Best of the Web - 2007

To keep you hip to what's cool on the internet, here are a few great summary pages.

Best of YouTube 2007
I could watch the tetris one over and over. Don't quite get the chocolate rain one but it kicked off a phenomenon, so you have to watch it at least once.

As an aside, I wish this video ranked up there:


South by Southwest 2007 Website winners These are great sites. These are the change-makers.

Webby Awards 2007 More conventional, better known. Some of the "bests" are debatable.

Eight Annual Weblog Awards This is the most relevant award list for us authors of this blog to read. There are amazing blogs recognized - great for browsing, discovering new sites, interesting activity going on on the web.

What are your favorites? Let's discuss.

p.s. This blog didn't rank in any "best of's" but it's pretty darn clever and so close to home it hurts.

Inspirational Quotes re. Persistance

“It always seems impossible until its done.”

Nelson Mandela

"Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

"Hey, you never know."
New York Lotto slogan

Banter and blog posts

Has been a poor showing from me on the blog lately. Blame it on the stars, the endocrine system, the time change. Hard to say why the pause from posting much, but my once fool-proof method of thinking, "what did I do today that went well...blog about it" has failed me of late.


Actually, it's mostly because my good advice lately has to do primarily to do with work, getting to work or feeding myself at work. Since my fellow blog-girls don't work in an office, it's feel somewhat useless in this space. But, I'm wondering, is the not blogging about the pointless work-efficiencies holding up the better more useful flow?

Anyway, here's my dumb good advice du jour:

- keep granola and yogurt at work in the work fridge. you'll never regret it and will start everyday well balanced. I will post the granola recipe later from the downstairs computer.

- have a folder on the toolbar of your internet browser called "everyday". put your sites in there you like to visit to start the day. keep an eye on the clock and stay within a reasonable time period (like 15 mins). good way to warm up the brain and something do to while eating granola. I typically check my email accounts, facebook, nytimes, wsj and my horoscope. on a slow day I'll also check in with Perez.

- make a little extra dinner in the evening and then take it to work the next day (this is probably something you're already doing if you like to pack your lunch, I know. Just trying to slay the demons)

- read perez at lunch. do it on the sly. somehow gossip's better when you're sneaking around.

- IM with the hubby, very briefly everyday. better than a phone call and good way to get essential information to one another, i.e. "need milk on way home." "okay". also pretty fun to do on the sly.

- keep a stocked diaper bag in the car at all times. gives you the freedom to change plans on the fly and keeps your child tended to. keep an extra set of clothes for him/her in there, too. where I live, the beach is luckily almost never out of the question.

that's all I have today. hope it helps someone somewhere and if nothing else opens up something better tomorrow.

If you are the Gov. known for ethics

Get your booty calls at home.

Random things that are probably obvious to everyone but me

* Frozen chicken breasts should always be kept on hand for those dinners you forget to plan

* LL Bean tote bags are fantastic after you've washed and dried them in the dryer

* Yogurt squeezers are really great frozen

* To get a disagreeable toddler to cooperate, singing the same song to them when doing the disagreeable act (changing the diaper, picking up crayons-toys-spilled green beans) is a pavlovian wonder spell

Finding Om in the Brillo Box

I skipped yoga this morning based on the thin excuse that there was too much snow for me to drive. Since I live in Maine and we've had about 30 feet of snow this season already, this is especially weak, but my husband was being sweet and it was my son's first day of swim lessons - how could I abandon them for a sweaty mat and some hip opening contortions?

So, instead, I made them omelets. Recently I read this article in Gourmet about one man's obsessive crusade to make the perfect omelet. I had never thought much about how to make an omelet but now I view it as a work of great art. My first, by the way was a dud, but the second one was much improved.

The real highlight of breakfast wasn't the omelet. It was the cleaning of the omelet pan. Not the inside - that part is Teflon and cleans in a snap. It was scrubbing the bottom. I'm not quite sure how this particular pan had gotten so nasty but it was dark and various shades of dark brown to black. I went in with a vengeance with my new-found-love the Brillo Pad. My mom used to always have some on hand and I remember the joy of getting hard to clean pots clean. This past thanksgiving my sibs and I stayed in the home of a fellow clean freak and discovered her stash of the Brillo. Oh, the joy! I forgot about this ingenious cleaning tool for I had been toiling away with the green scrubby for most of my adult life. I spent a good fifteen minutes putting serious arm muscle into the job, mindful to keep my shoulders relaxed, my hips aligned and my jaw relaxed. I went in circles this way and that and in this cleaning trance, the shiny, gleaming lovely All-clad omelet pan revealed itself to me. I saw my reflection in the bottom and as it happened, Krishna Das was chanting from the stereo. I had found my yoga moment after all.

HOLLAH for Crayola!

Ok, so I realize that's kind of like saying "Give it up for KLEENEX" in the world of mom-dom...I mean, duh, yeah, Crayola is great. We grew up with it, they've evolved with the times and make great washable art supplies of all manner and kind. But specifically, I love, love, love their Color Wonder line for the budding toddler artiste.

This stuff is a mess-free world of fun. They make markers, finger paints, and regular paints that ONLY work on Color Wonder paper. It is BRILLIANT.

We took the Color Wonder markers & coloring books on vacation and it bought us, say, 15 minutes on the airplane, and there were no stray marks on the seats, or us for that matter.

And at home, we can tape the paper down on the floor - it comes in large 20 x 30-ish sheets - and the paint tubes ONLY work on the paper. I am telling you, hours of fun. This stuff is great. And non-toxic.

So until your wee one understands that paint goes only on paper, and is not a great substitute for lipstick and eyeshadow, this stuff is the bomb-biddles.

Aggregating Retirement Accounts

If you are a woman who joined the motherhood clan later in life like I did, you are likely to have had jobs or a career that included the gathering of multiple 401Ks and IRAs. Do you now find yourself with retirement accounts strewn across several large and fairly meaningless (at least to you) brokerage firms?

While the thought of organizing this seemingly untouchable group of accounts can be overwhelming, indeed to the point of putting it off for so many years that you’ve lost passwords and all knowledge of what is rightfully yours, I promise that taking the time to get them all under one roof and taking control of them will go miles in maintaining your sanity.

Upon my leaving the corporate world due to baby #1 and my husband’s last job change, I realized we were sitting on 6 different and totally unassociated retirement accounts (both 401Ks and IRAs). This drove me a bit crazy as I felt I had no control over the situation much less a comfort level that this money was working as hard as it can for us.

I did a lot of research and am happy to report that there are IRA’s out there that are called “age-based” retirement accounts. The fundamental principle is that the farther away from retirement you are, the more risky your positions in the account are, i.e. more risk = greater return. As you get closer to retirement, the mix of the account changes to less and less risky positions. So if you are in your 30s, the majority of your mix will be in equities while a smaller portion will be in safer instruments like bonds and index funds. As you approach your 60’s – the mix gradually becomes the inverse as you will need to start using that money in the shorter term. Two companies, Vanguard and T.Rowe Price offer these “age based” funds and they have been heralded often in a most positive way.

So, if you can stomach the bureaucratic process of calling the companies where you and your husband no longer work and filling out the paperwork (which is minimal, I might add, it just requires some following up), I would highly recommend aggregating your retirement holdings. Each age based fund invests your money across an array of funds, everything from international to large cap, mid cap and small cap, so you are secure in the diversity it offers. In fact, both Vanguard and T.Rowe Price have such a rich and wide reaching mutual fund offering, short of Fidelity it would be hard to find a company that can match the kind of diversity they offer. Not to mention, they take care of adjusting the risk “mix” as you approach retirement. It’s fabulous!!!
Good luck.

Useful sites for our lives

Babble.
A site for parents from the guy who did Nerve. I did the RSS feed on the Strollerderby page. Now I get feeds in my outlook regularly updated. Keeps me up to speed with the hipster parent dialog. Which means I get to vacillate between guilt, indignation, self satisfaction and nervousness with the mass of other gen-X parents raising kids these days. (Am I gen-X? What exactly are the qualifiers?)

My Del.icio.us Bookmarks.
Delicious is a social bookmarking site. It's useful as a place to find information that's been found by people before you. It's a way to search the web in a more narrow way. People tag sites they find useful to Delicious. The aggregate power of the social network raises the status of certain pages above others. It's sometimes a better resource for finding detailed information that might not make it to the top of a search on google due to newness or being in a crowded, broad category.

If you use Delicious and want to save articles for me to see, when you tag your links, set a tag that says "for:emilybigpicture" and I can see what you've thought I might like.

Captioner
Take pictures of other people and write captions on them. Fun and funny.

Astro

Enter your date and time of birth and get an incredibly accurate daily horoscope.

Real Clear Politics

A one stop shop for the best articles Politics.

Diaper Change Suggestion for the Weary

Changing the stinky diapers of your toddler while grappling with pregnancy nausea is a major challenge. I've actually gotten sick 4 times over the last month while in the midst of a diaper change. My method now is to open the window next to the change table, take a big breath of cold air and get it over with as quickly as possible. Tonight was a tough one. The gag reflex started and I looked around for some relief. I grabbed Burt's Bees Apricot Baby Oil and dabbed it under my nose. Lo and behold it blocked the particularly bad smell from getting to me. No doubt this is going to turn into a daily ritual until I feel 100%. Let's just hope it doesn't make me break out. I'd have to imagine that any natural oil would work -- I'll bet that something minty or citrusy would give you the best result.

When you're craving a sweet but wanting to stay thin (or get thin)

Drink tea.

Sap, Sap, Enough to go Around

Wednesday came as any other Wednesday and I was looking forward to our date night. I was unusually jubilant that day and pinned it on things like a great nights sleep, an overall good morning with “the boy” as we saw some planes and a helicopter on the way to daycare, a light day of work and the snow falling outside my window. It was beautiful, the snow that is, and it enhanced my already good mood. On recent date nights we’ve opted for a movie out but this one we decided to go out to dinner. "A" (referring to my husband) suggested a particularly twinkly French restaurant that sits on a great corner with big glass windows looking out. We had not been before. We arranged to meet after his chiro appointment around 6:15. The babysitter arrived and I slipped out, finding myself alone in the car to play the radio and enjoy the beautiful snow coming down. Jackson Brown was on, you know the song “Doctor my eyes have seen the years and the slow parade of tears…” which I appropriately blasted in order to sing loud and get the full effect. I felt really young, like high school young - it was a great.

Upon parking I got out of my car and saw my date with his funny orange hat walking towards the restaurant. I yelled over, ran up to him and planted a big fat one on him. We were really happy to see each other and I was thinking, this is truly a delightful evening. We sat at what we considered the best table in the place – in the corner of windows - and I decided that tonight might be a great night to have my first glass of wine in 5 months (due to pregnancy). “A” had somewhat of a smirky smile on his face. He reached out of his bag and handed me an envelope. I’m thinking, what’s this? It was a very sparkly card of somewhat Moroccan style with two glasses of champagne. Still no clue (UNBELEIVABLY), I open it to see a lot of writing and the word “Anniversary” dead center. Holy Shamalamadingdong…... It was our anniversary!!! I had no idea and more embarrassingly it had not even crossed my mind….. “A” was most pleased with himself.
There’s no real point or advice to this story other than noting what a wonderful day it was even without the reminder of our anniversary. Next year, I’ll try reeeeaaallll hard to remember.