As a mother, I have only one annual over the top activity.  It’s in the form of an exuberant advent calendar.  Shameless bribery?  Perhaps.  Guilt-reducing?  Check.  As much for me as for my sons?  Definitely.

But its appearance can be deceiving.  The 24 little gifts I package up and hang from our kitchen light fixture are not exactly iTunes cards, electronics, or valuable baubles.  They shade a little more towards Morticia Adams.  Things like little skulls and antique pathology slides.  I’ve described my sons’(decidedly mixed) reactions to these things before, in this older post.

A couple times, I’ve tried to give the whole thing up, but the natives revolted.  This sealed my freedom to go “weird.”

OK, they already know “weird” because they grew up with me.  But in the face of all the holiday sparkles, I like to share my belief that treasures are not always new, pretty, or valuable.  They only have to capture your eyes, heart, or sense of humor.  Below is a sampling of the ones they’ll be getting this year.  (And since the kids don’t read my blog, no surprises are spoiled.)

Glass slides of WW2 aircraft.

Strange little vaguely Egyptian or Cambodian beads.  I hope no one thinks they are edible.

Big tall glass pipettes.  Yes, these will kick around my house forever.  They will start on the kitchen table, until I move them to the boys’s rooms.  Then they will get stuffed in various corners.  Then one will roll off a desk and break.  One will get lost.  And the third one will somehow mean something to one of the boys and it will end up on display or in a piece of art.  I’m in it for that one.

Seaweed.  One of my boys asks for this. The other two will twist up their faces in disgust and give their packages to the happy one.Antique dental molds.  This, my friends, is the main event.  It will inspire the “Nightmare on Dane Road” discussions with a future therapist.

This is not so bad.  Honey cones from the Netherlands.  When I was having my annual stress out November moment over finding 24 gifts, I happened to have a little fit in front of a friend who was travelling to Amsterdam.  He brought these back to help me cover one of the 24. Sweet!

I would not even want to sample this drink, but I bet one of my three guys will love it.  Probably the seaweed guy.  The one who gets H-Mart gift certificates for his birthday.

Just what is “Brown Mixture” anyway?  Of course shaking it makes all the difference.These are kind of sweet.  The little bird “perches” (or impaling implements, depending on your sensibility)  are paper scrolls you can pull out from under the tiny Tweety birds.  I did, and wrote nice “mom” messages on them.  But then I decided to get fancy and color the birds with felt pens and I pretty much destroyed them.  Not on purpose.  I wasn’t going for weird at all–but I got it–by Golly!

There are always some kitchy foods.  This is not antique.  Antique kitchy foods would just be disgusting.  And I suppose the “rainforest chicle” ingredient would be a good clue that these are VERY 2011.  Yes Mr. Glee, I will now buy your gum because I am also being a virtuous environmentalist saving tropical eco-systems when I blow these bubbles.

I do include some tasty treats too.  Locally produced or treasures from my travels, when I am enough on the ball to remember to collect them throughout the year.  Which is pretty much never.  The reality is I might have a maximum of five Advent items collected before November, and then I go on a crazy kamikaze quest for a couple weeks.  (See Dutch honey cones above.  Having fits in front of kind friends helps.)

This is just plain sweet.  I always seem to have some kind of nest or egg theme for one of the days.  My source for many of the non-food items is called “Nesting”…so there is no shortage of aviary-type items.

There is always at least one gift that features the boys’initials.  These are some kind of metallic letter decals.  Very Archie and Veronica.

These teeny tiny books are so old and brittle that the Rudyard Kipling (Original Mr. Weird) one I opened to make the photo almost broke in half.

OK so the Advent is up earlier than ever.  (Pat on back for OTT Mom)  And what am I hearing,?  Ooohs and ahhs and little sprinkling of excited clapping?  Uh… no.  It is:  “Mommmmmm.  Why did you go all earthy and Prius-driving on us?”  Browns?  Greens?  This looks like mud.  Where is the red?  Where are our old cool packages?  This is not Christmassy at all.  It is depressing.”

See below, at what I did for too many years in a row, carefully saving and reusing the packages.  I was sick of it.  But I guess I am still failing massively on the “teach weird” front.  They want red and sparkles.  Grrrrr.

Some post Christmas additions:

• I hadn’t noticed this when I selected it, but the main ingredient in Brown Mixture is…opium!  Always a popular gift from a mother to son.
• When the boys opened the pipettes one commented “Why did you give us pipettes?”  The other boy wryly commented, “Aren’t we beyond asking why?”
• The seaweed went down exactly as predicted.

1300 girls converged from all corners.  They also organized their own Leadership Institute which was broadly assembled around the theme of Innovation and Leadership.

It’s always hard to tell if a presentation or talk is “landing” with high school kids.  They are yawning and chronically sleep-deprived.  They are distracted by their phones.  They don’t nod and smile like adults often do in a talk. But the sharp questions from these girls afterwards revealed that they hadn’t missed much from our panel.

The girls swarmed afterwards for photos with the speakers.

Zubaida Bai of AYZH, Kim Karlsrud of Commonstudio and GreenAid, a Girl Scout, me

They kept pressing little trinkets into my hand.  I didn’t understand the gifts until they explained their heart-warming tradition of giving each other things to collect and display.   They are called SWAPS:  Special Whatchamacallits Affectionately Pinned Somewhere.

The giant George. R. Brown Convention center was packed with events and inspiring photos of Girl Scouts and their history.

The hundreds of adults on hand were equally engaged, and many dressed in coordinated outfits that helped their regional groups stand out.  This Florida woman explained the little hats her group sported.  They were meant to be a specific reference to the fashions of the times 100 years ago, with symbolic details of daisies (the founder’s nickname), her pearls, and also the navy color to represent the new Girl Scout uniform being released for the next 100 years.

I participate in a lot of tech conferences and competitions.  I typically only see one woman startup founder for every ten men who choose to compete or speak.  I told the girls that they need to change that.  Girls and women have to stop waiting to feel “ready” to create companies.  I can tell you that these girls are ready.  They are perfect.

People don’t often get direct exposure to what an industrial designer does and it’s pretty engaging stuff.  I like this Core77 story because it is easy to quickly scan (lots of pictures) and grasp  the process of this project. And I thought the Chef’s Backpack answered a real need quite nicely.  (But then I am a rabid Top Chef fan….)

But here is the one actual “mom story” part.  I happened to visit my son the weekend his team was constructing the first backpack prototype.  It required a lot of pattern making and sewing.  I am a pretty skilled seamstress and I would have been slayed by the amount of work ahead of these completely unaware students.  I started to hyperventilate in the design studio (it was Sunday afternoon, and the project was due the next day).  When I repeatedly offered to help and started rolling up my sleeves, my son kindly escorted me to the door to “make it to the airport nice and early.”

Later he told me, “You know how you were saying that our professors assigned a ridiculous deadline on this massive project?  At Carnegie Mellon we don’t think like that.  We just get the job done.”  I was impressed.  At the University of Michigan we might have held a sit-in and organized a Design Students Union with cards and membership dues.

Students on the team:  Dane Pieri, Julius Tarng, Albert Junehwan Song

A typically beautiful and uber-simple luxury wooden toy, by Naef

This got me pondering my own favorite toy:  Jumbo Cardboard Blocks.

I first met these Jumbo Cardboard Blocks  in Kindergarten.  I was four, and like most of the kids in my neighborhood, I hadn’t been to preschool.  It was a brave new world. I loved those blocks and I simply couldn’t believe our classroom had so many of them.  Oh, the possibilities!  I passed many happy hours making cities and castles and school rooms, where I tripped in and out of the “doors” directing imaginary citizenry.  It was great, absorbing fun.   But the real reason these blocks are my childhood favorite is they created a shining moment of childhood.  It was the day my teacher “Mrs. Affleck” singled me out.

I was surprised to recently learn that  a fellow student hated Mrs. Affleck.  I thought she was a dream, with a melodious voice, an old-fashioned (even then) brown bob, and a colorful array of slim, friendly-looking shirt-dresses.

On the big day, I’d had one of my usual free time sessions with the blocks.  Nothing unusual, yet Mrs. Affleck called the class over and said,

Children, just look at the wonderful creation Julie Knittel (my maiden name) and Roy Stufflebean made!  They worked so nicely together.  What a great job!

That was literally the first time I realized I could do a “job.”  And that someone might notice.  And that I could get credit for it.  And it was good to “work” on a team.  The rest is history, I guess.  (But I still wonder what happened to Roy Stufflebean.)

So…I am asking what childhood toys might be the favorite for other people.  No slightly sappy psychological dramas (like mine)  need be attached.  Sometimes Play-doh is just Play-doh.  But it’s still great.

Our kitchen is a bit crowded right now.  My son and two friends are making french fries.  I am making ketchup.  (One of those ridiculous things I try just once, for fun, like making bagels, or brioche, or sushi.)  My recipe tells me to peel four tomatoes.  I don’t know how, and I think,

I should call Anne.  She’ll know how.

Meanwhile, the three teenage boys are using my son’s  favorite Christmas present, a FryBaby.  It hasn’t seen a lot of action lately (woo hoo, says I).  My son forgets how to tell when the vat-o-oil is ready.  He says,

I’ll Google it.

Now, I Google plenty.  My son consults his friends a lot too.  But I still thought it was funny that my first thought was to ask a person, and his first thought was to ask a tool.  Nothing profound there.  I am three decades older than he.  But our opposite instincts still made me laugh.

Short random takes:

• Oddly, I’d planned to make the ketchup with no prior knowledge of the french fry plot.  I was just eager to try making ketchup with all the juicy tomatoes available at my farm market.  I get inspired to try silly recipes when I read them on the dock in Maine.  Usually I tear them out and quickly, wryly, tear them up when reality hits me again, back at home.
  
• Here is my ketchup recipe, from the current issue of Metroplitan Home.  I just finished cooking it (albeit neglected and somewhat burned at the bottom of the pan, because I have been simultaneously writing this post.)  It’s much spicier than Heinz.  More adult.  Overheard; son telling friends, “I don’t know what this tastes like.  Not ketchup.  But it’s good.”
  
• Oddly, the only place I could find the recipe was on Yahoo! Shine.  Two reactions:  why are so many magazines so poor at indexing their content?  (OK, I know, dying businesses don’t invest.)  Second:  Hooray for Yahoo! Shine.  We have a nice relationship with them at Daily Grommet and I think they are really trying to run good content.
• Here’s one “No-I-am-not-crazy” reason to make homemade ketchup, that I just picked up on Yahoo!….the third ingredient in commercial ketchup is high fructose corn syrup.
• In making this ketchup, I finished up my precious bottle of French apple cider vinegar I bought at an Irish farm market.  It’s my secret pie crust ingredient.  I hope I can find the same Stateside.
• Teenage boys are changing.  Cooking is cool.  I took this same trio to the mall last night. Visiting Williams Sonoma was their second requested destination.  “Dinner” was first.  I was quietly waiting for “Game Stop,” but it never came up.
• OK enough Betty Crocker.  There must be a product road map or spreadsheet I should be building.


My end result--took me a month to get the photo inserted here....I still sometimes use a film camera, with the whole processing lag time thing.

As you know, Thoreau lived in an isolated cabin in the woods near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.  His stated goal was to “live brutally” and to “front only the essential facts of life”.   A newly built railroad line from Boston to Fitchburg travelled right along the shores of the small pond.  I was very surprised to learn that Thoreau was actually pretty sociable,  and he walked the two miles or so to Concord center quite often, availing himself of the flat, cleared off train tracks.   On our re-enactment, Dane and I traced his route to town, but to avoid the relative boredom of a return trip, we stashed our bikes in Concord center so we could cycle back to the pond.

I’ll start with our little photo essay and end with the new thoughts inspired by the journey.

We left our bikes in town and then drove to the Pond to begin our walk.

The railroad route, more or less as Thoreau experienced it. Dane commented, "It's an interesting walk because where you are stepping is so monotonous and it makes you more aware of what changes around you as you cover ground."

A little glimpse of the Pond from the train tracks. Here is one of Thoreau's illustrations of a more "consciously-constructed" life. Train tickets were expensive at the time. Thoreau pointed out that he could walk to Boston in less time, and with more pleasure, than it would take to earn the money to take the train. It was exactly this kind of decision that he made at every juncture during his two year experiment.

Commuter trains still travel the tracks. We were also passed by a jogger...an odd place to run, I thought. However, in this area of the country I can imagine that runner is probably a Thoreau scholar, channeling his hero on his daily route.

Even on the short walk (two miles, appx.) it was easy to transport ourselves to Thoreau's time.

And then we would see totally contemporary artifacts and return to the present. This graffiti was actually pretty beautiful.

One graffiti artist's homage to Thoreau

Old cottages started appearing as we neared town

Concord center--which would probably be unrecognizable to Thoreau--but still manages to be a charming example of a fairly uncorrupted New England town center, with the requisite town green, steepled churches, and an historic inn

We rode our bikes back to the Pond, which would be completely unrecognizeable to Thoreau. It is totally overrun on hot summer days, and there is an elaborate traffic and parking management system maintained by the state parks system

With the bikes loaded back in the Rambler, we set off down the road, still chatting about Thoreau. I'd learned a lot from my son, and found the notion of Thoreau's grand experiment less intimidating and more applicable to today than I imagined.

So we tried to apply Thoreau’s thinking to today, and our own lives.  Start with the basic facts of his living in a cabin and performing just the minimal amount of paid work necessary to fuel his existence.  In his case, that was about 30 days a year of odd jobs.  For everything else he was self-sufficient. What would be the modern day equivalent?  I mean in terms of degree of “sacrifice” and the extent of deliberate change from current norms, in order to pursue Thoreau’s exhortation:

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!  I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand

Dane and I puzzled on this when I said I could imagine a future when I lived very simply, and crafted something Grommet-worth for a living.  Similarly,  my scientist friend Andy and I agree that being a letter carrier is a job we’d both aspire to in some simpler version of our futures.  (Not now, but after we play out our current endeavors.)  Dane said that would actually be a much bigger leap than Thoreau ever made.  Here’s why:    Thoreau’s contemporaries and neighbors in Concord were mainly farmers.  So, on balance, the degree of separation between his life, providing for his own needs, was not that disparate from the rest of his local society.  That basic notion was a revelation to me.  So when my friend Frank changed from being an HR executive to crafting half-scale reproduction Les Paul guitars, he was making a more radical change in his life than Thoreau!

We also chatted about the decisions one would face today, in truly paring back to the bare minimum.  OK–you eliminate a mortgage, and any other significant property,  and any recurring obligations like memberships, loans etc.  But after that, what about a car?   Or how about a computer?  Dane theorized that Thoreau would have actually owned a computer.  He was a pragmatic guy who employed modern tools of his time, and he was, after all, a writer.  His idea of independence did not necessarily mean sacrifice for philosophy’s sake.  It just meant keeping things simple.

I told Dane about one Grommet customer who is disabled and finds a computer essential to supplementing her family’s income, in searching for coupons, freebies and sweepstakes.  She does not necessarily live sparely by choice, but the computer allows her independence, and in that way is possibly  a Thoreau-like use.

My perspective changed a lot on our journey, regarding Thoreau.  The walk to town was a flat two miles or so, and easy to do.  He was not nearly as isolated as I had imagined.  And the separation between his chosen existence and that of his local neighbors was really not nearly as dramatic as I had imagined.  But it WAS thoughful, purposeful, and well-examined.  That is, after all, the hardest part.

There’s a new book getting a lot of attention for a similar reason.  It’s called Shop Class as Soulcraft. It’s written by Matthew Crawford,  a Ph.D. who used to work in a Washington think tank.  It makes a brilliant case for the intrinsic value of skilled work.  In the author’s case, he abandoned his fluorescent lights for opening a vintage motorcycle repair shop.  Here’s a good summary from the Wall Street Journal:

Physical objects and machines, especially those that need fixing, pose cognitive challenges, Mr. Crawford argues, since they resist the application of explicit rules and require instead the use of a craftsman’s hard-earned “tacit knowledge.” By contrast, he says, many white-collar jobs have been reduced to nearly rote tasks, following elaborately devised systems that leave little room for actual thinking.

Another key point of the book is that most skilled hand work cannot be outsourced overseas.  You have to do it on site.  Think about that when it comes to  individual economic security.

So if I don’t become a letter carrier, someday I will likely be a future Grommet supplier.   Working with my hands, probably outdoors.  For now, though,   I can always eat my lunch outside, with my hands.  I can live with that.

*Photo from this blog.   The author says he is “testing sword blades for the Orchihi store.”  Whatever that is.

The second is a “documentary” inspired by my son’s extended recovery from a major hip surgery.  He knows how I feel about foul language (especially out of my sons’mouths) so he warned me “There’s bad language in that one Mom.”  Uh.  Yeah.

But it’s funny, and I know that his concerned far-flung family and friends will trade that offense for getting a look at him, post-surgery.  (He had an open procedure surgery to shave off a very distressing bump on the top of his ball joint.  Big deal.  He is just off crutches, six weeks later. No sports, which is killer for a guy like him.)

I had a Eureka! moment yesterday. It took the combination of  three observations:

1. The Economist once wrote that an enormous–and largely under-reported–driver of the Irish Celtic Tiger economic boom was the sizeable mass of college-educated women entering, and also returning to, the Irish workforce.
2. In my world I am surrounded by women who have taken a career break and are looking to re-enter the paid workforce.
3. Even in this economy, my college-age son has had good access to summer internships.  But college-age kids have nothing, contribution-wise, on an adult with five, ten, or more, years of professional experience.   So…..

Here is my big brainstorm.  Companies looking to do more with less (which is virtually every company) should have a formal “Executive in Residence” program for retooling career break professionals.  These would be structured four to six month internships specifically designed for highly skilled and experienced women (could be men too, why not?) who re-enter the work force.  I discussed this topic yesterday with someone who said,

That idea really resonates with me.  College interns are hit or miss.  But experienced women–you absolutely know they would deliver!  I’m friends with so many women in this boat.  One of them was a former VP of Marketing at Sapient and she is having trouble landing a middle management marcom job!  She missed so much change over the last few years, especially in social media.  She just needs someone to give her a break–so she can catch up and, again, work at her appropriate level.

I think, as long as the training burden was not too onerous, the arrangement could be eminently fair for both sides.  The re-entry professional could get up to speed on new tools and processes, and the sponsoring company could get some experienced workforce boost to their enterprise.

OK President Obama.  Now I am envisioning some kind of tax credit, or subsidy, for companies that rally behind this idea…  This could be the best economic stimulus plan no one is discussing.  Yet.   And if it worked for Ireland…

P.S.  A great resource for more ideas and advice regarding relaunching a career can be found at www.irelaunch.com

Mom what is the point of raising these “grants” [his word for an investment funding round] for your company? All you do is spend one grant trying to get another grant.

Woah. Kinda stopped me in my tracks.

A family friend overheard this statement by my son, and said, (with a dropped jaw), “That’s the central thrust in the fundraising book I just read.” (He was talking about the great book Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur.)