Sayonaru Scoobaru

Last week I had a bittersweet day. I replaced my car. It seems peculiar to be sentimental about a vehicle, but Scooby, the 2002 Subaru Outback wagon, has been such an integral part of our lives that its hard to imagine life without him. We bought the car, shiny and brand new, before we were married, before we had the dog or the kids. Before I even had a proper job.

The 202,000 miles on his clock delineate the great waves of life we have lived since then. A measure of the life of a family in miles.

I watched my brand new sparkling diamond engagement ring cast rainbows on his dashboard as I drove to my first proper job.

We sat in his warm leather cocoon as we debated whether to buy our Tahoe cabin.

We filled his trunk with cases of wine as we scoured the wine country planning our wedding.

We collected Geekydog from the animal shelter, her happy dog laugh misting up the windows as we transported her to a new life of dog luxury.

I screamed through the last part of labor with Geekygirl as we hit every red light crossing town, fearing that she would be born right there on the back seat.

I nursed both kids (pulled over and stationary of course), in his passenger seat on many a trip to the mountains.

I locked two year old Geekygirl inside, prompting the most critical test of my negotiating skills to date.

We transported cribs and changing tables, then toddler beds and sectional furniture back from Ikea in his spacious interior.

We transported a dazed and pathetic Geekydog to and from not one but two knee ligament surgeries.

We negotiatied rain, hail and snow storms with sleeping kids and pets all held safe in his steel embrace.

The miles represent hundreds of ordinary journeys to work, to get groceries, to get up and down from Tahoe. Some of those miles were the extraordinary moments; first days at school, interviews for new jobs, unexpected trips to the ER, and bringing new babies home.

I drove the car for the last time last week, down to the dealership, where we left it to its fate. It was a sunny day, and the wood and leather of the steering wheel felt warm, worn, and oh so familiar under my hands. 202,000 miles of hands sitting at ten to two. I felt disloyal, as if I was taking a beloved old dog to the pound. I started to understand why some people keep old cars on blocks in their driveways forever.

We traded it in for a brand new Subaru Tribeca SUV. It is fantastic.  A sleek dark indigo blue, with a pristine rich smelling cream leather interior (Though cream may not have been the best choice for a family car, I am already realizing). It is eerily quiet and rattle free, the engine smooth and powerful and the stereo as clear as a bell. I think we are going to have a beautiful relationship. But I'm still not quite over the other guy.

This isn't really a Thansgiving post, its just that the holiday has given me time to write. There's nothing like mulling over ten great years though to feel almost overwhelmed with things to be thankful for. The least of these being really good cars.

the holidays begin wth halloween

Halloween heralds the arrival of the whole holiday season here in the USA. Fall and winter and their collection of holidays just run right along into each other without stopping for breath. The orange of fall slowly deepens to the red of Christmas as the pumpkiny-ghostly themed tableware and knickknacks morph into the pumpkiny-pilgrimy items only to be supplanted in the aisles by poinsettas and snowflakes. When I'm feeling happy and energized I love the costume hunting, the various parades, parties and community events. I enjoy the holiday card making and the anticicpation of special food and presents. When I'm tired, all of this seasonally prescribed fun seems to expand into into a relentless list of 'to do items' to be stuffed into the giant gant chart in my head. Perhaps I should start making actual gant charts for the holidays, that way I might avoid paying rush shipping for last minute presents and everyone who should get a present or card from us might actually receive one before January. Anyone know of a good "microsoft project for mothers" iphone app?

This halloween, however, I exceeded even my own expectations by getting the kids costumes well in advance and getting everyone to their various events and parades with all costume bits intact. Nobody got sick, and Geekygirl obliged me this year by choosing her halloween alter ego (Tinkerbell) many weeks in advance of the day, and for possibly the first time in history not changing her mind at the last minute. Geekyboy got it into his head that he wanted to be "max's red robot toy from max and ruby". Of course the creative mum who prioritizes her children's wishes over her demanding schedule (my alter ego) would have jumped to this challenge. The mum who prefers to order costumes online while sitting in her office (the actual me) suggested to Geekyboy that he be Plex the Robot from "Yo Gabba Gabba" instead, since this costume could be conveniently purchased with a single click.

I'm always rather jealous of families who manage to persuade their kids to take part in a themed extravaganza. One of my friends boys was an incredible miniature Elton John,and she, in an amazng feat of creativity, was his piano. My kids were delighted with their off the shelf costumes though, so I should quell the "I'm not superhalloweenmom" guilt. In fact Geekyboy so embraced his robot persona that he would answer only to "Plex" while in costume, and insisted on walking in a special and rather adorable robotty way for the entire parade. I suspect the boy may end up on the stage.

Selfishly, I ended up reviving my long dormant creative talents for my own costume. We have a party at work every year with prizes for creativity. We have a fun crowd, but recent changes have left people rather despondent. Our group decided to try and bring back a bit of the fun. Inspired by this brilliant video (warning, it may only really resonate with you if you spent six years of your life as an impoverished graduate student or postdoctoral research fellow), we did our own "lady gaga wears lab wear" team extravaganza, complete with dance routine. We won. I was really quite pleased with the way my latex lab glove dress came out. It made me a little nostalgic for times when my actual hairstyle was not dissimilar to this wig, and when I went to clubs wearing outfits that were not all that different either. I was also very grateful, as I wandered the neighbourhood trick or treating event that evening, still in costume, to live in warm, accepting San Francisco.

Happy belated Halloween!

Cabernet, Callouses and Contrast

We are well into the school year now. Geekygirl has settled in remarkably. Most days her dad drops her off, and I pick her up from the afterschool program. We have fallen into a new routine, and are moving though our days with calm competence again. Mostly. Our little schoolgirl has become very goal oriented. There seems to be fierce competition amongst the little girls to get across the monkey bars on the playground climbing frame as fast as possible. The advanced kids, I'm told in awed tones, can even skip every other bar. To this end Geekygirl has developed thick callouses on her palms, and assures me that she is one of the best at the bars. I'm glad all those gymnastics classes were good for something!

Our school places a lot of emphasis on reading and writing in the early years. As a school that is struggling with test scores still, they need to focus on the basics. Every morning they have a 'writers workshop' and these efforts, a picture described in the child's own words, are put together to make a book. Geekygirl is an academically inclined child, she loves to read and write and will spend hours with markers, paper and stapler making her own little books even at home. I noticed an additional callous today building on her index finger, from holding her pencil so often.

The first of these books came home not so long ago. I was proud of Geekygirls careful and descriptive illustrations, and glad to see how happy the representations of us family members looked in her pictures. Then I looked more carefully. On three of the five pages mummy looks particularly cheerful, and on each she has a large glass of wine in front of her, as exemplified below!

This started me wondering about all the details of our lives that the kids teachers become privy to.  I can understand why therapists use art to find out what is going on in a child's mind. An observant kid like geekygirl puts so much detail into her drawings, and they give away all sorts of clues about our lives.

This past weekend we had a fundraiser for our school. I'm one of those "personality types" that gets seduced by an idea without thinking about the actual effort involved in pulling it off, which is why I and a couple of other parents ended up running a street carnival aided almost exclusively by some of the fifth grade kids.

Our school is undergoing a demographic shift; the younger grades are a mixture of "people like us" and poorer families, but the fifth grade is comprised exclusively of kids from the nearby housing project (council housing to folk in the UK, if it is even still called that). After the event finished, three of my helper team asked me to walk them home. Laden with pumpkins and other goodies that we gave them in thanks for helping, I walked the short few blocks with them enjoying their self satisfied happiness from a day of being both helpful and rewarded.

There is a dividing line in our neighbourhood that most of us don't cross. Charming tidy houses and clean tree lined streets streets abrubtly give way to rough grassland scattered with broken glass and ugly concrete barracks. The only thing we share is the million dollar view of sky and bay. As we crossed that line, my helpers called out to another kid, perched like a meercat on top of the hillside, "is it OK to go home?". He said that it was, so we continued down into the development, between  washing lines and empty fast food bags, between cheery hellos from young mothers and scowls from sterotypical gangsters.

They pushed open a battered door, beckoning to me "Can you acks her if we can come back with you?" I had promised them earlier that I would take them back up to the street fair once we had dropped their loot at home. The tiny house had nothing. Bare kitchen counters, bare walls, bare lineoleum floors.  A single couch in front of a huge flat screen TV, blinds drawn against the sun and the view. A young woman sleeping on the couch with three young kids bouncing all over her, the kids happy to see their sisters and a visiting stranger. I asked her if the girls could come back with me, and she raised her head an inch, asked them not to be too long, then lay back down. My kids offered me a soda, and we headed back out together. I wondered, after seeing their home environment, what kinds of pictures they drew in school.

I  hoped that by going to our local public school we would get a chance to help the kind of people that I don't usually meet. America, perhaps more than Europe, becomes very socioeconomically segregated as we move through life. I know people with all sorts of origins and ethnicity but almost all of them went to college and most to graduate school. I don't think I know anyone who grew up in a housing project. There are two Americas, and one of them is not a place where you would want to be. Here in San Francisco they are right on top of each other, and one of the only places they do meet is in our public schools. I'm glad I took those girls home, but I'm discomforted by the stark contrast between their lives and ours, and fear that the gulf is to wide to be bridged. How do we, as a society, get bright kids like these out of there?

I'm not really asking you for answers, just sharing my thoughts, but if you have any, please do leave a comment.

Silent Sunday

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone because my daughter has commandeered my laptop

the tyranny of time

Never enough hours in a day. Never enough days in the week. This sums up our life and I suspect the life of all working parents.

Today I was struck by the importance of even tiny increments of time. Fifteen minutes lost or gained can dictate the whole course of a day.

Biological science experiments are divided into precise chunks of time. Experimental protocols state precisely how long cells must be incubated with test drugs, how long they must be spun in the centrifuge, how long a reaction must proceed for before it is stopped and the result read out. If you ever visit a biology lab you will see harried scientists with timers clipped to their jeans chugging down too hot coffee during the precise 5 minute break they have between steps in an experiment. Once you start your experiments you can't just stop half way through and continue the next day, either, so if something is going to take four hours from start to finish you need to organize your day accordingly.

On Thursdays I take the kids to gymnastics class. It is one of the high points of their week, and mine too, but it starts at 4.30pm. With our new double drop off kindergarten and preschool schedule this requires me to leave the office at or before 3.55pm at the very latest to arrive at class almost on time. My working days are split between desk work and lab work, and my experiments sometimes fall on gymnastics days. Seemingly insignificant issues can throw the whole day out of whack. Needing a sharp pair of scissors to open the box of 96 well plates, and taking five minutes to locate one; needing to restart the computer controlling a critical instrument, there is ten minutes lost; having an urgent email to answer, that's twenty more minutes gone....

Today at 3pm I realized that this dribbling loss of little bits of time meant that I no longer had time to run my experiment and get out in time for the gymnastics class. The experiment was very important for a project, a project with its own timelines and deadlines, and it also utilized a very precious human tissue sample, one that had been donated by the family of someone who had died, so I felt a strong obligation not to waste this gift. I had to do the experiment, and if I did there was no way I could get the kids to the class any less than twenty minutes late. I tried to justify that missing one gymnastics class isn't a big deal, but to them, it is. I have disappointed them before, showing up at school and having to tell them that actually, mummy is too late to take them to class. They struggle to understand what I could have been doing that mattered so much. I send a message that I don't want to send; that my work is more important to me than they are.

The story has a happy ending. I don't work in a vacuum, I work with a team of other scientists, most of whom are also parents. I've learned, rather belatedly in life, to ask for help when I need it. My coworker finished my experiment for me, and I made it to class.

I'm blogging via the free wifi at gymnastics class now, watching the kids with half my brain, blogging and responding to the ping of my work email with the other. Stealing a fragment of  time back for me.

Ten years

I heard about it from Geekydaddy. Back then we were cohabiting, not yet married, though we were already living in the home we still have here in San Francisco. He called me from his drive to work, and I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit. My mum and dad were visiting from England that week, and on the morning of September 11th 2001 they were at the San Francisco Airport, waiting for a flight to Las Vegas. They watched the events unfold on the airport TV monitors. They were efficiently bused back to an eerily quiet city, and wondered about the wisdom of being dropped off downtown amidst San Francisco's skyscrapers. I took the shuttle to work, everyone sitting on it in uncustomary silence, watching the sky, waiting and wondering whether our iconic American structures too were destined to burn.

Sometimes it doesn't feel as if ten years have passed since then, but other times it feels as if we live in a different world. Especially when traveling by air. International travel always had fairly rigorous immigration and security, especially at Heathrow, but do you remember domestic US air travel before 9/11? When, if you didn't have bags to check, you just walked into the airport and strolled right up to the gate to check in? There were no security checklines, and you could carry whatever you liked in your carry on bag. Your non traveling companions could walk you to the gate and kiss you goodbye right as you boarded the plane. Geekydaddy would meet me at the gate, often with flowers hurriedly purchased at the airport shop designed for just that purpose, when I arrived home from a conference.

When I moved out to San Francisco back in 1996 I was invited to ride in the cockpit for part of the flight, courtesy of a friend of my fathers who worked for the airline. I can't imagine my children will ever get to do that. The children are seasoned travelers though. For them it will always be normal to remove your shoes at the airport, to walk through body scanners and to pack tiny ziploc bags of miniature toiletries. We all moan about the inconvenience, but to be honest, I have got used to it. Perhaps it has already saved us from other acts of violence. We probably never hear about many of the near-attacks that are prevented.

No amount of security can protect us from idiocy though. Southern California should have been on a code red idiot alert last Thursday, when someone flipped the wrong switch and inadvertently sent the whole of SoCal into the dark ages. We are so dependent upon the flow of electrons through our world. When there is no power there are no ATM machines, credit cards are useless, cell phone service is patchy and gas pumps don't work. I was standing at the self check in machine, ready to fly back home from what was supposed to be a day business trip to San Diego when the screen went blank. A long line began to form behind me. My scheduled flight time came and went. People started to mutter and wonder if something more ominous than a simple power outage might have occurred, this anniversary being forefront in everyone's minds. Twitter reassured me that there was no foul play, so I found a taxi to take me back up to my company's office in La Jolla so that I could join the rest of my stranded colleagues. Our admin staff back in SF got us booked into a powerless, but fortunately not drink-less hotel, but there was no way to get flights rebooked while the airport was still without electricity. I was fortunate to be with our company president, an amazing woman who I always want to be with in any crisis situation. She found a cab with enough gas to drive us to LA, and had enough cash on her to pay the fare. The amazing admin staff, working overtime back at mission control in our SF office, got us booked into the LAX Hilton, and on flights back to SFO the next day.

This was a minor crisis, a mere adventure in the grand scheme of things. Even the children were unphased by the news that Mummy would be back a day later than expected. I showed up at work the next day in a snazzy LA souvenir T shirt, having been reminded that so much in our lives is beyond our control, and is instead in the hands of the randomness of chance. From now on though I will always carry cash, and have spare pair of knickers in my handbag.

clothes maketh the woman

I consider myself a feminist. I like to be admired for my intellect, my scientific insight, and my hard work.  Often I find myself wondering why I also care so much about my appearance. I worry too about projecting this onto my daughter. Geekygirl is a gorgeous kid, and people tell her so. Peggy Orenstein in "cinderella ate my daughter" raises concerns about teaching our daughters that their value lies in part or at all in their looks, that this will set them up for eating disorders and poor self esteem, but the ugly reality seems to be that no matter how much we wish it were not so, looks do matter.

I'n my profession, I'm a scientist in the biopharmaceutical industry, looks are probably less important than in many others. There could even be a downside of appearing too "bimboey". I wonder sometimes whether I should cut my hair, embrace my natural brown locks rather than spending a fortune on blond mane maintenance at the salon, and relax my rigorous figure-maintaining salad eating and exercise regimen. Science is a forgiving career, personal grooming wise. I was recently at a party filled with the other, more glamorous bookend of our industry, pharmaceutical sales reps, and felt distinctly dowdy, though I was secretly delighted to be proclaimed by one "way too fabulous to be a scientist".

Finding that balance between looking both attractive and intelligent consumes far too much of my energy and money. Before business trips, mental energy time that should be spent pre reading slides and brushing up on science is devoted instead to preparing what to wear, down to what type of underwear will provide smooth support for my aging bum under my nicely fitted but not too tight slacks, without causing me to have to keep adjusting them all the time (these are great, in case you are looking for such an item). I spent far too much time coming up with a formal yet feminine style for my trip to Japan last year. I was pretty happy both with how the trip went professionally and with how I looked though, I have to say. So much so that I snapped this shot of myself in the hotel room mirror!

It was with great interest, that I read this quite old article, which points out that there is no neutral work ware for women. hair up, hair down, short, long, every style says something about you and how you see yourself. High necks, a touch of cleavage or an eye popping bustier. Make up or no make up. Everything makes some kind of statement, whereas a man in a pair of grey trousers and a blue or white shirt, as long as both fit him and are vaguley clean and pressed, blends in to the background. Men can choose to stand out, of course, with jewelery, exposed chest hair or flashy shirts and ties, but most don't even have to think about the image that their clothes project.

Changes at work leave me back in the world primarily of men. Nice men, don't get me wrong, but people who tower over me, leaving me with the dilema of whether to wear comfy flats that leave me a head and a half below the conversation, or to rock shoes like these babies, which give me an almost eye level experience with our senior team, but walk a fine balance between 'executive' and "stripper".

It took me until I was about 27 to become reasonably happy with my own physical appearance. I spent most of my teen years designing elaborate hairstyles and eye make up techniques to detract attention from my too large nose, and most of my twenties worried about my weight, despite only ever skirting the edge of the overweight BMI category. Now I've hit my forties the brief period of being vaguely satisfied with my appearance is passing, as the spectre of aging looms and lures me, a scientist who really should know better, to spend stupid sums of money on tiny pots of expensively packaged face cream. I run and do pilates, not just to keep my blood lipid profile healthy, but to ensure I still fit into my slim pants. I get great satisfaction from looking slim, pretty and sexy, and feel miserable when my skin flares up in dry scaly patches, when the bags under my eyes reveal my age or when my tummy wobbles over the waistband of my skinny jeans. I really don't understand why I feel this way, since what I look like has no bearing at all on how well I parent my kids, do my job, or live my life.

In hope of understanding more about this issue, I picked up  two books exploring this very subject. The first, The Beauty Bias : The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, by Deborah Rodes, explores the unpleasant reality that attractive people are more successful, especially women. The author speculates that this is a form of discrimination that should be legislated against, and exhorts women not to buy into it, to stand firm and age gracefully. She also accepts that there is an uphil battle for change while men are in charge, since men just seem to prefer pretty women. The second, The Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom by Catherine Hakim takes this thesis further and offers a different solution, accepting it as brute fact of life and encouraging women, indeed everyone in all walks of life to use their looks, their "erotic capital" as she coins it, to get ahead.

I'm still distilling my thoughts on this complex topic, but I would love to hear yours.