Category Archives: Daily Life

The Economics of Staying at Home

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I don’t usually comment on the political news, or on things at Instapundit (because I figure lots of people read that anyway); however, amidst all of the verbiage on Ann Romney’s choice to stay at home and raise the five Romney, I saw this post.

I don’t know anything about Kevin Williamson, and I didn’t read any of his post except the paragraph Glenn Reynolds quoted, but I agree with that paragraph completely:

It is difficult to put a dollar value on parental time, but it is clear that to the Romneys one hour of Mrs. Romney’s time at home with the family was worth far more than one hour in C-level wages; further, a 2,000-hour annual block of time invested in earning C-level wages would have fundamentally changed the character of the Romney household for the worse, while providing negligible economic benefit. Instead, she provided the family with a critical good that Mr. Romney, for all his riches, could not acquire without her cooperation. If we think of the household as a household, Ann Romney’s decision to stay at home makes perfect economic sense: Her decision to be a full-time mother enormously improved the quality of life for Mr. Romney, for the couple’s five sons, and — let’s not overlook this critical factor — for Mrs. Romney herself.

My wife Jane is a stay-at-home mom. She worked outside the home before we had kids; she might possibly work outside the home when our kids have moved out. But right now, right at the moment, having her at home has proven to be the best thing for all six of us, economically and in all other ways.

Pictures of the Rally

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Here are some pictures of the rally. I have pictures of each of the speakers, but I generally didn’t catch their names (or recognize them, for that matter), so I’ll skip those. Instead, my goal was to try to capture the size of the crowd.

Here’s the crowd from the back, early in the rally. That’s L.A.’s City Hall in the background.

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Here’s another view from a point behind the speaker.

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A little later on I was listening to the speakers, and happened to turn around and see that some more people had gathered. This was taken from toward the front of the crowd.

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Finally, here’s one I took whilst trying to be artsy; but at the time I didn’t notice all of the other people with cameras in hand.

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If you ask your browser to show the images in their own window, they will be bigger.

Rally for Religious Freedom Redux

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So I went to the Rally for Religious Freedom at the Federal Building in Downtown L.A. this noon; I’ll have pictures later. I’m not particularly good at estimating the size of crowds, but I’d say that there were between two to three-hundred people there.

I’d never heard of any of the speakers, but they were all good; they didn’t rabble-rouse, and they didn’t demonize the opposition. The strongest note was a call to prayer. The speakers included a Catholic priest from Downey, a bishop from the “Charismatic Episcopal Church”, which despite my twenty years as an Anglican I don’t believe I’d ever heard of before, a priest from the Antiochean Orthodox Church, a Lutheran minister, a couple of Evangelical ministers, and a number of lay-people. The event was sponsored by the group “Survivors of Abortion”.

There was only one heckler, an angry man who walked past and told the clergy present in rather foul language that they should stay out of politics. He was just passing through, though, and the crowd did not respond in kind.

There was no media presence at all, so far as I could tell.

Macbeth

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I just watched a 1983 BBC production of Macbeth with my son.

The difference between TV and live theater is that on the stage you have to be big and bold and larger than life, and on TV you have to be much more restrained. And these actors tried to pull it in—I could tell—but the general effect was of many people overacting in low voices.

Oh, well.

SxSW—Huh?

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So I was reading a blog today, and it asked the musical question, “Does SxSW matter anymore?” And I said, Huh? What on earth is SxSW?

Apparently the name stands for “South by Southwest”; and it’s some sort of blogging/social media conference. The post showed a “famous picture” from 10 years ago, which it describes as showing “just about every significant blogger at the time all gathered around one table.”

Hmmm. Fascinating. You know, I’ve had a web presence since December of 1996. I remember when blogging got started. There was a time when I had the most popular Alexandre Dumas page on the World Wide Web. The Times of London once linked to my web site in an article on Patrick O’Brian. I don’t mean to imply that these pages were anything special; just that it was a really small pond.

And yet somehow I never heard of SxSW. Funny.

Down with Early Daylight Savings Time

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This morning came too early, and it was dark. Friday morning the alarm went off and there was light outside. Today it was dark. There’s somebody who has a lot to answer for, and I hope he does.

In the meantime we had an extremely busy weekend (my youngest’s birthday party, among other things), and I’ve been reading Shogun, by James Clavell. I hope to have more to say about it later.

In the meantime, this is one corner of what’s left of my kitchen. Note the retaining walls, and the sizeable rock at the lower right.

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FitBit

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I’ve just recently gotten a “FitBit” pedometer. The neat thing about it is how easy it is. Clip it to your shirt or drop it in a pocket, and it measures how many steps you’ve taken, how far you’ve walked, how many calories you’ve burned, and how many stories you’ve climbed; and when you come back to your computer it will automatically upload that information so that you can track your progress over time. There are other products that do similar things; this one was recommended at Cool Tools, which I’ve found to be generally reliable.

So far, it appears to work as advertised; and I’m interested to see that I’ve already climbed 19 stories today. (Comes of working at JPL; the Lab is built on the side of a hill. My office is at the top of the hill; most other places of interested are way down below.)

No Post Today

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I’ve been trying very hard to do at least one post a day; but today I went on a five-mile hike with the boy scouts.

The thing you need to know is that to hike for five miles in the vicinity of our house involves going more or less straight up the side of the mountain…and I’m not really in shape for that. I did OK, but now I Will Rest.