A Rare Valentine's Treat, Plus a $200 Gift Card Giveaway

My husband and I, being natural rebels, usually skip the Valentine's Day hoopla because of all its furry/stuffed/chocolatey/gooey-hearted baggage. But also because it is impossible to get a reservation at a good restaurant that night (if you never plan that far ahead) and even harder to get a babysitter (if you usually wait to procure one the afternoon of the night you want to go out). This year I was prepared to really not bother at all since we are new to Lafayette and I still don't really know where to go. Oh, yeah, and we are still holding a second mortgage on our other unsold house and feeling all tapped-out after splurging on Christmas.

Despite all those reasons, I am planning a Valentine's date for my husband, anyway because I have all the bases covered (thus allowing me to make a homerun, if I remember my baseball metaphors correctly)! My mom is going to be in town, so babysitting is a non-issue—and YP – Local Search & Gas Prices app, has stepped in (like a knight in shining armor?) to help me find the perfect restaurant for our night out and is paying for us to go!

Don't be jealous, be happy— Because YP app wants to send you $200 to spend on a Valentine's Day night out, too. Woohoo! 


Here's how the YP app sets itself apart from other apps:  

First, over 300,000 restaurants have posted their menus, so I can search local restaurants for my husband's favorite dish... like mussels. And then cross-reference the menu for mine... cake!!

Jolie's, which I have never heard anyone talk about down here, looks FAB. In fact, looking at it's menu of Mussels in Garlic Cream Sauce with a side of frítes, it looks a lot like our favorite bistro back in Madison. Perfect for our date! 

Second, there is a gas price finder built-in, so I can potentially save that downer moment when I realize that we have to stop and get gas because the light's been on since yesterday, but I forgot to fill up earlier—by knowing that if I go one more block around the corner, we'll save 10¢ a gallon. (After 14 years of marriage, it's the little things, right?)

Third, it also has a movie theater finder that allows you to search by movie title, so you don't have to scroll through each theater's choices to find what times your movie is playing at all of them. Maybe if Lincoln is still in town we can finally catch a showing before the Oscars.

Fourth, it is free, has built in coupons if the business is running a special, and is completely accessible to ALL platforms—iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Blackberry and Palm mobile devices. PALM!! (I didn't even know they were still making devices.)

THE RULES

Here is what you need to do to be entered into the drawing for $200:

•  Follow me on twitter (click on my twitter feed in the right column to get there -->)

•  Tweet to me (@theBitchinWife) and YP (@YP) from the YP app’s social sharing feature:

—That entails downloading the YP app on your phone, selecting the restaurant you   want to attend on your Valentine's date and then using the "share via Twitter" through the YP app (see screenshots below).
—Include a brief description of your dream date planned with the YP app
—Use the hashtag #ypvday

Your tweet should look kind of like this:

You can enter the contest TWICE. Once for your tweet and once for re-tweeting my tweet above. The link to my tweet is here.

The contest ends on Monday February 11th, at which time I will direct message you on twitter to get your address and then YP will send you your $200.00 gift card. Good luck!! 

Disclosure: I was compensated for this post by YP app. 

Dad 2.0 Summit Wrap-Up

My main reason to go to the Dad 2.0 Summit may have been just to get away for a fun weekend and see what the other side of parent blogging gets up to when the mama bloggers leave the room, but I ended up getting a lot more than I bargained for. Doug French and John Pacini, the founders of Dad 2.0, put together a great array of speakers that kept me laughing, thinking, crying, and then thinking some more. Kudos to them for not only booking so many incredible speakers, but scheduling them in a way that kept me happily glued to my seat and never feeling like an outsider.

As a mother to only boys and having only my own experience as a daughter to draw on, I treasured the opportunity to hear all the speakers approaching their topics through the lens of fatherhood. Brene Brown, in particular, hit so many marks in her talk about vulnerability that had everyone in the room nodding along and seeing how the world conspires to make women think they want their male partners to be vulnerable, while at the same time secretly loathing any sign of weakness they may display—which, she pointed out, men are perfectly aware of! So they learn to lie and only share the "acceptable" sorts of vulnerabilities that they think their wives can handle. It was so good to hear her say (not quoting her here, this is what I took away personally) that we all want (and need) the same thing—to have a partner that we can share our fears and weaknesses with that will listen and console, but won't try and fix everything. I wish I had a recording of the talk, it truly was amazing and so full of moments that I wish I could quote perfectly. I guess I'll just have to buy the book and then fill it full of tabbed stickers to refer back to in the future. To whet your appetite, here are a few of the quotes that particularly resonated with me (all quotes pulled from twitter, so accuracy is questionable, to say the least).

"How many times have you walked away from your partner with a huge story in your mind about what just happened that may or may not have anything to do with the truth?" 

Brene Brown's advice on "therapy speak" to employ with your partner: Start the conversation with "The story I'm making up right now is...[insert why you think something is bothering you or the other person]."

"The greatest act of vulnerability is parenting." 

"To be human is to be vulnerable...to be the partner and parent you want to be...you need to be vulnerable." 

"It's not joy that makes us grateful, it's gratitude that makes us joyful." on practicing gratitude with your family.  

"You can't raise whole-hearted kids without talking about vulnerability. Or gender conformity, or privilege, or race." 

"I used to talk about 'What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?' Now I say 'What's worth doing even if you fail?'" 

"Tell your kids a story about when you were struggling at the same age. It will change their lives."

If you haven't ever watched Brene Brown speak, her legendary TEDtalk is a great place to start.

The other highlight of the conference came in the form of the breakout panel "Writing a Wrong: Authentic Blogging Through A Major Life Change."  Brad Lawless, Jon Armstrong, Kristen Howerton, and Black Hockey Jesus spoke about their experiences writing their way (carefully and with sensitivity to those involved) through divorce, a traumatic adoption process, and addiction. While none of these are my personal flavor of trauma, I was grateful to hear their advice and thoughts on how to not let raw emotion get the better of you in situations where what you might really want to write on your blog is absolutely not the right thing to write. Posts like that are only going to make YOU feel better, while they would most likely make your family members, your children in particular, feel terrible. Throughout my many moves in the last few years and the upheaval they've caused in my life and relationships, I often find that I can't write about the things that are most heavily weighing on my mind for that very reason mentioned above—unfortunately, my normal response is to shut down and not write anything at all.

This advice from the pros will hopefully help me open back up and enjoy writing again like I used to: Start journaling to get out the emotion and the things that you really want to say. Use that journal as fertilizer (the shit, basically) to get you to the mental space to write the things you can post. The final product can allow you to look back on the emotion with the perspective that (hopefully) you've gained since resolving it, making it not just a venting, but a story with resolution.

I also loved Black Hockey Jesus' exhortation to embrace fantasy in our writing and stop being so goddamed literal. (The wording is mine, the message is his.) Sarcasm very firmly set aside—that man is a poet. I think many in attendance would agree that Jon's writing is so painfully good that it makes one feel sad for their own lack of talent when they read it. Or maybe it's just me and that other person I was talking to who worded it in such a perfect way, but I don't think so...

So, when all was said and done... as a stay-at-home-mother and wife in what I would consider a pretty "traditional" American home (for an almost unseemly amount of years, I might add), my perspective can often get contaminated by the "stories I make up" about why my husband does this or says that. Dad 2.0 set the story straight by allowing me to hear personal stories from real, modern men about how their lives as fathers affects everything they do. It doesn't seem like that big of a revelation, but in our culture that seems almost incapable of showing fatherhood as co-parenting, instead of bumbling ineptitude, it was fantastic to see a bunch of guys who are all just doing their best to love and do right by their kids and families—and saying, "Hey, isn't it about time we got some props for that?"

On top of the thought-provoking speeches, emotional post readings, and a general feeling of "Holy shit, these guys are some of the most thoughtful, coolest, and greatest dads ever." —while NEVER being self-congratulatory about it, I might add—the conference brought together a handful of blogging karaoke die-hards. 

You may have seen something in the news about a supernova exploding in the Houston area over the weekend. Rest easy, it was just Chris Read exploding onto the stage at Spotlight Karaoke with a graceful, yet slightly menacing, swing around a karaoke stage stripper pole. Un-fucking-believable. Watch the video below for two nights' worth of highlights... 

I want to put about forty links in to all the great people I got to meet and spend time with and the friends I had a chance to reconnect with, too— but a short list is going to have to do: Faiqa, Kristen, Father Muskrat, Andy, Kevin, Jason, Jim, Momo, Polly, Whit, Charlie, Isabel, Liz, Adam, and a special thanks to my pregnant roomie, Jill @babyrabies, for being my designated driver and voice of reason. 

Entering Bizzaro World

I am heading to Houston this weekend for a blogging conference that promises to be extremely interesting on a couple different fronts.

One, it has a great line-up of speakers talking about a lot of topics I'm interested in, i.e. parent blogging issues, keeping your writing authentic while also respecting your family's privacy, how to turn your social media expertise into a full-time job. And I am, quite frankly, starry-eyed about getting to finally see Brene Brown, one of the keynote speakers, in person! 

Second, it is going to be outside my comfort zone a little because it is a complete gender-ratio reversal compared to my previous conference experiences. 

Huh? 

You see, the conference I'm attending is the Dad 2.0 Summit. A conference presumably only for DAD BLOGGERS. 

But if you think about it, BlogHer is presumably a conference only for women bloggers (the "HER" in the title says as much), but a handful of well-endowed (...with HUMOR! Get your minds out of the gutter) dads show up every year to participate in the conference sessions and to keep an eye on how their unique voices fit into the parent blogger community. I mean, I assume that's why they're there, anyway. 

After four BlogHer conferences and getting to be good friends with quite a few of these guys, when I saw that the Dad 2.0 Summit was scheduled to be in Houston this year (only a four-hour drive from home), I felt like I had to sign up. I am nervous in some regard, because it is going to be really strange to be a gender minority—but I survived five salmon-canning seasons in Alaska, where the male-female ratio is about the same, and, oh my good lord, I survived CES (a tech event so man-centric they convert the women's bathrooms into men's rooms!)—so I know I'll be just fine. 

Also, the promise of getting to go out to karaoke with the only other person I know in the world who loves it possibly even more than me makes it a no-brainer. And rest assured (dear husband), I won't be the only lady there, by any means at all! Faiqa, pictured below, and Kristen will be there singing along, too!!! (Along with a host of other women that I adore—check this schedule to see who else will be there.)

Muskrat and Kristen breaking it down with Poison's "Every Rose Has a Thorn." 

And, below, Faiqa and Muskrat singing something or other—and killing it.

Winning Tips: How To Create Groups on the Windows 8 Start Screen

We’re all busy. I get it. I really do. So I totally understand why some people have been grousing about Windows 8 being hard to use… It IS hard to get used to! But the only reason it’s tricky is because it is so different from anything else we’ve used before and that just makes it more interesting, in my opinion. In fact, I think Windows 8 is incredibly forward-thinking and once people get past the learning curve of figuring out how to interact with it fully, via using the touchscreen in conjunction with the keyboard and mouse, it is going to be what every other company will be playing catch-up to. Seriously.

In the meantime, though, a lot of people have new computers and laptops with touchscreens and are probably as frustrated as I was trying to figure out how to get it to do exactly what their old computer did, am I right? Well, once we all get over that notion, things will start getting a lot more fun.

As part of Microsoft’s Windows Champions program, I get to sit in on monthly webinars that give me a peek at people who are using Windows to it’s full potential. Because I don’t usually bother to seek out the finer points of operating system manipulation on my own, i.e. figure out anything I can’t intuitively figure out during normal use, or because I am generally too busy to be bothered, these webinars are a really good thing.

For example, I’ve been using this super-slick new Asus Aspire S7 touchscreen ultrabook, that Microsoft loaned me, for about a month and have been using the beta of Windows 8 for even longer… and yet, I had no idea that, beyond simple drag-and-drop tile rearrangement, the start screen can be turned into an organizational mecca that would satisfy the most fastidious of users.

And now I can teach you how to create groups on your start screen, too!

What. That’s not exciting to you?

Sheesh, baby steps, people. *eyeroll* And trust me, a well-organized start screen is the first step to easily navigating Windows 8.

First, you need to open your start screen (just hit the Windows key, that’s the one with the four blocks on it, for crying out loud) on your keyboard. Now, using your mouse or trackpad, NOT your touchscreen, move the curser around. This will pull up a drag bar across the bottom of the screen that ends in a wee, tiny minus (“-“) sign in the right-hand corner. Click on the minus sign.



That make all of your tiles go into a birds-eye view, so you can see them all at once. Now, right-click on a section of the tiles and it will pull up a bar across the bottom of the screen with an icon and the words “Name Group.”



Click on the icon and then name your group. I have sections called “Faves" for my most-used apps, “Kitchen” for all the apps I use while cooking, and another section reserved for all the people I want to keep tabs on, in a 100% un-stalker-y way, of course. (I will show you how to add people to your start screen next week.) After naming all your groups, you can rearrange the groups in that same birds-eye view area, so they are ordered just like you’d like them to be. To fine-tune your groups, you will need to drag and drop each of the app tiles individually, on the start screen. If you don’t already know how to close an app (you will inevitably open one accidentally while rearranging), you do so by simply swiping with your finger from the top of the screen to the bottom, over the open app.

So, this is what my start screen looks like now, as opposed to just a bunch of apps randomly grouped:



Pretty cool, huh? And easy, if you know how to do it. Which you now do.

BABY STEPS.