Thoughts, two

Moms everywhere were excited when Marissa Mayer (the new CEO for Yahoo) got hired with full disclosure of her being pregnant.  That elation turned to vitriol when Marissa announced that she was going to only take 2 (or so) weeks of maternity leave and planned on working from home throughout that time.  My thoughts: 
1.  She can do whatever the hell she wants, if she wants to work, she can work, if she doesn't, she shouldn't have to or feel obligated to. 
2.  If Yahoo is like most companies in America, she probably isn't given maternity leave and instead has to use vacation or sick time or take FMLA leave.  She may not have the vacation time given to her at the beginning of her tenure, but instead is doled out throughout they year (like my job).
3.  FMLA requires that a person has worked for the company for a specified amount of time prior to taking the leave, and it's quite possible that she won't have worked for Yahoo long enough to qualify. 
4.  Basically what I'm saying is that if someone started at my job (which is the government) 2.5 months pre-due date, she wouldn't have the vacation time, she wouldn't have the FMLA qualification; and while I'm sure that if someone was hired at 6.5 months along with full disclosure, she wouldn't be told she couldn't take the time off, but she also wouldn't be getting paid nor would she have the relief knowing that their job would be held open for her.  So yeah, it's quite possible that she feels like she needs to get back to work as soon as possible even if it's only in her head. 
5.  As with most women at that level in the tech field, I'm sure she's got ideas running around in her head all the time and actually goes cabin-fever crazed within a few weeks of being home anyway and if working from home helps her feel less crazy, then so be it.

Point is - the mommy wars are just things made up in women brains and we really need to get away from who's right and who's wrong.  Can't we all just agree that what works for one doesn't necessarily work for everyone?

thoughts

Miscellaneous thoughts I've had this week:
-Breast feeding, and therefore by association, pumping, are rights. One cannot be angry about an employee taking a break every 3-4 hours to pump.
-what is the issue with the requirement to have health insurance?  How is this any different than having car insurance, homeowner's insurance, or flood insurance?  Would people be less angry if it were law, and if you went to the hospital/doctor without health insurance then they could ticket you?
-Google should have some major lessons learned from the launch of the Nexus 7; namely, it is bad form for the people who preordered the device through the parent company to receive said device later than those who ordered it through a third party vendor.
-Smart development in dumb places is non-sustainable.
-Bad news travels faster than good news.
-Man, my homemade blackberry infused vodka is some pretty nasty shit.  The raspberry, however, is wonderful.
-Mama (the feral cat I've been feeding in hopes of catching her to get hr spayed) is either super sneaky or I've been feeding two different cats.
-I remember lat year when we didn't have mosquitoes, it was divine.
-Not so devine: the drought we were in in order to accomplish the no mosquitoes.
-I won a pair of sweatpants through a give away on Kristie's blog (the spiteful chef). She is awesome, go read it.
-yep, I think I'm done for now...

Pictures! the second

Pictures of the family in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Hopefully Dani and/or Mary Jo will upload their photos to a location where they can be shared...

Butlers in Santa Fe

Pictures! the first

From Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns

Carlsbad Caverns & Guadalupe National Park

Are Teests

Some of the art that impressed me while in Santa Fe:

"Meet and Greet" by Barbara Meikle ($3,800).  Barbara was very outgoing and loves talking about her art.  You can find her artwork at the Pippin Meikle Gallery.

A giant ball made out of chain link fence - I think it looks like a lantern.  I don't remember who was the originator of this piece, but it is located at InArt

"Autumn in Taos" by Pamela Dewitt ($1,200).  This picture does NOT do this piece justice.  It is a reverse painted piece on shattered glass.  The effect is awesome.  We were told that this artist is relatively new so her pieces are currently very reasonably priced.  Her artwork is currently at InArt.

"Canon del Agua" by David Perez Escudero ($18,500).  First, this painting is huge.  I was standing at the door to the gallery and this is all I got of the painting (it's 5' x 5.5').  Second, this is pointilism and this guy sure does take it to a whole different level.  He was a programmer for Los Alamos before retiring.  He now paints full time.  His artwork can be found at InArt.

"Wyoming Sunrise" by Carol Shinn ($3,9,50).  This is freestyle sewing.  SEWING.  It's insane!  Her artwork can currently be seen at the Jane Sauer Gallery.

"Poppies Whirl" by Gregory Smith ($1,250).  Just cuz I like me some botanical artwork.  Gregory's artwork can be found at the Ventana Fine Art Gallery.

New Mexico Trip

As most of my faithful readers (all 2 of you!) already know, Shawn and I took a trip to meet up with my family over father's day weekend.  Since Shawn and I are nerds, we generally keep track of the gas mileage the car gets.  We don't have any charts (like Shawn does for our combined Net Worth), but we generally know that in town, the car gets between 32 and 34 mpg and on trips it's usually better.

On trips, we also keep all of the receipts...I'm not really sure why; Shawn claims it's so he knows how much money we spend, but that's not it since we can track that via our credit card statements, so it's gotta be something else.  He also used to set our "B" odometer to log the total number of miles for the trip, but I wouldn't let him do that this trip since I use it to track the number of miles between oil changes.  ANYHOO, we spent $282.28 on the trip (on things that we wouldn't have had to pay for if we had gone by plane).  Of that, $163.57 was spent on gas.  If we had travelled by plane, we would have spent an additional $150 (over the $280).  The car got some amazing gas mileages with the worst being 30.39 mpg (we had only used half a tank and filled up because gas was cheap).  The best, by contrast was 40 mpg.  On average, we got 35.68 mpg.

So, do I love my car (2008 Honda Fit)?  Yes.  Absolutely.