What a President Understands

Anyone who knows me knows that I will be voting for Obama. No reluctantly as the least bad option, but as the only politician I've ever gladly helped elect.

I was thinking about what makes him so appealing to me after hearing for the 40 billionth time that Romney thinks a President should primarily "know about business". It occurred to me that this seems to be accepted wisdom, and honestly? I want a president that primarily understands people. Because a government of the people should have a primary representative who understands people and cares about people. What people want, what people need, why people do things. When they don't know, they make an effort to find out. And by a vast margin, President Obama understands people from all walks of life in a way Romney has demonstrated that he doesn't, and doesn't care to, and can't even fake. Romney also demonstrates the kind of behaviors used by bullies - he would make himself better comparatively by holding others down. Obama would rather lift everyone up. And so would I (on my better days, at least).

Even more, for all that business relies on people, businesses don't need to care about people - if they did, we wouldn't have developed unions or regulations. Sometimes we need government to step in and protect the majority of people from the tyranny of the few - and from the businesses. One careless business or one bad neighbor can really spoil things for a disproportionate number of people. There's also a lot of talk about how markets will sort out answers to problems. The two main problems with markets are that there's uncorrectable asymmetry in all aspects of markets, and markets aren't moral. Free markets are needed to achieve those mythic optimal solutions and we expect some solutions to be moral, so unregulated markets aren't the best way to solve those problems as, ironically, they aren't really free.

Even without invoking religion, government can help promote moral solutions (and I can't believe I wrote that either, but "can" =/= "does") and promote market symmetry with regulation and enforcement of business. And historically, solutions that limit business in order to help improve the lives of people in society are better for everyone, including the massively wealthy. The massively wealthy in a land of serfs are comparatively more well off than the serfs, but like bullies, they're less well off than they'd be if the majority of people were productive citizens working on the most advanced thing they can rather than scratching every day to survive.

One example of this is Saddam's palace. It was the "best" estate in Iraq, and from the reports I read, it was kind of a shithole. Ornate, but clunky and prone to breaking and inefficiency. He didn't even have the best available in the world, and the best available in Iraq wasn't all that great. Surely on some things he did have the best in the world, but in the main? Not for the household goods. If the average goods in Iraq were, on average, excellent, the best in the country would truly have been impressive. But he cared more about keeping others down so he could stay on top.

Instead of thinking about ways to make the country better, dictators and bullies spent time keeping others down and consolidating their personal power. It's an enormous waste for temporary gain and makes the average standard of living worse. The better off the average person is, the further they can plan into the future and the less likely they are to stage a revolt. When everyone's hungry, 10 years from now doesn't matter. Ten days from now may not matter. When you can't think past 10 hours, you really have nothing left to lose. I don't want to live in a country with nothing left to lose. I want to live in a country that provides opportunities that allow everyone to do something beyond just survive, and right now, we don't meet that threshold for an alarming percentage of our populace - it's well into the double digits. The richest country in the world should be able to care for its poorest. And our poorest shouldn't actually be poor.

I will to vote for the humanist over the businessman. If the humanist hires good advisors, the businesses can be accommodated.

I like that Obama can multitask. I like his choice of priorities. I like that he has shown concern for all people, even after I may have written them off as not worth the time. I like that Obama considers what he does and says. I know he does this because from the day he was elected, his public speech contains many pauses that didn't happen beforehand - in particular there was a "keep up the good work" speech to his Chicago campaign staff in 2008 that he delivered off the cuff, fluidly, for 15 minutes.

There are some things I'm not as thrilled with (drug war comes to mind), but there isn't a single thing he's doing that a Republican would do more to my liking.

To cap it off, Obama has kept his cool in a way I could never do. Probably because he's had to and I haven't. He knows that he can never be seen as "angry black man", not even once, and so far so good. See the comedy show Key and Peele for good "Obama interpreted by Angry Obama" for a handy reference of how I would react to traitorous intransigence that puts the party over the country. Obama has kept people calm in crisis after crisis. He's managed to NOT get us into war with Syria or Iran, something some Republicans are actively advocating. I think it's hard to judge a person on what doesn't happen on their watch, but after living through the Bush II years, I now know what happens when those things aren't prevented and preventing avoidable issues are some of the most important things a president does. We just had a massive storm wipe out part of our biggest city and several states, and the vibe coming from the White House is "Keep Calm and Carry On" not "Let's Panic and go to War!" I want a president who believes we are strong. I want a president who promotes our strength by allowing us to be strong, not by making others weak. And in this election, that choice is Barack Obama.

I really hope that the storm damage doesn't prevent people from voting next tuesday. Carry on.

Validation

There's a self-help special on PBS right now talking about happiness. The speaker is running through 5 things one can do to increase baseline happiness. Number 1? The ostensible reason for this blog! I'll pre-date a post that included the things I gleaned from the show if you want the guide to do it too. I can say it unequivocally works - when you focus on the good things of your day, it becomes a lot easier to see good things and remember good things.

So here I am, telling you why I'm happy today. It's an odd day, as I will be having a medical test tomorrow which requires fasting today and I'm a bit jittery. If all goes well, I'll learn more about why my guts are balky, and it's driving me to blog, which I do actually enjoy.

The TV is on PBS because Stephen Colbert interviewed Harvard President Drew G. Faust, the author of a book on how the civil war formed some foundational notions of our nation that are prevalent today because of all the deaths that resulted from the war. And that book was summarized in a two hour show which I watched a couple nights ago - I kept thinking I'd DVR it and break away, but I was glued to it the whole two hours. I'm grateful to have watched that, and grateful to see the Happiness show now.

On the civil war show, though, there was a quote that I think applies really well to the death of our Ambassador and his detail this week: I've rearranged it somewhat, but this was written to a grieving father 150 years ago:

Your son is no more. The grim monster, Death, has ravaged him. But one consolation: he died in the full discharge of his duty in defense of his home and country.

I love this quote because it shows that people are people, and it doesn't make a soldier into a victim for coming to an undesirable early death at the hands of people he cared about, but someone who died for a purpose he believed in.

The second thing I'm grateful for today is that my car is fixed because I was persistent. My car has been making a repetitive click/tick noise that was subtle until I drove next to a wall or into a drive thru. I've had several people try to figure out what's wrong, and no one found anything. I took it back to the most honest mechanics I know. (If you drive thru Ventura County, I'll tell you who they are to share the love.) We discussed what it could be. They didn't find it in the exhaust. They found nothing wrong with my belts or tensioner. They did find a cracked motor mount. And replaced it for a nominal sum that did not obviously include the cost of all that troubleshooting. Since, after my medical test, I will be driving to San Fransisco with a book club friend tomorrow, I'm VERY happy that my motor mount is no longer cracked. But 5 different mechanics told me there was nothing really wrong, and I knew there was something wrong and I was right. Hah!

Lastly, I'm happy that I've now had a few vendors over to sell me things and two of them, one today, noticed my tiki, Rikki Tiki Tavi, on the patio and thought it was awesome. It is awesome! I pierced his tongue :) It's not for everyone, but it makes me smile every time I see it, and now it's made other people smile too!

Happiness Helpers

My quick summary of "The Happiness Advantage" which is a PBS special advertising an eCourse. You can delve into this much further, but here are some straightforward, dare I say simple, things anyone can do starting now that will help you be happier, and help you influence the people around you to be happier. If you do any or all of these things for 21 days each and and notice yourself feeling good enough to do more, go get the book, DVD, and/or eCourse. (Or, go donate to PBSSoCal.org and get them that way!) He claims there are 5 things, but I think I split them up more than he did but they're all good.

Once a day for 21 days:

1. WRITE DOWN 3 specific things that made you happy or grateful today. (Not "I'm feeling good" but "I was healthy enough to do a pushup") This gets you thinking of good things, which makes them easier to spot and remember in the future.
   
2. Write down, for 2 minutes, the details of a meaningful experience. This exercise focuses on the nitty gritty of why and how an event was meaningful, beautiful, funny, or endearing. It's practice looking at details instead of the broad strokes and sound bites.
   
3. Smile! Consciously add 3 smiles a day. This is one that my brother relies heavily on - when you see someone in the hall, smile and nod or say hi. When someone provides you a service, look them in the eye and smile at them. When a meeting is getting tense, just find a reason to smile. They're contagious too.
   
4. Youthful thinking and words. Check your vocabulary such that when you can, think about words with youthful and positive connotations, textured instead of wrinkles, smoky instead of gray, etc... They found people who focused on how they lived and thought 20 years earlier improved their memories and attitudes and postures in the space of a week. (If you were an unrelieved bigot or bum back then, maybe you can think of it as going back while knowing better, perhaps.)
   
5. Fun 15! Add a mindful, fun activity. This needs to be energetic, but you have to pick something you think is fun. It's ok to go longer than 15 minutes to keep enjoying your fun moment.
   
6. Write a 2 minute note to someone in your social network to share something positive. Take a minute to look up an address and write an envelope, then write and send a note to someone.
   

Like any plan, overdoing it might not lead to the best results. Pick one of these things and give it a shot. Then try another one. Even if you don't keep doing these things deliberately, they will help you find and keep the more delightful things while crowding out the less delightful things. You'll see how straightforward it is to make a change in your own life and the lives of friends and family so you can live happier ever after.

Not so Young Adults

Earlier today I was perusing The Atlantic for my daily dose of random inputs and ran across a good article by Meghan Lewit on women dominating popular young adult (YA) fiction. The question posed
by the title was, "Why women in YA?"
and by the author, "What's the draw of YA?"
and by my brain, "Why now?"

I went to write a comment and constructed a treatise. That's my cue to write my words where people who like me want to read them, rather than hijacking someone's article. Also, it's apparently National Book Day, and for someone whose major summer vacation was going to a 500 author booksigning, it would be remiss of me to let it pass unnoticed.

Given that I'll be 40 next friday, I am officially not a young adult anymore. I'm ok with that. I'm getting creaky and my guts are weird and I can afford acupuncture and pretty much whatever I want on iTunes. Anyone between the ages of 16 and 26 who doesn't look 12 looks 25 to me these days. The grey streak is still cool, but it blends a lot more than it used to if I stop dyeing my hair. I'm starting to feel like a grown up.

In these four decades, I've spent a lot of time reading books, discussing books, meeting authors, discussing authors, befriending voracious readers, befriending authors, reading about writing, learning about writing, and getting all excited about writing on my blog only to think so hard about some things that they never get written. I've read two of the three most popular YA series, and gotten an earful on the third. Which is to say I've got some idea of what's going on in the book world and the world at large and I've got something to say about the state of young adult literature.

Starting with the good news:

"[C]ommercially, teen fiction is crushing almost everyone else. Three of the biggest book-to-movie franchises of the last decade (Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games) are YA series penned by women."

This is fantastic news. I'm pretty sure she says "*almost* everyone else" because I'm pretty sure Romance is still over 50% of the publishing industry, while it remains a miniscule part of the literature that gets critical attention and acclaim. And the wildly popular YA books made into movies take in a looooot more money than Lifetime movies made from wildly popular romance novels.

Then there's this:

"While teen titles may never reach the upper echelons of critical adulation... the phenomenal popularity makes it increasingly difficult to marginalize the genre."

Young Adult literature is still a lower status genre, despite Harry Potter making Rowling richer than the Queen of England. In the article's comments, even the YA supportive folks tend to qualify their support by acknowledging that some find it "schlocky writing" or "childish plotting" implying that these are valid descriptors of a whole genre. They feel compelled to say that because YA is considered lower status. We feel the need to justify that status by claiming it has less-than qualities whether or not the claim is truthful or fair. Because if we want to be seen as knowledgeable about "real" literature, we can't take YA lit too seriously.

The best books in any genre can be held up to the best books in any other genre. Similarly, so can the worst. SciFi/Fantasy has been battling this problem for decades, they just developed powerful allies and superstars over time. Romance is still fighting it, as the powerhouses of literary/review publications don't seem care what "housewives" think (which is stupid because women control 70% of US household spending), but there are Romance superstars and they're gaining power too. Now there's a new kid to pick on, so YA gets bullied even though it's making people money hand over fist in a down economy. Why do we let that stand? It's ok to give a book a bad review. It's not ok to dismiss entire genres. Let's stop marginalizing genres starting now.

Why women?
My top two reasons:
1) larger pool of female authors
2) status implications

1) There are a LOT of female authors who started writing professionally after they had kids and needed the scheduling flexibility that being an author provides but being a lawyer doesn't. Most authors make a pittance - maybe enough to make it worthwhile - meaning there are likely more women writing professionally for low pay than men because even in this day and age men are more likely to be pulling in the family's primary salary. Comparatively fewer family men are able to write full time (or 3/4 time) for a pittance than family women. Not that all YA authors are moms, but there are a lot of moms out there who need a paid creative outlet.

2) Women are culturally "allowed" to be successful at lower status things. (Oh, isn't she cute!) YA doesn't threaten the status quo of "serious adult literature" so women's success, even phenomenal success, in YA doesn't threaten the status of "real" authors because these women aren't seen as writing "real" books. While I observe this to be true, I find this odd considering how many countries Rowling could buy outright because Harry Potter was the number one top selling book series in the world for ages, but I digress.

Men who are (rightfully) worried about not being taken seriously in publishing would not submit YA novels because once they do, most won't be able to sell "real" novels later if the YA thing doesn't work out, for all that well loved adult fiction authors are happily writing YA novels these days. (I'm looking at you, James Patterson.)

Women who were already not being taken seriously by "literary" or "hard science" SciFi/Fantasy publishers had nothing to lose by writing YA over Romance or any other genre. The marginal cost for women to submit in a "secondary" genre like YA is much lower for women than men. A woman can write a young adult novel and still sell in romance, where she can possibly make a living at her craft. (I'm looking at you, Jax Abott = Alyssa Day.)

Why this explosion of success now?

They only populated the "Young Adult Bestseller list" to keep the NYT list open to non-Rowling authors whose publishers depended on their authors making the NYT list. They didn't create a new list for "perpetual bestsellers" or "Long Term Best List", they demoted her to "Young Adult" even though millions of adults enjoyed her stories. (To my knowledge, Dan Brown's similarly long lived novels were allowed to stay on the list.) And for all that's insulting to think about, it has done the young readers of this world a fabulous service.

The YA genre was around before Harry Potter, but it was marginalized for decades to the point that there was no "YA bestseller" list because there were so very few new YA novels being published before Rowling. The library was full of Nancy freaking Drews, Madeline L'Engle, ancient Little House books, and Judy Blume novels - which are all well and good, but we read them all and did so 30 to 60 years ago. It was time for an update, and Rowling's success with HP meant that publishers were no longer afraid to publish young adult books for fear they wouldn't sell.

Why are YAs so popular?

First, J.K.Rowling (who, honestly, might not have been as successful if readers knew at the outset she was a lady author) put Harry in the world, and got a generation of kids back into reading. Then, to paraphrase a quote in the article, youths fall in love with their novels more than adults do. They're passionate about what they read when their world is still fairly new. This tidal wave of readers demanding "give me something just like Harry Potter but different" is calling for new material and a 20th reread of Little House, or even HP, isn't going to suffice. There's a need for more.

The genre is seeing fantastic success with new authors in part because it had a decades long dearth of new material. I know some authors who have 20 year old YA novels that only got published in the last 5 years because no one would touch them when they were written. That buildup of material, meant there was a lot of untapped potential, readily available to start filling the gap.

On top of that, Ms. Lewis makes some really good points about the genre and the genres dominant heroines:

YA lit offers heroines to suit every mercurial mood and developmental stage, from spunky, disaster-prone Anne Shirley to dreamy, bookish Francie Nolan and the modern ass-kicking incarnation of Katniss Everdeen.

And perhaps, therein lies the true appeal of young adult literature: The stories and the genre itself represent a world of limitless potential. As a young reader, I didn't comprehend that the opportunity to disappear into the lives and adventures of strong-willed young women represented a kind of feminist victory. The best young-adult books provide a portal to characters and perspectives that simply aren't as readily available on the adult reading lists

This wealth of stories about strong, complicated, empowered girls and women has never before existed in the history of literature. So women who grew up thinking they could do anything and be anybody are writing those stories now. And teens and adults are buying, reading, and loving these stories now.

Ideally, all the young women and men reading these books with strong, complicated girls and women (and boys and men) in them will grow into adults who will change the status quo because they have a new normal they're bringing with them. Hopefully more diverse starring characters will also come to the fore and be normal because women should be supporting all women becoming all they can be, even if they're fictional.

Hamster Roshambo

With my guts being uncooperative of late, I've been reading up on various studies. Oh, who are we kidding, that's something I do for fun anyway. I'm following @DearSarah on twitter because she's a good aggregator of technical and feminist references. One led me down a habitrail of issues in using rodents for medical testing.

Mild Warning: If animal testing is anathema to you, you may not want to proceed on general principle. But I won't be talking about truly icky stuff, rather one point is about how to improve conditions.

The reasons for testing medical treatments on non-humans are compelling: fast turnaround, many samples, controllable conditions, and fair warning, ala the mine canary, of imminent harm. We can all agree that conditions for test animals should be humane above a certain threshold. We can agree that the number of tests should be minimized, especially if there are alternate assessments - aka testing is not done frivolously. Assuming that to be true, I don't have a problem with most of it even though I have a particular fondness for hamsters. /Disclaimer

I have given animal testing some thought. I don't like that they're generally in barren cages, because bored rodents are not healthy rodents, and a lot of medical testing assumes the controls are healthy. So why don't they all have wheels, at a minimum? Ever since I read the hamster blog about the guy who hooked up a rotation meter to his hamster's wheel and recorded wheel spins per day over the life of the hamster, I've wondered why they don't do that with all lab rodents who run in wheels. It would also be a way to check on whether or not your fountain-of-youth medicine really is extending their quality of life - will the hamsters on your supplement run longer as adults than the controls? Will your hamster have off days? Will there be earlier spikes or longer depressions in activity? And you get this just from them being in their cages.

This article, I think from Discover, was talking about problems with mouse models of disease and how things can improve. What I hadn't known/realized/retained was that medical research used to be dominated by rats. They're pretty intelligent and can entertain themselves pushing levers and running mazes. But all the research these days seems to be on mice, so what gives?

The "knockout mice" revolution happened. Scientists figured out a way to drop genes out of mice then breed them true. They're excellent to find out what a particular gene does/doesn't do and whether or not your drug will fix it. Rats resisted the knockout technique until very recently. So for the last 10 or so years, mice dominated the research. But it's emerging that all the tests that had been so painstakingly developed for testing rats... might not be so great for testing mice who don't much like pushing levers or bright lights in white mazes. Reasons for not changing techniques, I assume,include: some people - even scientists - assume rats and mice are much the same being long tailed rodents. Established testing has support in the way of developed instructions and supplies. Uniformity of testing methods makes findings replicable, and interpretation less sketchy. However, if you're testing for, say, stress, your mouse is already above baseline doing these non-preferred things, so you might not realize as much of a distinction between control and experiment as you should. And your tests kinda show that mice are dumb, but maybe they're just balky, or you're not playing to their strengths.

Enter some scientists who've thought about these things. It's actually pretty fascinating. One lady from the breeding facility can talk all day about interpreting their emotions from their interaction with their bedding - Supplied a compressed cotton pad, happy, healthy mice will shred it and make a nest. Some of their knockouts didn't get that memo and sleep on it like a tatami mat, or hide under it in some fashion. And they haven't even gotten to the testing yet! Yet another in-the-cage passive test.

One researcher gave some thought to what mice prefer to do that is different than rats. They're not big on visuals, but they like smelling things. So he buried treats in sand that had been mixed with various spices. Turns out that mice can learn that treats are in cardamom but not cinnamon, or cinnamon but not pepper (for instance). So cdm>cnn>pp right? So cdm>pp, right? Wrong... Like rock-paper-scissors, this tricky scientist made pepper beat cardamom. And mice can learn this! (I do wonder how well they'd do with rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock...) It's tricky enough that the test can be used to see if they get confused or not, without unduly stressing them out. I'm just really entertained by the fact that somewhere out there, knockout mice are playing roshambo. For science.

Did not see that coming

A semiconductor manufacturing facility, called a fab, takes teams of people to run. The operators move the product from place to place and make the machines go. But before they do that, the process engineers like me have to create a process that runs and devise some way of knowing at any given moment whether or not it should be run. Before that, the equipment engineer makes sure it's safe to turn the tool on and set up according to spec for general use. Before that, the facilities group makes sure there's power and water, gas, and a floor that will support the the tool. Before that... get the picture? There are more people involved, but primarily it's production, process and equipment once things get going. Any problem gets kicked back to process and equipment and when it's a challenging problem, the process and equipment engineer usually work together to solve the problem. Or when we need it to do something new, we work together to make it do what we need it to do.

Our fab has a dozen process engineers, of which I am one, each responsible for a subset of process steps. We also have about 10 equipment engineers. We work together all the time. Just yesterday, my equipment engineer and I met to hash out some action items for one of my toolsets, established some priorities, and from that devise a plan of action to beat my balky tool into submission. There's just one hitch.

My equipment engineer died suddenly this morning.

This was very unexpected and has hit the office pretty hard. He died before coming into work and I have no details. I feel a little outside of it all emotionally because while he's my direct counterpart, we've been struggling to build relationship since we both got reassigned to work with each other. He's a nice guy but we didn't really connect...yet. That meeting yesterday was also an attempt to build rapport. And now we won't. My boss, however, has worked with him for years and years, and has a friendly relationship that includes regular lunches and the like. He's pretty devastated. I'm a little worried that my lack of overt grieving will be seen as callous disregard. I really hope not. But this isn't a death that makes me rethink the direction of my life or think I'm next on the list, and I actually got a large amount of work done today. I like to think it's partly because I was motivated to make sure his toolsets don't go to hell. Because he surely won't.

Progress and Pools

[Time flies! I wrote this on May 25th on my iPhone, but the "publish" button doesn't work in that app, so it languished until I felt like checking in from my computer.]

This week was really good. I felt good. I had energy to burn off. I mostly woke up pretty well (a couple sleep interruptions but not crazy bad). I'm starting to think I could do things outside work regularly again.

Good thing 1: Exercise I've found a hiking buddy.
Three weeks in a row we've gone out to a local trail after work and meandered around. The first day she overdid it a bit and got stiff, so we're doing 45 min jaunts but might try an hour or more tomorrow morning since it won't get dark on us.

I went swimming! Before I get in the water, unless it's clearly a beach day, I almost always resent getting chilly and wet and the amount of time it will take me to clean up after (never less than 20 min in my whole life.) but I get in the water and love it 99 times in a hundred. I love being in water; I don't much care for getting into water. Bearing in mind the fallout my hiking buddy had from her first trek in ages, I set my sights in a 20 minute swim. I actually made it 25, but the last 5 pretty well knocked me out. I was so still in the hot tub afterward that bubbles gathered behind my knees. Long after the agitation ceased, I moved my legs and there went bubbles! It was like I had been carbonated.

Good thing 2: Getting stuff done
I had volunteered to rent a house for some book club friends coming to LA area in July for a conference. I'd looked at one house that was workable but mediocre. I tried to rent it but it fell thru - the owner was kind of a flake. My friend thinks it's because they had no intention of doing the upgrades I'd inquired about. Maybe, but it left me with no house. Then I had a conference myself in Boston, and pushed that visit as long as I could, taking both weekends. Then I had another off weekend and a weekend where I was just lazy. I went to find another house - there had been 60 options when I started looking - and ALL of them were unavailable the dates we need. Oops!

Thankfully my planner friend came thru with alternate websites. I found 3 likely properties, and was able to pick one. I'm going to go see it this weekend to see how reality compares to pictures. Only signing up for 4 nights instead of 7 saves us about $50 each - more if we get the security deposit back. Hopefully this will go well.

Good thing 3: Keyboard design update
My patent attorney contact (college pal's wife) remembered me fondly enough to give me some advice over the phone, then recommend a couple of local attorneys. I'd caught her after my conference but just before hers, so I had a week of impatiently waiting! Then I got the names early this week and got all squirrely about how to approach them. Finally at lunch today, I went with the "you can fix a bad page but not a blank one" mentality and cranked out what I thought was a good query letter. Both offices responded to my email. One of them should work out or get me a referral, and I am making appointments for next week. Things are moving.

I have one friend sending me keyboard newsfeed articles which is awesome, but I'm not going to read any more of them until I file so I don't accidentally copy an idea. I'm keeping the list, though, to read after filing.

Bonus Good thing 4: Kickstarter
Out in Boston, friend J showed me a game he got from sponsoring the makers on Kickstarter. I hadn't realized you'd be able to *get stuff* for the money beyond a warm fuzzy (like mullein) feeling. Suffice it to say, I went shopping for Christmas presents on Kickstarter this week. And a couple things for me. I think candleholders with feet will go well with my vases with arms. My favorite that got me to sign up in the first place is "Roominate". A build it yourself modular dollhouse - with electric circuits. You build the house, add in lights, fans, and sounds by wiring it up yourself. Girls' engineering toys! That don't pander! That aren't an adapted "boy" centric toy. Love it. And it funded, so if it ships by Christmas, I'll have good gifts for at least two friends.

What have you been up to?