We thought it would be fun to wind up National Poetry Month with some of the Geek Moms’ favorite poets and poetry. My own memories of poetry are quite early. My mother lived in Los Angeles and my father lived in the mountains over six hours away. This was back in the 70’s, so long […]
Continue ReadingLast week Madelyn Pugh Davis died. She is best known for the 174 scripts she wrote for the I Love Lucy show. Her career as a screenwriter spanned decades, through the mid-1980’s. Davis was born in 1921 in Indianapolis, where she edited her high school newspaper. She earned a journalism degree at Indiana University, and […]
Continue ReadingFriday morning my Greg-Mortenson-Controversy post went live on GeekMom. As per usual, I tweeted and Facebooked this news to my potential readership–which, in my mind, consists of eight friends from college, one amazingly hip and precocious sixteen-year-old, and a bunch of people who would actually prefer to hear how Kari Byron is doing. My […]
Continue ReadingTo trot out another overdone cliche, if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. It never applied to me. If I didn’t pick it up immediately, I would get frustrated and drop it altogether. I have a terrible habit of pulling back and quitting when things don’t go right the first time. I […]
Continue ReadingVast amounts of time and skill are invested in video game design annually. Everything you see and hear, and every move you make in a game was first drawn, composed and spelled-out in code by someone else for our enjoyment. When gamers geek out about the games we play, there’s usually a lot of talk […]
Continue Reading“What the heck is it with Easter? I mean bunnies and eggs? What’s one got to do with the other?” Easter perplexes the heck out of my daughter. She loves the candy and the decorating of eggs of course, but she’s long been incredulous at the array of seemingly unconnected symbolism that is so associated […]
Continue ReadingWatch the 60 Minutes coverage here. Last Saturday, over a meal of chapati, daal, korma, and basmati rice that we’d come together to prepare, the youth group that I mentor sat down to discuss Greg Mortenson’s “Young Reader’s Edition” of Three Cups of Tea. The book chronicles the events that ultimately lead Mortenson to create […]
Continue ReadingWhat if you’re an introvert who somehow has managed to give birth to an extrovert?
Continue ReadingFollowing our harrowing day of bus rides in Honolulu, we set out early to spend the entire day at the Pearl Harbor Historic Sites. A recent renovation makes it super easy to maneuver all four of the sites. Two of the featured sites–the USS Missouri and the Pacific Aviation Museum–are actually located on Ford Island, […]
Continue ReadingIt’s not easy being an introvert in an extrovert world–especially when you’re a kid. It is even more difficult if none of the adults in the kid’s life recognize that the child is an introvert. This doesn’t happen only when the child’s parents are extroverts, but also with introverted parents who have never understood their […]
Continue ReadingIf you’ve not played Dragon Age or Dragon Age II, you might want to avert your eyes. You can’t tell a good love story without some spoilers, eh? I’ve been playing video games for the better part of my life, and through the years, I’ve certainly had my crushes. So when Dragon Age came out, […]
Continue ReadingDo we even want them to have sex on-screen?
Continue ReadingOn April 12, 1861, 150 years ago this week, the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, as the state militia attempted to take the fort from Federal troops. While this “battle” itself didn’t result in any casualties — only two accidental deaths due to a Confederate cannon misfire and Union a 100-gun […]
Continue ReadingWhen we had our first two children just over a year apart, we knew that it might make some stages of life tricky. Potty training, times two. Science fairs, times two. And then, eventually, teen drivers, times two. So when products started coming on the market that could track a teen driver, I sat up […]
Continue ReadingI refer to role-playing, not actually having sex with your fellow gamers (unless it’s a whole different kind of role-playing group.) I played a character for about a year that had had sex every single gaming session (not alone), and you can do it too! I did not set out to make such a stud, […]
Continue ReadingToday I ran for 20 minutes… in a row. This may be a paltry amount to you runners out there, but a couple months ago running for even 5 minutes seemed impossible. It all started in January when I signed up to run the Run For the Wild 5K at the Bronx Zoo, an event […]
Continue ReadingLast week we ran a giveaway for ten copies of the Chore Pad HD app by Nannek, our newest sponsor. By midnight last Friday, Pacific Daylight Time, we had 20 comments. I gave each comment a number from 1 to 20, and used a random number generator to spit out the winners. Nannek has now […]
Continue ReadingBy the time my older son was four months old, he would sit on my lap, point at images he enjoyed, and help turn the pages of the board books we’d read together. At this age he was a stormy, intensely-observant little person already passionately opposed to doctor’s offices, food stores, malls, elevators, escalators, cribs, […]
Continue ReadingOnce upon a time, long before parenthood was on my radar, when I was young, single and training to be a city Metro driver, a crotchety old-timer on the fleet taught me to smile at each and every passenger who stepped onto my trolley.
Continue Reading