Zeno's Bar & Grill

What I want to know is whether the editors of The Economist think that rappers reading their magazine will hurt or help their Wall Street Cred. In case you missed it, Jay-Z is boycotting Cristal because of comments made by managing director Frederic Rouzaud of Cristal in The Economist. I won’t go into the whole sordid “he said/he said” details of the controversy, but who knew The Economist had such influence?

--Kelly

Pull up a chair and pop open a Pacifico. It's time for Thirsty Thursday. Join us if you want, invite a friend, and/or come back next week when we'll have a new Special. Today’s theme… Thirsty Thursday (doo doo doo doo, do you feel like you’re in the Twilight Zone?)

What is your favorite cocktail at the moment?
Melanie: For summer, the beloved Margarita. Blended, of course, with salt.

Kelly: Since it is summer, a Mojito can’t be beat.

Anything you can’t drink because of a bad experience?
Melanie: Not really. I can't figure out whether that means I’m really bad: as in, there’s no experience so lousy that I won’t go for a recap…or else it means I’m really good: as in, I haven’t had any truly awful drinking experiences. What can I say? It’s all a blur.

Kelly: Ironically, (because a mojito is made with rum), it would be rum and Coke. Yuck. I couldn’t eat popcorn for many years afterward either, but that is another story.

Red or White?
Melanie: What’s red?

Kelly: Usually red, but now that it’s warm I’ve been really into whites that have a little sparkle, like this Spanish wine Ameztoi Txakolina.

…For Solstice Parade. This is a picture of the mayor of our fair city, all dressed up for the occasion last weekend. It was an awesome parade, very inspirational, and now I want to take hip hop dance lessons, so I can join the beautiful ladies dancing up the street. Would I actually have the guts to dress up and do it? I hope so. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

--Melanie

Last week, I had to drive to my old lab for a birthday party. I had the kids with me and was planning to use the portable DVD player to keep them occupied on the 2 hour drive. Can you guess what happened? That’s right, from the first moment, the player was mysteriously not working. The screen was black and there was much gnashing of teeth.

The saga continued as I tried in vain to find anyone to repair the thing when I returned home. “Throw it away, Lady,” one guy told me.

Then, a couple days ago…this is the Gift from Heaven part…it fell off the shelf and had a soft landing on some paperback books piled below.

Lo, and it worked.

--Melanie

--Kelly

Back in October there was quite the brouhaha in London over a certain statue of a naked, pregnant, disabled, woman. Now, the problem is pigeons. London mayor Ken Livingston wants to get rid of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and has banned feeding them except for a group called Save the Pigeons and even they can only do it for ten minutes at 7:30 in the morning. Now a splinter group is feeding the pigeons in the afternoon and the mayor is threatening to end the ten minute morning slot. Perhaps in 2007 both problems will be solved when a new sculpture replaces that of Alison Lapper Pregnant. The title of the new sculpture? “Hotel for the Birds”.

--Kelly

Pull up a chair and pop open a Pacifico. It's time for Thirsty Thursday. Join us if you want, invite a friend, and/or come back next week when we'll have a new Special. Today’s theme…Lazy Days of Summer.

Any travel plans this summer?

Kelly: We’re planning a road trip to Pennsylvania. At almost 500 miles it will be the longest we’ve done with the kids.

Melanie: We’re taking the train to a family reunion in Bend, Oregon at a place called Sunriver, which is supposed to be this wonderful place, with golf, rafting, horses, spa, bicycling, hiking…pretty much any recreational activity you want. I’ve never been before but my relatives all have. Also, we’re going on a road trip to a wedding in the Monterey Bay area.

Camps or Classes?

Kelly: Just a short two day, two hour camp for my two kids. Enough for me to be able to get my nails done or more likely, go grocery shopping. I’m taking a tennis class.

Melanie: I thought I wasn’t signing them up for much, but somehow my oldest daughter has 4 summer camps all through July. My middle one has a few weeks scattered here and there as well. But I’ve been given strict instructions to take them to the pool a lot too.

What is your favorite part of summer?

Kelly: Not having to put eleventy million layers on before venturing outdoors. Actually, just being outdoors. I hate the cold and I hate being stuck inside.

Melanie: Long summer days. I was a tiny bit sad to realize that with solstice last night it’s all downhill from here. I really love the extra daylight, which is sort of pitiful since we already have so much anyway in the winter (especially compared to Alaska, where I grew up.)

It’s almost done. You might remember a few months ago I posted a video of our then-gutted bathroom. Well, as of today, all that remains is for the shower ring to be installed and the woodwork to be painted and/or stained.

We painted it a bright chartreuse, which sounds gross, but is actually very bright and cheery. The original pink, gold and black bathroom with formica wainscot and flocked wallpaper definitely had its own charm even though it didn’t really fit the 1920’s era house. I guess that’s why we lived with it that way for four years, until the floor started rotting away. Tile will be much better with three kids.

--Melanie

Last night was book club once again and I’m feeling a bit groggy this morning from the margaritas that replaced our standard wine selection. We discussed The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. It was a semi-autobiographical novel about Ms. Cisnero’s childhood in a less than desirable area of Chicago. Our hostess was completely prepared with a map showing Mango Street and she even went to the now semi-gentrified area and took photos of where the house used to be. It was a great discussion and we got on the topic of immigration, stereotypes, racism, and sexism. (This was obviously after the margaritas!)

Next time we go to more familiar territory with Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, a story about stay-at-home parents in suburbia. I’ve already read (and liked) this book and I’m relieved that I get a free pass because I’m about to embark on Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and if that goes well I may move on to The Idiot.

--Kelly

We feel like we’ve given the dads in our life short shrift by not mentioning that yesterday was, of course, Game 5 of the NBA Finals. Okay, okay, it was Father’s Day. We gave our husbands the requisite ties, cards, Brazilian CD’s and that coupon book good for a year’s worth of breakfasts in bed and days off from chores. We let them sleep in and catered to their every whim.

Still, with the good, must come the bad and the ugly. Dads are starting to get not only more of the credit, but also blame, for how children turn out. From writer Daphne Merkin’s article in the New York Times Magazine lamenting her lack of fatherly attention to a book called The Father Factor that links fathering style with the type of employee his child will later become, dads are finally getting their moment in the spotlight. Welcome to the guilt club guys and Happy Belated Father’s Day.

--Kelly and Melanie

In early 2002, when I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband’s company sent him on a one year assignment to Santa Barbara. One of the first things we did was go to Costco to stock up. Among the three or four hundred dollars worth of oversized items we bought was a ginormous pack of Q-Tips™. My husband is a closet Q-Tip™-a-holic, pleasuring his ear canal 2 or 3 times a day (yes, very odd, but that is for another blog), but even at that rate we joked about how long it would be before we bought another box. Well, four years and 5 months later, Q-Tips™ are back on our shopping list as today he used the last of those addictive little cotton swabs. Break out the champagne, (Kirkland-brand of course.)

--Kelly

Pull up a chair and pop open a Pacifico. It's time for Thirsty Thursday. Join us if you want, invite a friend, and/or come back next week when we'll have a new Special. Today’s theme…Read my mind.

What was the last book you read?

Kelly: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. It was recommended to me by a woman in my book club and it was excellent. Kind of a techno-secular Da Vinci Code with better writing.

Melanie: Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz, which made me realize even incredibly popular writers can commit serious writing fouls. Very encouraging for an aspiring writer. I think Koontz is getting a little lazy, as his recent books aren’t nearly as good as his early ones.

Which periodicals to you receive?

Kelly: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The local weekly paper, Santa Barbara Magazine (it makes me simultaneously miss and hate Santa Barbara), C (a magazine about California society, it came free with my Santa Barbara subscription), Total 180, Mother Jones, Newsweek, and The Economist.

Melanie: New York Times, Local Newspaper, C Magazine, The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Redbook, The Sun.

What are you reading now?

Kelly: One Day in the Life of Alexander Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Two women from my book club along with myself are secretly forming a splinter group and are reading this book. It is also the book pick for One Book One Chicago, a book club for all of Chicago and this time for its sister city Moscow as well.

Melanie: I need a book. I got Lipstick Jungle by Candace Bushnell from the library, but it’s so awful, I don’t think I’ll be able to get through it. Even the names of the characters and companies in this book are annoying. Splatch-Verner Publishing (Time-Warner)? Bonfire Magazine (Vanity Fair)? Nico O’Neilly? Bleah.

A controversial new public health push for increased breast feeding is taking things to a whole new level of guilt for non-breastfeeding mothers, according to an article in yesterday’s NY Times (“Breast Feed or Else”, by Roni Rabin.)

The admirable goal of this effort is to raise the numbers of mothers who nurse their babies. However, it’s not clear to us that the moms who choose not to breast feed are doing so because they lack information on the benefits of nursing. Certainly this new public health effort is going to make things more stressful for anyone who formula feeds by choice or necessity.

According to the article, there’s even a senator who has proposed requiring warning labels on cans of formula, similar to those on packages of cigarettes. There’s also an especially infuriating quote from a scientific adviser to the Office of Women’s Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, that compares not breastfeeding to smoking during pregnancy.

Apparently the Ad Council also came up with ads showing pregnant women doing things like log rolling and riding mechanical bulls to suggest that not breastfeeding after birth is a bad thing. The tag line was, "You wouldn't take risks before your baby's born. Why start after?" To our knowledge, those ads were pulled.

We’ve pointed this out before, but geez, so many of us in our generation were formula fed and still managed to turn out okay. Couldn’t we lighten up a little?

--Melanie & Kelly

P.S. Disclaimer: we both nursed our kids for eons, so you know this isn't just a knee-jerk defensive reaction based on personal choice.

I bought a tank at the Gap, size 8 for my eight year old, and it came with a shelf bra liner. Huh? Did I miss something? Are girls really starting to develop that early?

--Melanie

On Sunday I had planned to go to the Barnes and Noble store near me to see Jennifer Lancaster, author of the book Bitter is the New Black and of the popular blog Jennsylvania. Found a great parking space (meaning no more than a four block walk), and no huge crowd to wade through as is frequently the case when an author is in the store. I guess the only bad news was that I was 26 hours too late.

I first became aware of Jen Lancaster when I was behind her in line to have Jennifer Weiner autograph my copies of Little Earthquakes and In Her Shoes. See this blog entry for the full sordid details. I’m not sure why I wanted to go to her book reading so badly. Maybe it was partly in hopes that it would fulfill some sort of Karmic circle with both of us going to Jennifer Weiner’s reading, me going to hers, and then…Jennifer Weiner coming to mine? I also wanted to go because I was curious to see what she would be like in a reading, and because I would want someone who followed my blog to come to my reading, especially if it was five minutes away from their house. In any case, I was sure that it would be funny, provided she’d had enough wine (I even had a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade in my purse to give to her for insurance)

Unfortunately, I had written on my calendar that she would be at the B&N on Sunday at 2, but then on her blog it said 4pm. (It also said Saturday, but I must have missed that part) and then to top it all off when I got to B&N at 3:55 on Sunday, their calendar said she was there at 2pm on Saturday.

Anyway, Jen, if you read this, I hope you do another reading in the North Shore. Maybe at the Book Stall where I first saw you and the other Jennifer. Best of luck to you!

--Kelly

First thanks to Melanie for taking over last week on the blog. I’ve been in sunny (totally an understatement, can you say 97 degrees with the same humidity) Florida. The first part of our trip was spent visiting my in-laws who live in a retirement community. If our book is Mean Girls for moms, that place is Mean Seniors. It is just like high school, complete with turf wars over who is going to sit at whose table and a power mad principal cum cafeteria manager.

I hope that I never have to live in place like this. The bureaucracy and the surfeit of rules are stultifying. Over one lunch and one dinner (after which we all got stomachaches, no wonder these people are so feeble) we accidentally trampled on the following rules by doing the following: (1) trying to buy a soda at lunch; (2) wearing shorts at lunch (my husband); and (3) wearing shorts at dinner (my six-year old). We were told by the “manager” that we couldn’t eat in the dining room unless my son wore long pants. First of all, a better punishment would be the opposite: forcing us to eat there. Second, who packs long pants for their six-year-old boy when going on vacation in Florida? In June!! The manager called my inlaws the next day to reiterate the no shorts, no surly service, no lousy food rule.

As an interlude between the first and second parts of our trip we drove across the state to Naples, where my husband had a meeting. On the way we saw real alligators in their natural habitat of the Everglades. It was kind of scary to be that close to an animal that is capable of killing people. My daughter and I thought it would be okay to walk down to the pier to get a little bit of a closer look until one of the natives told us that the gators can run 30 miles an hour and jump right out of the water- yikes!

Our final hurrah in Florida was a fantastic stay at the Trump International. Donald, you’re hired! As our hotelier at least. What a fabu place (to quote Melanie). We had an ocean view room on the 29th floor, and most spectacularly they had a free kids club that the kids went to from 9am to 4pm, so I could sit at the pool enjoying a Mojito and a great book I’m reading called Pattern Recognition (thanks Sheri!).

All in all it was great week, but I’m happy to be home.

--Kelly

Psst. Books on Tape. Your kids get the benefits of being read to instead of watching a video or shredding your house when you need a couple of minutes to yourself. Of course, we don’t advocate this as a substitute for snuggling up on the couch together. But, y’know those times when you really just need…a shower?

--Melanie & Kelly

This week we had planned to do a Thirsty Thursday on pets, but in the saddest of coincidences, our sweet Russian Blue, Gracie, is no more. The coyotes got her late on Monday night. This one's for her.

We told the kids tonight. This is our first experience with pet death, and the outpouring of grief was incredible, and yet strangely life-affirming at the same time.

I really hadn't expected them to be so upset, because Gracie tended to hide from these noisy creatures who for some inexplicable reason lived in her house.

Their responses were a reflection of who each of the kids are, as well as their ages, of course. The two older ones really got what had happened.

My five-year old said, "Gracie's mom and dad and grandma and grandpa are going to be sad because they'll miss her." She really made the connection between what happened to Gracie and how death would affect the people in her own life.

My eight-year old can hardly talk about it, she's so upset.

And my three-year old...is ready for a new cat. "Let's go to the store, Mommy. Let's get a new cat tomorrow," she said, with some urgency. She told me she's seen a cat named Ellie "in the night," presumably in her dreams.

Goodnight, Gracie, we love you!
--Melanie

Nintendo is entering the fight against Alzheimer’s with their brain game, Brain Age, being launched worldwide right now. Seriously. It’s a game for their Nintendo DS platform that is supposed to actually be good for your gray matter.

This looks so cool. We are sorely tempted to try this. Even if it doesn’t work, they’re going to make a fortune on it.

--Melanie & Kelly

June’s issue of North Shore magazine had an article right up our alley, titled “The Parent Trap: Are We Really Raising the Best Kids Money Can Buy?” Its author, Susan B. Noyes, describes an eight year saga of trying to break free from the bonds of serfdom...er, extracurricular activities for her six children.

Her life is so hectic, in fact, that she looks with envy at her friend Sally Schneiders, who has five children, paints and writes her own thank you cards, and helps her children perform plays in the basement for the entire neighborhood so they can donate the proceeds to charity. Somehow, embracing Sally’s lifestyle doesn’t sound like it would be exactly getting off the treadmill.

At the end of the article, Ms. Noyes concedes that nature trumps nurture and that her children would be the same if they hadn’t taken the multitude of classes, sports, and lessons. She doesn’t really seem to buy it, though.

We’d like to invite both Susan and Sally over for a margarita and let the kids do something really crazy, like play by themselves in the backyard or maybe even watch a cartoon.

--Kelly and Melanie

These great ads have been appearing in the NYT for a while now. Each is a tongue in cheek take on conventional marketing to women. Instead of trying to sell women on the idea of blowing all their cash on Manolos or wrinkle cream, they suggest something really hot: learning to manage their finances.

They’re part of an effort by Citicorp to woo women, specifically those with at least 100K in assets, according to one reprinted article on their site. Membership, however, is open to anyone. For $125 a year, you get access to information that includes e-mail updates, master classes on financial topics and where to get discounted rates on loans. Without actually trying it, it’s hard to say whether this is really all that helpful or just another marketing ploy. Our gut reaction is that similar information is available elsewhere for less.

It's a funny mix, because on the surface it seems like these ads are doing something really different, by encouraging women not to buy, buy, buy. On the other hand...they're just selling something else, and it's not entirely clear whether it's a good value or not.

--Melanie & Kelly

The WSJ reported on Thursday about new technology that allows parents to monitor their children’s internet usage from a remote location (like from work). Companies such as SpectorSoft, SafeBrowse, and ContentWatch have software that can send parents copies of emails, instant messages, and even allow parents to actually take a peek at what their progeny are viewing when they think that no one is around. Some of the parents don’t even tell their children that they are doing this, or at least not until something comes up that warrants a confrontation.

My children are too young to want to see anything more risqué on the computer than Kim Possible, but I’d like to think that we would have enough trust not to use these virtual spying techniques. I was upset about learning that the government may have been tracking my phone calls without my knowledge and I imagine that it would be the same feeling a teen-ager would have upon learning that their parents were secretly tracking their web use. The loss of trust between parent and child may do more harm than the good the parents think they are doing. That said, however, I realize that there are cases where this might be necessary, and in the six years that I’ve been a parent I’ve certainly done many things that I vowed I would never do before I had kids.

A frightening point that the article studiously avoids is the question of what’s to prevent employers or the government from using the same technology on us. I’m sure that everyone visits sites that they’d rather other people didn’t know about (even if it’s just checking for spoilers on your favorite reality shows.)

--Kelly

Pull up a chair and pop open a Pacifico. It's time for Thirsty Thursday. Join us if you want, invite a friend, and/or come back next week when we'll have a new Special. Today’s theme…That’s Entertainment

What is the last CD/iTunes music you bought?

Kelly: I finally replaced my cassette of Blood Sugar Sex Magik with the CD version.

Melanie: Three songs from the Rent Soundtrack: La Vie Boheme, Take Me or Leave Me and Seasons of Love, purchased on iTunes.

What was the last movie you watched at home and in the theater?

Kelly: Theater was Friends with Money and on DVD we watched Mean Girls.

Melanie: I saw Thank You for Smoking in the theater, and Rent on DVD.

What was the last thing you watched on television (without kids in the room)?

Kelly: All of my answers so far are so lame and totally not representing what I normally watch. The Apprentice. (OK, this last one is what I normally watch. I admit it, I’m a reality show junkie.)

Melanie: The last thing I remember was something pretty awful in the reality show genre too…it had celebrities past their prime living together in a house, but I can’t remember the name of the show.

P.S. Kelly tells me it's The Surreal Life!