For aspiring world conquerors everywhere

I feel bad for our cats.

Sam and Horace used to be moderately pampered. They ruled the roost, were no strangers to tuna, and they went to bed in our room ever night after much petting and purring.

These days, our cats seem to be less companions and more obstacles to climb over when rushing to get the baby his bottle. They are forced to jump over a baby gate every time they wish to access their food. Arguably, this is good exercise, but I mean, what would you do if you had to scale a wall 3 times your height whenever you were hungry? You’d probably track down the wall-builder, cut him into lots of little cubes and then eat him instead.

But, the cat’s downgrade in social status truly became clear to me this morning when I was cleaning their litter box.

Not only do they have yucky Costco litter (we’re replacing that, it’s like peeing on giant blue fish tank rocks), but I noticed that the bag of food we have for them is called “Maintenance Cat.” Oh, we don’t feed our cats. We MAINTAIN them.

How did our poor treasured pets become just another thing on our to do list? Change the oil in the car, vacuum the rug, maintain the cat. And while I readily admit that purchasing this brand of cat food is not the most compassionate consumer behavior, who names their brand that? Just think. Instead of “Hungry Man” dinners or “Lean Cuisine” it would be “People Sustenance” and “Repair Your Fatties.”

It would be very interesting if suddenly, in the age of blogs, review sites and honest communication about products in public forums, marketing lost its spin. I challenge you to review the products in your home and label them exactly what they do for you and why you bought them. If you’re feeling particularly witty, post your marketing campaign here, and entertain us all.

It’s a great big colorful world out there!  Everything’s got a color that it can wear. Hand! Green hand!  Yaaaay clap clap clap clap clap.

I am starting to dislike our Laugh and Learn Puppy dog.

Of all our toys that talk, sing, giggle and snort, the Laugh and Learn Puppy is the only one that gets on my nerves. Mainly, this is because the song takes over your mind and repeats itself, over and over.

To put this in perspective, this is including a 2 page story that repeats, “Let’s go out to play; it’s a sunny day!” and “Playtime was such fun; it’s bedtime everyone!” over and over.  And a hoe-down banjo toy.  And a talking octopus with a really snotty voice.

In addition to having numerous voices chasing me around the house (nothing new, they’re just outside of my head now), my emotions are still shot to heck.

During pregnancy, it was normal to cry at ads with saccharine plotlines and books where children were eaten.  (Thanks, Desperate Passage.)  But, Maddox and I watched Tarzan today, and I cried through the first 15 minutes of it.  Baby eaten by tigers?  Parents eaten by tigers and baby left all alone?  Sobs, I tell you.

Possibly, both of these reactions are caused by exhaustion. A friend of mine used to say, “Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead.” This may be true, I don’t know. But if I have to be dead before I get another 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, I may have to scare up a couple of tigers and feed them Laugh and Learn Puppy.

But what the hell. It’s a great big colorful world out there (or so I’ve heard) and Mr. Maddox and I are going to go enjoy it.

2009 has been an eventful year.

In May, Maddox Jaesun Heller was born, and he is amazing.

The other significant (but not quite as) event occurred in November, when Jon and I finally bought a house after over a year of searching.

Both events have taught me a lot. Here are 5 lessons I learned in 2009:

1. Having a kid makes you react to things differently.  Movies become traumatic as you imagine your child in a similar situation to the kid on the screen.  Screaming children in restaurants are less annoying.  You are never bored, because you do not have the time to be bored.
2. Redfin is a great way to find a house.  Buyers agents are terrifying when let loose, and should only be hired when they work per hour instead of per commission.  You’ll consider houses with the worst possible features before coming to your senses.
3. Sleep, although coveted, is optional.  You can function on interrupted sleep for 7 1/2 months.  I’ll let you know if I pass out before I get to 8.
4. Hiring movers is so worth it.  Having people lift my furniture and endless boxes, carry them down 3 flights of stairs out to a truck, and then carry them back into my new living space was worth every cent.  These people are professionals – they actually take doors off to get your furniture inside, instead of attacking said furniture with a sawzall until it can be thrown out the window in pieces (my preferred MO).
5. You can never have too many boxes.  Children and movers like them.  Children like to sit inside them (top open – important detail there) and bang things on the sides.  Movers like it when boxes are stuffed full (but not of children – also an important note) so long as the weight isn’t ridiculous.  My buddy Sean at work scored me a server box to pack in – it held a baby bathtub, a jumping bouncer, 2 game console guitars, a pile of winter accessories, and I think a big tupperware cake keeper and a decent-sized fan.

So those are my pearls of wisdom from 2009.  I’m not going to put baz luhrmann out of business anytime soon, not because the advice isn’t as good, but because I don’t have backup singers or a soundtrack.  Maybe next year.

Happy New Year, guys, and here’s to a great 2010.

I’ve always wanted the power to smite people. You throw your arms up in the air, call on the powers of heaven and lightening, and fry the offending party where they stand. Generally, this urge comes on when I’m driving around Salem.

Now I hear that Sony has developed wireless technology that sends electricity through the air.

While my mind is boggled – Flying invisible electricity! Get excited! – I have to ask myself. How is this not dangerous?

I understand that this is not strictly a new concept. My cell phone works, and it’s not plugged in. My laptop can connect to the internet while I wander around the room, carrying it like the surrogate child it is. But electricity just seems more intense.

Perhaps it’s an after-effect of all those Hollywood movies and storm chaser shows. I just imagine sitting calmly on my couch while bolts of lightening zap around my head, charging my electronics and periodically frying my cats.

Not being a scientist or an engineer, I’m just going to assume they’ve got this under control. Because in a related technological breakthrough covered by Apartment Therapy, there are now wireless charging mats available on amazon. And I want one.

Why? Well, practically, I could charge my electronics more efficiently. I’m a big fan of toys and I’m pretty OCD about keeping them charged. In this scenario, I’d come home, empty my pockets of gadgets and gizmos a-plenty, and drop everything on a Powermat. I wouldn’t have to plug anything in, and when I went out again, I’d just scoop everything back up and it would be magically charged.

Aesthetically, this means I could dispense with some of the cords that currently make my home an unsightly nest of plastic and wire. Also, we’re in the process of baby-proofing, and going cordless (even a little) would help a lot.

Considering the future, I am somewhat concerned. In a society with both wireless electricity conduction and tasers, it can’t be long before smiting-in-traffic is a reality.

You’ll be sitting in your vehicle, someone will cut you off, and instead of moving on with your life (or yelling obscenities out the window) you’ll press a button on your Honda Powermat Traffic Enforcer and zap the other driver from 3 car lengths away.

I fear for the world. And I’m also going to advance order any road rage related powermats stat.

Image credit: mat & taser.

Article credit: Thanks to Apartment Therapy, Jon Heller and PC World.

Jon and I were driving to pick up Maddox from daycare when I thought I heard Jon say “eight” and then a moment later, “seven.”

Thinking, gee, this is a weird game, but okay, I’ll play too, I started counting down from six.

From Jon’s confused reaction, I gathered that I had misheard him, and we were not in fact flexing our awesome countdown skills.

Because I figured I might as well finish what I’d started, I kept counting aloud anyway. This had an interesting effect: Jon grew progressively more alarmed with each number. I began to realize that 1) this was fun and 2) he was anticipating horrible acts when I ran out of numbers and 3) that was why it was fun.

Although I don’t want to psychoanalyze what this probably indicates about our marital relationship (if you have a hot line Jon could call, you can tweet him), I am kind of excited about the ramifications of this discovery.

I mean, who ELSE might be susceptible to this? What will happen if I start from a higher number than six? Will the increased anxiety cause people to explode? Most importantly, could you use the Countdown of Doom to take over a small country simply by implying that ominous things will occur if the clock counts down to zero?

If you think about it, LOST used a countdown to add suspense without ever explaining what would happen if the computer stopped counting down. And we all have heard a Mom disciplining her child by saying “don’t make me count to three?” God forbid she reach it, I still don’t know dire things my mother had planned.

So here’s the takeaway. I suggest that today you try counting down in front of someone, calmly but without explanation or pause. Then, let me know what happened. Please do not try this on pregnant women or people with heart conditions.

The Back Story:

It took awhile for me to trust our baby monitor. I didn’t believe that the voice-activate setting would work, and pictured my poor baby crying his head off in the other room.

Note: We live in a 2 bedroom apartment, and there is virtually no room in the house where you could not hear a baby from another room.

So, this is a post for all the other neurotic new moms out there who are worried that their baby monitors won’t actually allow them to monitor their babies.

Product Description

The Sony Baby Call Baby Monitor has three settings: On, off, and voice-active. The “on” setting is a bit much – you hear absolutely everything, and if your baby requires music or a white noise machine to get to sleep, this is not a benefit.

Voice-activate is smart enough to recognize a repeated sound, so it filters out the background noise. The sensitivity is good – it picks up our baby’s cries pretty early on, so he’s hasn’t reached the full-out “WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON” stage by the time we reach him.

The “send” half of the monitor plugs in, and the “receive” half has a detachable plug, so you can carry it from room to room. When the receiver needs to be charged, it beeps at you until you hunt down where you’ve put the plug and recharge the battery.

Price

The monitor costs $45 at Baby’s R Us, and there’s currently a 10% discount if you use the code 930851. It’s $42.50 on amazon, but then of course you have to ship it.

Either way, I think this is a fair price. You and your baby get security, the monitor lasts a long time so you can reuse this with each child you have (or give it to your sister) and you don’t even need to buy batteries.

Overall, the Sony Baby Call Baby Monitor has allowed me to sleep easier, and to stop making 3 minute check-ins when our baby is napping. Also, while letting our baby sleep in his own room is traumatic for Mom, it gives our baby quieter, less-interrupted sleep and will probably decrease the chances that I’ll need back surgery from contorting my body in weird shapes to protect him when he’s in our bed.

I hate to wait for things. I also hate to wait for people. Sometimes, when someone is explaining something, I yell at them to talk faster. I adore Jon’s Dad, because he and I can actually have conversations in which we both talk and listen at the same time. Seriously. You can quiz us afterward and we’ve processed what the other person is saying.

Once, when I was in Florida helping to create a title processor training guide for the title insurance company where I worked, in the midst of a heady brainstorming session, an exasperated co-worker cried, “talk slower!” to which I replied, completely without thinking, “hear faster!”

Everyone laughed like it was a great joke, which was fortunate, but uh, I wasn’t joking.

Anyway, I’ve finally stumbled upon a form of delayed gratification that I don’t mind, due entirely to clever marketing.

Since I live with Jon, and therefore have to keep my technological toys up to date in order to keep up with all the cool stuff he’s getting into, my laptop loads programs almost instantly. Some programs take a few seconds longer than instant, and I actually get impatient while waiting. I mean, if you’re not Adobe Photoshop, you really have no reason not to load immediately.

But one program’s load time doesn’t bother me. This is because when the program loads, the tagline is “Take a deep breath.” And I do. So, not only does that buy the program some time to load, but all that extra oxygen calms me down.

If more people incorporated sneaky relaxation techniques into their delays, it would be a different world. I mean, imagine instead of “we are experiencing technical difficulties” the announcer lead everyone in a meditative chant of “om.”

Should you attempt to take over the world, I suggest that you use this technique whenever possible. This will enable you to pacify your populace as well as to buy yourself more time to stash your treasury’s gold bars in your island slush fund. And if it’s taking you awhile to get started on your global domination, I suggest you slowly stretch your arms over your head and yawn 10 or 12 times, while taking frequent herbal tea breaks.