Photos of the day

Just couldn’t pick between these two fabulous shots from a Big Picture compilation of “daily life” photos.  As for the first, as mentioned, lighting is everything:

Opal Cosby lifts her legs as she rides through puddles on Ironwood Drive in Hartselle, Ala., following a rainy afternoon on March 22. The setting sun lit the puddles with a red light at the end of the day. (Gary Cosby Jr./The Decatur Daily via Associated Press)

And I couldn’t resist the cuteness of the following:

A duckling climbs a curb near Ellis Lake in Marysville, Calif. on March 26. (David Bitton/Appeal-Democrat via Associated Press)

Lots of other great ones, too.  If you like these, check out the whole set.

On work-life balance

Friend of mine (who manages to work very hard and still be a very good dad– far as I can tell)k posted this on Facebook:

Successful career women are almost always — perhaps even literally always — asked in interviews how they deal with the infamous “the work/life balance.” Women who haven’t married or had children are quizzed on why they haven’t — can their withering wombs be chalked up to a heavy workload? — and women who do achieve the mythical “balance” are forced to describe, over and over again, how they’ve possibly managed such a feat. Men, on the other hand, are rarely asked how they balance family time with work…

So kudos to Amanda Steinberg, founder and CEO of DailyWorth, a successful online finance community for women, who told The Grindstone that being a mom is “challenging,” yes, but that doesn’t mean she’s striving to balance the supposed scales. When asked about work/life balance, she said:

I don’t strive for a concept of balance — I never have. It almost seems like a silly idea to me — that life should play out in some sort of contrived separation between “work” and “relaxation” or “family time.” As a CEO and mom, I’m always working and always “mom.” They exist in an almost blended fashion. I lean in both directions depending on which needs me more in that moment.

Ummm, nice try.  I’m guessing Amanda Steinberg is not a particularly dedicated mom .  What a crock– “always working and always mom.”  I’m all about work/life(/blogging) balance, but when I am teaching my class or running regression models on election data I’m not “dad,” and when I’m changing diapers or reading Wocket in my Pocket I’m not “working.”  I make a conscious decision to spend as much time doing the latter (okay, not really the diapers) as I possibly can while still being a responsible scholar/professor/adviser/blogger, etc.  That’s work-life balance.

Yeah, it is certainly noteworthy that we look at this very differently with women and men (one of the reasons I often feel more of an affinity with working moms than fellow working dads), but let’s not pretend it’s something that isn’t real or can be finessed through semantics.