Shannon Phillips

Molly the mastiff didn’t have enough puppies for us to get one from this litter. I think we’re top of the waiting list now, but it will be several months before another litter of puppies is born—and Molly won’t be the mama, which is a little bit of a pity, as she was our favorite of the doggies that the breeder had. But we’re still getting a puppy sometime in the near future!

Robin was accepted into the awesome co-op preschool! I am doing my happy dance all around the house!

So Sam has a new job!

Pretty much ever since we moved into the new house, we’ve been talking about ways to shorten his commute, which is currently awful—it takes about an hour and a half to get from our house to his office in Mountain View. But with the move, and the new baby, Sam also didn’t really want to add a new source of upheaval to our lives, so it’s only in the past few weeks that he’s really been sending out résumés. Oddly, as soon as he’d applied for one job, four different people got in touch with him about possible openings in other outfits: I guess a lot of companies that put off projects or growth during the recession are looking to make new hires now.

He’s had a few interviews at different places, but of all the possibilities we were really rooting for Zynga. Yes, the folks who make FarmVille. Neither of us play FarmVille (or any of their games, actually), but Sam really likes the platform they’re using to run their services, and he was impressed by the general intelligence level around the office. “Those Zynga people make me feel dumb,” he said after the first interview, which if you know Sam is really saying something. (Sam is quietly, devastatingly intelligent: I have a pretty darn high opinion of my own IQ, but over the years I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that Sam is actually smarter than me.) It’s also a really good sign that he was struck particularly by the elegance of their architecture and the competence of their technical team, as when Sam complains about his job he mostly complains about: 1) having to work within arbitrary limitations imposed by poor network architecture or badly-engineered products, and 2) inept coworkers. He doesn’t mind having to deal with difficult problems: he minds having to deal with stupid, unnecessary problems.

Anyway, apparently the affection between Sam and Zynga is mutual, as they offered him the job—he starts on April 18th! His job title will be Linux/Splunk Administrator. Splunk is a specific tool for analyzing network data that Sam has been specializing in over the past few years at VeriSign and Symantec—he likes it a lot. (I know this mostly because he has four Splunk t-shirts and he wears them all the time.) It turns out that Zynga is probably Splunk’s biggest customer, and while they’re currently using it in a fairly straightforward way to locate bugs and performance issues in their games, they have plans to build out some Splunk-based tools that would do things Sam describes as “sexy.” (Seriously. He said that.)

In the Zynga interview, the hiring manager asked Sam where he sees himself in five years. Now, Sam and I did some practice interviews where I helped him work out stock responses to some of the cliche interview questions (“What’s your greatest strength? What’s your greatest weakness?” etc.) But we hadn’t practiced that one, so Sam kind of blinked and then made what might have been the mistake of answering honestly. “I don’t know,” he said. “If you asked me that five years ago, I would’ve said that I wanted to be married, and I wanted a house. Now I have those things, and a couple of kids. So I guess in five years I just want to be watching my kids grow up.”

Of course he probably should have said something pertaining to a career arc, but when he told me that I just went “awwww.” And apparently the hiring manager has kids as well, and he kind of went “awww” a little, too.

But then! He explained that while at first Sam’s job would just be to keep all the existing technology running smoothly, because Zynga has all these plans for live, nude, sexy data analysis action, they also need someone who can help them design and build out that stuff—a tools architect, sort of. I don’t think there’s really a standard job title for it yet, but it’s something that’s becoming more common: companies need people who aren’t really traditional sysadmins (although they need the sysasmin knowledge base) and aren’t part of the programming team either (although they do need to be able to write code). But instead of working on the end product like the programmers do, or working in operations like the sysadmins do, these people build and maintain the technical infrastructure that both teams use to do their jobs. This is actually what Symantec has Sam doing now, except it’s frustrating because he has to spend too much of his time creating kludgy hacks to support legacy systems, and also doing other people’s jobs for them. So he’s really excited about the prospect of moving to a sleek, shiny startup where he’ll have more leeway to design things in an intelligent fashion.

And I’m excited about the prospect of amassing piles of cash and rolling around on them, Scrooge McDuck style. Well, not really, but Sam will be getting some Zynga stock as part of all this, and if and when Zynga has the IPO that all the analysts are a-twitter about, we could become Internet fraction-of-a-millionaires! Where the fraction is, uh, small. But hey! Still exciting.

Oh, and the commute! Zynga is based in San Francisco, so Sam will be able to take BART (or maybe even the ferry) into work. It’ll be a lot more pleasant than spending hours every day on the freeway. And hopefully he can also do things like get lunch with some of his friends who also work in the city.

So, new job! Wooo!

While we’re on tenterhooks to hear about Robin’s preschool (they say that “In early April we will notify all interested families with either an Admission Invitation or a notice that they have been placed on our waitlist”), spring has arrived in the Bay Area—but the swiss chard is still coming. Luckily I’ve discovered a new chard recipe to put into the rotation. This swiss chard and lentil soup is super-healthful, easy to make, and comes together quickly (although you do need to soak the lentils for a few hours beforehand).

Credit for this recipe goes to The Silver Spoon Cookbook, which was a wedding present to us from my sisters-in-law. I use it all the time!

Right, so, first, a few hours before dinnertime, put 2/3 cup of lentils in a bowl covered with cold water, and let them soak for three hours.

Then when you’re ready to actually make your soup, chop up an onion, a clove of garlic, a celery stalk, and a carrot. Tear up the leaves from a bunch of swiss chard, coarsely chop the stems (discarding the tough ends), and wash thoroughly.

Bring six and half cups of chicken stock (homemade is immensely better, as always) to a simmer. You can either do this in the pot you mean to use for your soup, or you can use a smaller pot and do the next part in the stockpot. You’re going to need two pots, is what I’m saying. So! Either you now have an empty stockpot (or Dutch oven), in which case you are going to want to use it to heat up three tablespoons of olive oil over medium-high heat, or else you are going to go fetch a big skillet and use it to do the same thing. Add the chopped veggies and chard stems (but not the leaves) and sauté until lightly browned, about ten minutes.

Oh! I have a question for someone who has access to an OED. Wikipedia says “The French word ‘sauté’ is a past participle of to jump. This refers to the need to have pan and fat, or oil, to 500 degrees or higher. Whole butter and many oils will not withstand this amount of heat without reaching their ‘smoking point,’ meaning the temperature that they begin to burn. When ingredients are added to this amount of heat they hop and ‘jump’ around in the pan, confirming that you have begun with a sufficient amount of heat.” Meanwhile Wiktionary says “French sauté, past participle of sauter, to jump, because the cook shakes the pan to make the food move around.” What does the OED say?

Anyway, your veggies are browning now, so go ahead and stir in the chard leaves and cook until wilted (just a few minutes). Drain your lentils and add them to the pot (or skillet, whichever you’re using) along with two tablespoons of tomato paste. Stir it all up.

Now, if you’re cooking the veggies in your stockpot, then go ahead and pour your hot chicken stock in there too. Otherwise, if the stock is in the big pot and you’re cooking the veggies in a skillet, then you’re going to add the veggies to the stock. You see how it works. In any case, now everything’s in the same pot. Yay! We’ll have soup soon!

Bring that stock back up to a (low) boil and add 1/2 cup brown rice, along with a rind of Parmesan cheese if you have one on hand (it’s always good to save your Parmesan rinds, they add a very nice complexity to soups). Put in a tablespoon of salt, or less if you’re sensitive to salt, but I like to go big with it. Grind in some pepper too. Let the soup continue to cook at a low boil/fast simmer until the rice is tender. Soup’s up! Fish out that Parmesan rind before you serve it, and dish it up drizzled with olive oil and/or a dusting of fresh-grated Parmesan.

Sam took this picture with his cellphone, so it’s a bit grainy, but I had to share:

Also, by popular demand, here is a picture of the ratty sock puppet that Robin still loves. It looked much better back when it had its yarn hair.

Robin’s “family play date” at the Peter Pan Nursery School co-op is this Saturday. They also have a written application they want us to submit, and they’ve asked that we attach a photo so they’ll be able to remember who the kids are when they’re reviewing the applications. So I took a few new pictures of Robin. Here he is playing dress-up with a pair of his daddy’s glasses:

Here he is wincing away from the camera’s flash:

And here’s a perfectly straightforward photo that is probably the one I’ll give them:

I do kind of like that middle one, though.

Yikes, apparently it’s been two weeks since I’ve posted anything? In the meantime we had a lovely visit from Nanita and Marqueño. Davy is old enough now to enjoy attention from his grandparents, and it was really sweet to see him bonding with my mom and Mark. Robin was also thrilled, of course. Unfortunately it was rainy most of the time so we had a tough time getting out of the house. Instead we stayed in and did arts and crafts projects. Robin was especially proud of this fish that Nanita helped him make:

He also is inexplicably attached to a sock poppet that I made him out of one of Sam’s ratty old socks. It is in fact so ratty that I am not going to take a picture of it. I let Robin pick out two buttons for eyes and sewed them on the sock, then cut out a cardboard mouth and glued it in roughly the right place. I covered the cardboard with red construction paper to make it more attractive, and also sewed on some yarn hair. The yarn hair lasted a bit over 24 hours, and the mouth has also come out several times. The eyes are doing okay, but basically this toy looks like something I picked up out of the sewer and gave to my boy to play with. He finds it delightful. It’s especially gross when he brings it to the dinner table and tries to feed it.

Meanwhile of course we are saddened by the devastation in Japan. We’re not personally affected, but I have so much sympathy for those who have been. There are a lot of Californians now rushing to stock up on potassium iodide—I understand the impulse, but I think it’s not good to create global scarcity at a time when those in Japan may truly be in need. When I read about people here weeping because they can’t get any iodide pills I just have to shake my head. People are ridiculous.

Internet, I do not want to talk about Charlie Sheen. Yes, the memes are funny, but the man has two small children and a history of domestic violence, which rather spoils the yuks.

Instead, here’s why I’m grateful for the Internet today. Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose blog I have mentioned admiring before, has discovered Jane Austen.

I love this about blogs—the way they allow you to observe the authors’ thoughts and reactions evolving over the short term. There is such a pleasure in watching a writer who I admire falling into books that I love—and given that I was initially attracted to TNC because he writes so incisively about race in America, a particular pleasure in hearing him declare: “I feel like she’s talking to me, and strangely enough, only to me. It really is kind of sick to say this, but I think I’m in love.” Austen is so often pigeonholed as a genre writer and dismissed on those grounds, and contemporary black writers can be pigeonholed in the same way, stuck off on the African-American shelves in one shadowy corner of the bookstore. It’s delightful to watch two minds reaching across time, geography, and culture to create that ageless alchemy that happens when a receptive reader takes up a great book.

Ta-Nehisi + Jane Austen 4ever. They make such a lovely couple.

Not good news for me:

“Two years after her mother has disappeared, and two foster homes later, 15-year-old Ariane moves in with her Aunt Phyllis in small-town Regina, but any hope of normalcy is soon dashed. Mean girl Felicia and her ‘coven’ of followers target Ariane, and she experiences troubling visions and then hears mysterious chanting from the water. She discovers that she is a descendant of the Lady of the Lake and learns that she has no choice but to try to find the scattered shards of the sword Excalibur…”

This was published last October, meaning it would have been in the works for a couple years before that. It’s not exactly the same as my novel, but it shares enough of the basic concept—a girl inherits Excalibur and becomes the modern-day Lady of the Lake—that I now know agents and editors will have “seen it before,” and seen it recently. It’s really a stroke of bad luck, or bad timing, on my part.

So I want to tell you about our local branch library. It’s wonderful. It was closed for remodeling when we first moved in:

But now it is open! Yay! Let’s all go to the library!

(If you wonder why Sam is hauling what appear to be—and are—two very heavy grocery bags, it’s because they’re full of comic books to donate. If you wonder what Robin has on top of his head, hold on, you’ll see it better in a minute.)

Built in 1916 with a Carnegie grant, the library is a gracious, serene Classical Revival building (look at those marble steps!) with some Craftsman touches inside. Check out these skylights:

The reading areas are sunlit and peaceful, fitted with old-fashioned bookshelves, tables, and chairs, and splendid wooden paneling:

Here and there they have carved benches set in the walls. Here’s a picture of Robin looking goofy on one of the benches (yes, that’s quite a hat he has):

Every Thursday morning they have toddler storytime at the library, which I’ve been trying to attend faithfully, although last week we didn’t go as it’s a longish walk and it was rainy. But Robin loves it. The children’s librarian, Adina, is one of those delightful people who seems to brim with cheerful energy. She knows all her regulars by name, and when we poked our head in for the first time she was quick to take Robin under her wing. She’s got the kids’ book section categorized, partly in the expected age-range groupings, but also partly by interest—so there’s a “dinosaur” shelf and a “things that go” shelf, where fiction and non-fiction books for readers of different levels are mixed in together. So within just a few minutes she was handing Robin as many train books as he could hold.

I felt a kinship with Adina almost immediately. She’s a library person. I have spent a lot of time working or volunteering in libraries: I can quickly recognize library people, and I like them very much. “This library,” I told her, “is amazing.” I really was blown away. I hadn’t expected it to be anywhere near this nice. It’s the nicest library I’ve seen in ten years. It’s vastly superior for our purposes to the San Francisco Main Library—they have fewer books of course, but with interlibrary loan you can get any book you want. And they provide something that the San Francisco Main Library does not: a calm and beautiful space that’s inspiring for children.

I mean, when we lived in downtown San Francisco we rarely went to the library because it was ugly and depressing, with scowling security guards and metal detectors at every door, and homeless people bathing in the restroom sinks. I just ordered books from Amazon instead. But this library is a treat to visit—it’s not simply a place to get books, it’s a place for Robin to spend a delighted half-hour playing and exploring, while I chat with the librarians or just bask in the sunlit serenity.

Modern libraries are torn in two different directions: there’s the old mission, that of serving as a sort of communal temple to the mind, and there’s a new mission of providing Internet access to the homeless. The second mission is important too, but I wonder if it’s wise to try and combine the two functions in one facility. Places that are set up to provide services to the homeless aren’t usually great spaces for kids. It’s obvious to me only now—from being in a library that executes the old function and does it well—how much can be, and has been, lost.

“What do you need?” I asked Adina, after I’d had a few minutes of just being staggered to find such a treasure in a place where I’d almost forgotten to look.

“Well,” she said, “there’s the Friends of the Library…”

“Yes, yes, obviously,” I said, somewhat impatiently. I already knew we’d be joining the Friends of the Library, just as I already knew this library would be imperiled—all libraries always are. “But what do you need? Any specific materials? Periodical subscriptions? Infrastructure?”

And then there was a little gleam in her eye. “Circulation,” she said, with an intensity answering my own. “We need circulation. The city allocates funds based on usage, and we’re coming up short. Check things out. Here, take more books. There’s no late fee on the children’s materials.”

“How many can we check out at a time?”

“Forty.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you right, it sounded like you said–”

“Forty. You can have forty items checked out at a time, and please do, we have DVDs too—I would be just delighted if every visitor went home with forty things every time they came.”

“Well,” I said. “All righty then. We’ll start over in this corner here, how does that sound?”

So that is how we embarked on a new mission, that of reading every book in the library, forty at a time (although to be honest we don’t take forty things every time, because I have to carry them home). But we do try to go every week, and check out as many books as we can keep track of. Robin practically sings all the way there: “Going to the library! Going to the library!”

And what a nice library it is.