Chrome Toe

My Comments (2080 so far…)

What's your No. 1 tip when asking for a promotion or a raise at work?

number one tip… be damn sure you deserve it.

Liz Smith: Sophia Loren in 'The Best Movie I've Ever Done!'

I home "Nine" is an amazing movie. i get so tired of movies with incredible casts and tons of promise that are status quo or just bad. Plus i’d love to see Kate Hudson live up to her potential! When I first saw "almost famous" I thought… that kid is just an incredible actress! then she started making all those stupid romcoms. Just baaad. predictable, boring…. dissapointing.

Have you ever lost your child, even for a moment?

Ann…. i did CPS as well! how about this for an ironic funny type story. I was on my way to investigate a referral (winter) turned a corner and low and behold there is a teeny tiny toddler in nothing but a diaper directly in front of my car!! in the middle of the road! I slam on the brakes and I wait a couple minutes as in my mind i’m expecting a parent to come bolting out in front of me to grab the child. then it dawns on me…. no parent. then i see two other tiny kids with no shoes and no coats standing on the sidewalks yelling and waving at the baby. we are in a super dangerous spot and i keep thinking a car is going to careen around, hit my car and hit baby. I park i jump out and get the baby. I find out that these little kids live at the house i’m parked in front of which is on the corner. I take them over. knock, pound, knock on windows (it’s about 11 am by the way) an no answer. i’m on the phone with the police when a very young mom opens the door. I ask her if these are her kids etc.. and then i say "honey… i got some bad news for you… " lol! what are the chances. you’re passed out after a night of partying, you’re kids escape and a cps investigator practically runs them over! Turns out though that yes she was passed out but she had installed all kinds of locks to try and keep her oldest from escaping. she was a houdini. we’d had other calls on it. this time the kid had snuck out under the garage door that was cracked like 3 inches so the adults could smoke out there and let the smoke out!

Have you ever lost your child, even for a moment?

That question took me right back to the moment and it was 16 years ago! My youngest daughter was 6 at the time. The school had sent home one of those fund raiser things with wrapping paper for kids to sell. There was some kind of a prize that went along with it. Well we were at the table having dinner. My oldest daughter and my boyfriend were both there and we were very chatty and happy that night about something going on with the oldest. So the youngest wasn’t getting a lot of attention. At some point she asked if she could go out and sell her wrapping paper. in my memory i don’t actually recall her asking. i was preocuppied and said yes. i remember thinking she just wanted to go next door to our friends house with it. none of us noticed when she actually left the house. we knew she got up from the table but didn’t think she had left. I don’t really know how long she’d been gone when we noticed she had left. It was at least 20 minutes. I was irritated as she wasn’t supposed to go next door without telling me. so i went over to get her and she wasn’t there! That’s when the fear started to slowly creep in. And to make this rather long story short it was over an hour before we found her wandering the neighborhood with her fund raising book!!! She had just decided to take off and go. At one point I was certain in my heart that she had been "abducted" in some form and that i was now one of "those" people that you saw on the news. the people whose lives had changed forever. Like the Duggards or the Smarts. It was the worst feeling in my entire life. Obviously we found her but i’ve never forgotten it.

The Truth About Marriage, by Carin Rubenstein

wow…. you took the words right out of my mouth lol! and in a lot shorter post…

The Truth About Marriage, by Carin Rubenstein

Ya your post comes across as school ground name calling and bizarrely angry BUT I totally agree with your statemtn about men not caring about things like color coordinating kids clothes and vacuuming behind the furniture. I think that a lot of superior wive’s tend to be women who want things the way they want them when they want them. and it’s often things like vacuming behind the furniture and shampooing the cat. Things that as you say… men just don’t care about.

The Truth About Marriage, by Carin Rubenstein

Oh ya… i also have a "theory" that the superior wife thing is bad for your sex life. No one wants to sleep with their mother. and no guy wants to sleep with the woman who constantly makes him feel like he’s "less than" even if he is buying into it to make it easy on himself. and women don’t want to sleep with a man they feel is "less than" either. even subconsciously. You did the research… what do you think Carin?

The Truth About Marriage, by Carin Rubenstein

It doesn’t describe my marriage. but then again on another thread i posted my lifes theme song as "Bitch" by Meredith Brooks. And one of my favorite lines in it is "so take me as I am this may mean you’ll have to be a stronger man"

However… it does describe soooo many of the other marriages i see. I’d say easy 7 out of 10 maybe? that might be a lot but… close. I just had no desire to parent a grown man.

If you had to choose a theme song for your life, which would it be?

"Bitch" by Meredith Brooks - "I’m a bitch i’m a lover i’m a child i’m a mother i’m a sinner i’m a saint I DO NOT FEEL ASHAMED"

I love that song! told my husband when we got married i was going to walk down the aisle to it. he didn’t even bat an eye! ended up we had no aisle and no music. But it’s definitely my theme song.

The Love Goddess: Are We Too Far Gone for Monogamy?

Yay the Love Goddess is back! i love you’re articles… wisdom extraordinaire. It cracks me up that so many of the posts talk as though you’re skewering monogamy when in fact you’re just pointing out the way things are. I have four kids in thier 20’s. We enjoy each others time and while they thanfully don’t tell me everything they tell me a lot and i’m good at reading between the lines. your summary of the differences in the generations is right on.

It also cracks me up that people get so self righteous about it. Like divorces and infidelity haven’t been rampant forever. I’m 46 and can count on one hand the people i know in a long term first marriage. Out of those i can count on half a hand the ones who haven’t had at least a little strange in their day.

Women… we’re so "romantic". what’s that about? Has anyone ever actually lived that dream? i mean really? and i’m sure at least one or two people (partly because of the age group of this group) will jump on and say they have. But really? who knows… for all we know the other partner has a long term affair on the back burner.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. i dont even think it IS cynical. and ironically i’m married to the love of my life. Both of us on our second marriage and both of us having had plenty of sex with other people before we met each other. but we met in mid life really… I can’t even imagine trying to get married in this era in your twenties "till death do us part". with our life expectancies that’s a damn long time!

Highlights From 'The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything'

ABSOLUTELY Kat! When i was single and raising my kids my employer offered excellent flex time. We picked four times a year which of several flex schedules we wanted to work for that quarter. during the school year i’d go in really early and get off work just after my kids got home. Then in the summer i’d work twelve hour days when their dad had them and be home when he didn’t. the employer was also very flexible about "flexing" if you had to on any given day. i could call up and say my kids were sick and their dad couldn’t come help unitl noon and i’d be allowed to work a swing type shift. It absolutel saved my family when it was a young family. In those days that employer was considered quite progressive for those reasons.

Highlights From 'The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything'

This is a good post Maureen. I’m not a stay at home mom, never have been and in all truth would never want to be. I’d go postal. It holds no appeal to me. But I thought your post was well done. I especially liked the part about men not objecting to women working because they get extra income and still don’t do all the extra work. The "second shift" i thin is what it’s been called in literature and research when women work all day and then come home and do all the caretaking or at least 80% of it.

The majority of the time I was raising my kids i was a single working mom. so my kids had extra responsibilities. Then when i met my husband and got married he’d been a man whose mother stayed home and whose first wife stayed home. So he had no desire at all to do any kind of household stuff that wasn’t in the garage. I was very clear long before we got married that i wasn’t the maid, cook and bottle washer. Since we had two decent incomes and no kids left at home to do it for us lol…we hired out the cleaning.

A lot of why women work a second shift is they refuse to allocate that job to anyone else. They take on all that responsibility instead of delegating and insisting that it be shared. I delegated and insisted.

Women have come a long way, as evidenced by the Shriver Report. What will be the impact of these new facts on our daughters?

It simply means more choices. For both sexes really. I can see a time when it won’t be nearly as stigmatized for men to choose to stay home and parent if they can and want to. The few men i’ve known in my life who have done that are very much marginalized. When the men from my husband’s generation have completely given over power to younger people… some of those stigmas’s and barriers will change on both sides of the coin. By the time my grandchildren are in their prime earning and power stages the world will look a lot different in terms of gender. I think frankly that the power base is going to be much more even and possibly even a tad heavier on the female side.

Is multitasking something to move toward or away from?

I read a report somewhere that multitasking actually costs people a ton of productivity. It was an excellent report. The bottom line of it was that you actually get MORE done if you focus on one task at a time. I’m horrible at multitasking as i work from home. and i know it costs me in productivity. I’ll be writing a report while texting one kid and e mailing another person… or i’ll do laundry while i’m organizing office stuff and talking on the phone. No bueno.

What is your reaction to the Dow's closing above 10k on Wednesday?

I checked other as I think the stock market is just one of many indicators of a healthy economy. It’s great that some of the folks i know who were retired and living off their investments (the ones who did NOT pull their money out) are able to breathe again. That’s nice. But on the whole… it’s just an indicator that things aren’t as bleak as some thought. But they aren’t as great as some predicted either.