A few recent adventures of 5-year-old Lucy. WARNING: dead bird.

I’m pretty sure this is her first original pun/joke: I slipped and fell on the stairs and Lucy said, “it’s a good thing you’re wearing your slippers.”

On October 25, 2009 while sitting in the backyard eating pizza with the neighbors, Lucy looked up and proudly grinned, “my tooth fell out!”  Moya and I scrambled to figure out what the tooth fairy would do (the result: a pretty marble and a $5 bill under Lucy’s pillow).

While trick or treating on Halloween evening, Lucy saw an empty bowl by a door (with a sign that said “have a cold, can’t come to the door, help yourself”) and poured half her bag of collected candy into the empty bowl.

Trick or treat!

There have been 2 dead birds on the street at the corner of Collingwood/18th recently, a corner that we often pass by on our walk to/from school.  The first was on the corner for several days and inspected daily by Lucy who was very concerned about how the bird died and whether or not someone would bury it and whether or not it hurt when it died.  It was eventually gone with a few feathers left behind and then another dead bird was added to the corner.  Lucy stomped her feet one morning while looking at the remains of the birds and declared, “I’m done with birds dying! I don’t want any more birds to die!” Then she picked up some of the feathers from the dead bird and put it on the ground near a tree because “the ground is soft and comfy for the bird, the street is hard.”

Lucy’s generally an advocate of kindness to all animals and also an inspector of all animal and insect death that she discovers.  Holding Lucy’s hand while she leans close to a dead bird in the crosswalk reminds me of the times in my childhood when our cows were butchered.  My younger sister wanted some parts of the cow so she could inspect and dissect them.  I had to hold her hand while she walked out to the field to ask the butcher for the eyes, or whatever gross dead animal part.  She was shy. I was brave but queasy.  Lucy’s shy.  I’m still brave and queasy.

Some thoughts that Lucy expressed during the year when she was 4 years old.  Leopard and Kitty are stuffed animals and also Lucy’s invisible animal friends who are a sage source of wisdom and advice, as in “Leopard told me …” or “Kitty knows …” or “Leopard already did that …” and Wanda is our elderly cat.

November 2008
“I have a date with Leopard. We had a fight. We’re going to talk.”

“If you’re zero years old then you’re just a seed that is put in someone’s tummy”

“I can’t take naps at home because my [stuffed] animals are talking and wake me up”

(looking at leaf on sidewalk) “That’s a footprint of a dinosaur made out of a leaf”

(in car with music playing) “My feet are singing”

(smelling the air) “My nose is stinky”

“Since I have food in my tummy I am not having a sad day”

“Did you notice I can jump and twirl my arms at the same time?”

When asked “Do you know how much I love you?” She answers, “yes, five.”

(near harrison/20th in the mission district in San Francisco) “This would be a good place to live because you can see the sun setting and it’s really beautiful.”

February 2009

“A long time ago, before I had a momma and mommy, it was just me and Leopard and Wanda and we were saving pigeons.”

Lucy sits down at dinner table and notices I made her a “cocktail” (fizzy juice with a maraschino cherry) and says, “You didn’t have to make me a cocktail, Mommy. I didn’t ask you for one. Thank you so much for making me a cocktail.”

She put the cap on her scissors and said, “Look at me! Now I can run with scissors because the cap is on and I’m protected”

March 2009

(after her great-grandmother died) “Dead people aren’t as fun because you can’t show them your toys or play with them, you can only remember them, not as fun.”

“I’m tired of running but I don’t want to walk so I have to run”

Listening to Obama read his book and Lucy says “Obama’s grandparents are from the same Kansas as Dorothy!” (devoted Wizard of Oz fan)

April 2009
“I’m thinking of what it might look like inside of a song – how is music made?”

“The clouds in the sky look like blurry thunder”

Lucy ate a sardine and asked, “Where did it come from? Does it know that I’m eating it?

At the top of Twin Peaks at night, looking at the city, Lucy gasps, “it looks like a toy! So pretty!”

May 2009

Woman with a child was shouting expletives on F-Market and apologizes to Lucy.  Lucy says, “she’s angry because didn’t sleep well.”  I asked Lucy if she heard every expletive and insult that was screamed for 10 minutes. She says, “No, I didn’t open my ears.”

June 2009
(talking about dealing with being afraid of the dark) “I can go under the covers in my bed and then I own my own darkness”

“I didn’t step on the millipede because I think it wants to live”

July 2009
Lucy’s invisible friends Leopard and Kitty (who are also stuffed animals) apparently had their first day of kindergarten today and Lucy has a talk with them about what it was like and how they feel about kindergarten.

“The spinney thing makes the dizzy part of my body go to my tummy,” says Lucy while spinning on playground equipment.

August 2009

“I know everything I already need to know. I never need to know anything else”

“Being smart means you know a lot of stuff and your brain is really strong and you can think of lots of things”

“Even if I already know how to do the whole thing I need to practice to get more good”

For years the right-wing has used a mantra something like “no special rights for gays” or “gay rights are special rights” to fight against and to legally deny any sort of protection or rights for LGBT people and couples.

In 2002, “President Bush announced that ‘gay rights are special rights,’ as his defense against criticism that came when he refused to enact various civil rights laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people from discrimination in their daily lives.”

March 5, 2009 in front of California State Building

The campaign for Prop 8 in California last year mostly used slogans of “marriage is one man plus one woman” and themes of “protecting” marriage and “protect the children” and so on.

However, by passing Prop 8 they unwittingly gave those exact “special rights” to a special class of approximately 18,000 couples who remain legally married, caught in time, in California in spite of Prop 8.

Yeah, sure that wasn’t their intent of Prop 8 but they didn’t include anything retroactive in their proposition language.

That’s exactly the “special rights” that these campaigns have been trying to fight against – to keep us from having any protection, from having any rights and responsibilities within our families, all in the name of “protecting children” and “protecting marriage.”

So then what’s my special locked-in-time-marriage status?  It’s special gay rights!

These anti-LGBT slogans and campaigns are slowly dying.  Even if, fingers crossed this doesn’t happen, Ref 71 in Washington is rejected and Question 1 in Maine is passed, the mantras of “protecting children from gays” and “keeping gay marriage out of school curriculum” and “saving traditional marriage” are being slowly dismantled because the anti-gay groups have no proof that marriages such as mine do any damage at all to the institution of marriage, to schools, and to children.

My special gay marriage protects my kid.  Before my special gay marriage was legal, domestic partnership protected my kid and me and my sweetie and helped define our family and give our family rights to each other that married people usually take for granted.

Approve Referendum 71 in Washington State!

Vote No on Question 1 in Maine!

Be kind.

Thanks, Belinda Carlisle, for supporting and endorsing No on Question 1 in Maine!

Apologies to “My Fair Lady” *

Bill Nemitz, a respected Portland Maine columnist, has skewered the Yes on 1 campaign and smartly pointed out that No on 1 (a.k.a. Protect Maine Equality) is using real local citizens while the Yes on 1 campaign is mostly relying on stock images and an ad recycled from last year’s Prop 8 campaign in California and people who don’t live or work in Maine:

The anti-repeal “No on 1″ campaign overflows with real Mainers who are willing – no, make that eager – to go public in their support of equal marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.

And the pro-repeal “Yes on 1″ campaign? Not so much.

Since it took to the airwaves a month or so ago, Stand for Marriage Maine has attached four – and only four – faces to its televised ad campaign. And of those four, only one person is actually from Maine.

-from  Real Mainers step up for ‘No on 1′ ads

Paul Redicker, Catholic, Veteran, Mainer, stands up for all of us, “Maine’s moving along in the right direction …” — these real people standing up for marriage rights still make me cry because they don’t have to stand up for us and talk in front of a crowd, be video recorded and put on YouTube, and they do!

* “The rain in spain stays mainly in the plain …” (Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady)

Shown during keynote session at the Grace Hopper conference this morning. Wish I’d seen something like this when I was a young girl! Fabulous montage of women in tech. I’m going to show this to my 5 year old daughter.

somewhere above the earth

I took an evening flight from SFO to Tucson last night. It was a full flight on a small plane and I’m pretty sure half the people on the plane were headed to the Grace Hopper Conference.

When I got tmy hotel room I opened the sliding doors, stepped out onto the balcony and looked up and immediately saw Cassiopeia.

I left the door open to let in fresh warm air and got a bunch of moths flying around so I captured most of them and sent them back outside — too bad there isn’t a screen door.

cloud spackling

This morning I woke up to this view of a hillside of cacti and street lines of clouds.

they're everywhere

I met some new friends for breakfast (Moya introduced me to Anne who introduced me to Patricia and then Colleen complimented my shoes and then others also showed up for breakfast!).  I got my registration badge and Hopper assignment and couldn’t figure out how to order the colors and words.  This is what I ended up with – trying not to make the green and red look to christmas-ish!

ordering decision

My hackintosh is back to 10.5.6 after a trial run with snow leopard.  I’m hoping this NetBookInstaller/NetBookMaker get some bugs fixed soon for mic & headphones – it’s a much cleaner path to hackintoshing! Thanks, Meklort!

Sarah Franklin, South Portland, Maine school teacher for 45 years, “Schools should be safe havens for children, places where all children feel welcome, accepted, and safe” <– what she said!

Give this No on 1 campaign a few bucks to help them put and keep this ad on the air and hope that Maine doesn’t have the same experience as California-post-Prop8.

And Sam Putnam, this gorgeous kid? Give him more airtime!  I’m curious why the women with him are described as his mother and her partner — aren’t they both his mothers?

I do a lot of griping and complaining and bitching about how the tech industry and tech conferences are so gender unbalanced.  I’ve been using computers since I was a young girl and been attending plenty of tech conferences for the past 15 years.

My first computer

Some of my griping comes from my experience in college where I was often the only girl (or one of 2 or 3 girls) in a math or statistics or computer science or other geeky class.  Some of it comes from my work experience of often being the only woman in a meeting or on a team or being asked if I’m the assistant when attending a meeting with a male colleague or employee (I’m not the assistant – I’m the head muckracker, a.k.a. Chief Scientist).  I discovered Systers (and other women-in-tech listservs) in the early 1990’s when I started my first job out of college (working on a mostly male team) and I’m still subscribed to the Systers email list.  My grandma worked in math and science her whole life and was often the only woman in a room, on a team, and was always horribly unfairly underpaid.  Basically I have a bit of history with my cynical feeling towards the lack of gender balance in tech.

A few years ago my wife went to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference and loved it.  I’ve been trying to go to it ever since (they provide free childcare!).  Last year I applied to be a Hopper (volunteering in exchange for free conference registration) and was accepted.  I declined because marriage became legal in California and my wife and I got married right around the time of last year’s conference.

This year I applied again to be a Hopper and was accepted and now I have a plane ticket and a hotel reservation and a list of devices and power chargers and cables to bring and I’ll be on my way next week!

I idealistically believe and hope that the tech industry will join the current millenium and catch up to other professional industries, like medicine and law, where there is a gender balance.  I also hope that people who are leaders in the tech industry, particularly men, will continually point to and try to eradicate this inbalance instead of shrugging their shoulders and saying not much can be done or that they don’t know what to do.

In my ideal world, I would always attend tech conferences that had a decent gender balance, but that mostly doesn’t exist … yet.  My favorite conference, so far, that has a good balance of people and has a bit of geekiness to it is the Gel Conference each year in NYC.

I’m thrilled to be going to a tech conference with the gender pendulum swinging the other way for once – where the conference will be mostly women instead of mostly men.  I’m not super comfortable with any gender imbalance, but if I had to choose, I’d rather swing back and forth between “mostly men” and “mostly women” to try to obtain a balance, and not always be with just men or just women.

Lucy with her great-grandma in 2006

Our daughter Lucy, currently 5 years old, wants to be a scientist when she grows up.  She came up with that on her own (and I do my best to modulate my excitement about her interest in science).  My wife and I tell her she can try to be anything she wants, including a princess who rides on a unicorn (this morning, “Mommy, I hope unicorns are really real in real life. I don’t want unicorns to only be pretend”).

I hope my daughter is never the only woman on a team or in a meeting, and I hope she’s always paid for her worth and skills and experience, not for her worth+skills+experience with a discount for her female gender.  My grandma would be so proud to know her great-grandaughter wants to be a scientist, and my grandma would’ve loved something like the GHC and Anita Borg Institute if groups and conferences like that had existed in the 1930’s when she was looking for her first job after finishing grad school.

I know a domestic partnership is not a marriage. I have one of each. I’m in a legal domestic partnership which has been superseded by my legal marriage in California.  Unless, of course, I leave my home state and travel somewhere where my marriage is not recognized but maybe my domestic partnership is.  At the very least, the legal definition of my relationship with our child is still mommy, all over the world, and it’s our child (as well as the mortgage on our house) that legally tie us together regardless of laws.

In Feb 2004, my wife and I were married at San Francisco City Hall.

San Francisco City Hall, Feb 14 2004

When the California Supreme Court invalidated our marriage in August 2004, we became domestically partnered within days to protect our rights when our daughter was born (my wife was pregnant and our daughter was born in late August, shortly after our marriage was invalidated). We don’t have any photos of our domestic partnership form signing.

Then we were married on Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver, BC in March 2007.

Kitsilano Beach, March 31 2007

We were married in San Francisco in Golden Gate Park in October 2008 and in May 2009 the California Supreme Court decided that our marriage was still legal.

San Francisco, October 5 2008

The campaigns to reject referendum 71 in Washington State have brought out arguments to reject referendum 71 because it’s “everything but marriage.”  That’s a big fat lie.  Domestic partnership is nothing like marriage.

Ask Flickr: domestic partnership has 700ish search results and marriage has 700,000ish search results

According to Wikipedia, one is very legalese and the other is very touchy feely, guess which one?

A domestic partnership is a legal or personal relationship between two individuals who live together and share a common domestic life but are neither joined by marriage nor a civil union.

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between individuals that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged by a variety of ways, depending on the culture or demographic.

They’re both a legal state, but marriage is usually associated with romance – look at the words in the Wikipedia definition: kinship, interpersonal, intimate, sexual, acknowledged – and domestic partnership has a negative definition: “share … but are neither joined …”

From the records of our family and our relationship, it’s clear that a marriage means photos and flowers and fancy clothes and people showing up and a party and lots of documentation and gifts and records and cards and photo albums.  A domestic partnership is a legal document kept in a safe with copies kept with us when we travel (in case someone questions our legal relationship in a time when we need to be recognized as something other than “friends”).

We don’t have any photos from the day we were domestically partnered at the California Secretary of State’s office.  We didn’t throw a party and we didn’t send out announcements or receive gifts or dress up or buy flowers — and we didn’t invite anyone and nobody showed up to toast us.  There was a bike messenger in front of us in line and my wife was 9 months pregnant and a woman was reluctant to let her use a bathroom.

The “deny domestic partnership” crowd is afraid of their children learning about gay people in school, but their children are already learning about gay people in school. Children with gay and lesbian parents are sitting next to their children in school.  They claim that domestic partnership is “everything but marriage.” It’s not.

Domestic partnership rights protect families and children. The Prop 8 groups in California even conceded (and argued in court) that it was okay with them to give domestic partnership rights to gay and lesbian couples, just not marriage (though we are still married and our marriage seems to be doing no harm to any children or schools in California).

Without domestic partnership rights, gay and lesbian couples can jump through legal hoops to take care of each other — and pay legal bills that seem like a gay tax.

Approve Referendum 71 in Washington and retain dignity and responsibility and rights for people who already do more than most couples to secure their legal ties to each other and protect their relationship.