Are you in the California Bay Area? Jill Asher (Silicon Valley Mom's Blog) is sponsoring a bone marrow drive in honor of her mom's recovery. I'm in the donor registry and it takes just a second and is pain-free. They do a quick cheek swab and you're on your way. No needles.

Erin is my new crush. She's pretty fucking smart, you know, for a mom.

I hesitate to think what her landlord might suggest for a plumbing problem. I suspect it might involve many, many towels.

"Emergency Etiquette" The title says it all.

She's home! And has grand plans of becoming a couch dictator.

Use WordPress and miss the 'Category Visibility' plugin? I found a replacement Category Visibility plugin that appears to be working with WP2.5. (Greek to you? Ignore and move on :-)

And thank you Guy Kawasaki for adding PJM to moms.alltop.com. Here's to hoping I don't junk up your directory too much!

Yes, it's true, "GO READ IT TODAY" is back on Plain Jane Mom, baby!

I loved having these posts live over on Wendy's eMoms site, but they never really found an audience over there. I still write Momsational (bazillions of giveaways), but Linksational will be coming back here. The amazing Wendy is even letting me move all the Linksational posts back over here. She's one hell of a friend, I tell you what.

But enough administrativa, and on with the linky do-dads.

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In the interest of remaining a functioning human being, I recently gave the heave-ho to 95% of the social networking sites I belong to (like Facebook & LinkedIn), but one I really hesitated about was Cre8Buzz. They have a strong Moms community, and come Monday you won't even need an invite to join. Check it out and tell Antman I sent you ;)

Go hug WTM Michelle.

Hey, wow!

A great post which describes perfectly my new-found obsession with Twitter. (Follow me @ErikaJurney.)

Have you tried out Adobe Photoshop Express Online? It's free and comes with 2GB of storage. If you've used it, let me know if it's any good.

OK, so she's not pregnant, so you need to go guess again.

Congrats to Mrs. F are in order!!

Awesomer — I love it!

"Is it possible to love someone without being bonded to them?"

Amen.

Thank God this has a happy ending.

Why I don't watch this show.

Hell with a moat. I suggest barbed wire.

Stop by and Support Maria.

OK, Part One is here. I'm waiting for the remaining parts anxiously.

Purple.

Yes yes yes!! This is how they're going to learn.

I love it.

Phew, I love it when problems get resolved in a sane manner.

Hell, ditto.

Very lucky indeed.

Yay :)

Wow, OK, this is really cool.

You deserve eleventy-five drinks.

Seriously awesome hair.

I think most bloggers have better things to do than jump through these kinds of hoops.

Every day I hate Facebook just a little more.

Thank you for all your thoughtful comments on my post about education today, or at least my corner of it. I've had some great materials forwarded my way. Watch these now.

5 Dangerous things you should let your kids do, by Gever Tulley

I grew up like this. It works. Tulley runs The Tinkering School very close to where I live. I'll be sending Mike there when he's about 10 for sure.

Thank you Zoe for showing me this.

A Vision of Students Today

Nearly made me cry.

Thank you Melanie.

Sit still.

No running on the playground.

No playing chase or tag on the playground.

No pretending to be the guys from Star Wars on the playground.

I get it. You're afraid of lawsuits from kids getting hurt. You don't want children playing violent games and making other kids feel unsafe. It is hard to manage kids who are active on their own terms instead of via organized sports.

So where do you draw the line?

If imaginary light sabers are OK, why not imaginary guns? What about chase games that get out of hand? There are hundreds of kids at school, and it makes sense to have big rules that keep everyone in line.

But. I have to say that reliving Kindergarten through Mike's eyes reminds me why I felt like I was in prison until I graduated from college.

And what happens in repressive regimes?

Well. For instance. Mike and his friends now play a game called "Zar Gors." I love it so much that he and his friends invented a subversive game. It is modeled after an "approved" playground game that sounds a lot like "Red Light Green Light" and involves aliens. See? That's what happens.

When I was a reasonably young kid my dad let me read The Monkey Wrench Gang. And now I get why.

Easily Abbey's most famous fiction work, the novel concerns the use of sabotage to protest environmentally damaging activities in the American Southwest, and was so influential that the term "monkeywrench" has come to mean, besides sabotage and damage to machines, any violence, sabotage, activism, law-making, or law-breaking to preserve wilderness, wild spaces and ecosystems. It is the bible of what some critics call "eco terrorists". (wikipedia)

I want Mike to follow the rules. I want him to understand why someone made the rules. And I want him to be able to make his own judgement about whether or not the rules are right and just.

Sure. It starts with something as small as thinking "Are you kidding me? There's nothing wrong with playing good guys vs. bad guys!" and builds to living a life where you question authority before submitting to it. Or not.

Seems a lot of you are looking for Megan. She's back!

And bear with me folks, this flu really has a firm hold on me. I'll be back soon. (And it won't take 3 months! Sorry Megan, had to say it ;)

I'm now sicker than I was yesterday, but at least the kids are in school. The little germ-laden fuckers.

Seriously, when they get sick I only catch what they have occasionally. And when I do I just get a little touch of what they had. You know, because I'm big and strong and all that.

This time it was totally the reverse. The kids each got sick enough to stay home from school, but really they felt pretty OK. You know, the kind of sick where you must spend the entire day in your PJs but you still have the energy to clobber your brother on a fairly rigorous schedule. That kind of sick.

Me on the other hand — whole different story. I am sick. Unbelievable! I never get sick, and it really is a drag. I woke up this morning and it was completely a choice of the lesser of two evils. Do I stay in bed and keep the kids home another day? This has the advantage of allowing me to roll over and close my eyes again, but I think all you parents out there will see the major disadvantage. Healthy bored kids. Home. All. Day. Good God, nobody wants that.

So Plan B was enacted. I tried not to pass out while packing lunchboxes, I almost forgot to feed them breakfast, but pulled it out of my ass at the last moment. (Delicious sounding, no?) And got them all out the door with the help of my fantastic husband who is also sick yet did all the school dropoffs for me. Problem is, I have 5 minutes left alone in the house before I have to go pick up the kids, and all I want to do is nap…

Monday, home with one sick kid.

Tuesday, home with two sick kids.

Wednesday, home sick with three sick kids.

You see where this is going, right? Come Friday we'll be on the news. "Local family harbors mutant strain of plague! Film at Eleven!"

In my delirium, however, I can't stop laughing at this picture. Is it a cat litter box? A rice cooker? A cat space capsule? Some demonic combination of the three?

Well once I'd seen it there was no going back. I had to keep clicking around Amazon… Big mistake. I found out that there are lots of robo-cat-boxes out there. And they all sound disgusting. Check out this review entitled "An expensive way to smell poo" that had me laughing until I cried.

You will become more familiar with your cat's feces every day as the cat genie gently fills your home with the aroma of baking excrement. Plus, you get to pay over $300 for technology that was "designed" and built for less than $2. The "processor" unit was designed in 1967 and allows all the functionality of the most advanced microchip devices of its era. It has both on and off modes. (Note: off mode available only while unplugged.)

To say something positive, the customer support line is manned by kind, well-meaning kids who really do feel badly that you're having a hard time with your mechanical poo soup maker.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole review here. And then come back and tell me how the hassle of these foul sounding devices is better than scooping cat poop.