Prepoceros

 My company's parental leave policies aren't great. Birth parents get eight weeks paid short-term disability leave, and non-birth parents get THREE DAYS paid leave. Any new parent can use FMLA leave, which is unpaid for up to twelve weeks (and runs concurrently with paid leave). I've tried talking to my boss about how painfully inadequate these policies are, especially for dads, and his responses have been: "You probably have a skewed frame of reference because you're comparing our policies to your husband's company's policies." (Um, sure, he works for a software company, but they're not particularly progressive, and actually they have zero paid leave for dads.) "Oil and gas is a conservative industry. I think we're about average for the industry." (Multinationals do appear to have better policies, but we're not that big, so, fair. Why not be better, though?) "I think it's five days, isn't it?" (A. It's three...

I'm blogging again! Gosh I've missed it. Near the end of high school (or maybe the summer after?) I started my first blog. Blogging was the hottest thing going in 2002. Blogrings! Aggregators! LiveJournal (is now Russian, apparently?)! DeadJournal (was around for a minute)! Mine was on Xanga. I named it "Demeter" after both the "Cats" character and the Greek goddess. Because I liked "Cats" and I took Latin, and I thought that was pretty clever. You could create your own "skin" for your blog, and in mine I wrote all the headings backwards. Again, I was very clever. I posted regularly, and occasionally I'd even include a picture, which required a cable connection to my digital camera and some light HTML. Xanga wasn't really a social media site like we have today, but you could subscribe and comment on other people's blogs. I made a couple of friends there. The person I commented back and forth with most regularly, Jenni, was an ...