But, but, I thought we were rich

Holy crap, people. I just talked to a mortgage broker about buying a house. Lalala, I am thinking, Mr. B. makes just over six figures and yeah, we don't really have a down payment but you know, with that kind of money and a gold-plated credit rating and no debt it shouldn't matter, right?

WRONG.

"Well, I can get you into a townhome or condo," the guy says.

"What?!?"

"Where do you want to live?"

"Well, my kid goes to Midtown Elementary, so we want to be there because I'd like to be able to walk him to school."

"Do you have a real estate agent? What's she telling you?"

"Yeah, she's been showing us listings for like $600, 650..."

"Well, let me see..."

An hour later and we've determined that if we can somehow borrow $25-50 thousand we can get a $500 interest only loan. Which will cost us $500-700 more a month than the rent payment we're making, which I formerly thought was absolutely fucking ridiculously high. My vision of a cute little house with a tile roof, or maybe a bigger boring ranch-style house (since Mr. B. prefers space to charm) quickly morphs to an image of a plain little square two bedroom with vinyl siding, a chain-link fence, and no garden to speak of.

"Can't you borrow a down payment from your parents?"

"Um, no way."

"Don't they have equity in their houses?"

Look, chump, I want to say. My mom hasn't worked in over a year and lives in her brother's 600 square foot house with shag carpeting from the 70s rent-free and has no money at all and needs cataract surgery and has no health insurance and I'm probably going to be fucking paying her rent and her medical bills in five or ten years. My dad has a tiny two bedroom in what used to be a boring valley town that's now a two-hour commute bedroom community for the bay area, he's a retired elementary school teacher for chrissake, his wife works for the social security office, and she has a daughter my age with five kids and no education who works as a bookkeeper and gets her electricity and phone turned off regularly--if my dad's bailing anyone out, it's them, and the man is *retired*--I'm not going to fucking borrow money from him, he needs it to live on. My mother-in-law is a 70 year old widow with five kids who manages a fairly comfortable modest middle-class retired life because she's an old world immigrant who never buys anything and continues to live in the three-bedroom house her kids grew up in, which I am *not* going to ask her to borrow against for the same reason I'm not going to borrow from my dad--that's her only fucking savings.

Instead, I say, "no, trust me, that is not going to happen. We're the rich people in our family." Inside I'm thinking, who the fuck has parents who can loan them $50,000?!?

At the end of the meeting, I come away with instructions to somehow find someone I can borrow that kind of money from. I'm thinking fuck that shit; I guess we keep renting and somehow--despite the $500 vet bill this week and the overdue $350 ticket for running a red light and the $500 I put on my credit card to rent a car when I went to clean out my office goddamn it I have got to stop thinking I'm rich and stop buying stupid shit--save for a year or two and then see if we can try again.

How the fuck do people do it?

Don't Forget Poland Afghanistan

Remember how we were going to war in Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden, to overturn the Taliban, and to ensure women's rights?

Well, bin Laden's still free, the Taliban are still around, and women's rights in Afghanistan are pretty much as shitty as they ever were. For instance, Afghanistan has the second highest rate of death in childbirth in the world (first is Sierra Leone, which is still recovering from ten years of civil war).

Most of these deaths are preventable, the product of unsanitary conditions, poorly maintained roads, limited access to health care, forced marriages, lack of education, poor nutrition and sanitation, and a fundamentalist religious regime that, even in the post-Taliban era, prohibits women from seeing a male doctor or health care practitioner and limits them largely to the home.
....
But the tide may be turning. In 2005, Afghan midwives banded together to form the Afghan Midwives Association; by 2006, the organization had been admitted to the International Confederation of Midwives, and had helped to triple the number of trained midwives in Afghanistan.

Training midwives is one of the top priorities of the World Health Organization right now. But of course, the Bush administration has been holding WHO funding hostage for years now because of right-wing anti-abortion assholes--and the U.S. is the biggest contributor to the WHO, so our assholery makes a real difference.

When George Bush took office in January 2001, he reinstated the Mexico City Policy, also called the global gag rule, which prohibits U.S. aid to foreign nongovernmental organizations that provide any abortion-related information or services, even if those services are funded with other money.

"Local NGOs have lost crucial money, technical assistance and access to contraceptive supplies as a result," said Wendy Turnbull, a policy and research associate with the Washington-based Population Action International.

At WHO, the United States has also delayed the approval of lists of essential medicines because some of the medicines could be used to induce abortion. These lists serve as guidelines for what drugs countries should have available for their populations.
....
U.S. interference with WHO came under scrutiny in January 2006 when the organization's top official in Thailand, Dr. William Aldis, was demoted after arguing in an editorial that a U.S.-Thai free trade agreement would undermine Thai access to cheap AIDS drugs.

Each year since 2001, the White House has requested higher levels of bilateral aid for HIV-AIDS while seeking to cut funding for maternal and child health. The fiscal 2008 budget request submitted to Congress by the White House on Feb. 5 proposes $5.4 billion for HIV-AIDS and $345.6 million for maternal and child health. The White House is also asking for a 25 percent funding cut for family planning programs.

So much for our commitment to Afghan women. Luckily, along with the Afghan Midwives Association, there are a few other international or private organizations that have stepped up: Johns Hopkins for one, Sweden for another, and International Midwife Assistance for a third. And of course the Afghan Women's Mission, which seems to be closely allied with RAWA (The Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan), which was around long before Laura Bush had ever heard of Afghanistan, and will doubtless be around long after her husband's reign is only a bad memory.

The situation of Afghan women wlll be a central concern at the upcoming international conference Women Deliver in London.

Light Up the Darkness posts a request for donations to train Afghan midwives; apparently $3000 is enough to train one woman.

What do you guys think? Can we raise that much? We've done it before. Leave a comment if you think we should do it (and are willing to kick in a few bucks), and if there's enough interest that it seems doable, I'll put up a dedicated post.

Cross-posted at SG.

I have figs!

Yesterday Pseudonymous Kid had a soccer game at the unholy hour of 8 am (which his team lost). PK was upset, not by the losing, but by having too many adults yelling orders at him--"move up the field! spread out! run run run! pass!" It's AYSO soccer, so of course we're all supposed to be good sports and not horrible yelling team sport parents, and we did cheer when the opposite team made good plays, but okay, yes, it's a little hard to watch a game and tread that fine line between encouraging noise and overbearingness. Oh well. We had fun, anyway.

Afterwards, since we were--for possibly the first time ever--up early on a Saturday, we went out and had brunch and then finally went to the downtown farmers market, where I purchased something like five pounds of different kinds of figs (mmm, figs) which no one in the house likes except me. The figs are all mine! Mine, I tell you! Of course now I have to eat them before they start going bad. I am vaguely considering this recipe, but since it would require me to actually go to the store to pick up ingredients and then actually follow through on the baking, I predict I will instead just eat figs until I can't eat figs no more.

Meanwhile, Mr. B. is off on a business trip for a week, I've agreed to take a neighbor's kids to school with PK tomorrow (must call her and find out where she lives, exactly), I've cleaned the kitchen (bonus: now I can see that the living room could use sweeping and a bit of tidying too, but FUCK THAT), and PK and I have played Battleship and spent the day in our jammes. And yet, I feel kinda restless. If it weren't for the figs, the ennui would be overwhelming.

By the way, it is Women's Equality Day--the 87th anniversary of the 19th amendment. If any of you women are not registered to vote, or are planning on not voting because of some harebrained lefty notion about no one perfectly representing your values (or if you know anyone like that), don't be an ingrate. Register and make sure all your friends do too, and get your and their butts to the polls.

from here on out

I guess it's time. Filling out forms for school and after-school programs, I'm pausing before the sections, which I'm pleased to see, about "any additional information we should know about your child." Hmm.

Pseudonymous Kid is sensitive about gender norms (X is for boys; Y is for girls), and related issues like gay marriage.

So far so good.

Parents are in an open marriage; mother has a long-distance boyfriend.

Do I really need to be telling them this? Mr. B. is going to want me not to. Sigh. Well. PK was asking the other day if it's possible to be married to more than one person. So, yeah, I probably do.

We appreciate your sensitivity to these issues.

Ugh, that sounds stiff and defensive rather than friendly and understanding that we're a little outside of the norm. Crap. Oh well.

---

In response to PK's question--which I think was actually prompted by the usual "I want to marry Mama" thing, rather than by thinking about my boyfriend, though I can't be sure because PK declined to explain why he was asking because "it's a little embarrassing"--I explained that no, legally you can only be married to one person at a time. But you can love as many people as you want. He thought about it for a second and said, "but can you marry one man and one woman?" No, I said, you can only marry one person, and in fact there aren't very many places where it's legal for a man to marry another man or a woman to marry another woman; in the U.S. and most other places you can only marry a person who's the opposite of you. Although there are some places, like Canada or Spain, where you can marry anyone you want, but still only one person.

"Is that why our friends E. and L. live in Canada?" he asked. It's probably one reason, I said, though I don't know if they're married, actually. But it's definitely a reason why they don't like to come to the United States. Sometimes in the U.S. judges have decided to take kids away from one or both of their mamas because because gay marriage is illegal.

PK considered this and decided that it's stupid and unfair for there to be a law about who you can and can't marry. I told him that I agree.

Feel free, btw, if you're a gay or lesbian parent, or transgendered, to suggest useful resources and/or things I should say to him when this stuff comes up in the future. It's surprisingly tricky to figure out how to explain things in a neutral way, since my own heteronormativity does sometimes get in the way.

Shoot me now

Arrived home 5 a.m. Monday after flight delays, shuttle delays, confusion, and loaning a stranded passenger $20 which I may or may not ever see again, but you know, I could afford it and he really needed to get home (I know this is true b/c he took the same shuttle I did).

Woke Tuesday at 11:30, spent some quality mama time, then went out for three hours of after school, pet food, and grocery shopping. Me and every other mom in town. Had an entertaining conversation with a fellow harried woman at Target, whose children were saying things like, "Mom, you're in that lady's way" and "Mom, we've already got two of those" about how it's inevitable that your kids are going to think you're a fucking idiot because your mama brain is on overload thinking about back-to-school shopping, whether or not your kids are acting up, whether or not you're also out of juice, what time it is, and how your bank balance is doing, which means you've gone into zombie mode and don't even know where your cart is any more.

Woke today at 6:30, was impressed that PK is now old enough to get out of bed and pick out his own clothes rather than expecting me to bring them to him (kudos due to Mr. B. and Lady Miss Orange, the latter for recommending this book and the former for reading it--PK's much earlier and more regular bedtime, which was established in my absence, being a major factor in his improved morning behavior I've no doubt), made him bacon, eggs and strawberries for breakfast (yes, I am one of *those* moms, dammit, probably because I myself ate Carnation Instant Breakfast throughout my school days), had him feed the fish, took him to school along the proposed bike route for days we don't have the car (I am going tomorrow to buy myself a NEW BIKE and a tagalong of some sort), dropped him off, went to coffee with a couple of other moms (where we had much the same conversation as I had with the Target woman the night before--who, it turns out, is also a mom at this school; we were amused to recognize one another in the office this morning), and then went and did *more* back to school shopping, this time armed with the Official Teacher's List of Necessary Items which required two different stops, at both of which I ran into the coffee mom friends with whom I am going to share carpooling this year after calling her cell phone to tell her I'd found the required brand of watercolor paints, and where I was.

Then home to read through and fill out all the first day of school paperwork before making a sandwich to eat in the car on the way to pick PK up. He turned me down on running by TJs to pick up mayonnaise and help me select preferred lunch foods, agreed that pb&j tomorrow is fine as I'm out of mayo for a turkey sandwich, and requested a snack and a movie "or something where I can just relax for a while" when we got home. Snack and movie provided, one hour to write a quick blog post for SG on, as it happens, a subject rather similar to this one. Then off to soccer practice, where it was kind of cool (noted: next time bring a sweater) and where I learned that our first game is at 8 a.m. Saturday, followed by games every Saturday for the next three months--all at either 8, 9:15, or 10:30. Mmm baby, no more sleeping in for me, I guess.

Then home where Mr. B. had dinner ready, bless him, although PK was too tired to eat it, poor kid. Talked him into a "relaxing" shower, followed by a little massage while Mr. B. read a bit of Harry Potter, then bedtime and a promise that I'd feed the mice tonight.

At which point I found out that Micky, our sole remaining Christmas mouse from 2005, was dead. In fact, *had* been dead, apparently for quite some time. So long, in fact, that at first I thought her mummified head was just a partly rotten piece of food or some such. No clue what she died of or when. So there I am at 9 p.m. getting Shiny and Squeaky (2) out of their cage so I can disinfect everything (completely pointless, of course, given the state of poor Micky's corpse, which had not only been there for a long time but had also been, ahem, partially eaten. On the other hand, there were larvae of some sort, so.), taking the cage and parts out to the patio to clean them, finding out that apparently Citrasolv dissolves the plastic out of which Habitrail parts are made and then finding out that we are out of mouse bedding (but I was just at the pet store *yesterday* buying food for the cat, dammit), so after rinsing off all the non-Citrasolv-ruined cage parts I spent twenty minutes shredding an entire box of unbleached coffee filters by hand so the poor stressed-out mice would at least have a comfortable place to lay their weary heads, then an additional ten minutes searching through the bathroom cabinets for unused mouse toys (which we have a frightening lot of, actually) at which point I found out that we do too have bedding, only when Mr. B. cleaned the cage after I left town, he put it back under the sink rather than where I usually put it, which he didn't remember while I was griping about being out of bedding (even though he came in after hanging out the laundry and helped me shred coffee filters).

So. Tomorrow I'll drop PK off at school, go bike shopping, and then after school break the sad news to him. I feel bad about not realizing that Micky was dead last night when I went in with him to feed the mice. But I'm glad that I've pointed out to PK rather frequently of late that Micky, who was mostly white with a brown muzzle, was actually growing gray around the nose and eyes, which is a rare accomplishment for a mouse. When Mr. B. gets home we will cremate Micky, as we did her "sister" Squeaky, on the gas barbeque. And of course I will tell PK, if he asks, that I don't think it's a good idea for him to see Micky's dead body because it's completely unrecognizable it's better for him to remember her as she was.

RIP Micky. I did my best by you, little mouse, and thanks for making PK so very happy during your lifetime.


Update: Aaaand today PK wakes up with a sore throat. Fabulous.

Friday Cat Blogging

Awwww.

Duh

Mystery solved.

If you need the dots connected, go here.

Fallback position: no war, but at least we can engage in Special Forces skirmishes and torture anyone we catch without having to worry about that pesky POW label.

Fluffy, helpful rats

Briefly popping in from a coffeeshop to post this fascinating and utterly necessary link. The author's prejudice against our rodent brothers and sisters is obvious and inexcusable, but his clear hatred of his own subject only makes his reluctant admission that they are clever and useful all the more significant.

Conspiracy Theory Time

So Karl Rove's resigning.

To move to Mexico and stay out of jail?
To go underground and assassinate Obama?
To arrange for a series of hookers to be caught in bed with Hillary?
To poison Elizabeth Edwards's chemo drip?

I can't figure this one out.

Momentary Minneapolis Blogging

John McLaughlin, disgusting excuse for a human being:

We have a number of immigrants coming every year. One hundred million new Americans will be in this country by what, 2015? Now that's wear and tear. It's on emergency rooms, it's on roads, it's on bridges and so forth...Are you surprised that the American government -- the Federal government, did not anticipate (that) the waves of immigrants that have been coming into our country and joining this great society (would) exact wear and tear on the infrastructure?

Found today: the bodies of Hana Sahal, 20 months old, and her mother, Sadiya, 23, five months pregnant with her second child. Apparently the remains were in such a condition that it was difficult to tell if one body or two had been found.

It's impossible not to think of what it would feel like, going over a bridge with your baby strapped into the back seat.

Hat tip to Mr. Ogged.

Ooh this just burns me up.

Not like we didn't all already know that being female and speaking your mind makes you a bitch (and proud of it), but there's a new study coming out that tells you what it's costing you to act like a human being.

The average salary assigned to the angry man was almost $38,000 compared to about $23,500 for the angry woman and in the region of $30,000 for the other two candidates.
...
"Participants rated the angry female CEO as significantly less competent than all of the other targets, including even the angry female trainee," Brescoll wrote. She said they viewed angry females as significantly more "out of control."

That impacted salaries. Unemotional women were assigned on average $55,384 compared to $32,902 for the angry ones. Male executive candidates were assigned more than trainees, regardless of anger, with an average $73,643.

Almost enough to make you lose your temper, isn't it?

While I'm away

I command you all to start uploading *unprimped* pictures of your own housekeeping standards to the real people's houses pool. You can do it anonymously.

And no, it isn't a contest to see who's the messiest. I'm genuinely curious about what houeskeeping standards are when it's not "for company."

Where the fuck is that bitch?

Y'all, I'm in Big City near Previous Job Town visiting friends (and packing up the books in my office). Next week, I'll be in Minneapolis visiting my boyfriend for a couple of weeks (and not driving on the I-35W bridge, I tell you what). And Mr. B. and I were too busy cleaning the house last week for me to find a guest blogger.

Worry not overmuch--I'll probably post on and off starting next week, when I'm no longer driving back and forth from BC to PJT (and when I can use my own laptop, my friends having forgotten the password to their wireless connection. What with two jobs and three kids, guess they had other priorities).

In the meantime, I urge you--completely unselfishly, I don't get paid extra for click throughs or nothin'--to stay caught up on feminist bitchiness through my posts over at SG.