Left Coast Cowboys

Made it back from Chicago and BlogHer and can barely remember my own name, let alone pull together a blog post. So here are some bits and pieces of wisdom or foolishness. You decide which is which.

Interesting Fact: Flickr can be used as a child behavior modification tool

Waiting for my flight in an overcrowded, hot and muggy O’Hare I sat behind a woman with three overtired, overwrought, whining kids. The mother was reaching the medical condition that I believe psychiatric professionals term “Losing One’s Shit.” At the point where she stepped away from the kids and said, “You have to not touch me and not talk to me for the next two minutes”, I knew I had to spring into action. Since my laptop was open and I had Flickr in a window, I quickly typed in the tag “terrier” into the “search my photostream” option. Up came all 2000 or so of the pictures I’ve taken of my dogs Lucy and Oscar. “Hey kids, want to see pictures of puppies?” Kids rapt. Crisis averted. Another mom saved. Hint: this works best with terriers.

Interesting BlogHer Fact #1

Georgia Getz of the great site, I Am Bossy, is thin as a whippet. But just as funny in person as she is electronically.

Interesting BlogHer Fact #2

Keynote Speaker Donna Byrd, publisher of The Root, showed grace, calm and what I’m calling “The Sotomayor Poker Face” when asked about last week’s events with her fellow Root editor, Professor Henry Gates. Can someone send Sonia and Donna to Vegas, ’cause those gals could clean up in high stakes poker.

Random Thought

Chicago is an amazing city, especially if you walk it. And don’t keep staring up at the tall buildings like I did. It makes you look like a rube from farm country. Plus you miss all the interesting architectural and decorative details on the door arches, gates and gratings.

Wishful Thinking

Can one recharge one’s brain with an iPhone charger?

Internet Expectations Exploded

Checked my visitor stats to find they are through the roof. Hundreds and hundreds more visitors than usual. Thought it was my fabulous wrap up of the BlogHer Conference. Nope, someone Stumbled my tribute last month to Farrah Fawcett. That’s okay, she deserves another look.

Today the mother of The World’s Most Beautiful Baby had a full day scheduled, so Amelia May came to our house for the day. Which was good. I’ve got a big Spanish test on Thursday and could use a study partner. So the plan was to listen to the conjugation of regular Spanish verbs. Clearly, that would be as entertaining as Winnie the Pooh. Things started fine with the audio portion of my class material. Then I put on a little Mariachi music to get us both in the mood.

Interesting note: did you know it’s possible to send a baby into sensory overload in less than ten minutes? Apparently Mariachi music, Spanish verbs, ceiling fans, new surroundings, being bounced up and down in the Baby Bjorn and the addition of two yapping terriers is enough to send a baby into meltdown. But there were smiles soon through the tears and we got through Chapter Three of my Spanish text book with a few breaks for poems from Now We are Six.

Well, that’s Baby taken care of. Then Mom returned, tripped over the sidewalk outside and sprained her ankle. More tears. In retrospect, we should have applied Mariachi music and Winnie the Pooh poems.

Spanish irregular verbs are hard!

But the workbook is tasty.

Sometimes the audio exercises can bring you to tears.

But Mariachi music can always bring back the smiles.