My mom didn't work for pay after she had kids. Even when I was a kid, my parents always referred said "we decided that she wouldn't pursue that" rather than saying she didn't have to work or shouldn't or anything like that.

Another department decided to give us all smoothies today, so that's pretty sweet. And I think I heard there are nachos somewhere. Today is looking up.

Today is looking up.

Seems only fair, it was a rough start

My mom worked for pay before having kids and after my sister and I went to kindergarten. Dad's mom had worked for pay, too, as a teacher (as his teacher for a while--one room schoolhouse and all that), so I don't think he ever questioned that that would be a reasonable option.

In kinda cool (to me) news, I was poking around online and found the yearbook where my grandmother was listed at the "normal" school where she received her teaching degree in 1914. I wish the scanned images were better, so I could try to recognize her in the photos.

My mother worked part time through college and got a full-time job after graduating. She fought to keep that job even after getting married, but was forced to quit when she got pregnant (with me). Had my sister four years later, went to work part time when I was seven, then went to work full time when I was 14 or so. My father would periodically declare, "no wife of mine is going to work!" ... but she hated staying at home and kept working.

Elizabeth Warren and ... her daughter, I think ... wrote a book about the Two-Income Trap - about how in earlier years, when things got tight financially, a stay-at-home mother/wife could get a job to get through, but now just to stay afloat it requires two people working full time.

a book about the Two-Income Trap

I read that; it's a very different take on the two-income family than I was used to, but she made a darn good case *economically* for having one parent stay home with the kids, and how it's been bad for American economic health that that's no longer possible for most families. That is, hard economic times made it impossible, and the fact that it was impossible made the hard times worse.

My mom worked her whole life; when my sister was little mom had a salon in the garage, and when I was little mom was doing seamstress work in the basement, until she got an admin job at RCA. Later she worked at a shirt factory, then she got her accountant certification and got a job at TRW, from which she retired. It never occurred to me that I should not work. The whole idea that women couldn't or shouldn't do anything just passed me by; it was a bizarre foreign concept to me when I realized people really believed women couldn't work.

To her credit, Mother never insinuated that I and my sisters were going to do anything but go to college and get educated in something useful. She even pushed me towards those new computer things (I wish I remembered if she pushed computers at my sisters, I was such a self-absorbed child that I ignored most everything). As we said at her funeral, we wished she could have appreciated that we grew up to be the strong, independent women she taught us to be.

So apparently there's a Pokémon gym in my company's parking garage, but it's "owned" by Team Valor. Does that mean the other team isn't allowed to use it? Are there going to nerdgangs having dance battles in the parking garage as they fight for access to Pokémon?

I'm already preparing to be irritated by NBC's tape-delayed Olympics. They're not even running the opening ceremonies live.

Other teams can take over the gym, Connie. Their Pokémon fight the ones at the gym. If the attackers win often enough to lower the gym's prestige points, they can claim the gym for their team.

My mom tried to go to college but dropped out after one semester. This was apparently so shameful that I never learned about it until after she died (!). She then went to nursing school, and at least one of the jobs she got after graduating was as an emergency-room OB nurse. This was in NYC in the 1950s, so as a result she saw a lot of women coming in after back-alley abortions. She was a lifelong Catholic, but she was pro-choice her entire adult life, because she'd seen the damage.

She worked until she got married, and then had five kids, and went back to work again in her late 30s, over a decade later. It must have been hard for her to to study up for the exams again, in a different state. So she worked until she was about 63, spending 20 years at a state hospital for people with profound mental and physical disabilities. And then quit when my sister had her second kid -- only five months before her pension would have vested!

There was never any question that my sister & I would be expected to work for a living, and Mom's income was very welcome in the household -- it basically paid for the summer house we had on a lake. But she didn't set much aside for her retirement, and when they retired, they were dependent mostly on Dad's money. Happily, he had a good pension, a good IRA, and had invested well.