearts, jars of sun dried tomatoes, cans of beans, boxes of chicken and beef broth, pasta, rices (not Uncle Ben's or any bleached white stuff), couscous, tuna.  

5. I always have the following items in the fridge: onions, peppers, carrots, celery, lettuce, olives, and potatoes. Then I fill up the fridge with whatever fruits and vegetables and fresh herbs look happy in the supermarket. Right now, everything looks a little sad, so I drive to Whole Foods and get their frozen versions of vegetables. I especially love their frozen kale and collard greens, because it's already cleaned and chopped. 

6. OK, back to the cooking part. Let's talk about the carbs. I always have a side of carbs (pasta, rice, couscous, or potato), but they are never stand-alone dishes. I mix them heavily with herbs, spices, and/or vegetables.

For example, I'll make a box of plain couscous. Maybe I'll throw in half a brick of bullion to add a little flavor. I'll serve the plain stuff to the kids with a little parm cheese. Then I'll saute onion and garlic in olive oil, add zucchini, add spices, add a can of beans, and then mix the rest of the couscous with that. 

Another example. I'll peel a potato, chop it into big chunks, and then boil it. I'll add a little butter and some parsley to half of the potatoes for the kids. Then I'll spice and vegetable up a version for Steve and myself. 

7. Always have a salad and a cooked vegetable. My mom did that. I do that. 

8. This is very time consuming stuff, but that's the way it is supposed to be. Dinner is about more than shoving fuel down the gullet. It's family time. There are no shortcuts. 

9. One of my biggest changes in the past few years is the types of cheese that we consume. I stopped buying mozzarella, except for the hand-made stuff as a treat. I stopped buying cheddar and swiss. I go for little nuggets of highly flavorful stuff like blue cheese or feta. I sprinkle that stuff liberally on salads, vegetables, and carbs. I'm not making foods where the primary component is cheese, like lasagna or Mexican stuff. 

10. I buy desserts for the kids that I don't like. Ice-cream doesn't do anything for me, so that's what the kids get after dinner. If I remember. Mostly, we forget to give the kids any dessert. 

11. Learn how to cook vegetables. I think most people hate vegetables, because they cook them badly. They are too droopy or under seasoned. By doing easy meats and carbs, I've concentrated my efforts on the vegetables. Thanks to my CSA, I was forced to learned how to deal with the beet this summer. Now we love them. 

Anyway, we eat like this, because it tastes good, not because we're on a diet or anything.

It is very time consuming, and I certainly couldn't do this if I was getting home at 8 every night. I suppose it is a luxury in this day and age. But I am home at the moment. I've got the kids doing homework in the kitchen, so I'm cooking and doing homework assistance at the same time. Working friends cook like this by spending an entire Sunday preparing meals for the week.