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.

Not really watching, but already 600% more classy than London's.

Olympics. They're not even running the opening ceremonies live.

And extra annoyed here on the west coast where they are further tape delaying! But I'm going to watch anyway

My mom was a teacher before I was born. I'm not sure if they would have let her kept teaching, back then, even if she wanted to? But when I was a bit older she ran a daycare in our house. And then when my brother was in school, she went back to grad school, to become a speech pathologist.

My mom was a professional volunteer in my dad's post doc days until they landed in LC, got health insurance and promptly got knocked up with me. Yes, I was conceived because insurance. She had a BS in sociology at the time, But moving every 2 years for my dad starting in '68...she worked for free as a women in prison advocate, LWV, special needs kids, ERA, CPS advocate. Even after I was born, she did that for years until going back to get teaching credentials when I was 10 or so, and started teaching shortly thereafter. And getting paid. Though I think by the time I hit elementary, she was getting paid at the universalist daycare we went to, but given what I recall, the pay had to be bad, but it was about socialization for my brother & I. It was what made her go into teaching.

And the thing is, my women in astro forum is still full of sacrifices made by spouses in the post doc to tenure or industry path. Both ways. Niche field, pita.

I just turned the Olympics on. This runs to 11:30pm, I didn't expect it to go so late. ...I'm old, huh?

Well, the alternative is talking heads screaming about politics, and a rerun of Graham Norton.

Graham Norton it is then.

Windsparrow or aurelia, either of you want to do another tweet thing? this involves being tagged in a tweet with 2 lines of a poem, then retweeting that out and adding 2 more lines (we could provide you the lines) and tagging someone else.

msbelle, I missed this last night, but will gladly tweet anything else you want. Let me know here or at cynthia[no space]mclennan AT gmail dot com (or link me to your relevant tweet; glad to help).

...

Interesting discussion on stay at home parents vs working mothers. My own mum stayed at home 'til I was about 10. Dad was a self-employed carpenter. Mom went back to work to get us health insurance, because we had been priced out as individual subscribers, which is why I always laugh when known conservative culture warriors (who don't think women should work outside the home) are against "Obama Care." Had *we* had Obama Care, mum could have stayed at home.

Scott & I married in '94. To get married in the church, we had to partake in pre-marital counseling with the pastor. One of the nicest surprises of that experience (for both of us) is that we both preferred that I would stay at home with prospective children, before they were in public school, were that financially possible.

That said, I never bought into the mommy wars. I loathed stay-at-home moms who thought they were superior to mothers who worked for pay outside the home. By the same token, I hated employed mothers who looked down upon stay-at-home mothers.

I have always felt that way about various marriage and family issues, including "submission." Marriage is hard enough. If a couple finds itself in a groove (egalitarian or otherwise) and it works for them and produces a loving home, leave it be, judgers.

On a larger scale, I don't want women to be subjugated to men, but I don't have that sort of marriage, and neither did my parents or either set of grand-parents (and from what I gather, neither did my maternal great-grandparents, so it's not what I think of as marriage).

That said, I think the media has, in both cases, exaggerated the animus between mothers of different ilks, because I never experienced much of it, face to face. My day-to-day has always involved regular people just trying to make it through 'til bedtime.

My Mom worked as a secretary in the 50s until she had me and then stayed home until I was in 1st grade and one of our cats got sick. Because money was tight, she decided to wait another day before taking Tiger to the vet. He died that night. And Mom went back to get her teaching certificate so she should work and still have summers off with me and my sister. I don't recall Dad complaining about it, FWIW. This would have been about 1964.

I've got British Bake Off from YouTube on in the background. I'm always amazed at the amount of alcohol they put in things--and themselves.

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?

It may be owned, but here gyms turn over from team to team with shockingly great regularity. Like it's not uncommon for some gyms to turn over within in an hour or less.

Are there going to nerdgangs having dance battles in the parking garage as they fight for access to Pokémon?

Yes. If it's a high status or convenient gym to hold. The one at my school is in a locked part of campus. You can't really reach it from classrooms, but you can't access it unless you are in the gates on the campus itself. This gym turns over far less -- I held it for 20+ hours since it's summer and there aren't people on campus.

Evolution in politics reminds me of two things. The first is that it reminds me, in lots of ways, of the Personality Myth episode of Invisibilia which looked at research that indicates that personalities change over a lifetime (usually for the "better") based on experience. [link] If that happens, then it seems totally reasonable that the beliefs we hold also change based on experience Why not? Why should one's political beliefs not evolve in all sorts of ways. It's not flip flopping or inconsistency. It's experience.

The difficulty, of course, is when someone's beliefs shift away from our own as opposed to towards them. Then we view it scathingly. Or we question how "real" their shift is. For example, Diana Ravitch was a key voice in creating the current state of ed systems, with frequent testing and the privatizing of public schools via charters. She know is one of it's most vocal and ardent critics. I feel myself being very eye rolly about her change in position, but she's a well respected voice of dissent now. Or George Will leaving the GOP is causing not sympathy but schadenfreude. It's weird and interesting to consider our responses to other people's changes.