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Our cat now has a prescription for antidepressants. If you see her drinking alcohol or driving heavy machinery, please report her to us, as she’d be a danger to herself and to society.

We’ve had to put her on the happy pills since Callie came home. Cat’s don’t show that they’re depressed by moping and sleeping all day – that’s normal cat behavior. No, how cats show that they’re depressed and stressed is to scratch on furniture and try to mark things as their own. It’s a turf war, basically, and my house is the ‘hood.

Cats on pills are a recursive problem, though. To sedate my cat by giving her a pill, you need an already sedated cat if you’re going to get the pill down her throat. My arms are marked with cat scratches from attempts to solve this inherent problem, and yet still no medication has gone down her throat. She’s a suspicious cat, too, so pills or even liquid versions of the medication haven’t been successfully hidden in tuna.

Today I had my six week post-partum checkup. After seeing my wrists, slashed with cat claws, I got a slew of questions of ‘feeling depressed? Angry? …’ No, I haven’t been trying to slit my wrists – my cat’s been trying to do that for me!

Well, our cat has it coming – Monday she’s scheduled to be spayed. Supposedly that’ll help calm her down. Too bad animals are allergic to chocolate – liberal doses, I’ve heard, have near medicinal properties for such things in women.

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Timeline today:
1:53 – Boss sends an e-mail, saying that the proposal I’ve been working on in the evenings needs to be out, not tomorrow as previously promised to client, but by COB today, as the client will be out of town tomorrow. I don’t get the email until later because…
2:00 – get the toddler finally down for a nap, after 45 minutes (at least) of valiant attempts by the toddler to sleep in her “big girl bed”. ‘Big Girl Bed’ has been the challenge du jour for the past two weeks. Each nap time starts with chants of ‘Big Girl Bed!’, but she’s as yet too excited to actually _sleep_ in the thing. Finally mommy informs toddler that BGB will have to wait until tomorrow, and plops toddler into her crib…
2:15 – get the email from the boss. Clock’s now ticking – toddler will sleep for two hours or less…. email the boss that I’ll have it to him in two hours or less.
2:30 – infant wakes up. Wants to eat. Wants held. Doesn’t want mommy to have two hands on a keyboard.
3:15 – having one-handed typed for a while, finally get infant to snooze in her swing. Finish editing/formatting/recosting proposal. Wrangle with Microsoft Word to get it to stop monkeying with my formatting.
4:00 – talk with boss on phone, explaining why proposal’s cost estimate is as fuzzy as it is. Basically, it’s an R&D project – a more tight cost estimate isn’t possible! Hear baby snoring lightly in swing behind me. Pray she doesn’t wake up during call.
4:15 – get off phone with boss, after letting him know can’t commit to working anymore, due to toddler naptime soon expiring… Doesn’t seem professional to state it that way, but, figure I’m working on my maternity leave time, and reality says that I have to let him know that more progress today will need somebody else’s efforts. Else, my daughter will add text of the following variety to our proposal – “asfwrouasdf;asl1 Big Girl Bed!”.

Breathe sigh of relief that toddler slept through whole thing, and that infant could be coaxed back to sleep. Otherwise, the afternoon would have been even hairier than it already was.

Check here in our photogallery for the view of Tina doing the Mommy/work meld thing.

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I’m always excited to see someone put up a comment on a blog entry, but I’ve now been disappointed to see that there’s a new form of spam: comment spam. Rather than send me an e-mail trying to get me to click some link, the spammer puts up a comment on a post. Their comment is full of ridiculous text, seemingly generated to put in as many links to various other commercial sites as possible. Bleah. I can of course delete the comments, but still, yuck. I wonder who they think is el stupido enough to go through those links? Or is it actually some other scheme to try to get those sites up higher in hit counts for search engines due to them being mentioned across various pages? I wonder how sites are targetted for this kind of thing – is there some web crawler out there that just randomly picks blogs and somehow submits comments? Or is some human being paid some amount of money to be web scum and troll the Net for sites to, essentially, graffiti?

If you’ve got some insight, I’m interested. I’d love to somehow turn the scheme around on these folks – become a pain in their electronic neck in the same way that they’re a pain in mine.

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(Title stolen/tweaked from Coupling episode that I had the misfortune to see last night, and worse, the amazement at it to sit through it all.. Now I’ve seen it once and can avoid it like the plague…)

The daughters are already in cahoots. When one’s asleep, the other’s awake. Up to today, I could count on the option of reclaiming some much-needed sleep during Cora’s nap. She always naps for two hours or a bit more in the early afternoon. Callie’s so little that she naps nearly round the clock, particularly if she’s just eaten. But today, no such luck. Cora went down, as planned. Callie stayed up. Oh, she snacked and dozed, but no sooner would I lay down to attempt to recoup some of my sleep loss from last night then she’d wake up again and start fussing. Pacifiers didn’t soothe her, swaddling her didn’t soothe her – only being gently bounced or given another go-round at the mommy Atkins diet plan (babies prove it wrong – no carbs [directly, anyway], yet they still gain a ton of weight) would calm her. Get her calm, put her back in the bassinet, sneak under the comforter to doze and … the cycle would begin again. I _think_ she’s down for the count this time, but I’m already hearing Cora begin to stir, so my nap time has come and gone. Given that Callie granted me one 3 hour stretch of sleep last night, and then nothing more until my husband graciously granted me another hour and a half by whisking her away with a bottle, I’m running a little low on steam here. Maybe tonight will be better (hah!).

It’s funny. Among the many guidelines for nursing mothers (no caffeine, no alcohol, no gassy foods, no spicy foods, …) is the instruction to get plenty of rest. What cruel, cruel words…

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Priorities, priorities, priorities… Write a blog entry? Clean a bathroom? Try to learn something more about Java or BEA’s WebLogic product? Heaven forbid, spend time with my husband? Nah – I’m a mom with an infant who goes two, maybe three hours tops between feedings, max, round the clock. Priority #1: get a shower. Priority #2: go to sleep. Anything else will either slide into some time slot when I can’t sleep (that whole sleep when the baby sleeps thing works great with the first child – doesn’t work so well when it’s child #2 and child #1 is a toddler) or will just have to slide off the plate together. All brain cells are now targeting pillow territory.

And for that co-worker who questioned my commitment to the company for not coming in for a non-billable meeting on my non-paid maternity leave on the morning when my daughter had a doctor’s appointment that was otherwise keeping me from sleeping??? Pffffffft. Remind me to remind you about your commitment when/if you have children. And should your wife take all the burden of childcare off of your shoulders, remind me to remind _her_.

Upcoming blog entry: thoughts sprouted from reading Fortune magazine’s annual issue on women in business, combined with reading ‘I Don’t Know How She Does It‘, by Allison Pearson. An interesting convergence of reading material, not consciously chosen to point and counterpoint.

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This entry is a draft of a portion of a required essay for entrance into business graduate school. The topic is my reason for pursuing a business graduate degree. I’m posting this draft for critique, in the same way that you’d ask a classmate to proof read a paper. Thanks for any comments. Comments of the “this is awful” sort can be emailed directly to me. (t i n a – at – this domain)Wonderful praise should of course be posted here…

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To put it in the most blunt terms possible, a business graduate degree represents to me the required next step both personally and professionally. My undergraduate degree is a dual degree in computer science and economics. Computer science offered me a hands-on skill; economics showed me how to look at the business arena in which my technical skills are offered. Several years of work later in the software industry, I ve become more and more convinced that the value of my technical skills and abilities is tied to the way that they solve customers business needs. I want to understand those needs, be able to speak knowledgeably of the return on investment of my services, and be able to craft the solution that solves a business need, rather than merely a technical itch. My economics degree began to hint at the impacts of markets and trends on business needs, but took much more of a broad-brush approach than the in-depth detail I find myself lacking. I need to understand the financial models used by businesses, the case studies in marketing, management, and operations from companies who have done well and companies who have failed miserably, and the skills in strategy necessary to craft a company or project s direction. Personally, attaining these skills represents an accomplishment worth working for, a business itch scratched in the same way that mastering a technology scratches a technical itch. Professionally, the value of a geek understanding the problems or opportunities of a customer is immense, both within my current company and in the industry overall. This geek envisions proposing business solutions implemented via technical means, rather than the technical solution du jour shoehorned onto a business need that s only been loosely translated into the technical realm. A business graduate degree will earn me the knowledge and skills necessary to be the geek whose solutions add recognizable value to the customer.

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Born to two computer geek parents, Callie entered the world on 10/10 at 1:10 am. (Never mind that she was supposed to come some 8 hours or less after induction began on 10/9… she’s apparently as stubborn and determined to make her own way as her mommy.) That either makes her a binary baby (all 1s and 0s, for my non-geek readers) or her own long-distance calling plan code (just dial 1010 0110, plus the number, to get our best rate ever!).

Surprisingly, she’s blond. Not sure why that’s such a surprise – Jason was blond as a little guy, and still has some blond in his beard. But we’ll get to see first-hand whether blondes have more fun… heaven help us!

Check out pictures of our new little girl. Please grant me more than a little leeway in any pictures that have me in ’em… 15 or so hours of labor just doesn’t do much for a gal’s looks. (My) vanity aside, Callie’s cute enough to cover the two of us. And pics with Cora in ’em (the new big sis!), too, just are nearly too cute to bear.

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I’ve been Jonesing for another PDA again. It’s not as if my Treo 90 doesn’t work… I depend on it to keep my calendar, contacts, to-do lists, and the like all in order. The problem is one of layered Jonesing. See, SanDisk is releasing a wireless access card for Palm OS 5.x sometime this fall. My Treo only supports OS 4.x, so I can’t add the card/get the really cool geek toy on my Treo. Combine that with a Jonesing for a new phone integrated with my set of phone numbers stored on my organizer (Jason got me started here), and suddenly I’m out surfing PalmOne and Handspring.

Problem is, there doesn’t yet seem to be a product that meets my needs/wants. I love the keyboard on my Treo – don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to pay for a data access plan, so don’t want to use the wireless capabilities that are built into some of the PDAs. I’d rather use the SanDisk card and just use the network available at home or at work. (I really don’t need instantaneous access to my email or the web while I’m at the mall or the grocery store – at least not at today’s data access plan rates.) And I want a built-in phone. So, I need a PDA that has a built-in keyboard, is a smartphone PDA, and uses Palm OS 5.x. Doesn’t seem to exist yet, unless the Treo 600 ends up fitting the bill (and then I suspect I won’t like its price). Palm’s Tungsten W _almost_ fits the bill, but its OS is listed at 4.x, rather than 5.x, so that card (when it’s available for the Palm OS) won’t work. I have hope, though – the Palm datasheet for the Tungsten W lists it as 4.x, but on their product comparison sheet, they list it as 5.x. Not much hope, though – the product data sheet also lists it as 4.x – and you can’t upgrade from 4.x to 5.x, ’cause they require different processors. Boo hoo. Guess I’ll have to restrain myself for a while…,and just keep drooling for the “perfect” PDA.

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Ran across an odd “holiday” called ‘Take Back Your Time Day’. The idea behind it is that on that day (October 24 this year), Americans will already have worked as many hours this year as our Western European colleagues will for the whole year. That’s through a combination of the American proclivity for overtime, as well as the European policy of a month’s worth of vacation time. The site describing the day lists it as just one step in a fight against ‘time famine’ and a struggle to better handle the work/life balance. Americans aren’t balanced in anything, work/life or otherwise. We eat too much. We spend too much. And now, as demonstrated by ‘Take Back Your Time Day’, we whine too much. Want to work European hours? Move to Europe! Or scale back your spending and ambition so that you don’t need to be on the bleeding edge of overtime, whether that requires you to change jobs, companies, or even careers. The idea behind ‘balance’ is that you can’t have it all – to get more of A, then you need to give up some of B. Want the big American salary to live in the big American dream home with the big SUV and the fancy vacations? Then to fit that into your balance, you’re going to have to work a bit more.