Are We There Yet?

It was shocking really.

One of my best friends randomly met a college buddy. It was especially odd because I have moved out-of-state four times since college, and now live far enough away that my girlfriend has never met anyone else from my home state. In fact, that is why she mentioned meeting Sam at all.

Imagine the surprise when the only two people she knows from the whole state, know each other. What are the odds?

My girlfriend has gotten to know Sam better over the last few months. Therefore, she asked what I was like 20 years ago back in school. I have completely lost contact since college, so Sam asked about me now.

Intriguing isn’t it. Having two important people in my life – who knew me during different periods of my life – describe ME to each other. Narcissistic most definitely. But my ears were burning to hear more.

I would describe myself as being brought up in a small, rural part of mid-America. I learned wholesome values about family, hard work, and relating to people. Not much about fine arts, culture, fashion or style. We didn’t have much money. We didn’t go anywhere or have many things. That was OK. We were a content family. I had a happy childhood. I nearly stayed “there.” Then, half way through college something clicked for me. I was ready to move on. That is when I met Sam.

I agree with Sam. I was unusually self-driven. Mostly determined to make something of myself and have some money in the bank so I could do things my parents never did, like travel abroad.

I was a crazy, hard worker. Supported myself 100% from the day I left home for college. I held down 3 jobs at the same time to do it. NEVER went on a Spring Break trip, rushed a sorority, or even lived in the dorms, because my budget didn’t allow for it.

No leg up. No real anchor or direction, let alone a head start on life. I was an average student who started completely from scratch. Yet, I desperately wanted to know more about the world and understood that the only resource I could tap to do that was ME.

Paraphrasing, Sam described me as being uncomfortably driven and pretty much obnoxiously aggressive when it came to preparing for my future. That is fair. Looking back, I see now my actions and thought processes were over-the-top.

But it worked for me. I went places. I did things. I met interesting people.

Fast forward 15 years.

My best friend described me today. I am a stay-at-home mom who hasn’t worked professionally for over 8 years. Still chronically over scheduled managing my family and completely absorbed in the lives of my two wonderful children. Any free time is filled with various volunteer activities. That is the snapshot my life. Fair enough.

Sam was shocked….and so was I. Actually took the air right out of me. To be honest, it squashed my spirit. How did I get from there to here?

Is this it for me? All the hard work and all the years investing in my future, and I have nothing to show for it. I have left no mark on the vapor of those 15 years of my adult life.

I know. I know. Mothering is vital. Most important and meaningful job I will ever have. I will never regret the memories of being home with my children. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you, and get it. Feel the same way too. Deeply and passionately feel it. In fact, I am very happy as a SAHM. Love it! TRULY! Honestly, I aspire to no more.

Ah Haaaa!!!! There it is -- the most shocking part.
Did you miss it? Let me say it again.

I aspire to no more.

Shocking! Did I just go back “there?”
Is this the last, best description of me?

Are we there yet?

My New 'Do

Hey guys. I'm Anna, and you have probably seen my many sarcastic comments on this blog. Well, now I'm writing a post. Thank you, MIT Mommy! If you didn't know, MIT Mommy is my aunt. Be shocked! Isn't that awesome? So I can catch up what's happening up in Cleveland (a 6-hour car ride away) just by hitting a few buttons on my Inspiron 1520. Well, now everyone can catch up with me in glorious Baltimore, Maryland. Isn't that lovely and deep? Reading insightful insights into the insightful life of a middle-schooler...


Okay, I'm getting a bit carried away.


So the title on this post is "My New 'Do". Why? Because "My New Hairstyle" sounds weird. Also, because I got a new hairdo. Why? Because I can. And there's nothing you can do about it.


So I went to the salon on a Wednesday evening. It was about four o'clock, and kind of rainy. I sat down on the little sofa with my hairdresser and told her what I wanted her to do with my hair.


First, I wanted my eyebrows ripped.


Second, I wanted my split ends trimmed.


Third, I wanted my hair dyed blue.
Not completely blue. Just like a few highlights.
She nodded and said something like, "Okay. Blue hair. Okay." She also looked at me like I was a strange little girl.


At seven o'clock that night, my hair and eyebrows looked superultrafantabulous. My sister hated it at first, but then it 'grew on her' and now she thinks it looks superultrafantabulous, too. When my dad first saw it, he just got kind of quiet and didn't say much. (My mom told me later that he didn't like that 'stuff'. He's really conservative. Which is another way of torturing your children.) My mom says that it's "just a stage." I beg to differ. She also says it's better than piercings or tattoos. This, dear mother, I agree on.


At seven o'clock the next morning, I got on the school bus to get to school.


At eight o'clock that morning, my friends almost passed out laughing at me. I passed my crush talking to his friends in the hallway. All I caught him saying was "blue hair." My mom's friend, our school's special education teacher, loved it.


Maybe blue hair could be a new trend.


And now for my photo section. I have two pictures. I have no idea if they will upload, but I am crossing my fingers. So...if they don't show up, don't get angry or anything.


This is me with blue hair. It took about forever and a half to figure out how to blur out my face. Since I have no Photoshop on my computer, I had to make do with Photo Impression, Paint, and my webcam. There is a big purple question mark on my face, because I am really paranoid.



(And remember, this is after like five showers and a week. It doesn't look as good as the first day.)






This is the replacement color that I bought yesterday at the ULTA. You're supposed to use it to make your whole head blue. But that would look a tad bit ugly, no? So I'm going with highlights (again). If my dad lets me.


Well, this concludes my post. But before I say au revoir, I have one thing to ask you...SHOULD I DO PINK NEXT TIME? Lol. Well, I hope to see everyone in the comments section! <3,>

The internet's bad rap

Another day, another guest blogger. That would be me, Brigette Russell of Moralia, pinch hitting for MIT Mommy while she's away on her three week internet-free vacation. If you can call being away from the internet for three weeks a vacation, that is. Personally, I'd call it the first, or maybe even the second, circle of Hell.

But MIT Mommy's being a good sport about it all, wrote a clever post called My wireless, analog laptop before she left, with a photo of a journal and a pen. Her husband wanted her to leave the world wide web behind on their trip, and being a devoted, loving wife, she agreed. I'd have probably said, "Oh, honey, you have such a clever, off-beat sense of humor!" and packed up my laptop and wireless card.

Then again, my husband would never ask me for such a sacrifice, since he's even more of an internet addict than I am. Three weeks off-line? I think it would kill the poor man.

All this got me thinking about the Luddite strain in our culture that deplores the internet as something that is somehow corrupting us. Google makes us dumber. So does Facebook. Becoming accustomed to the convenience of a BlackBerry makes you some kind of sick addict, hence the term CrackBerry. Pompous academic windbags repeat all of the above, but in more tortuous language.

Despite the fact that it's full of disgusting porn, unsubstantiated Wikipedia articles, spam and bad writing, I love the internet. I don't have to look at the parts of it that are distasteful to me (Yahoo mail does a great job of spam filtering, so I don't have to see the obscene photos in the spam e-mails I used to get on Earthlink) and its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks.

I read quite a few newspapers online, and not a single tree is felled bringing them to me. I save countless hours and gallons of gas doing most of my shopping online. I keep in touch with a great many friends who have moved away (or stayed put while I moved away), friends with whom I might have lost touch if we had to rely on mail and long distance phone calls. Since I have four small children, my telephone time is limited. As any mother will tell you, the quickest way to turn a child who is calmly entertaining herself into an attention-starved monster is to pick up the telephone.

And then there are the friends I would never have made if it weren't for the internet. Friends like MIT Mommy. Friends like the moms on my baby lists. These are e-mail lists I joined when I was pregnant with my first and second babies. Each list contains 10 or 11 ladies who have become really good friends over the past 8 and 6 years, respectively. Some of us have met in real life, others remain online-only friends, but friends we are.

The internet is what you make of it. Some people use it for pursuits that may indeed make them dumber. Others use it to enrich their lives in countless ways -- and still have friends in real life, and still read books, and still do all the things people did before the internet existed (except maybe do some of the dreary, tiresome shopping we had to do in person, and kill a lot of trees to read the newspaper).

MIT Mommy is one of those who uses the internet to enrich and uplift rather than to degrade and dumb down. I hope she's enjoying her internet-free vacation. I also hope that next year she gets to bring a laptop.

Adventures in Hypermiling

Hi, I'm MIT Mommy.  I am an MIT alum, a mom and I brainwash engineer my kids.  No wait!  There can be only one.  Will the real MIT Mommy please stand up?  The truth is that this impersonator is the ever geeky Angela at mommy bytes.

While the real MIT Mommy is off guzzling gas on vacation, this MIT mommy obsesses over gas mileage with her spreadsheets.  Ever since the days of Lotus 1-2-3 (for those who remember the DOS days), I have kept spreadsheets for every car that I've owned.  I track every tank of gas going into each car, including the number of gallons and price per gallon, in order to track gas mileage and gas price per mile.  Here is a glimpse into my insanity.

When gas prices skyrocketed last year, I realized that I could create my own chart of gas prices because I had years of data!  Here is the price per gallon for regular gas in New England over the past 8 years.



From this chart, you can see that in December 2008, gas prices returned to their lowest levels since 2003, but they are creeping back up again.  When gas prices hit $4 per gallon last year, a friend of mine told me how he has been getting 20% higher gas mileage by hypermiling.  There are moderate to extreme techniques to hypermiling, but the one that fascinated me the most was to coast down hills in neutral. 

In my car (a BMW 325 xiT), there is an instantaneous gas mileage gauge at the bottom of the tachometer as well as an average mileage readout.  When I coast down hills in gear, the instantaneous gauge is pinned to the extreme left (100+ mpg?).  But when I coast in neutral, the gauge reads somewhere around 80 mpg.  From these observations, I assumed that it took more gas to spin the engine in neutral because of the nominal load of the engine friction.  However, it only spins at idle speed of 600 rpm, as opposed to 2k-3k when in gear.  All those extra cycles eat up more gas even though the transmission is helping the engine, right?  Obviously, empirical testing was in order.


(I took this photo while driving, do not attempt this at home unless you are a professional MIT mommy )

It is absolutely true that you get better gas mileage when you coast down hills in neutral.  It could be that you go much farther without having to apply gas again than you would in gear.  It could be that the gauge isn't telling the whole truth.  Either way, I have taken to coasting down hills in neutral whenever I can.

There is a long rolling hill on the way home from work that I used to just drive in gear, applying gas without thinking about it.  Now I know that when I see a particular Blind Driveway sign, it's time to shift into neutral.  I usually start out around 40 mph and coast up and down this rolling hill, with my speed varying between 35 and 45 mph.  I leave enough space between the car in front of me because nothing annoys me more than cars that brake going downhill and accelerate going uphill, the complete opposite of hypermiling (would that be hypomiling?).  This road ends going uphill, where I have to stop and turn.  If there are no cars behind me, I try to coast all the way to the stop sign.  When the car slows to 25 mph, it feels deathly slow.  At 20 mph, you can see me nudging my seat to get the car to move faster.  But it does eventually reach the stop sign, even though the last 50 feet seem to take hours.  Usually a car shows up behind me, forcing me to use some gas and saving me from hypermiling insanity.

In all the other hypermiling areas, I fail miserably.  I can't accelerate from a stop slowly (other than being obsessive with spreadsheets, I like to do things fast fast fast).  I don't think it is safe to draft larger vehicles or to over-inflate tires.  It is way too much bother to shut off the car at lights.  But I do like taking ramps at close to full speed, wouldn't that be the point of having a BMW?

Hopefully, the gas prices won't spike during the real MIT Mommy's travels and she will have fun but sane stories to share with us.  Happy trails everyone!

Summer Magic

Summer vacations were a magical time for me when I was growing up. I’ve never forgotten that feeling of immense freedom as I got off the school bus for the last time at the end the school year. The end of summer and the start of the next school year was nothing but a faint thought in my mind, if it even was there at all.

My summer-mind was always a whirlwind of all the things I had plans to do. In addition to the activities that just about every boy does during his summer vacation (which, other than getting scrapes and grass stains, is testing the limits of his mother’s patience), my parents always packed my sisters and I up in the car to go camping for a week or two.

Whenever I think about my childhood, the memories I have about camping are some of the best ones I have.We made tie-died t-shirts and competed in sand sculpture contests. We ate countless hot dogs and hamburgers. We cooked pizza’s over the campfire in my great-grandfather’s unique campfire oven. We got sunburns and bug bites but miraculously avoided poison ivy. We got rained on and nearly flooded out, and learned the hard way about the benefit of properly hung tarpaulins. We went fishing and often caught more trees than fish. We went swimming until our fingers wrinkled and learned how to dive off the dock. We went canoeing and paddle-boating, and watched our mother water-ski that one time. We played board games and seemingly endless rounds of Twenty Questions by the campfire at night. We made s’mores and got scolded for making torches out of flaming marshmallows. We found that loud, snoring neighbors makes for a late-night giggle-fest.

As my sisters and I grew older, we went camping less and less as our summer schedules filled up with extracurricular activities and summer jobs. I was lucky enough to find a woman who loves camping as much as I do, and we have spent many nights under the stars. We even went camping for our honeymoon. I hope you’ve had a good time making memories with your family, MIT Mommy.

I look forward to hearing all about them when you come back.

Badass Geek