Personal/Family

The Digital Home Hub – Family Calendar

June 4, 2017 by Pamela Parker

If your family is anything like mine, every day is aflutter with activities — Cub Scouts, Football Practice, Soccer Practice, Parkour Class, etc. And as our eldest enters Junior High next year, the number of goings-on is only likely to increase.

With all this hubbub, we’ve experienced mornings when we’ve started hustling the kids out the door to get to school, only to realize that today is School Picture Day or Field Trip Day or Crazy Socks Day or whatever the school has cooked up. And, of course, we simultaneously realize that our child is woefully unprepared for the occasion — dressed all wrong for picture day, failing to have the correct accouterments for field day, and with socks that are unmatched, but not exactly “crazy”. [Read more…] about The Digital Home Hub – Family Calendar

Alexa as a part of the family: We got Skills

May 15, 2016 by Pamela Parker

Since we added the Amazon Echo to the household last year, it’s been fascinating to see how my children (now 7 and 10) have adapted to “her” presence. The youngest delighted in asking Alexa to tell him corny jokes and, more practically, used the device to time himself when doing his homework. The oldest learned quickly how one needed to ask her questions to yield useful answers. Digital natives, to be sure.

Since then, Alexa has become an integral part of our lives. I use her to entertain me and answer questions while my hands are occupied with cooking or washing dishes. She’s set to remind us of when we should be headed out the door every school day, and we’ve set up a Friday playlist on Spotify — which, of course, include two versions of Rebecca Black’s classic — to cheer us and get us moving on the last day of the work/school-week. I even replaced my bedside alarm clock with a Dot.

So when I started to investigate the idea of Alexa Skills, it was natural that I involved my kids — well, one kid in particular who happens to love trains.

Teaching Kids STEM With Cooking

November 27, 2015 by Pamela Parker

There’s no better way to really learn than to use your newly-gained knowledge in a practical way. Growing up, math was never very interesting to me, in part because I had zero idea of how this information would be at all useful. Now, as an adult, I find that in everyday life, I use my math skills and science knowledge most often in a seemingly mundane task — cooking.

A couple of years ago, I was spending a weekend at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, and I volunteered to make pancakes from scratch for breakfast — something I do at home all the time. We were a big crew, so, though I had the written recipe, I needed to double it to make a sufficient quantity.

Dispatches From A Standing Desk, Week 1

November 14, 2015 by Pamela Parker

It was somewhat shocking to learn how long it would take to fully recover from a dislocated toe — 6 to 8 weeks and, in my case, even a bit more. But, finally, I felt comfortable enough on my feet again to give the standing desk another shot. Last weekend, I set everything up again and was determined to start afresh on Monday morning.

I have to say that my first instinct when I walked into my office was to sigh. The last thing I wanted to do was to stand up all day. But I got over it soon enough, and reluctantly assumed the position.

My Setup

As a reminder, I’ve got the Ready Desk holding my external monitor, wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, while alongside it, I’ve got my laptop arranged as a second, sitting, workstation.

The idea is that I can switch between the positions as needed, because, even though there’s plenty of evidence that sitting all day is killing us, it turns out that standing all day isn’t so great either. Ask waiters and nurses. [Read more…] about Dispatches From A Standing Desk, Week 1

Not Just Gingers And One-Offs: The Enrichening Of English Around The Globe

December 23, 2014 by Pamela Parker

This morning, I caught up on the news by reading about the recent terrible accident in Glasgow that took six lives. Most headlines I saw referred to it as the “Glasgow Bin Lorry Crash.” Here, we’d call it the “Garbage Truck Crash.” Sad as the incident was, It got me thinking about a less-tragic cultural phenomenon that I’ve been observing for some time.

When I was a kid, I wouldn’t have had any idea what a “Bin Lorry” was. I remember having to look up words like “treacle” after I’d come across them in books. And books were nearly the only places I ran across such words. I met an exchange student from Australia in high school and was fascinated by slang he taught me like saying “no worries” rather than “you’re welcome” or “not a problem.”

I also remember being confused about the term “mince” or “mince meat” — I thought I’d figured out that “mince” was what we termed “hamburger meat” or “ground beef,” but then I heard about a “mince pie” or a “mincemeat pie,” which sounded like dessert to me. And speaking of dessert, that Pink Floyd song that asked “how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!” mystified me a bit, too. I thought I knew what pudding was, but this seemed an odd usage of it. [Read more…] about Not Just Gingers And One-Offs: The Enrichening Of English Around The Globe

On the Move

August 24, 2010 by Pamela Parker

Photo credit: jypsygen

Over the next few months, I’ll be blogging entries with the theme “City Girl Moves to the Country.” Oh, wait, has that been done?

Seriously, though, after growing up in the fourth largest city in the country, then living ten years in the undisputed largest — notwithstanding three years in the SF Bay Area — I am slightly nervously packing my bags for a hamlet with a total population of 1,600. We’re going from a Brooklyn brownstone neighborhood with a population density of 47,716 per square mile to a town with 57 people per square mile. Can’t you just imagine the tumbleweeds rolling by?

OK, so, I’ll admit, this tiny town is on the outskirts of a pretty darned cool, and fairly populous, city — Austin, Texas. You know, the place where SXSW is held. The place with the amazing start-up scene and the burgeoning social media community.

I’m a Native Texan, and most of my family still lives thereabouts. We’ve loved living in New York and San Francisco, but, as the years have gone on, we’ve missed being close enough for family barbecues, pool parties, weddings and baby showers, not to mention the occasional hospital visit or funeral. We want our kids to have the kind of family relationships I grew up with, and have grown to cherish even more as I’ve gotten older. It just didn’t seem possible to give them that living so far away. (With the lower cost of living, we hope to be able to visit our Scottish family more often, too.)

It’s hard for me to believe that we’re at this point, given that this move has been more than a year in the making, but, by next week, we’ll be in the Austin area, with the kids settled into their new schools and us unpacking at our new house on three acres out in the boonies.

As for work, I will be leaving Federated Media at the end of the week (after 4 years!), but I’ll be doing some part-time consulting work for the company and continuing some of the key projects I’ve been a part of — after I take next week off to get my bearings and unpack a few boxes, of course. I also expect to do some freelance writing and editing, and am keeping my eyes open for interesting projects. Feel free to get in touch with ideas! (pamela *at* pamelaparker.com, @pamelaparker, http://www.pamelaparker.com)

Austin peeps, I look forward to getting in touch, or getting back in touch, in the coming weeks and months! Let’s do lunch or coffee!

Personal/Family

My Setup

Footer