My firstborn is 16 today.

Random Thoughts:

• How could this be? Wasn't she just born like yesterday?!
• Can we take back teaching her to drive?
• I hope her feet grow one more half size so we can share shoes.
• Can we turn back the clock?
• Will we ever be able to see the floor of her room again? Or the bathroom counter? I picked out that carpet and tile, you know?
• I want to wear her Free People clothes. Will I ever fit in them?
• Is Dave as freaked out about this 16 thing as I am?
• This makes me feel old. Does it make my parents feel really old?
• How did my sister-in-law deal with this when her daughters turned 16?
• Seriously, how do we turn back the clock?
• Alternatively, can I lock her up in her room and throw away the key until she's 18? Or 21?
• Why does she need so many clothes?
• How much of my hair has turned gray in the last 16 years?
• Will we kill each other on the trip we're taking together Spring Break?
• I must research arranged marriages.
• Should I bring her a Tuxedo Hot Chocolate or a Vanilla Bean Frappuccino between classes?
• Thank g/d she is not into the same things I was at her age.
• This is a big day, a big deal. I'm so proud of her and happy she's my daughter.

Happy birthday sweet girl.

The University of Washington

Often I look at Eldest Daughter and am shocked at what I see. She is so together, so ambitious and focused at this age. Add to that long brown hair, long legs and ridiculously long eyelashes that she lengthens with mascara. Is this child even mine?!

We experienced our first college tour together Monday at the University of Washington. It was cold and foggy, unlike the perfect, sunny day prior when we played tourist.

I didn’t take any college tours before I went off into the Wild, Wild (mid) West. Did they even do official college tours back then?! I remember visiting a friend at UCLA and another at Cal. And that was it. This child will visit many schools on her journey to pick one.

Our Beyonce-look-alike tour guide could simultaneously speak, smile with all of her face and gesticulate broadly with her hands. She was a perfect promotional vehicle for the school – all sweetness and light. We walked through the quad, the library, the computer science building, the union. We learned about the 800 student run organizations (aka clubs) and that California provides the second highest number of students to UW after the state of Washington. We learned that the average undergrad receives their degree in 4.1 years (what does that .1 mean anyway?!) and that 70% of freshman live on campus.

It was surprising to me how much the tour was a sales job. But then again I had nothing to compare it with. I worked very hard to keep my mouth shut during the tour so as not to influence Eldest Daughter's observations. Eldest Daughter and I both loved how the UW is a community within the large Seattle community. She mentioned it first. Remember, my mouth was clamped tightly shut. The setting is spectacular – on the lake with views of the ocean and Mt. Rainier and the Olympic Range. Although the school is large, 28,000 undergrads, the campus is fairly compact and the buildings were visually interesting. It’s a pretty campus. Eldest Daughter kept commenting on that.

This makes me wonder how much the physical appearance of a school influences its student appeal. I never gave it any thought. Madison, my UW, had a lot of beautiful old, historic buildings. In fact, I had classes in one that was built in 1851. Bascom Hall, the building most people associate with the school, was built in 1910. I never appreciated it although I did think the campus scenic with its location on the isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona.

One more down. TBD how many more to go.

Sleepy in Seattle

More like EXHAUSTED in Seattle as I write this.

Paris and I flew in this morning and made the most of a sunny winter day in the Pacific Northwest.

I have to say, an iPhone and map app make driving in an unfamiliar city so much easier than the good 'ole days of reading the map they hand you at the rental car counter. Add to it an eager co-pilot and it's about as unstressful as it gets.

It's been 15 years since I've been to Seattle. It's still beautiful. The water. The boats. The mountains. The skyline. We started off at Pike Place Market and satisfied someone's quest to find the original Starbucks. From there we went into the market proper and sat down to a late lunch with a view far and west. After lunch we explored more of the market and saw the fishmongers throwing purchased fish prior to packaging it.

Next on our list was the observation deck at the top of the Space Needle, built for in 1962 for the World's Fair. I'd forgotten that the Chihuly Garden is in Seattle and fortunately for me, it's adjacent to the Space Needle at Seattle Center. That's worth a post all by itself. I think this picture is my favorite from today. Paris and I are reflected in the glass along with the Space Needle.

Seattle seems to have a big commitment to art in public spaces. One of the most interesting things we saw were five solar powered flowers named Sonic Bloom at the Seattle Center. The 40' tall flowers absorb the sun's energy during the day then use it at night to light up and sing. 

The original Nordstrom was our final stop and now we're in our hotel room eating takeout from Maggiano's. I have meetings tomorrow morning and then we have a tour of UW. Crazy! And by crazy I mean both the pace of this quick trip following last night's dance competition and that Paris is interested in going to school here.

Bedtime.

The beach in winter.

There wasn't a lot of snow at Tahoe the week of Christmas. Sure, we skied but the conditions read more April than December.

One of my clients lives up at the lake full-time and she suggested meeting at the Commons Beach one afternoon with all of our kids. I would never have thought to go to the beach in the winter. And The Pinks were dead against it. Until we got there, that is.

The beach was covered in snow and ice, which made for fun slipping and sliding. Not surprisingly, the kids were drawn to the water's edge and were fascinated with the transition from ice to water. The beach resembled tide pools. I shot a lot of pictures -- the whole scene was beautiful and something I hadn't planned to see since we rarely leave Squaw during ski season.

Our kids ran around on the playground and then we headed to Syd's for a late lunch of smoothies and bagels.

An unexpected treat.

A walk down Memory Lane. I mean Second St.

My first job out of college was in magazine publishing. Like pretty much everyone else I knew, I lived in one part of San Francisco and worked in another. SOMA, where I spent the first three years of my career, was a neighborhood in transition back then. It had none of those cute work-live lofts it has now, and none of the hip wine bars and high-end nail salons. South Park, (nee 1855), had homeless people on its benches instead of the mothers and strollers it has today. Moscone Center was just one building back then (it's now four) and the further south you went, the grittier it got.

I worked in one of the nicest buildings around, 501 Second St. There was security in the lobby and both a deli and Gold's Gym on the ground floor. I belonged to the gym for a time, the years of high-impact aerobics, but then quit because I couldn't work out and clean up in the hour I had for my lunch break. And that neighborhood was not safe enough after dark to stick around!

Fast forward twenty years. I have a client meeting in the city. And it's in that same building, on the same floor I worked. Gold's Gym is gone. So is the deli. There's no 20 foot tall Christmas tree in the lobby with turquoise and salmon colored ornaments. (So early 90s!)

The walk down Second Street from Market is a walk down Memory Lane. Eddie Rickenbacher's, where I spent many evenings is still there. The Flytrap now serves Persian food. Patelco, where developed my first banking relationship and got my first car loan, remains. Adolph Gasser, the iconic camera and photographic rental house is still there. The San Francisco Dancewear outlet is gone. Boy do I need it now! So is the three-story Chinese restaurant. Chaiken & Capone's first offices were on Second Street. It's now just Chaiken and Julie moved a few blocks over to New Montgomery.

Just four of us were in my client's offices that morning. I hoteled in a large open space with a view toward the west, a view I never had from my windowless cube back in my publishing days, the days I had to take my lunch from exactly 1pm to exactly 2pm. The 5th floor patio was still there, the patio where Scott, Cynthia, Guy and I ate many deli lunches and soaked up the occasional San Francisco sun.

I was so naive back then, so green in business. I took it all in, realizing that the editorial side of a magazine would never hire someone who had worked on its advertising side, figuring out how to work with prima donnas and high functioning alcoholics. Playing with one of the first NeXT computers, moving up to traveling around the country on the trade show circuit. Learning how to plan $100K corporate holiday parties from two executive assistants. Met Caryl Lyons who I am still close with today, and Callie Smith, whose husband became Gina after they moved to Seattle.

Ah, the good 'ole days ...

The glamorous life.

I recently read an article in the New York Times which described Facebook as often providing its members with the sensation of feeling a little left out when their friends post from that party they weren't invited to or from someone's last trip to an exotic locale. In this same article Instagram was described as a vehicle for unadulterated voyeurism because it is almost entirely a photo site with a built-in ability, via the retro-style filters, to idealize every moment, thus encouraging users to create art-directed magazine layouts of their lives.

Just in case you were wondering, my life isn't like that.

Here's an example. One of the things I do for my current client is host and moderate webinars. Last week's webinar featured a speaker nine hours ahead of me. This presentation, which had more than 200 attendees, was scheduled to start at 7am Pacific Time. I decided to forgo the 4:30am wakeup call, get two additional hours of sleep, do my duties from the house in my snowman print pajamas, and then doll up and drive the 50 miles to work. The only problem was that the internet was down in our whole neighborhood at 6:30am, which I only learned by running around the neighborhood in those aforementioned PJs pounding on the doors of all neighbors with lights on begging for a live internet connection. Glamorous, huh?

Today was Liberty's Ballet Tea Demo. It's a short performance at the end of her ballet class. I popped this picture of the little ballerinas doing a frog stretch. Why do they do frog stretches in ballet, anyway? Liberty dislikes ballet but takes the class because it's required for dance team. After seeing the demo today I honestly believe that teaching ballet is the most boring job on the planet.

The last time I went to one of these demos was when Paris took ballet at this studio. We skipped this event during her last competitive season because she was upset that it was all Christmas music. I was good with that since it was only a performance for the families, not a competition. Oh no. I got a less-than-friendly call from the studio owner reminding me that we were not the only Jewish family who took ballet. Again, so glamorous.

Tori did something quite glamorous last weekend if you're the Sporty Spice type. She took a lacrosse clinic with the Cal Women's Lacrosse team at Memorial Stadium. Go Bears.

An open letter to our friends at Safeway.

Dear Safeway Corporate Buyers,

We're loyal. We're your target audience. You provide a clean, convenient, generally easy-to-find-parking-at store in our suburb. In exchange, we provide you with thousands of dollars annually.

However, while I was shopping for Thanksgiving I noticed the large display of Passover items. Apparently you didn't pay attention to the 2011 Whole Foods Incident in Washington DC. These items were in a stand-alone display, far from the regular Kosher or ethnic foods where we MOTs (Members of the Tribe) find everyday Jewish mainstay foods such as packaged matzoh ball soup mix and Manischiwetz. Clearly this setup was an intentional act, one that took space away from other manufacturers. We've seen this in the early fall, too, around the time of our Jewish New Year.

The thing is, we only need those unleavened cake mixes, macaroons, jelly candy and gefilte fish during Passover. Passover is in the spring. So when you start thinking about that big pastel-colored bunny, you're there.

Here's the way our conversations go down at Rosh Hashana and Chaunkah dinners:

"Oy vey, Phyllis. Did you see the three-story matzoh display at Safeway this week?"

"Yes, Sadie, I did. Messhuganah, those people! When are they going to figure out that every Jewish holiday meal does not end with chocolate-covered matzoh?"

So, friends at Safeway, we really and truly appreciate you thinking of us. And we know it's hard to keep all of those Jewish holidays straight. Heck, if you need help correlating your sales reports with your buying plan, I can recommend a great software vendor or two ...

Loyally yours in latkes,

Jewish Suburban Wife of One, Mother of Three