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More news on the Tour successor showed up this morning! A screenshot of the specs for the upcoming Bold 9650 was found. Also included in the screenshot is a launch date of May 27th. There isn't much in the specs list that we didn't already know. Only major thing I see missing on the list is the lack of info on how much memory will be onboard. We will assume it will be the standard 256 MB for now. Maybe RIM will surprise everyone and up that amount.
When the Storm 2 came out people complained about the lack of new features, even though the memory was doubled, Wi-Fi was added and a new screen technology was introduced. Let's face it, there really isn't much new on this device when compared to the Tour 9630. Sure there they have added a Trackpad, Wi-Fi and the Bold name, but is that enough to get owners to upgrade? What do you guys think? Are you going to extend your contract or use your "New Every Two on the 9650? Let us know what you think.


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PANAMA CITY – Counting down his final weeks in office, Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli on Saturday is inaugurating the most-emblematic project of a five-year term marked by fast economic growth and more than a hint of hubris — Central America's first subway system.
The metro will surely alleviate the booming capital's dreadful traffic. But critics say the $2 billion spent on the 9-mile (14-kilometre) rail line would have been better used building a higher-capacity surface transport network and expanded bus system.
The critics also are unhappy about what they consider Saturday evening's over-the-top party, with a free concert, fireworks and a Chinese dragon dance, to celebrate the new subway. They call it a political stunt a month before Panama's elections to drum up support for Martinelli's preferred successor, former Housing Minister Jose Domingo Arias.
Trains themselves won't start running a full schedule until Monday.
Martinelli, who leaves office July 1, isn't fazed by the criticism. Notably brash with friends and foes alike, the 62-year-old supermarket magnate hasn't tired of boasting that he has accomplished more in five years than was done in the previous 50. He has an approval rating of 60 per cent, and relishes the chance of getting his chosen successor elected, which no incumbent Panamanian president has done since democracy was restored in 1989.
"Many times I've been called crazy for wanting to do works like this, but here it is, and it is for the Panamanian people," Martinelli said Saturday at the inauguration during which he danced calypso and conga along with some of his ministers.
Several thousand spectators, some waving Panamanian flags, gathered in front of a stage by the los Andes station north of Panama City for a concert featuring local acts.
Since Martinelli took office in 2009, Panama has spent upward of $15 billion on infrastructure improvements, including new hospitals, airports and 990 miles (1,600 kilometres) of highways. The subway is Panama's second costliest project in the past century, surpassed only by the current $5.25 billion expansion of the Panama Canal that began before he became president.
"Never has a government done so much for a country and its people," proclaims a TV ad featuring the subway and a catchy, merengue-tinged chorus of "Promises Fulfilled."
The government hasn't announced how much a ride will cost. Instead, it is waiving fares for the first few months in what analysts say is a clear attempt to boost the candidacy of the little-known Arias, who holds a narrow lead in most polls over former Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro.
Panama's region-leading infrastructure is a point of pride for many of the country's 3.4 million people, although the spending hasn't been without controversy.
Vice-President Juan Carlos Varela broke with Martinelli in 2011 and later accused the president and his two sons of taking kickbacks from Italy's state-controlled Finmeccanica in exchange for government contracts.
No charges were filed against the president, but the allegation has reinforced perceptions that the construction — which has propelled economic growth averaging 9 per cent a year since 2010 — is also fueling corruption and waste. Panama fell 20 places to 102nd in Transparency International's latest annual ranking of 177 countries on corruption.
The subway cost 30 per cent more than the price budgeted when the contract to build it was awarded to Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht SA in 2010. Roberto Roy, the metro's top executive, says costs rose because of design changes, including construction of two additional stations.
Martinelli's penchant for self-promotion led to the two giant boring machines used to dig the metro's more than 4 miles (7 kilometres) of tunnels being named Marta and Carolina, in honour of his wife and daughter.
First lady Marta Linares is Arias' running mate, a sign that Martinelli will remain influential if his political disciple wins. The president was barred by the constitution from seeking re-election.
Carolina Rodriguez, who works as a maid in the downtown district of flashy, high-rise apartment buildings, doesn't much mind the political overtones of the subway's inauguration so long as the train reduces her pre-dawn commute and remains affordable.
"It's all very pretty and Martinelli says the train will help us," said Rodriguez, who spends 90 minutes every day commuting in from San Miguelito, a poor neighbourhood on the subway's northern terminus. "Hopefully the train will relieve my daily headache."
Associated Press writer Joshua Goodman in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.
Juan Zamorano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Juan_Zamorano

subset: commoncrawl


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About the OasISS mission logo
In addition to depicting the ISS and Earth as oases for astronauts and humankind, the mission logo features the theme of water as the basis of life as we know it.
Our planet is shown as a drop of water, resembling Earth as seen by the astronauts on the ISS. The importance of water for life is represented by the tree that grows out of the arms of a man. He is rooted in the Station and its scientific utilisation. Water flows through the man's arms and the branches of the tree.
The rocket illustrates the Soyuz that will carry Frank De Winne to the ISS. A single white star symbolises how human exploration will eventually lead humankind to other planets.


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I'd like to suggest that the "post needing approval" restriction be made more prominent.
When I made my first post I did not notice it (people are used to get some page that takes them back to the thread once they have made their post, and don't read the text there), and wondered what had happened to my post. Maybe make the font size of the message telling the user that the message needs approval bigger, or color it?


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Residence | The Residence Chalet des Neiges Plein Sud**** is our smallest residence, with 12 apartments and the most required by our loyal clients.
Located in the neighborhood of Plein Sud, our apartments are furnished according to the Savoyard tradition and they can accommodate from 4 to 14 people. All the comfort is available in our apartments and everything is done to make your stay a unique experience!
Ski-in / ski-out residence, depending on snow conditions. Access to the blue slope "Plein Sud" from the ski lockers of the residence, located on level 5.
Our rates include :
Bed linen, Beds are made upon arrival (except for short stays)
Towels provided (2 per person and per week)
A welcoming cleaning kit: dishwashing detergent, a bin bag, a dishwasher tablet, multi-use product and a sponge.
Free Wi-Fi access in the apartment
Flat screen TV + Satellite, direct-dial telephone (calls not included)
Free and unlimited access to the sauna and fitness room located in the residence
Free and unlimited access to the indoor heated swimming pool (located in our Residence Hermine 4* at about 200m, except on Saturday)
A wood bag for the fireplace (€10 for the extra bag) – except for the 3 room apartments 4 people and for some resort events such as La Grande Première.
Private Ski-locker with shoe dryer
CHECK-IN: 5pm the day of arrival & CHECK-OUT: 10am at latest the day of the departure
On loan, free of charge, on request and subject to availability:
Baby cot and high chair
Raclette, fondue set
DVD Player
Services « à la carte » with an extra charge, on request and subject to availability:
Covered parking space in our private garage : from €85 to €120 per car and per week (2.05m high)
Bakery delivery service (bread & pastries) on request at the reception before 07 :00pm to be delivered directly to your apartment in the morning
End of stay cleaning (except kitchen area): from €57 (depending on the apartment size)
Pets are welcome : dog €75 / cat: €40 per week and per animal
Ski Shop "Go Sport" located in the residence Hermine 4* at about 200m
Spa next to the residence, preferential rates
To be paid at reception, on arrival:
Refundable deposit : €500 per apartment by credit card only
Tourist tax is not included: 2.53€/person/day, children under 18 years free of charge.
Please note that the lift of the Residence Plein Sud stops on the 6th floor. 2 apartments 7 rooms are accessible by a staircase from the 6th to the 7th floor.


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Newswise — Screening to detect medical conditions has become standard practice for many diseases, but insufficient attention has been paid to the potential for harm, according to research conducted at the University of North Carolina.
"I think guideline groups, just as they are systematic about thinking about benefits, need to be systematic about thinking about harms. We should not implement a screening program until we know enough to have a clear understanding of both benefits and harms," said lead author Russell Harris, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine in the UNC School of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology in the UNC Gillings Global School of Public Health, and member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Harris worked with a number of co-investigators at the UNC Research Center for Excellence in Clinical Preventive Services in the UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.
In an article published by the Journal of American Medical Association - Internal Medicine, Harris and co-authors outline a framework that physicians, patients, policy makers and researchers can use to think systematically about the harms of screening programs. This rationale – a "taxonomy of harms" – makes it easier for decision makers to fully consider all harms to balance against anticipated benefits. Harris said the framework for understanding harms provides physicians, patients, policy makers, and researchers with an approach for reviewing the potential downsides of any screening recommendation.
"Harms are any adverse effect that people feel because of screening. It is important to take the perspective of the patient, the one who experiences the harm. The whole idea of what we did was to develop a systematic way for people to look at a screening program and decide whether screening makes sense for them, without being blind-sided by harms that they didn't know about and didn't expect," said Harris.
Harris' team interviewed dozens of policy makers, physicians, researchers and patients to develop four major categories of harm that need to be considered in any screening recommendation:
• Physical harm – The potential for a screening procedure to cause physical injury to patient, such as when a colonoscopy perforates the intestine and requires hospitalization.
• Psychological harm – The immediate and long-term psychological strain caused by screening. For example, a patient whose screening test was positive but additional testing ("work-up") was inconclusive, and the patient must then undergo further surveillance for some time without knowing whether she has a serious condition or not. This shows how screening can cause ongoing uncertainty and psychological strain.
• Financial strain – From the initial screening to follow-ups and monitoring, each medical intervention will increase the financial burden on patients, possibly interfering with their financial planning and security.
• Missed opportunities – From the need to miss work to have the initial test to further time to have additional testing – the screening process requires multiple visits and testing. This all becomes a distraction, taking time and attention away from people trying to attend to healthy lifestyle and to taking part in the everyday activities of work and family life.
Because the research on screening has traditionally been focused only on its benefits, little evidence has been collected on the potential for harm. Harris said he hopes his work will spur the collection of such evidence, with an understanding that it must come from the patient perspective.
"Unfortunately, the data is not available in a systematic way. That would be wonderful if we had surveillance systems that we put in place 20 years ago to systematically look at benefits and harms," said Harris. "Besides being helpful to decision makers today, we hope this taxonomy gives researchers a direction for future research."


text: The 2017 Oregon Handmade Bike Show is this weekend (Aug 12th &13th). Admittedly I wasn't sure how exhibitor attendance would shape up but the show is just about sold out. Some of the PDX regulars will be there Ahearne, Igleheart, Ti Cycles, Strawberry, etc. I'm really looking forward to seeing Fat Chance, Jeff Lyon and Jeffrey Bock. I'll be getting my feet wet with a little booth too. Should be fun! Any V-salonistas going? It's always fun to put faces to names, come say hi!


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Wow! My work was mentioned in an article in the New York Times last week: "A Hobby Best Kept Small" by author J. Courtney Sullivan. In recent years Sullivan has rediscovered her childhood love of dollhouse miniatures and her article gives a fond and humorous look at the hobby.
In fact Sullivan has fallen SO under the sway of the hobby (we all know how that goes) that she included it in her latest novel, Maine:
"When I started writing my second novel, I decided that one of the characters would have a passion for dollhouses, which allowed me to do hours of guilt-free 'research' online and at the Manhattan Dollhouse boutique inside F. A. O. Schwarz. I wrote entire chapters about dollhouse exhibitions and created an ill-fated love affair between two characters that began with a dollhouse."
Well, Ms. Sullivan, welcome back to the hobby. Of course you realize that soon miniatures are going to take over your entire life as you find yourself buying things just to take them apart and use the bits, or asking waitresses for extra jelly just to get the little plastic tubs (great sinks), or reminding surgeons as they put you under that you want to keep that leftover tubing when they're done because it'll make such a great gaa...
On the upside, merely owning a dollhouse won't seem embarrassing at all by comparison (to your family). And thank you for mentioning TreeFeathers Miniatures in your article!


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Randy Hulshizer wrote:Thanks, Matt. And congrats on your acceptance at FFO. Saw it on the Grinder.
Thanks not posted anything about it yet as I haven't yet signed a contract (and I only logged it on the Grinder for my own stats), but I'm delighted as (a) first magazine sale (WotF was my first ever sale) (b) FFO were the first place I submitted to, so I'd made it a point of honour to get published there!


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By Patrick Cronin
Hampton Union, January 29, 2008
[The following article is courtesy of the Hampton Union and Seacoast Online.]
William Smart said there isn't a day that goes by that he doesn't think of his son Gregory and while he can accept the apology from the man who killed him, he doesn't want him to get out of prison.
"Your apology was heartfelt and I hope it helps you heal," Smart told a tearful William Flynn. "I want you to know I accept your apology and may God bless you."
Members of the Smart family testified during an emotional two-hour hearing at Rockingham Superior Court on Friday asking the judge not to grant Flynn's request to reduce his 28 years-to-life sentence.
Superior Court Judge Kenneth McHugh took Flynn's request under advisement. Flynn, who was only 15 when he shot and killed Gregory Smart execution style in 1991, took the stand at the hearing not to address the judge but the Smart family. "I want you to know that I'm very sorry," said a sobbing Flynn.
Flynn said he takes full responsibility for his actions but wanted the family to know why he did what he did even though there is no excuse. He told them he was insecure teenager who felt abandoned by his family.
"I just had a general feeling of being worthless and isolated," Flynn said.
All that changed, Flynn said, when he met Pamela Smart, a media coordinator at Winnacunnet High School. Flynn said she gave him the attention he desired, made him feel important and picked him among everyone at the high school to be her lover.
"I would have killed for her and she knew that," Flynn said.
Flynn said when Pamela asked him to murder her husband, he knew it was wrong but didn't want to lose the only person who treated him like he wasn't a piece of garbage.
"She threatened to take away the only thing that was good in my life," Flynn said. "I know none of this excuses what I did. I take full responsibility for my actions. Every day I think about what I've done to you and the people I hurt and I'm terribly and deeply ashamed of myself for being so weak."
Flynn's lawyer Cathy Green argued Flynn is rehabilitated and deserves a chance to live a productive life. Since entering prison, Flynn has earned a General Equivalency Diploma (GED), taken college computer courses and earned an electrician's helper license.
He also got married to the former executive assistant to the superintendent of schools in Wiscasset, Maine, and has a stepdaughter. Flynn's wife, Kelly, was in the audience but didn't speak at the hearing.
The state attorney's office objected to Flynn's request, saying he was rewarded for his cooperation when he accepted a plea bargain for a lesser charge.
Originally charged with first-degree murder, prosecutors dropped it to second degree, which allows him to be eventually paroled, in exchange for his testimony against Pamela Smart.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Susan Morrell said the message to the community needs to be clear. "No matter your age or circumstances, when you commit premeditated, cold blooded murder, you will spend the majority of your life in prison," Morrell said.
She also said Flynn's stepdaughter, who wrote a glowing letter to the judge, apparently changed her mind. In a new letter she said she will not live with her mother if Flynn lives there.
William Smart, wearing the wedding band that belonged to his son, told Flynn if he completes his full sentence he will not object to his request to be paroled in 2018.
"But until then, I will fight you with my last breath and last heartbeat and I am not a well man," Smart said.
But Dean Smart, Gregory's brother, wasn't as forgiving pointing out in Flynn's own letter to the judge asking for the reduction he mentions himself 85 times but only made four references to the man he killed.
He also said Flynn misspelled Gregory's name.
Dean Smart said he had only had one word to say to Flynn about accepting his apology. It was the same word Dean said Flynn told Gregory when he was begging for mercy May 1, 1990.
"Bang! No," said Dean Smart.


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Mammoth and baby in Anthropos
The Anthropos Pavilion was built in 1962 for the exhibition of the same name created by Prof. Karel Absolon in 1928 and situated originally at Brno exhibition ground. Absolon's Anthropos was part of his project to establish an international institute researching the origins of man and his culture. The building underwent a complex renovation in 2006.
Brno is Czech's second largest city. It's a place full of peaceful country folk who drink more wine than Bohemians, their Czech friends to the west. Brno hasn't been trampled by many tourists, so it has quite a different character than the capital city, especially from the eyes of a visitor.


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Pickled Chanterelles and My Very Real Martha Moment
Here's a very simple recipe to use the glut of chanterelle mushrooms we picked the other day. Since our chanterelle season is going on for a while yet, I have a feeling I'm going to be making this recipe quite a few times this year. Happily, it's really easy, and the resulting pickled chanterelles are really fantastic, tangy, earthy, spicy, and with just little sweetness from the raisins. They are so versatile - you can eat them outright, toss in pasta, throw into omelettes, pile on top of steamed rice, use as condiment for a steak, all kinds of roasts or even a burger. The pickling liquid is sort of like a vinaigrette, so you could even toss a few spoonfuls with salad greens, perhaps add a bit more olive oil to freshen it up a bit.
I'm not sure where this recipe came from. It's one of those recipes that got pass along from one cook's Moleskine notebook to the next, until the origin became a bit blurry. I've heard it was from one of Jean-Georges Vongerichten books - but I don't know for sure. Well, if it indeed was, then consider this a credit and thanks to him. Here's the recipe, as adapted by me.
Pickled Chanterelles
2 lbs mushroom
5 shallots, sliced into thin rounds
5 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced into rounds
1 Tablespoon whole coriandar seeds, lightly toasted
1 Tablespoon black peppercorn, coarsely ground
1/2 Cup golden raisins
1 cup cider vinegar
1 cup of olive oil
1 teaspoon Kosher salt
Clean the chanterelles by brushing away the dirt and lightly scraping the base. If there's a lot of dirt on the mushrooms, don't be afraid to rinse them under cold water. The mushrooms will absorb some of the water, but that sure is better than having gritty mushrooms later. Pat the mushrooms dry and tear them by hand into large pieces (see photo).
Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add the mushroom to the pot and let boil for 1 minute, then remove from heat. With a slotted spoon, scoop the mushrooms into a collander. It's important to scoop them up and not pour them directly into the collander, as there may be excess dirt at the bottom of the pot - and you want to leave them there. Run cold water over the mushroom until they are tepid. Squeeze out excess water from the mushroom and let them drain on the collander.
In another pot, pour in just a tiny bit of the olive oil, add the garlic and shallots and cook, stirring constantly, over medium heat until the shallots are translucent. Don't let them pick up any color, turn the heat down a bit if they begin to turn brown. Add the pepper, coriandar,raisins, vinegar, olive oil, and salt. Stir to blend and bring to a simmer.
Add the blanched mushrooms, stir to blend and remove from the heat. Transfer the mushroom into a glass or ceramic container. Cover and let them rest in the fridge for 24 hours before using. They can be kept covered in the fridge for a couple of weeks, although I promise you'll finish them way before that.
This recipe is also great for other wild mushrooms, even a mélange of them. If you're using different types of mushroom, I'd blanch them separately to make sure you get the right consistency for all of them.
As for my Very Real Martha Moment, that's coming tomorrow to a television near you! Yes, I will be on the Martha Stewart show tomorrow - she's doing another blog show, and I'll be cooking my famous Pad Thai on it tomorrow! There'll also be other bloggers, and plus she's giving away a copy of my book to everybody in the audience! Sorry about all the exclamation marks, but DID I MENTION I'M GOING TO BE ON THE MARTHA STEWART SHOW? (Ok, sorry about the all-caps too, but CAN YOU BLAME ME FOR BEING EXCITED???)


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You'll notice a big gap--nearly 300 years--between the earliest speech in the Index by Queen Elizabeth I in 1588 and Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech in 1851, and that's no mistake: For many of those years, women in many cultures were forbidden to speak in public. "History has many themes," wrote Kathleen Hall Jamieson. "One of them is that women should be quiet."
It was still rare for women to speak publicly in the 1800s and the following decades, but more publicly acceptable in Western cultures for them to speak about issues like temperance, slavery and religion. That's what makes some of the Index speeches from this era so remarkable, because they ignored social conventions to speak about lynching, war crimes, free love, anti-war themes, and yes, votes for women, the right that would help women gain authority to speak on other issues. Later in this collection, you'll see women enter new spheres: politics, science, human rights and television. This grouping from The Eloquent Woman Index includes women speakers from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, England, Ireland, Poland, and the United States.
Dip into this collection and share it with other women and girls. Clicking through the links will take you to text, video or audio (where available), along with what you can learn as a public speaker from these famous speeches. I've updated this list to include posts on the Index through 2016.
1588: Elizabeth I's speech to the troops at Tilbury, a rare battleground speech by a great queen. We have three versions of it, none of them from her own time, so this one likely was rewritten and it's unlikely she actually said these stirring words.
1851: Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" is moving--but also was rewritten by others after its delivery, including its most famous line.
1866: Clara Barton's Andersonville testimony to the U.S. Congress is bald, gorey and honest on the topic of conditions for prisoners of war, and sparked a rare speaking tour for this battleground nurse in the Civil War.
1871: Victoria Woodhull's "Principles of Social Freedom" was well ahead of its time with its advocacy of free love, as was the speaker, who also ran for president of the United States.
1879: Sarah Winnemucca's San Francisco lectures brought the plight of Native Americans to the public.
1873: Susan B. Anthony's "Is it a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" was a seminal speech in the battle for U.S. women's suffrage.
1909: Ida B. Wells "This Awful Slaughter" came at the first convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, taking on lynching directly at a time when it was rarely spoken of publicly.
In the same year in Ireland, Countess Markievicz shared her vision of the ideal woman--one that flew in the face of traditional views of women and their roles and abilities.
1911: Rose Schneiderman's speech on the Triangle fire was itself fiery, a speech about the poor working conditions that led to the deaths of so many women garment workers.
In the same year, Marie Curie's 1911 Nobel lecture--for her second Nobel Prize--was careful to take full credit for her contributions to her science, as men who spoke about her did not.
1912: Mother Jones speaks to striking West Virginia miners in her trademark "hell-raiser" style, giving voice to their working conditions. The only reason we have the text is because the mine owners hired a stenographer to take it down, hoping to prove Jones was a violent danger.
1914: Nellie McClung's "Should Men Vote?" tweaked the nose of Canada's male politicians, turning around their words about why women should not get the vote in a funny mock debate that turned the tide for women's votes in that country.
1915: Jutta Bojsen-Møller's victory for votes speech came after Denmark gave the vote to women, summing up the struggle poetically. Great perspective and a great metaphor here.
1916: Helen Keller's "Strike Against War" reflected her pacifist views during World War I, an unpopular stance. And yes, this blind, deaf, nearly mute woman was a public speaker.
In the same year, journalist Ida Tarbell's "Industrial Idealism" speech was a rare speaking circuit lecture by a woman--who was sometimes advertised as "the woman who talks like a man."
1920: Nancy Astor's first speech in Parliament was the British institution's first "maiden speech" by a woman. This first woman MP more than held her own in a debate that began to change history.
1924: Juliette Gordon Low's Girl Scouts speech reflects the changing times of her day, including voting as one of the Scout's civic responsibilities.
1927: Aimee Semple McPherson's "speech in a speakeasy" was on one of the safer topics for women giving speeches. But this early televangelist did anything but play it safe to bring her message to the masses.
1928: Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" lectures took the time to parse why we have so few women writers, let alone speakers. These lectures became an inspiring book.
1903: Annie Oakley's libel cases and courtroom speeches were to defend her reputation, a one-woman effort that turned around a smear campaign.
1913: Emmeline Pankhurst's "Freedom or Death" explained this British suffragist's view of the stakes for women's votes--a more militant and even violent view than that of her U.S. sisters.
1935: Amelia Earhart's "A woman's place in science" brings radio into the picture. She broadcast this talk to encourage women to be consumers, careerists and researchers in the sciences.
1940: Eleanor Roosevelt's convention-saving speech, famous for its phrase "no ordinary time," kept her husband from losing the Democratic nomination, no small feat in this contentious conference.
1941: Eleanor Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor radio address came the day before her husband's more famous speech on the attacks, and sought to prepare the American people for what was to come.
1943: Dame Enid Lyon's "Strike a Human Heart" speech reflected the unique perspective of Australia's first female parliamentarian.
1944: Huda Shaarawi's speech at the 1944 Arab Feminist Conference called for women to get their political rights, and dispelled the myth that Islam and feminism were incompatible.
1947: Novelist and scholar Dorothy Sayers lectured on the "Lost Tools of Learning" in postwar Britain, making the case for a classic education--one evident even in her mystery novels.
1949: Eleanor Roosevelt on the UN Declaration on Human Rights shared her life's great work with women college students, and raises the curtain on the endless meetings needed to achieve this diplomatic tour de force.
1950: Margaret Chase Smith's "Declaration of Conscience" was a rare defiance of McCarthyism and communist witch-hunts--delivered on the U.S. Senate floor with Sen. Joseph McCarthy in attendance. A brave and important speech.
1951: Evita Perón's Renunciamento, in which she declined calls for her to become Argentina's vice president, came in the form of a radio address that reflected her personal approach to public speaking.
1961: Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch often told this story about her own epiphany about her weight, and what "thin" meant.
1962: Frances Perkins on the roots of Social Security was a lookback speech from the first female Secretary of Labor in the U.S., who was present for Rose Schneiderman's Triangle Fire speech, a lasting influence in her own efforts to help the working class.
1962: Jackie Kennedy's televised tour of the White House took a relatively new medium and made it her own. This wasn't just a tour, but a tour de force.
1963: Rachel Carson's "A New Chapter to Silent Spring" brought her message of environmental dangers to the gardeners of America, a major speech given despite her public speaking fears.
1963: Julia Child's "The French Chef" cooking demos took television by storm, giving a woman an unusual platform for extemporaneous speaking-while-demonstrating.
1964: Fannie Lou Hamer's convention committee testimony says out loud what black Americans went through in the struggle for civil rights. Her testimony didn't get her a seat as a convention delegate, but did reach a much wider audience.
Also in 1964, Lady Bird Johnson's whistlestop tour took place in town after town before U.S. southerners angry at her husband's signing of the civil rights legislation. Grace under pressure doesn't begin to describe it.
And in the same year, actor Julie Andrews's acceptance speech at the Golden Globes was short, sweet--and saucy, as she tweaked the nose of a studio executive who'd turned her down for a big role.
1966: Dolores Huerta's speech at the Delano Grape Strike march let the world know that "the workers are on the rise."
There are many more--and more recent--famous speeches by women in The Eloquent Woman Index of Famous Women's Speeches, and we add more nearly every week. Please share this unique resource on women and public speaking!


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NEW YORK (AP) — Zachary Quinto might be headed into other worldly places this summer in "Star Trek Into Darkness," but he says a social issue that's near and dear to him is taking care of the earth.
He turns off the water when he is brushing his teeth and shaving, and unplugs all his chargers when they are not in use. It's the little things that are going to add up, he said in a phone interview.
Quinto is serving with Alanis Morissette as Kiehl's Earth Day ambassadors in the beauty brand's fifth year working with Recycle Across America. The effort aims to standardize recycling labels and collect empty grooming-product jars, and Quinto designed a limited-edition label for facial cream that serves as a fundraiser.
"I felt inspired by this organization. It's trying to make a tangible difference. Sometimes part of the challenge of getting involved in a cause is when it's abstract," Quinto said.
Not that charities and causes aren't asking. Quinto, also a star of TV's "Heroes," said he can feel his celebrity on the rise in the number of requests he's getting to use his name and attend events. For him, though, the connection has to make sense, he said, ticking off elder care, animal welfare and Hurricane Sandy recovery as other issues that he supports. "I try to be judicious and I don't want to be ubiquitous," he said.
If not ubiquitous, Qunto will become a lot more familiar in the coming months. The J.J. Abrams interpretation of "Star Trek" already has the franchise's fans buzzing — and they aren't shy about giving their opinion to Quinto.
"It's exciting, and there's a lot of anticipation," he said. "I hope it lives up to people's expectations."
He said "Star Trek" breeds some of Hollywood's most loyal fans, and for the most part the diehards have been "pretty respectful and supportive."
Still, he said he has to play Dr. Spock based on his gut and not how the fans might write the role. "I can't open myself up to other people's opinions unless they're people I know and trust their opinions."
Quinto trusts his instincts for good causes, Spock
NEW YORK (AP) — Zachary Quinto might be headed into other worldly places this summer in "Star Trek Into Darkness," but he says a social issue that's near and dear to him is taking care of the earth.


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A judge has declared a mistrial in former Desperate Housewives star Nicollette Sheridan's wrongful termination suit against ABC Studios and ABC Entertainment, according to Deadline.
Judge Elizabeth Allen White announced her decision on Monday after the 12-person jury returned to court unable to reach a decision. Last week, the jury told the judge it was deadlocked in an 8-4 decision. On Monday, the jury foreman indicated the split was in Sheridan's favor, according to Deadline. Lawyers for both sides of the case say they plan to seek a new trial.
Desperate Housewives Trial: Judge Dismisses Battery Charge Against Marc Cherry
Sheridan claims she was wrongfully fired from Desperate Housewives after she claimed that creator Marc Cherry hit her. Last week, the judge dropped the battery charge against Cherry.
A meeting to determine a retrial date has been set for April 13.


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Bearing and self aligning ball bearing bearing space should be in accordance with the request of high-precision bearings, according to the request of high temperature bearings, so when considering the coordination of open space, we need to consider the following two points.
(1) the changes are changed at high temperature and hardness at normal temperature.
(2) changes in the force system and shape caused by the centrifugal force. In a word, under the condition of high temperature, it is difficult to maintain the precision and work function of self aligning ball bearing from the choice of Concorde harmonic space.
To ensure the bearing device after rolling deformation is small, the amount of intervention work can not be too large, the expansion of the centrifugal force and high temperature, normal pressure or offset surface. Or cooperation surface relaxation, then annoyance quantity, it is necessary to consider these two factors under the premise of decision. It is probably not effective to jam the bearing at a steady speed.
The results contradict the hypothesis is too big, just ring lubrication and hydraulic lubrication, lubrication method, the plan may reach 3 million Ma Kejing bearing. When considering the self aligning ball bearing open space, we should not only consider the above elements, but also consider the influence of the axial thermal elongation of the open space, and request the best space for the bearing under the working condition, namely the working temperature, the empty space is precise, the outer ring groove center is in the opposite position. As the sliding bearing strives to reduce and internal conflict, it is best not to use the relative displacement of the inner and outer ring and the adjustment method of the axial ground of the ball bearing.
Considering the annoyance of tapered roller bearing space, and paying attention to soft data, simple deformation and high temperature characteristics, many times and high temperatures caused by temperature change are necessary for permanent deformation.
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The Steering Committee for the Consecration of Ireland (SCNCI) to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was founded by Simon Galloway in response to the growing moral, spiritual, social and economic crises in which Ireland finds herself at the beginning of the 21st century. He stumbled on a little-known fact about the consecration of Portugal to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the 1930s. The bishops of Portugal all got together and consecrated Portugal to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The results were unprecedented. The Church in Portugal in the 1930s was in a similar situation to that in which the Catholic Church in Ireland finds itself today with an increasingly godless government enacting laws which are contrary to the moral teaching of the Catholic Church and the law of God. The consecration of Portugal by the Catholic bishops there unleashed a deluge of graces which transformed Portugal in the following decades. A Catholic government was put in place there. Catholic laws were enacted. The threat of Communism was averted and Portugal emerged unscathed from the Second World War which ravaged its neighbouring European countries. All in all the consecration proved very effective.
Simon Galloway had the idea of starting a Rosary Crusade with the specific intention that the Bishops of Ireland carry out a national consecration of Ireland to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as requested by Our Lady of Fatima of the Fatima seer Lucia in 1917. He formed the Steering Committee for the National Consecration of Ireland to the Immaculate Heart of Mary whose main objective is to collect Rosary pledges from Catholics that they will include this specific intention in their daily Rosary for one year.
Volunteers committed to collecting rosary pledges from family, friends, prayer groups, outside church gates and at other Church events. The results were unprecedented. People realise that the situation is urgent and they are committing in their droves to pray for this intention. At the moment the pledge total stands at 31,300, the target being 35,616, which is 13 million rosaries being offered up annually.
The threat of legislation to make abortion legal in Ireland is imminent. An expert group consisting of pro-abortion members has been set up to consider an EU ruling on abortion in Ireland. They are due to give their recommendations this September. Dr James Reilly, the Irish Minister for Health, has publicly promised the pro-abortion elements of his party that he will introduce legislation legalising the murder of unborn Irish children as soon as possible. We cannot let this come about. Only prayer can stop this. When Ireland is consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary she will never let the scourge of abortion into this Catholic country.
We are at a pivotal moment in our country's history. Ireland is the last bastion of Catholic morality as regards abortion in Europe. Cardinal Brady, the all-Ireland primate, has publicly declared that he will do everything in his power to stop abortion coming to Ireland. Here in Ireland now we all stand in need of the graces to fight this battle. As we know the outcome of the battle has been decided. Our Lady foretold at Fatima: "In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph." Help us bring about this triumph by signing up to the rosary rally at www.scnci.org.
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The last time that we had talked about the 1972 Nova project was when I had cut off the old roof skin, and rested the "new" one in its place. Since then, I welded the skin into its new home, and began repairing the sections of it that were rotted. Now, before I go any further, you might be saying "You replaced a rotted roof skin with a rotted roof skin? What the what?!" And the answer is yes. Yes I did. See, people in New England can't have nice things because of rust. The "new" roof was "very solid" (for New England metal) except for the whole rear section where the glass sits. Water had clearly pooled there for quite a while and destroyed all the metal in that area. BUT. Replacing that section was about one thousand times easier than replacing the entire middle of the old roof. So that's what I did.
Once the back of the roof was somewhat together, I decided to see how terrible the front sheetmetal was going to fit. That process would have gone really well if the mounts for the lower fender bolts still existed. Sadly they did not. So, I now I have to make those. Great.


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IL managers ready for action
Half of the International League's fourteen teams will be piloted by a new manager this season, marking the highest turnover since 2007 when eight clubs were led by new skippers.
While Bisons manager Tim Teufel is one of seven new managers making their International League debut, the league returns two of the five winningest active skippers in Minor League Baseball. Combined, Dave Miley (SWB) and Rick Sweet (LOU) have won over 9,000 minor league games as well as five Governors' Cup championships.
All four managers from last year's playoff run return for another shot to become the 79th manager to have his name etched on the IL's postseason trophy. That includes the 2010 Triple-A Baseball National Champions, Mike Sarbaugh of Columbus, fresh off of his recognition by Baseball America as the Minor League Manager of the Year in his first season directing Cleveland's affiliate. The 2010 International League Manager of the Year, Durham's Charlie Montoyo, looks to lead the Bulls to a fifth straight division title in as many years at the helm. Louisville's all-time winningest skipper, Rick Sweet, returns as his Bats seek to win the IL West for a fourth straight season. Also, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre's Dave Miley, owner of more victories than any other International League manager since taking over the reins of the SWB Yankees in 2007.
The returning playoff managers won't be the only familiar faces in International League dugouts this season. Gary Allenson will once again navigate the Norfolk Tides, as he has done in each of the club's first four years affiliated with Baltimore. Dave Brundage, won the 2007 Governors' Cup with Atlanta's affiliate in Richmond, is back for the third straight season of baseball in Gwinnett County. In Rochester, the Red Wings are bringing back their 2010 skipper, as Tom Nieto prepares for another run in the leagues northern division.
Just two of the league's new managers have previous Triple-A experience. Last year's Pacific Coast League Manager of the Year, Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg, takes over in Lehigh Valley where he will work for the organization that originally drafted him over three decades ago. Dean Treanor, takes over in Indianapolis after serving as the club's pitching coach last year, managed six seasons in the Pacific Coast League in Calgary and Albuquerque.
The other five managers will be making their debut at the Triple-A classification. Buffalo's Tim Teufel has put in seven seasons managing at the lower levels of the Mets organization before getting his chance to guide the Mets' top affiliate this year. Similarly, Arnie Beyeler gets his chance to lead Pawtucket after having managed Boston's Double-A Portland club for the past four seasons. Former Chiefs catcher Randy Knorr will be returning to Syracuse as the team's manager in 2011. In Toledo, Phil Nevin has been named skipper of the Mud Hens after just one season of managerial experience in the affiliated minors. The youngest International League manager this season will be Charlotte's Joe McEwing, who at 38 years old is less than four years removed from his last game as a player.
Buffalo – Tim Teufel
Charlotte – Joe McEwing
Columbus – Mike Sarbaugh
Durham – Charlie Montoyo
Gwinnett – Dave Brundage
Indianapolis – Dean Treanor
Lehigh Valley – Ryne Sandberg
Louisville – Rick Sweet
Norfolk – Gary Allenson
Pawtucket – Arnie Beyeler
Rochester – Tom Nieto
Scranton/WB – Dave Miley
Syracuse – Randy Norr
Toledo – Phil Nevin


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Popular contemporary Christian band Shane & Shane will open its Christmas tour, "Glory in the Highest," at Metheny Fieldhouse at Geneva College on Wednesday, December 2. The concert, which begins at 7 p.m., will also feature performances by Bethany Dillon and Phil Wickham.
Averaging 275 shows a year, Shane & Shane has been a leading contemporary Christian bands for over a decade. Songs such as "Vision of You", "Burn Us Up" and "Beg" are compelling devotions lapped up by the general college circuit. With tour dates and locations across the U.S., the band′s Christmas tour will begin right here in Beaver Falls and include nine other markets.
The acoustic guitar duo mark up over a half a million total records sold. Their newly released album Everything is Different was carefully created after a re-evaluation of their purpose as Christian worship performers. The ultimate theme of the album illustrates the underlying ministry of Shane & Shane, to tell people about Jesus.
Alongside Shane & Shane will be recording artists Bethany Dillon and Phil Wickham. Dillon began her recording debut at the age of 14. Now 21, Dillon is married to Shane & Shane member Shane Barnard. Her recent album Stop & Listen is centered on a woman′s desire to understand God′s grace. Wickham is planning to release his album Heaven and Earth in mid-November. Safe, the first single off Wickham′s album is about God′s faithfulness in a time of need.
Tickets for Glory in the Highest are on sale at www.itickets.com and are $10 for general admission and $15 for reserved seating. For group sales, call 724-630-0817.
The Geneva College Admissions Office is offering a free pre-concert pizza party for church youth groups and high school students at 5:30 p.m. Registration is required for the pizza party, which will be held in Skye Lounge of the Student Center, and enables youth groups to sit together at the concert. To register for the pizza party click here.
Geneva College is a comprehensive Christian college of the arts, sciences and professional studies. Founded in the tradition of the Reformed Christian faith, Geneva prepares students to serve Christ in all areas of society: work, family and the church. Geneva College′s philosophy of education is based on the Foundational Concepts of Christian Higher Education. Geneva is a founding member of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU).
© Geneva College | All rights reserved


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2013-02-12 — bloomberg.com
Manhattan condo developers, in a construction revival after the credit crisis, are raising prices on their unbuilt units as often as twice a month as buyers return from the housing slump to find there's little on the market. The borough's inventory of homes for sale fell to the lowest in at least 12 years in the fourth quarter, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel Inc. Sales, meanwhile, were the second-highest in a decade in 2012.
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Would you want a robot dispensing drugs for you and your patients? Odds are, that's long since been the case, to one extent or another:
Robotics have been used to help dispense medication in some pharmacies since the 1990s and robots for delivering medication have been used in hospitals for a decade.
And even before that, machines have been used for decades to count pills for dispensing – Such technology is now the standard in more than 30,000 pharmacies worldwide.
But will technology ever replace pharmacists completely? Continue reading "Why Automated Pharmacies Will Never Replace Pharmacists"


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Busy, multitasking parents are at risk for making medication mistakes, as they may not remember their child's prescribed dose or may not know how to measure the dose correctly.
According to a study in the August 2014 Pediatrics, "Unit of Measurement Used and Parent Medication Dosing Errors," published online July 14, medication errors are common.
The study found that 39.4 percent of parents incorrectly measured the dose they intended, and ultimately 41.1 percent made an error in measuring what their doctor had prescribed. Part of the reason why parents may be confused regarding how to dose prescribed medications accurately is that a range of units of measurement, like milliliters, teaspoons and tablespoons, may be used interchangeably to describe their child's dose as part of counseling by their doctor or pharmacist, or when the dose is shown on their prescription or medication bottle label.
Due to concerns about these issues, use of the milliliter as the single standard unit of measurement for pediatric liquid medications has been suggested as a strategy to reduce medication errors by organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices.
In this study, compared to parents who used milliliter-only units, parents who used teaspoon or tablespoon units to describe their child's dose of liquid medicine had twice the odds of making a mistake in measuring the intended dose. Parents who described their dose using teaspoons or tablespoons were more likely to use a kitchen spoon to dose, rather than a standardized instrument like an oral syringe, dropper, or cup. Even those who used standardized instruments were still more likely to make a dosing error if they reported their child's dose using teaspoon or tablespoon units. Parent mix up of terms like milliliter, teaspoon and tablespoon contribute to more than 10,000 poison center calls each year.
Study authors conclude that adopting a milliliter-only unit of measurement can reduce confusion and decrease medication errors, especially for parents with low health literacy or limited English proficiency.


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On her first day back to work after a four-month maternity leave, Amy Vachon woke at dawn to nurse her daughter, Maia. Then she fixed herself a healthful breakfast, pumped a bottle of breast milk for the baby to drink later in the day, kissed the little girl goodbye and headed for the door.
But before she left, there was one more thing. She reached over to her husband, Marc, who would not be going to work that day in order to be home with Maia, and handed him the List. That's what they call it now, when they revisit this moment, which they do fairly often. The List. It was nothing extraordinary in fact it would be familiar to many new moms. A large yellow Post-it on which she had scribbled the "how much," "how long" and "when" of Maia's napping and eating.
"I knew her routines and was sharing that with Marc," Amy recalls.
She also remembers what he did next. Gently but deliberately, he ripped the paper square in half and crumbled the pieces into a ball.
"I got the message," Amy says.
That message was one the Vachons had agreed on from the evening they met, though they were clearly still tinkering with the details. They would not be the kind of parents their parents had been the mother-knows-best mold. Nor the kind their friends were the "involved" dad married to the stressed-out working mom. Nor even, as Marc put it, "the stay-at-home dad, who is cooed at for his sensitivity but who is as isolated and financially vulnerable as the stay-at-home-mom."
Instead, they would create their own model, one in which they were parenting partners. Equals and peers. They would work equal hours, spend equal time with their children, take equal responsibility for their home. Neither would be the keeper of the mental to-do lists; neither of their careers would take precedence. Both would be equally likely to plan a birthday party or know that the car needs oil or miss work for a sick child or remember (without prompting) to stop at the store for diapers and milk. They understood that this would mean recalibrating their career ambitions, and probably their income, but what they gained, they believed, would be more valuable than what they lost.
There are Marcs and Amys scattered throughout the country, and the most interesting thing about them is that they are so very interesting. What they suggest, after all, is simple. Gender should not determine the division of labor at home. It's a message consistent with nearly every major social trend of the past three decades women entering the work force, equality between the sexes, the need for two incomes to pay the bills, even courts that favor shared custody after divorce. And it is what many would agree is fair, even ideal. Yet it is anything but the norm.
"Women entering the work force changed the work force far more dramatically than it changed things back home," says Jessica DeGroot, whose senior thesis for college 27 years ago was about this conundrum and who, as the founder and president of the ThirdPath Institute, coaches families wanting a shared lifestyle. "When I graduated, I thought things would change, if not for me, then for my children." Her daughter, Jocelyn, is now 17, and her son, Julian, is 11.
"If you gave people a survey they would probably check all the answers about how things should be equal," says Francine M. Deutsch, a psychology professor at Mount Holyoke and the author of "Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works." But when they get to the part where "you ask them how things work for them day to day," she says, "ideal does not match reality."
Deutsch has labeled the ideal "equally shared parenting," a term the Vachons have embraced. DeGroot prefers "shared care," because "shared parenting" is used to describe custody arrangements in a divorce, and while "equal" would be nice, it is a bar that might be too high for some families to even try to clear. Whatever you call it, the fact that it has to have a name is a most eloquent statement of both the promise and the constraints facing families today.
"Why do we have to call it anything?" Amy asks.
Marc adds, "Why isn't this just called parenting?"
Marc Vachon was one of six children, raised in a working-class Massachusetts town with a high crime rate and, for a few bad months, a nightly curfew. His mother stayed home, his father worked for a small manufacturing company and neither had a college education. "My father's job was a means to an end," he told me when I first met him and Amy at their home last fall, "a way to put food on his family's table."
Marc paid his way through the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and then set out with his degree in mechanical engineering (and later an M.B.A.) to earn a lot of money. Working on the management track at an electric company, "I was playing the game," he remembers. "I was working 60 hours a week. I bought a fancy sports car."
But a few years in, he came to see that he only used that car to drive to and from work. When the human-resources department sent out a memo outlining a reduced-hours plan, he applied. His manager seemed surprised that a single man was asking for part-time status, but eventually he agreed.
For six months he worked three eight-hour days, at a reduced salary. When his temporary "leave" ended, he had to go back full time, and he stayed at the company for only another year. "Once I got the sniff of other interests in my life," he says, "there was no going back into the box." He trained himself in computers and took a job doing information and technology-support, ultimately working five days a week, 7 a.m. to noon. When his bosses offered a promotion, he agreed to work his personal version of full time: 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., with no lunch, at a big jump in pay. Periodically he would be offered a management position, which he turned down because "you can't work part time as a manager."
The only downside to this laid-back worldview was its chilling effect on his romantic life. The women he was meeting, he says wryly, did not aspire to say, "My husband works at the help desk."
The last of those women was Amy, and they found each other eight years ago on matchmaker.com, when they were both 37. Their first date was on a dreary March evening, and over dinner they learned each other's stories.
Amy's began with a childhood in Ann Arbor, Mich., shattered at the age of 8 when her father, a brilliant but troubled professor of biochemistry at the University of Michigan, committed suicide. Her mother, who had been a lab assistant until Amy was born, was forced back to work. Her "chemistry skills were rusty beyond repair," Amy says. She eventually found a job as preschool teacher.
Watching her mother "get up each morning to face another day as the only parent" made Amy determined "to assume full responsibility for myself, because anything can happen at any time, and to share the entirety of my life with a true partner, because I saw how hard and sometimes empty it was for my mother to play all the parts alone."
Like Marc, Amy also paid her own way through school, getting a doctor of pharmacy degree from the University of Michigan and starting a career as a clinical pharmacist. She married at 20 and then divorced at 31 because she was not ready to have children. All the married mothers she knew seemed nearly as alone in their roles as her own mother had been.
She and Marc talked for hours that first night. At the end of dinner, they split the check. Amy went home wary, thinking that "this guy was too good to be true." Marc woke up a friend and announced he had met the woman he would marry.
Their wedding was in September 2001, and they moved into a house with a picket fence that Amy bought a few years earlier. Maia was born in July 2002, and during her pregnancy, Amy kept thinking: It's real now. There's no turning back. If this partnership promise doesn't work, I'll be saddled with all I feared.
Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women. Any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men.
The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin's National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner's work.
But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.
The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. "Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one," says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.
"And the most sadly comic data is from my own research," he adds, which show that in married couples "where she has a job and he doesn't, and where you would anticipate a complete reversal, even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework."
Housework, in this context, is defined as things like cooking, cleaning, yardwork and home repairs. Child care is a whole separate category one that is even more skewed. The social scientist's definition of child care "is attending to the physical needs of a child dressing a child, cooking for a child, feeding and cleaning them," Blair says. It doesn't include the fun stuff, like playing and reading and kissing good night.
Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. As with housework, that ratio does not change as much as you would expect when you account for who brings home a paycheck. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom's average drops to 11 and Dad's goes up to 3. Lest you think this is at least a significant improvement over our parents and grandparents, not so fast. "The most striking part," Blair says, "is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago."
Back when women had to tend fires to cook and put clothes through the wringer and then onto the clothesline, they spent 50 hours a week on housework and men spent 20. (A ratio of 2.5 to 1.) And back in the 1950s, when no one was even bothering to measure how many hours men spent on child care because it was thought to be negligible, the average mother spent 12 to 15 hours caring for her children the same as they spend today.
Which does not mean women are happy about this. There are plenty of studies of that too, and according to Blair's research, 58 percent of women say the division of labor in modern families is not fair to them. (Eleven percent of men, in turn, feel that the division of labor in their own marriage is unfair to them.) When couples argue, it is most likely to be about children, money or the division of labor. "Those are always the Top 3," Blair says. "The order changes around, but the topics don't."
Why then does the status quo continue? "You assume people will look at relationships rationally, and if there is such inequity and such a sense of unfairness, they would end it," Blair says. "When you look at this rationally, it is very difficult to understand why things are the way they are."
The obstacles to equity are enmeshed and interwoven, almost impossible to separate from one another. Deutsch did a study of 150 couples who tried sharing to various degrees, and her results suggest that social norms play a large part in why so few marriages are truly equal. Choices are made in a context. It is rare that you choose something you have never seen. So men who do more around the house than their fathers and spend as much time with children as their neighbors feel that they are doing their share and their wives feel grateful to have such involved partners. That is why the single-most-predictive factor of how equal a couple will be, Deutsch says, is how equal their friends are.
Messages, loud and soft, direct and oblique, reinforce contextual choice. "A pregnant woman and her husband," Deutsch says, "how many people have asked her if she is going to go back to work after the baby? How many have asked him?"
Looked at through that lens, what seems like an external institutional barrier to equal sharing becomes something else entirely. He makes more money than she does, so of course she should be the one to step back her career; she has a more flexible line of work than he does, so of course she should be the one to work part time. Those may seem like choices, but they have their roots in social norms.
"They weren't born in those jobs; they chose them," Deutsch says. What decision tree, planted decades earlier and steeped in unspoken assumption, she wonders, led him to be a surgeon and her to be a social worker? What led her to work in a field where four-day weeks are common and him to work where they are unheard of?
"It's a chicken-and-egg thing," she says. "Even when men and women start off with equal jobs, they make decisions along the way to emphasize career or not, to trade brutal hours for high salary or not."
She goes on to suggest that the perception of flexibility is itself a matter of perception. In her study, she was struck by how often the wife's job was seen by both spouses as being more flexible than the husband's. By way of example she describes two actual couples, one in which he is a college professor and she is a physician and one in which she is a college professor and he is a physician. In either case, Deutsch says "both the husband and wife claimed the man's job was less flexible."
She has a similar response to those who say that they would love to share equally but that one parent almost always the wife has parenting or housekeeping standards that the other cannot (or will not) meet. Dad dresses the children wrong and diapers them wrong and sends inadequate thank-you notes and leaves the house a mess. This may look like a cranky power struggle, Deutsch says, but the dynamic, which sociologists call "gatekeeping," also reflects social pressures.
Women, she says, know that the world is watching and judging. If the toddler's clothes don't match, if the thank-you notes don't get written, if the house is a shambles, it is seen as her fault, making her overly invested in the outcome. Many women will also admit to the frisson of superiority, of a particular form of gratification, when they are the more competent parent, the one who can better soothe the tears in the middle of the night.
Deutch says that equality in parenting should be every couple's goal. Yet, as we all know, the nuances of relationships are complicated, built on foundations that even we may not see until we try to alter them. If your partner's ambition is what attracted you in the first place and if his/her decision to dilute that ambition would make you think less of him/her, then this is not for you. If part of the security and warmth you feel from marriage is because of the familiarity and tradition of husband and wife roles, this won't work for you, either. And if one of you is dead set against it or if both of you think the required regimentation that comes with equal sharing just isn't a way to live, then Deutsch probably won't persuade you. So go with your comfort level. But understand where that feeling of comfort comes from.
When Jo and Tim Pannabecker first met, their work was at the center of their lives. They knew they would not get rich trying to better the lot of the poor in Africa, but they did think they could change the world.
Jo, born in New Zealand, was working in Chad, researching how to grow crops in the dry season, and Tim was stateside coordinating the effort of development workers like Jo. They were both in their early 30s, having put off marriage for their peripatetic careers, and Jo in particular was worried that having children would table her dreams. "I was scared that if we had kids, I would be left home with the cooking, the cleaning and the children," she says.
Jo had not yet put those fears aside when she married Tim in 2001. Living in Lancaster, Pa. (where their employer, the Mennonite Central Committee, was based), they tried sharing all housework equally so that they didn't slip into the "wife as caretaker" pattern, and they got a dog and a cat "as our first step toward children," Jo says.
"It was a test," Tim explains. "We would have to decide who would take the dog out at night, who would walk her early in the morning, who could work with vomit."
A test he passed, his wife says: "The dog was the only evidence I had that Tim would change his schedule to accommodate the dog. That was my intellectual bridge, into 'I think I can trust this.' "
While pregnant with their first child in 2003, Jo read a short description in a woman's magazine about ThirdPath, and the couple signed on to be coached in the ways of shared parenting. Jessica DeGroot and her husband, Jeff Lutzner, lead the life DeGroot teaches (they have done so for all 18 years of their marriage), and they keep track of who is home and who is working with the help of a color-coded computer chart. Lutzner's schedule is blue, DeGroot's is pink, child care from nearby grandparents is purple and time at school is gray.
To Jo and Tim, the idea of the chart was concrete evidence that sharing was more than just talk. "We saw it could be done," he says. "It's like a puzzle. You have a certain number of hours during the day, and you decide who does what when."
At about the same time in a Boston suburb, Bill and Alexandra Taussig were also learning about ThirdPath and shared parenting. They met as undergraduates at Cornell, stayed together while she was at business school and he was at law school and were fiercely committed to work.
"My career is extremely important to me," Alexandra says, referring to her job in marketing at a large financial-services firm. "It's a big part of how I define myself." When their first child was born in 1997, "it did not occur to me to opt out or go on the mommy track or take an offramp," she says. "I wanted a career and wanted to be a good mother, but I thought it was up to me to figure it all out." She did as she had assumed she would do took a four-month maternity leave and then returned to the office on a four-day schedule.
Instead, it was Bill who did the unexpected. His firm had a gender-neutral policy offering three months of paid parental leave, and he asked for one. Looking back, he thinks he was responding as much to a desire to spend time with his son as to a gnawing realization that he wasn't interested in the intense life of those who would make partner.
When the leave was over, he didn't want to go back to his 60-hour weeks, but he didn't want to become a stay-at-home parent either. "The work is very important," he says. With a baby at home, he learned that sometimes he couldn't "wait to get back to work because there's sanity. It can be an oasis."
The couple hired a nanny, and Bill switched jobs a few times to a clerkship for a judge, to a solo practice, to a smaller firm looking for the right fit. Alexandra rose through the ranks at her company, and after their second son was born in 2000, she continued working four days a week. Her schedule every Friday off, spent with the children appealed to Bill, who took a job in the compliance department of his wife's employer, though it would be a while before he would get up the nerve to ask for a four-day week too.
In 2004, when Jo and Tim's son was born, Alexandra was pregnant for the third time (she would have another boy), and Bill came across a ThirdPath conference about "Creating Work-Life Balance in the Law." That was the first he knew that what he was trying to fashion had a name. Like Jo and Tim, he was reassured and inspired by DeGroot's orderly charts, and while he did not go as far as making his own, he did adopt her worldview.
Jo and Tim did draft a chart. After her three-month maternity leave, their schedule worked like this, as Tim explains: "I would get up extra early and head to work, and Jo would be home until later in the morning and then take him to day care. She would leave work again at lunch for an hour to nurse him. I would take half a lunch and leave work by 2:30 or 3, pick Seth up and take him home. Jo would stay at work until 6."
They agreed to share chores at home too, but their varying definitions of "done" soon made things unequal. "He would do the laundry," Jo says, "but he was so slow about it that I took it back. His level of alertness to mess is quite different than mine. I see dirt two or three days before he does." So she took back a lot of the cleaning too.
Their work-home time was evenly divided for about a year, and then in the summer of 2005, their daughter, Kate, was born. Jo tried to envision a schedule that would account for the demands of two children under the age of 2. "I realized what it would take to get all of us out of the house by a certain time in order for us to keep the life we had . . . ," she says, trailing off. She calculated that her take-home salary, which was substantially lower than her husband's, would barely pay for child care. She took a hard look at the satisfaction she got from her office job, which was nil compared with the joy she had found while planting crops in Chad. "If I could get a job that would pay me $50,000 a year, that would rival or compete with Tim's . . . ," she says, letting that thought trail off as well.
Jo would not disagree with Deutch's point that she had a role in creating that inequity choosing to major in international rural development, with little practical career application, while her husband obtained two master's degrees, one in counseling and the other in college student personnel, with better job potential. Even marrying a man who was ahead of her on the career ladder, and therefore likely to remain ahead of her, was a choice. But there comes a point where the origin of the cards you hold becomes irrelevant, and you have to play the hand you are dealt.
Jo left the work force completely. Now she is home full time, doing nearly all the cooking, child care and cleaning exactly the life she feared a few years ago when she returned from Africa and married Tim. While there are "a lot of days" that she thinks "this isn't what I signed on for," for the most part she is far more content with her choice than she could have predicted before the children were born.
Contrast their lives with those of Bill and Alexandra. What Bill took from his involvement with ThirdPath was that he had the same right to flexibility as his wife, and he requested a four-day schedule. While hers was granted automatically, his met with resistance, and eventually he "just took it," he said, by negotiating a paternity leave that he would parcel out one day per week for 10 weeks. When the 10 weeks were up, he kept taking Fridays off.
A year later, his somewhat amenable manager was replaced by "the kind of guy who came in early and stayed late and had a stay-at-home wife" and who called each employee in for a schedule review. Bill was asked to return to a full-time schedule.
And that was how he worked until Alexandra, who has always had a more senior position than her husband, was offered a new job within the company. That job would require a five-day week, at least at the start. She made it clear to Bill that it was his turn to spend an extra weekday with their children.
Bill was able to negotiate a 90 percent plan every other Friday off in part, he thinks, because the company didn't want to risk losing both of them. Eventually Alexandra took on that schedule, too, and now they alternate being home on Fridays. The 10 percent salary cut that they each take is a price they consider worth paying, understanding that this is an option available only to those who can make ends meet in the first place.
They are each equally likely to plan birthday parties or put the children to bed or be the parent who goes along on the school field trip. They have noticed that whoever is home on a Friday becomes the boys' "favorite" parent the one they call when they are hurt or want a bedtime story for the rest of the weekend, which they see as the payoff for making sure that Bill is equally immersed in and responsible for their lives.
Less equal is their allotment of household chores. Alexandra shops for groceries. Bill deals with the cars. She calls the baby sitter. He drives the baby sitter home. He has gotten better at putting birthday invitations on the calendar, but she is the one who remembers to buy the gift. Most of all, she keeps the literal and mental lists. "I know that Teddy missed his dentist appointment and needs another appointment, and that was three months ago, and it hasn't happen yet, but at least I am tracking it," Alexandra says.
The keeping of those lists, they agree, makes her the defacto C.E.O. of the Taussig family. "Ideally that should be 50-50," Bill says, "but Alex is just better at that. Also, outsiders expect her to do it we both gave the teachers our e-mail addresses, but the teachers only e-mail her." (But of course, says Deutch. There's the world getting in the way again.)
Periodically they make an effort to rebalance, but it feels forced and accusatory, "too much like keeping score," as Bill puts it.
"I'd prefer to have it unequal than spend all our time measuring," Alexandra says.
"It's a 60-40 split, with her doing the 60," Bill says. "I am aiming to bring my percentage up to 42."
For Amy and Marc Vachon, 42 percent is not enough. After Maia was born, they negotiated part-time schedules, which turned out to be the easy part. Amy worked four days a week, Monday through Thursday; Marc worked three 10-hour days, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
The division of work led naturally to the division of child care. On the days he went to the office, Marc would leave early and bike to work (having only one car, despite two commutes, is one way they are able to afford life on two part-time salaries), while Amy did the entire morning child routine. On Monday and Wednesday, when she worked too, she would take Maia to family day care across the street from their house. On Friday, she and Maia would spend the day together. On Tuesday and Thursday, Amy would sleep a little later and leave Maia in Marc's care. If Maia got sick on a Monday, they agreed in advance that Marc would take off from work, and Amy would do the same if the sick day was a Wednesday. It was a schedule that continued after Theo was born three years later.
Less seamless, though, was the division of everything but child care because they had lapsed into unequal patterns during their parenting leaves. Amy, the planner of the duo, spent those months reading every child-care book she could find and hating most of them. "Those books don't mention men," she says.
But while she disagreed with what she read, she was learning nonetheless. How to structure a nap schedule. How to introduce solid foods. How to soothe a colicky baby. "We had fallen into the trap," she says, "of master and apprentice." Marc, despite all their intentions and expectations, "was settling into the helper role."
The problem made itself clear on the morning Amy went back to work and in that clarifying moment handed her husband the List. She was feeling anxious and vulnerable when she scribbled the schedule, she says. He ripped it not in anger (because Marc is the laid-back type who rarely gets angry), "but he clearly was telling me to butt out of his day with Maia."
Other couples might have resigned themselves to inequity, redefining it as choice, but Marc and Amy fought back. If they were to avoid skirmishes over their parenting standards and if they were to avoid defaulting to Amy as the expert, they would have to decide what those parenting standards were. Marc explains: "Did we want to work toward a set nap schedule? Yes. Did our daughter's outfits have to match perfectly? No. Did we need to take the diaper bag when our daughter came with us to the grocery store? Not necessarily."
They also had to give the other the freedom to do things the "wrong" way i.e., not "my" way. In the hours before bed, they decided, Maia would be the responsibility of the parent who would be tucking her in that night. If it was Marc's turn and he wanted to roughhouse and "party in the tub," Amy would bite her tongue and not object. She would not point out that this might not be the best way to ease a baby toward sleep. She would not point out that the books suggest evening calm. After all, if Maia was too worked up, that would be Marc's problem, wouldn't it?
That settled, they moved on to the details of housework. Like Jo Pannabecker, Amy feels happier and more centered when her house is clean enough for unexpected company. Marc thinks fretting about cleaning is "an undue burden." In many homes, as in the Pannabecker home, the result would be that the wife cleaned to her standards. But in an equally shared home, what is the solution? That he clean to her standards? That she lower her own?
Each question led to another. How often should the dishes be done? What constitutes "doing the laundry": Washing it? Folding it? Putting it away in the drawer? How often do we need to vacuum, mow the lawn or dust the shelves? Does the litterbox need to be scooped every day or is once a week acceptable?
Marc's first reaction was to point out that he was far more of a contributor to home and hearth than any man he knew. Amy told him à la Francine Deutsch that other men were beside the point.
Slowly, consensus emerged. The cooking is done by whoever is home from work that day. The laundry is divided in half, with Marc doing the darks and Amy doing the lights. And yes, it has to be put away. Marc pays most of the bills, because he enjoys it and Amy does not. Ditto for mowing the lawn. Amy, in turn, buys nearly all the clothes for the children, an activity she loves and would feel "cheated" if she couldn't do. And thank-you notes to Marc's family? Amy has agreed that if Marc doesn't want to write them, they won't get written, and she will stop feeling as if his relatives are somehow blaming her.
Sure, some of their tasks would fall along traditional gender lines. The point, they say, is not to spit at tradition for the heck of it but rather to think things through instead of defaulting to gender. The result of all their talking, Amy says, is that "there is no nagging, passive-aggressive forgetting, feigned incompetence, unspoken resentment or honey-do lists."
There is one pocket of American parenting in which equality is the norm or, at least, the mutually-agreed-upon goal. Same-sex couples cannot default to gender when deciding who does what at home. How these parents make their decisions, therefore, sheds some light on why married men and women act the way they do. They are the exceptions that both prove and challenge the rules.
"Heterosexual couples can learn from gay couples about sharing housework and child care," says Esther D. Rothblum, a professor in the women's studies department of San Diego State University whose comparative study of the relationships of 342 couples lesbian, gay, heterosexual was published in the journal Developmental Psychology in January. "They are good role models."
One standard research questionnaire for looking at the division of household labor has been a survey known as "Who Does What?" created by Philip and Carolyn Cowan, both emeritus professors at U.C. Berkeley. Respondents are asked to rate "How It Is Now" and "How I Would Like It to Be" in dozens of household and child-care tasks. Created with straight couples in mind, it was adapted by Charlotte Patterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, for lesbian parents. The study found little of the inequity that shows up when heterosexuals fill it out. (There has not been the same research attention paid to gay men raising children because only recently have gays begun adopting or hiring surrogates in large enough numbers to support a study.)
Which is not to say that lesbian mothers do not argue often over child care. But, says Dr. Nanette Gartrell, a psychiatrist with the University of California at San Francisco who has been studying lesbian families for 22 years, the arguments among those in her study sample tend to be the opposite of heterosexual couples'. While "straight parents get into the blame game about who is shirking responsibility," she says, "lesbian moms bicker about not getting enough time with the kids," a dynamic that can be intensified in families in which one of the women gives birth to the baby.
Harlyn Aizley, mother of a 6-year-old daughter, describes the moment that her then-partner, Faith Soloway, first took their newborn in her arms in the delivery room. "Just moments after I gave birth," Aizley writes in the anthology "Confessions of the Other Mother: Nonbiological Lesbian Moms Tell All," "Faith scooped up the baby, cooed into her squishy newborn face and said: 'Hello there. I'm your mommy.' I wanted to kill her. Faith, that is. I wanted to be Mommy, the only Mommy."
Where a birth mother can feel possessive, the nonbiological mother (or co-mother, eliminating the negative vibe) can feel left out. For lesbian parents, as with straight biological parents, breast feeding means one partner has an additional, intimate, way to bond. In Gartrell's study, 64 percent of co-mothers acknowledged feelings of jealousy and competitiveness around bonding and child-rearing issues. "Whenever [the child] is tired or sick or cranky, [the child] wants the breast," said one co-mother, quoted by Gartrell. "I sometimes get upset that I can't soothe [the child] in the same way that [the birth mother] can."
Aizley says that while she felt possessive, her partner in fact felt excluded, referring often to "the holy trinity baby, Mommy, breast." As a result, she theorizes, Soloway became "more like a working dad, and I was the default mom."
Most lesbian couples work hard to return to equal balance, however, Gartrell says. And how do they do that? More or less the way Marc and Amy Vachon did. They trade off breast and bottle feedings, share bathtime and bedtime rituals and talk out the conflicts. "We talked, and we talked, and we talked, and we talked," says Dorea Vierling-Claassen of feeling like the odd-woman-out when her wife, Angela, was breast-feeding their daughter, who is almost 2 years old.
"We developed a wonky theory," Dorea says of all that talking. "You need a rabid N.G.P. nongestational parent. The N.G.P. has to push if you are going to get an equal relationship."
All this deliberate sharing means that 75 percent of couples in Gartrell's study considered themselves "co-parents." The other 25 percent said they consider the birth mother the primary parent, but that the day-to-day tasks of child care are nonetheless equally shared.
Who does what, lesbian couples say, is instead determined by personality and logistics. "Gaeta tends to be the soccer mom, the coordinator of the sports, while I am the coordinator of music lessons," says Dr. Audrey Koh, an ob-gyn in San Francisco whose sperm donor was a close relative of her partner, Gaeta, so that both mothers would share a genetic link to their two children. "Gaeta keeps mental track of the children's shoe sizes, shops for their clothes," Koh says, "but when they are sick in the middle of the night, they come for me."
Lesbian couples also have a more equal division of housework. Rothblum found that it is only heterosexual mothers who do the lion's share of housework for the family each week between 11 and 20 hours for her survey respondents. Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.
Both partners in lesbian couples seem to make equal professional sacrifices in exchange for this equality. That does not mean there are no "traditional" relationships Koh works long hours and earns more money as a doctor, while Gaeta, a naturalist for the local park district, earns less and is home more. Similarly, Aizley's partner worked full time while she was home with their daughter for several years. (The couple split up about two years ago; Aizley has gone back to work and says Soloway is still very involved in their child's life.) But more common is the couple in which both women "typically work shorter hours or have declined career opportunities so they can be more available at home," Gartrell says.
Their work schedules look far more like those of Marc and Amy Vachon or Jessica DeGroot and Jeff Lutzner than like a "typical" family. Patterson found that while heterosexual fathers work an average of 47 hours for pay each week and heterosexual mothers work 24, the average for lesbian mothers, both biological and nonbiological, is about 35. Added together, both sets of families are working a total of slightly more or less than 70 hours; they just divide the work differently.
It is not clear, however, why lesbian couples split parenting more equally. "Is it because you take gender out of the equation or because women are better at sharing or because parents of the same gender see things more similarly?" Gartrell asks. "We don't know," and won't know, she says, until there is equivalent data on gay men who become parents.
In the absence of statistics, however, Rothblum's informed guess is that it is the last of these reasons. "If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, it's really a miracle that hetero couples manage to ever make things work," she says.
Bill Taussig, the lawyer married to the marketing executive, was recently promoted to a vice president of his company, giving him some confidence that his 90 percent schedule will not sideline his career. He has also joined the board of ThirdPath. "I am a poster child for being equally engaged with your children and still succeeding at work," he says. As far as the chores go, he adds, "we outsource a lot."
Mia Pannabecker was born last May, which means that Jo is home caring for three children under age 4. That home is now in Bluffton, Ohio, where Tim grew up, where his parents still live and where he works in the development office at Bluffton University.
He is at the office from 8 until 5 and travels often. The children spend a lot of time with their grandparents. Jo is now pursuing a degree in dietetics, the science of food, hoping to eventually establish a career in nutrition.
She says that she is pleased that she tried equal parenting but that she is also fine with the fact that it was not right for her family at least not right now. Yes, she misses work, she says, and yes, she still wonders how she became "the happy homemaker," but sometimes you take the least stressful route for the family as a whole, and this seems to be it.
"The question should not be, Is it all exactly equal, but, What is best for all of us as a group right now?" she says. "If we decided it's really important that we are 50-50 on everything, we would work on that. If we decide it's really important that we be close to family, then we work on that."
Rather than thinking in terms of equality day to day, she says, she has begun to strive for equality over the course of a working life. Before getting married, she and Tim agreed that they would live, for several years at least, in New Zealand, where she plans to go back to work. Maybe then, she says, Tim will stay home.
A year ago, Marc's department was eliminated. At first, he wasn't worried. He and Amy deliberately live well below their means, so their necessary bills can be paid with one salary. He spent a relaxed summer buffered by a separation package, enjoying time with the children and working on their Web site, equallysharedparenting.com, because he and Amy wanted to spread the word.
As the months passed, the dynamic of home changed. Amy started letting Marc take charge of the children every morning while she took a "long leisurely shower." While she was at work, he did most of the cooking and the grocery shopping. He began to feel frustrated with the imbalance. She, in turn, began to feel guilty that she wasn't having one-on-one time with Maia and Theo. She also felt stressed. "I had guilt that I wasn't doing enough around the house, and also I could understand what a primary breadwinner guy would feel, especially if his wife was complaining," she says.
The solution? They divided the days as if Marc were working. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he left the house early and went for a bike ride while she had her usual morning time with the kids.
As he sent out résumés, Marc struggled with how much of his tale to tell upfront. At first he bared all, stating in his cover letter that he had been working reduced hours for several years and that he planned to continue with that schedule. No one responded.
Next he took the information out of his letter, waiting to raise the question of schedule in person. That led to many interviews, but when he asked about a three-day-a-week option, friendly conversations became frosty, and he did not hear from the companies again.
In February, he got a lead on a job that looked like a perfect fit. It was advertised as a full-time position, and he said nothing about hours in his cover letter, during phone interviews or even at the interview. He waited until he received a firm offer, which was far lower for 40 hours a week than he earned for 27 hours at his previous job.
He used that as an opening, but was told the job required at least 55 hours a week. He turned it down.
In April, he had another hot lead, and again he kept his goals to himself. When an offer was made, he replied that he needed to come in and talk in person about some details. Before he left home that Monday morning, he and Amy agreed that he would turn down the job if the schedule was not negotiable. "There was a point where I would take a full-time job, because I have a responsibility to my family and to my kids' future," he says. "We weren't at that point yet. We were close, but we weren't there."
His prospective bosses at the marketing firm of Chadwick Martin Bailey were surprised, but they didn't say no. Instead, they asked what schedule he had in mind. He offered two choices: four eight-hour days, which would be his preference so he would still have a full day off to be with the children, or a five-day week, with three days working 9 to 5 and two days working 8 to 12.
They chose the five-day option, a 32-hour week with a 32-hour salary and an agreement that he will always carry a BlackBerry and be available in emergencies.
Now he bikes to work every day, and when he leaves on his two short days, at least five hours earlier than everyone else, he must walk through the center of the office, dressed for cycling. There is no way to hide the fact that he is leaving. Not that he wants to he's proud of how he has constructed his life and work but he sees no reason to rub it in either. So he has learned to walk on the sides of his biking clamps, making the noise a little less noticeable on the polished wood floor as he heads out the door.


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Roundup of SAG Awards 2012 News
That's a Wrap — All the Fashion, Winner, and Celeb Action From the SAG Awards
Red-carpet fashion and beauty coverage:
- Who gets your pick for best dressed?
- Sexy slits and cutouts rocked the red carpet
- Vibrant colors were a big trend on the carpet
- Which actress rocked your favorite sexy slit?
- Seems like silver and gray were the colors of the evening!
- Headband braids were all the rage
- Find out who wore what
Catch up on other arrivals fun you may have missed:
- In case you missed it, check out our show from the red carpet!
- It was almost a double date for George and Stacy with Brad and Angelina!
- Aww — look back at the couples of yesterday at the SAG Awards past
- All the hot couples on the SAG red carpet
- Check out all the hotties in their bow ties
- There were lots of talented ladies catching up with their hilarious pals
- Tons more highlights from the show!
The list of all the winners, and more press room fun:
- See everyone who turned out for the show
- The Modern Family cast jokes abut fame and underwear in the press room
- A full list of SAG Awards winners
- Viola Davis gets support from The Help girls in the press room
- Alec Baldwin jokes about Words With Friends in the press room