Twinlets

Not telling anyone that I was pregnant for three months nearly killed me.  Especially after we found out we are having twins.  It made me think of the codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park in England in WWII, some of whom held on to their secret work for nearly 30 years (even from their spouses), until the1970s, when the story of Enigma was first released.  I had trouble holding my tongue for a quarter of a year.  I can't imagine the self-discipline required for a quarter century!  

I have been broody for a Very Long Time.  Probably about 12 years.  But, partly due to my age, and partly due to the risks of miscarriage in the first three months, we held off telling anyone - even close family - until we got past the first trimester.  We have just cruised past 20 weeks, however, and the vast majority of family and friends has been informed, so it was time to do some baby pontificating online...

The savviest among you may have noticed that the tagline to this blog actually changed at the beginning of the year.  It used to read, Fortune in the Valley: One Woman's Search for the Job of her Dreams.  But since a few days after the pregnancy test came back positive, it has read On Life, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  To some extent, this reflected the sorry state of my job hunt, and the fact that the blog had long since become a place for me to do a brain dump of what was on my mind.  But it was also, of course, a virtual nod to the vast change that is about to come upon the Coatney household.

Ironically, of course, I was finally offered a job just a few weeks ago by UC Santa Cruz.  But it was a fairly simple decision to turn the offer down.  The money was lousy!  And the possibilities were limited.  The positives were all around the location and the potential for something more fascinating down the road.  But even as I declined it, there was some agonizing.  I had always assumed that if I were ever fortunate enough to have kids, it would be as a working woman, and that I would be the sort who juggled a job and the cooking and the childcare (while naturally maintaining a regular gym schedule, and remembering to get pedicures).  So much for that.  Instead, I am adapting to the new reality and privilege of being a stay-at-home Mom (apologies to my English readers).  Which is actually far more scary (for me, at least) in terms of the skills required.  And the gym schedule is already up the spout.

Even though I haven't had a tricky pregnancy so far to date, I am amazed at how easy other people make it look.  My girlfriends all appeared to sail through in the manner of Hollywood film stars...looking glamorous and elegant, and producing extremely cute offspring at the end of it all.  By contrast I feel schlumpy all the time, and go to bed at 8pm regularly, since the thought of staying up until 10pm is a distant memory now associated with other illicit treats like cocktails and unpasteurized cheese.  And this isn't even the difficult part!  As all the mothers of any age I have met recently have said, with twins, we are going to be "busy".  Since when did "busy" become a euphemism for manically sleep deprived and completely unable to form coherent sentences?

Over the next few months, you will doubtless read more about the trials and tribulations of the pregnancy, before twinlet one (a girl) and twinlet two (a boy) arrive, probably sometime in late August or possibly early September.  After that, it is quite possible that this will turn into a mommy blog (Eric's hoping that I will be able to mimic the success of www.dooce.com and bring in $30,000-$50,000 a month).  In his dreams.

In the meantime, I am delighted to declare that I have found my Fortune in the Valley, and it wasn't in the place I was looking for it.  Not at all.

Green Guilt

So I confess that I switched back to Lysol.  For months, I had been struggling with an eco-friendly biodegradable toilet cleaner by Seventh Generation, but the unfortunate line of grey scum in my loo just wouldn't go away.  Enter the bleach, exit the scum.  Problem solved, apart from the agent of doom environmental guilt of course.

Generally, I consider myself to be an averagely responsible consumer where it comes to the green lifestyle.  I recycle religiously.  I compost occasionally.  I own a vast number of shopping totes and reusable water bottles, and remember to take them with me at least 75% of the time.  But I'm pretty much over what the Wall Street Journal christened the Pampered Countertop of products...the Mrs Meyers, Method Home, Seventh Generation stuff which looks pretty and smells great but does a fairly lousy job of actually cleaning anything.  I mean the hand soap is fairly harmless.  But have you tried Mrs Meyer's Lemon Verbena shower cleaner?  You need a real cleaning product at hand to wipe off the streaks and cut through the limescale deposits.  So you end up cleaning twice!

It was such a relief to discover that I was not alone in my disdain for some of these products, and that folk around the country are having a hard time adapting to the filmy deposit which new eco dishwasher detergents leave on their glasses and dishes.  As one savvy consumer put it, if you have to wash the dishes again (either before or after they've been through the dishwasher), then surely the excess water consumption is nearly as environmentally unsound as the phosphates in the old sudsy detergents were in the first place?

The problem with my argument is of course, that while my little piece of pollution is just a drop in the world's mop and bucket, if you add all the other polluters, it suddenly becomes more serious.  And if you scale up my argument to a bigger issue, it just doesn't work at all.

Take, for example, uranium mining at the Grand Canyon.  Two years ago, the Secretary of the Interior placed a moratorium on new mining claims within 1 million acres around the Canyon.  But that period is about to expire, and public comment is sought  by April 4th as to which of four proposals the Bureau of Land Management should adopt with regards to mining in the vicinity of the Canyon.  Let's make this easy.  The Colorado river supplies drinking water to some 25 million Americans.  Uranium contaminated drinking water, anyone?  I don't think it's necessary to refer to recent events in Japan to make this point any clearer. 

Should you need any further convincing on this subject, then I encourage you to visit the Grand Canyon Trust's website, which has additional cogent reasons for supporting Alternative B (which would ban all new uranium mining claims within public land watersheds that drain directly into Grand Canyon National Park), and has convenient links to the relevant reports, as well as the e-mail address where you can comment.

Here endeth the lesson.  Because I know that the above two paragraphs sounded just a tad preachy.  Which is ironic, given where I started.  I guess I'm just a conflicted green contender - eager to tell others how to clean up their act, before I have my own house in order. 

Why no Brouhaha?

Is anyone apart from me surprised at the lack of hullabaloo surrounding the Deutsche Borse acquisition of the New York Stock Exchange?  NYSE, surely, is one of America's most storied institutions - having been founded in 1792, when the fledgling Republic was not yet two decades old.  Some of you will remember the massive kerfuffle which occurred thirty years ago when the Japanese bought the Rockefeller Center in New York.  Or what about the Dubai Ports scandal back in 2006?  That was an issue of national security!

But turning over the largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization to the Germans doesn't seem to pose any problem at all.  Even Chuck Schumer, a severe critic of the Dubai deal (which ultimately failed), has given Deutsche Borse his blessing, insisting only that the merged company have the words New York somewhere in its name.  Has America's financial capital come to this?

Time was that the stock exchange was seen as a viable measure of the strength of our economy.  Periods of strong stock market performance often coincided with low unemployment - the Eighties spring to mind.  But as Felix Salmon argues convincingly in Wall Street's Dead End, the stock market is becoming increasingly irrelevant.  Two of the most innovative American companies to launch in the last decade, Facebook and Twitter, have chosen to bypass it entirely.  They are valued at $50 billion and somewhere near $10 billion respectively, but have chosen to raise money privately, leaving them free to develop without the pesky interference of shareholders.

Don't get me wrong.  It's not that I have anything particularly against the Germans.  Neither am I reflexively against foreign ownership of U.S. companies.  We buy stuff overseas.  It's only natural that strong companies abroad would be interested in owning a piece of the world's number one economy, and being able to tap into its freespending customer base.  But I guess I was under the mistaken impression that our primary stock exchange was sacrosanct.  It makes you wonder what's next.  Will the Mint start printing money in China because it's more cost effective?  Will the White House be sold to the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and leased back to the President for use? (You may mock, but that group controls 75% of the Chrysler Building).

I can't help feeling that America in 2011 is a bit like Britain in 1945. This is the beginning of the end of an empire.