Since I have been visiting my Mom, I have had a little time to watch some TV. I completely forgot about the Comedy Central show, Dr. Katz. It’s still pretty funny, even though they haven’t made any new episodes in ten years.

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I went to visit my Aunt Julie last night. We stayed up way too late and looked at old family photos. She has all the Creative Memories stuff and all the pictures are scrap booked in those albums. It was really cool seeing pictures of myself, siblings and my cousins (altogether sixteen of us!) from ten to fifteen years ago. I couldn’t believe the glass’s that I wore, and I completely forgot about this tacky and fantastic white leopard print cowboy hat I had in high school. My brother had a habit of laying across everyone’s lap when they sat on the couch for a picture.

It was just really neat seeing what we all used to look like. Who says family pictures aren’t fun??

Update October 9, 2009: I found my fantastically tacky cowboy hat. Still fits. Maybe I’ll have a silly hat playdate in the near future for the Joy Troupe.

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I think I want this T-Shirt.

T-Shirt T-Shirt

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When I was in high school my Mom used to take my siblings and myself to the Yankee Candle Factory in Massachusetts. It was really cool. The place was a little cheesy. We would go there in August, but they had all of this stuff set up to be like Christmas inside, but it was still very neat. It felt like there was a lot of effort put into the place to make it very special for its customers. There were all sorts of demonstrations and entertainment throughout the place. As you walked from room to room the themes changed and you were taken from one setting to another. From a room set up to look like a traditional candle making house from a time when people had to make their own candles, to a fake Bavarian village, to Santa’s workshop. I always used to love the “magical forest” you had to walk through to get to the Bavarian village.

Well, since I am home I figured it would be fun to go there with my Mom like old times. We made the drive out to Massachusetts in four hours, though usually it’s only two. We sort of forgot the way to get there. It was a beautiful day for a drive at least. Once we got there I was sort of disappointed. I remember the factory being very special, and this time it just wasn’t. There were so many things that were different, and not in a good way. It seems like now, the company is only trying to get money from their customers. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the entire purpose of having a business is to get money from people. It’s just that ten years ago, when they were trying to get my money from me, it seemed like they had put more of an effort to make their customers happy. I don’t know…. I was just very disappointed. I don’t think I will go back to the factory in Massachusetts. I think I will try and give the factory in Colonial Williamsburg a shot at some point, but I’m not expecting much.

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As I lay in bed suffering from insomnia due to asthma, I heard my oldest son fall out of bed over the baby monitor. After rushing into the room, tucking him back into bed and reading him a short story, I decided to come back and blog about it. Then I realized, to my absolute horror, that I am becoming…. (insert ominous music here) I am becoming a mommy blogger! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I’ve been sitting debating what I wanted to post for a few minutes and feeling slightly delirious and out of order (and sorts.) At first it was to be about toddlers falling out of bed, but then I became disturbed by that. Then I figured I would blog about not writing about photography. How my life has gotten in the way and I don’t have time to devote to f-stops and charged coupler devices. I feel slightly guilty that this blog is called Marla Anson Photography, but there is virtually no photography portion. Then I decided I would just write about this entire emotionally chaotic experience.

You can tell I’m really tired because I am all over the place here! My mind keeps racing in weird circles. I guess I can write about whatever I want. It’s my blog after all! If I want to write about photography, I will! If I want to write about my two year old falling out of bed I will. Then I shall feel guilty again! And so the vicious cycle continues….

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I love to cook. At this point in my life it kind of stress’s me out because of the kids, but I still love it anyway. The past two days I have made the mistake of going into Le Gourmet Chef and Williams-Sonoma at the mall. In Williams-Sonoma I practically left having convulsions because I wanted to buy just about everything in the store, with the exception of the Dutch oven section. I love kitchen gadgets and am always looking at something new to add to my arsenal of ladles, rolling pins and hand mixers, etc.

Anyway, today I was going gaga over cake pans. I saw one cake pan that had molds to make a giant cup cake once you put the cake together and another one that made a beehive. I don’t know why I feel the need to have a cake pan that makes a cake in the shape of a beehive. I would probably only  make a beehive cake one time. But, it’s so pretty.

Afterwords I called my husband to tell him about my visit and promptly drove him crazy with the way I pronounce Willian-Sonoma. I say it wrong every time, I can’t help it.

Update July 2, 2009: After writing this last night, I walked into my mothers kitchen today and there was the beehive cake pan! She bought it last year! How funny!

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Occasionally I do a Google search on my family and friends, just to see what’s going on with them. I recently did this to add people to my blog roll.

I just did a search on my closest friend from home and found this article from a few years ago by Ben Dobbin. This article made national news, telling my friends story in both the Washington and LA Times. I found the article here.

Women-Only Weekend Aims To Bolster Ranks Of Female Firefighters

BEN DOBBIN
Associated Press

MONTOUR FALLS, New York (AP) — After strapping on a 50-pound (22.5-kilogram) vest, Julie Pisanello reeled in a fire hose, hoisted two ladders, whacked a sledgehammer a dozen times against a door-like simulator, crawled through a dark maze and dragged a 165-pound (74-kilogram) mannequin a distance of 70 feet (21 meters).

The substitute schoolteacher is already a volunteer firefighter in suburban Albany. To join the mere 98 women who earn their livelihoods from firefighting in New York _ a state with 20,000 career firefighters _ she needs to demonstrate on-the-job dexterity.

“It’s so difficult!” Pisanello, 21, said with a gasp midway through an eight-station course set aside especially for female hopefuls on a fall weekend at the New York State Academy of Fire Science. “Keep going! You are so close, girl!” shot back an instructor.

It was when Pisanello came to the final event _ wielding a pike and hook atop a 6-foot-long (1.8-meter-long) pole to replicate pulling down a ceiling in a burning building _ that she almost buckled.

“If she even drops that pole she’ll fail,” said Fire Lt. Donna Kubarycz, whispering running commentary from nearby.

Seeking to broaden a field still dominated overwhelmingly by men, the main firefighter’s union helped develop a Candidate Physical Ability Test in 1999 that reflects not just brute strength but strictly job-related demands.

Pisanello was not disqualified. Neither did she finish soon enough _ she was about four minutes over the test’s cutoff time of 10 minutes, 20 seconds. But she came away encouraged.

Intent on building her strength and endurance through inline skating, swimming, running and weightlifting, and improving her technique by routinely tackling hands-on drills at her volunteer fire station, she is confident she’ll be a full-time firefighter someday.

That would land her in rare company. Of the 275,000-plus career firefighters in America, only about 6,500, 2.4 percent, are women. That’s up from zero in 1972. Some 40,000 women serve as volunteer firefighters.

“Is it small because it’s only 2 percent or big because we’ve increased 50 percent” in a decade? asked Terese Floren, co-founder of Women in the Fire Service, a research group in Madison, Wisconsin. “People have to make that call for themselves.”

The third annual training camp at the Fire Academy drew 200 women, from volunteers practicing entry-level tests to professionals getting guidance in arson detection, hazardous materials and emergency responses to ice rescues and acts of terrorism.

The state-sponsored sessions at a converted, Civil War-era college campus in the rustic Finger Lakes region broke ground in bringing together female firefighters from around New York. “There was no forum for them to ever get to know each other,” said Jackaline Ring of the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control.

Similar programs designed to bolster the female ranks have since been tried in Pennsylvania and Illinois. Fraternal groups within professional fire departments also are striving to create recruitment, training and mentoring programs that better prepare women wanting to join up.

While some cities have broken the pattern _ at least one in seven firefighters in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, is female _ many others have nearly all-male forces. Only 26 of New York City’s 11,500 firefighters are women.

The barriers begin with tradition _ one of the most physically demanding jobs retains a fiercely male culture _ and female trailblazers who cracked the shell a generation ago have failed to win a transformation in many places.

“It all depends on who’s running things,” said Kubarycz, 45, who in 1987 became the first female career firefighter in Rochester, New York “A lot of times you try to get things going and, if you don’t have backing from the important higher-ups, it doesn’t get anywhere.”

On one side is stiff competition _ “there are so many qualified men” _ but perhaps harder is getting word out to women “that this is a viable option,” said Kubarycz, a bodybuilder steered into firefighting by a friend.

The test offered by the International Association of Fire Fighters, which mimics the sequential order of battling a fire, “is not only standardized but fair” in assessing physical ability, said a union official, Rich Duffy. Its use must be accompanied by recruiting and mentoring programs aimed at increasing diversity “both in gender and ethnicity,” he said.

A few dozen women lining up on the grounds of the Fire Academy roared their approval as each one progressed through the course, which begins with three minutes on a stair-climbing machine.

“Firefighting is a challenging job that not many people are willing to do,” said Pisanello, still panting after her workout. “They can’t fake it.”

If men have stronger torsos, “women may have stronger legs,” said Christa Lombardo, 29, a fire captain’s daughter who joined Buffalo’s department in 1995. “Guys can put a lot of oomph into it. The women, it may take a little more technique.”

While Lombardo “practically grew up” in a fire station, “if you don’t pull your weight, they don’t care who you are,” she said. “You have to test men and women equally. There’s differences in body types and mechanics, but the job is still the job.”

Often, her colleagues find themselves scattered in various firehouses, so the women-only weekend is a rare chance to get together.

“We hang out, we talk, we discuss,” Lombardo said. “The guys do it, we can do it.”

“I see some women who are very discouraged within their own fire department,” said the Fire Academy’s director, Richard Nagle. “They’re accepted because they have to be accepted, not because they are considered to be equal in their abilities.

“The men have to say, ‘Yes, there are women who can do the job and I wouldn’t mind trusting my safety to a female the same way I would to a male.”’

The union test is required across New York. Rather than considering anyone who passes, however, some career fire departments like New York City’s draw up hiring lists weighted in favor of those who score highest on both written and physical tests.

“People should be judged on their ability to do the job and not anything else,” said Nagle, a retired FDNY lieutenant. Still, he expects “a couple of generations” will pass before there are substantial numbers of female firefighters.

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I pulled this from my Dad’s blog. He wrote this right after my Grandpa died a few days ago.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Paul

Paul A Butkereit April 1922 – June 2009

Everything I ever could ever define as good
Was there in this man

A scant five minutes in his presence
Was all it took to convince anyone of this

He had an honest and open relationship
With the world
With everyone
With everything

I never knew him to tell a lie
Not once

His simple philosophy
Could be summed up
With one phrase

Do the right thing

What the right thing was
Needed no mention

It was understood
That you knew

It was your responsibility

To know

I really believe that he felt that way
About so many of the world’s
problems

People, most often know
What is the right thing to do
Deep down inside
They
know

They just won’t always admit it
To themselves

Let alone
To others

If ever there was
An example needed
To define the opposite
Of pretense

That would have to be
My dad

Unassuming, charismatic, outgoing
He was the guy who

Picked up hitch hikers
Stopped to fix flat tires
Did business on a handshake
Volunteered his time
Trusted his neighbors

One of my earliest memories
Is of my dad
Rushing in to pull someone
From their shattered vehicle
Lying upside-down and on fire
In the middle of East Seaman Avenue

A crowd of people
Looked on
Frozen with fear
Dad walked right up
And pulled the man from his car

The crowd failed to act
Because they were afraid the car would explode
My dad went in
For the very same reason

Mom had a fit of course
But I don’t think Dad could have done any different

And so it went
He was always that way
Which caused Mom much grief sometimes
But as kids growing up
It gave us a very broad perspective

The sort of perspective needed
To realize that the world is more
More than a man
More than a people
More than a nation

That we can be the heroes
We can be the leaders
We can be the champions
If we simply

Do the right thing

Now he is gone
And I am realizing
Perhaps for the first time
That he is as much a part of my message
As I am

As we all are

Thanks Dad

Posted by Citizen of Earth at 4:35 PM

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I got a mosquito bite on the palm of my fucking hand! How does that happen!?

Please excuse the profanity, but I am highly agitated about this turn of events.

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I am beginning the process of buying a house. I am SO overwhelmed.

My biggest problem is that the area that I’m looking in had all of these great houses. A lot of them were exactly what I was looking for. They had all been sitting on the market for a little while and I was keeping my eye on them using a realtor website. Unfortunately that was also during the time period that I was overly pregnant and my dear husband was out of commission because of a broken knee, in addition to all of the other crap I had going on at the time.

Well, now that I have had my baby and my husband can walk again all of these great houses that I wanted to take a look at are either sold or under contract and as good as sold. I am soooooooooo agitated. It also doesn’t help that I am five states away from the state I am actually looking in. Dear hubby is still there to look at the houses, so I just need to trust his judgement in case he finds ‘the one.’

I feel bad for him because I keep trying to convince him that we should also be looking outside of the area that he wants to target. I keep sending him listings for houses that are farther away from his job than he wants to be. Usually these houses are just what we are looking for in terms of size and price, but add too much commute time for his drive to work. ARGH!

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