If You Belonged Here

Diosa, Trouble, and the Holiday Spirit

Trouble--that's how I refer to my oldest--is eight going on fifteen. Really, he'll be nine in April, but he has all the sass of a tween, all the angst of a tortured adolescent, and all the whine of a sick two-year-old. He has a girlfriend now.

She wants to kiss, he tells us.

I told him he can't kiss until he's fifteen. Blackstone, my husband, told him he can't kiss until he's thirty. Slightly harsh in my opinion. Trouble was nonplussed.

"You're just jealous," he responded, "because no one wanted to kiss you when you were eight."

Um. Burnnnnnnnn!

Have to hand it to him, kid's got style. And timing. It's seriously impressive. There's a part of me that can't help bursting with pride. It may or may not be the same part of me that wants to cut out his tongue with a carving knife on occasion.

No, seriously, I'm joking. And since DCYF is likely just one more pumpkin carving mishap away, let's keep it close to the vest. Especially since that last complaint from Trouble to his teacher about how abusive his parents are.

True story.

My point is, Trouble's already at that age. You know the one. The one where all innocence is about to be lost forever? Right now, he is still very much a wide-eyed, completely trusting, little boy. But while Trouble is still a goofy hair-free kid, I can already smell the stench that is puberty approaching on some of his friends.

This is Trouble's crucial Christmas year. He still believes, but it's tenuous, tainted with rising doubts, pockmarked with reality.

We brought the boys on the Polar Express ride this year. The Newport Dinner Train puts it on. It's about a 30-minute ride to the North Pole. Then Santa gets on the train and rides back to Newport with you, because who doesn't want to go to Newport?

Hot cocoa and cookies are part of the fare. You can order dinner off a limited, but reasonably priced, menu. And they do serve beer and wine, because let's admit it, the whole experience for parents is a little more enjoyable with a glass of Merlot.

The trip is nothing earth shattering, and certainly nothing as impressive as the movie. If you're expecting the waiters to dance on the ceilings and create tables out of table cloths, you'll be sorely disappointed. However, there are Christmas tattoos for the kids, activity books, a sing-a-long with maracas, and a visit from Santa himself.

And of course every kid gets a bell from Santa's sleigh to wear around their necks.

 

I wasn't sure how Trouble was going to respond, in all honesty. But he loved it. He's been telling everyone about how he took the Polar Express to the North Pole. It definitely helped reaffirm his belief. It was truly heart warming. I overheard Trouble asking his best friend if he still believed in Santa. Trouble rang his bell for him to see if he could hear it.

I know that as a kid, I kept believing in Santa until I was about twelve, way past the time when my subconscious knew the truth, but I was loath to let it go. I wasn't at all worried about not getting presents or anything like that, but somehow not believing in Santa was giving up on all magic, almost on hope itself. I couldn't let it go.

And in some ways, I've never stopped.

I still believe that beneath all the commercialism, toys, candy and food, there's something special about Christmas. Every year while I'm racing around decorating, baking, shopping, wrapping, writing out cards--I remind myself that this is all worth it. Sometimes--most of the time--I have my doubts. It just feels like another job. And the stresses of paying for all the presents, of how I'm going to get it all done, can induce a level of anxiety just this side of a heart attack.

And they're getting harder to shop for. They mark things in the Toys-R-Us catalog like X-boxes, iPods, DVD players, laptops, dozens of video games, motorized vehicles...

They're not getting all that.

Santa is generous. He's not a rich, immoral uncle with an endless bank account devoted to spoiling little boys to the point of  inducing brain damage, while most certainly degrading moral fiber and work ethic.

But I try to remember that it's not about all that at all. It's really about the gift of magic and hope you're giving to your kids. And if they're getting so big that nothing's going to do that short of a Lamborghini or some bling, well, you might as well realize that your little kid is not so little anymore.

So, I feel I better make the most of this Christmas with Trouble, while he's still full of hope and belief. Even if that hope and belief is almost lost in his constant complaining and sarcasm.

And there's always LT, Little Trouble, who's five. I've still got a couple of good years left in him. You know, if his older, wiser, and corrupted older brother doesn't spoil it for him early.

Ah, the joys of Christmas. I can hear the angels singing now.

(And, no, you don't need to point out where he gets it from.)

Diosa is Hot for Geeks

I am a web programmer. Don't get all nervous and let your eyes gloss over yet. I'm not going to bore you with too many details. I have one of those jobs people don't like to hear much about.

It's fine. I'm over it. 

Last Friday, I spent at the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) Conference in Boston. It's the first time I've been to a professional conference like that in my career. Honestly, it took me long enough. I've been so busy just trying to balance my day-to-day job and raising my kids, not to mention having a husband who's self employed and works all day and sometimes all night, professional development has kind of gone out the window. And the time and money I've had to spend on my career, I spent taking classes.

I may have been a bit misguided there. I'm starting to think professional certifications and conferences are where it's at.

A programming conference may not sound all that enticing to you,  but I had an absolute blast. First, I met two of my ColdFusion programming icons. Whenever I research how to accomplish something in CF online,  these are the two guys that come up. They have been my mentors for years. And I finally got to meet them.

In person.

It must be a bit weird having some woman come up to you and introduce herself, telling you what a fan she is of your blog. It was a bit weird for me, anyway. It's like I'm a groupie or something. I've never been the groupie type before. Leave it to me to become a groupie of the ColdFusion Jedi and Obsessively Thorough Web Application Development.

The latter used to be called Kinky Solutions, but Ben has gotten a little more mature and professional over the years. And he's totally cute. He lives in NY (Bookgirl, maybe you should look him up. He's single as far as I know. I really should have asked when I met him, but I was slightly awe struck). The Jedi told me his degree is actually in English too. I can't tell you how thrilling that is for me. Perhaps I will one day find the force within me too.

One can hope.

One of the coolest things about programmers is their terrific sense of humor. These are some quick and dirty replications of some of the more entertaining ways of making a point.

To let your audience know how you really feel about your programming language of choice:

 

To exemplify how you're not that impressed by all the trendy web services in the websphere:

 

To reiterate how you put this presentation together in your baby's delivery room this week:

 

And a lesson on string concatenation wouldn't be complete without a quote by George Bush.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on --shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."

I also had a great conversation about jQuery with a couple of guys that do web development for one of the colleges at Harvard. There are few things in life that impress me - not your money, not your BMW, but Harvard, as long as your not some conceited a*hole, that's impressive. And if you're a really cool guy covered in tattoos, even better. Of course the guy not covered in tattoos was cool, too.

But you get my point.

And it never hurts being in a room where the ratio of men to women is about 4 to 1. I may be married and loyal and all that, but the attention is still nice. Because I've never had anyone ask me if they could follow me on Twitter before. That would entail me actually signing on to Twitter, though, not just having that account I opened two or three years ago.

The Jedi was the one who used the photo of Paris. He confessed that he follows her on Twitter. Not because he's really a fan, but because she's exactly what you would expect. Not everything works that way in programming or in life, so getting exactly what you expect, well, that's often the best possible outcome.

In programming it's the only acceptable outcome, and you can spend days getting there. 

In life, it can be nice to get more than you expected.

As for me, I suppose I'd be thrilled winning the lottery, finding out my portfolio was worth more than I thought, realizing my phone can do cool tricks I didn't even know about.

But honestly, most of the time, I'm quite content just getting exactly what I expect.

Diosa: Scandalous

When Polly asked me to guest blog, I asked if she had a particular topic in mind. She said, no, but if I needed one, student teaching. Not that I'm one to follow directions, but she immediately got me thinking about what happened while I was student teaching. It had nothing to do with the students or teaching, but it's the first thing I remember about the whole experience of student teaching.

Now I've written a good deal about my teaching experiences, student teaching and official teaching. There's really not a tremendous difference between the two, except when you're student teaching, rather than getting paid, you have to pay to teach. You work all day teaching, go to class at night, and then have to work weekends to support yourself. It's a semester of absolute hell. The restaurant I was waitressing at kept putting my on doubles and I had to prep for classes for the next week over the weekend too. I had to go in one day and demand they take the doubles off my schedule immediately. I was about ready to have a mental break from reality.

There was a group of about eight of us, all women, that were student teaching in English that semester. They place us all at different schools in the state.  They try to place you not too far from where you live, and you get placed with a teacher who has requested a student teacher. There may be other considerations. I don't know what they are. One other woman in the group and myself were placed at the same school, different teachers, but same department.

This other woman, what should I call her, hmm, Kendall, let's say, I didn't know very well. She actually grew up in the same city as me, went to the same high school, but was at least four years ahead of me, which put her in her mid-twenties. This petite blonde was at school every morning with her hair perfectly curled, make-up flawless, tailored suit, heels, manicure. She obviously wasn't waitressing weekends to support herself like I was. I really couldn't figure out what the hell she was doing in the teaching program. She looked like she should be at a country club husband shopping.

Out of the blue, Kendall showed up at my house early one morning asking me to play alibi for her boyfriend if he called me. This was truly bizarre. I didn't realize she even knew where I lived. I'd mentioned it to her briefly, but didn't think she'd know it specifically enough to show up, nor did I think she'd want to. Her boyfriend never called, and I didn't ask what she'd been doing to need an alibi for the night, though I'd agreed to give her one, more out of shock than anything else. It's not like this woman was my friend, just a classmate.

A few weeks later, she was gone from the high school. It took me a few days to notice. I was so wrapped up in lessons, classes and work, I barely lifted my nose from the grind stone. When I asked my supervising teacher, he said she'd been moved to another placement. He didn't offer more of an explanation, and I didn't really think it was my place to ask for one. I pieced the story together from the other women in my teaching group and what I overheard in the teacher's lounge. Kendall had started dating the vice principal. This man was widowed, so it's not like she was having an affair with him. He was, however, very newly widowed, and twice her age. The teachers at the school were outraged, not only over how inappropriate the whole situation was, but over the amount of attention and supervision he had been providing to her.

When I started subbing the following semester and landed back at the same school for the first time, Kendall was there subbing too. The teachers were livid. Kendall would never sub at their school again, you could bet on that.

I have no idea what happened to Kendall, if the relationship with the VP lasted for any amount of time. I'd be shocked if she were still teaching. She appeared the type of woman that went to college to find a husband rather than a career.

I've never understood these relationships between couples with a generation between them. Is it daddy issues, gold digging? I just couldn't imagine being married to a man in his fifties. My dad is in his fifties. I mean, how do you get past the ewww factor?