A legitimately easy painted flower pot project

By Mary C. Tillotson

The picture says it all, almost, so I'll start with that.

Once I figured out the three-stroke trick, the flowers were easy.

Some other thoughts:

• Those plain, boring, orange clay pots are super cheap. I paid about $2 for the 4-inch pot and tray.
• I like using acrylic paint because it's cheap, easy to find, washable, and fast-drying. It usually comes in 2-oz bottles which cost anywhere from $1.09 to half that, so it's easy to amass a wide variety of colors and store them in a shoebox.
• Acrylic paint is washable, so, not waterproof - which will be a problem if you plan to water your plant. You'll want something for a waterproof finish - I used some spray enamel, which I got at the hardware store for $5.
• I use a paper plate for a palette. Lots of room, easy to see the colors, doesn't leak, and I can throw it out when I'm done. I start putting dabs of paint on it, then try to narrow down to a color scheme that I like. Then, I take all the colors from the color scheme and dab them all in the same area to see if they look good together. This time, I also painted a little bit of blue on the plate, then painted green, pink, and purple over it to see what the colors would look like with a blue background.
• Do some planning about the colors and spacing of the flowers. If you want to make them high-low-high-low like I did, you don't want to get around the pot and realize you can't squeeze another one in to make the pattern work.
• Because acrylic dries quickly, I could do pretty much all the painting in one sitting. I started with the brown rim, then one side of the brown tray. By the time I was done with that, the rim was dry enough that I could paint the blue background, then I flipped the tray and painted the other side. Then some touch-up work, then the green stems, then the flowers.

Let's assume that women get it all wrong.

By Mary C. Tillotson

There's a new study out showing that women, apparently, don't take credit for their work if they're working in a mixed-sex group, but do if they're in an all-women group. (I read about it in The Atlantic.) That's all the study showed. It did not show that women have a problem; calling it a problem is a value judgment that, apparently, everyone involved made.

Here are two sentences from the first two paragraphs of the Atlantic article:

For too many women, the hardest part of being successful might be taking credit for the work that they do, especially when they work in groups. 

...When women worked only with other women, they found, this problem of not taking credit disappears.

I want to question the assumptions here and explore a few possibilities.

1. Maybe being successful in a career isn't the top priority for some of these women. Plenty of women out there do things that are bad for their careers, like go part-time for a while or quit entirely because of kids. And plenty of women want to have kids, and they make this choice freely.

2. Maybe it is actually good to not take credit for your work sometimes. For example, to help someone learn a new skill and instill confidence in them, it might be better not to take credit for your work. If some middle school kids want to put on a play, maybe an adult will reserve the room, print programs, help with rehearsals, then tell the kids what a great job they did. If a three-year-old wants to help make cookies, an adult could measure out the one teaspoon of baking soda and let him dump it in, then praise him profusely.

3. Maybe men have the problem of taking too much credit for their work. Or maybe men and women both have a problem of not having a proper balance of when to take credit. Or maybe we both take credit in a way that's totally fine, but different.

Let's stop assuming that women get it all wrong.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg: Why Women Aren't Like Me at Work

By Joy Pullmann

Facebook COO and otherwise wildly career-successful Sheryl Sandburg has a new book out on women in the workforce. She brings her perspective to the tiresome question: Why aren't there more women at the top?

It's a tiresome question because all these quotas and grass-is-greener comparisons smack, to me, of large, steaming piles of envy. If there's some active evil force somewhere pushing down talented women who want to be CEO, fine. Let's discuss that. But, as Sandburg points out, it's women themselves who actually do not prefer to sell their souls to the workplace, which is usually necessary to get to the top. From the Wall Street Journal:

She describes a speech that she gave at Harvard Business School in 2011. During the question-and-answer session afterward, the male students asked such questions as "What did you learn at Google that you are now applying at Facebook?" and "How do you run a platform company and ensure stability for your developers?" The female students asked such questions as "How can I get a mentor?"—the "professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming," as Ms. Sandberg puts it. Her advice: If you want a mentor, impress a higher-up with how good you are at doing your job. She is similarly dismayed by a young woman at Facebook who asked her advice about how to "balance work and family"—even though the young woman wasn't even married. "If current trends continue," Ms. Sandberg told the business-school students, "fifteen years from today, about one-third of the women in this audience will be working full-time and almost all of you will be working for the guy you are sitting next to." 

As the WSJ reviewer points out, Sandburg contradicts herself. She insists women are the same as men, except we can nurse babies, but then frets about and suggests ways to get more women into high positions. If we're the same as men, who cares?

Sandburg also perpetuates this myth that women want to work 100 hours a week and never see their kids, because that's really what it does take to get to the top, as Penelope Trunk points out. That's why Trunk got off the fast track. She also points out a reason women feel so stressed out by doing what we generally actually like (having kids and being around for them): Society no longer respects that choice. Even though it's essential to society's Social Security benefits and the existence of future taxpayers and doctors and people who will not rape and loot them, parenting is no longer a respectable solo occupation.

You can change that, as a woman, by telling any and everyone who makes snide comments about mothering and kids that you believe it a wonderful, difficult, heroic occupation.

Image by Kevin Dooley.

Are Democrats the Women-Friendly Party?

A group of smart women, several of whom I have met, sat down in January to talk about why the majority of women in recent years vote for big government. "I’m not sure what’s worse, conservatives ignoring women’s issues or conservatives addressing them," said AEI's Christina Hoff Sommers, who used to sit in the office across from mine.

I think part of the reason may be that conservatives aren't as into gender politics as liberals. They, like women like me, think of women as part of the human family. My interests aren't opposed to society's interests. What's good for women is good for children, men, and society at large. At any rate, I think that how Democrats see themselves and present themselves as champions for women is wrong. Democrat policies directly hurt me, my family, and my fellow women. For one, the payroll tax increase the president demanded means an extra $200 out of our pockets each month. For another, making energy more expensive means it's harder for us to pay for our toddlers' doctor visits, which we do out of pocket. As Sommers says, feminist academics "represent only a tiny coterie of radical women, but they effectively present themselves as the voice of American womanhood." To me, it's the same with liberals.

So here these smart ladies talk about women's issues from a conservative perspective, and offer their ideas about why more women vote for Democrats and how conservatives can change that. If you consider yourself a moderate, this should be an extra-interesting discussion.

Watch the video for more.

IWF Women in the WIlderness: Charting a New Path Forward from Independent Women's Forum on Vimeo.

Recipe: Mexican Rice-Beans-Meat

By Mary C. Tillotson

I met someone who frequently scores big when she makes one of those dump-the-refrigerator-into-a-bowl-and-spice-it-up dinners. Here's her latest.

Ingredients: rice (cooked), salsa, black beans, chicken (cooked - baked or grilled is best), sausage (Mexican chorizo or kielbasa)

This is really a matter of throwing everything in a bowl and mixing it together. Read through the recipe and see if you have any leftovers you can pull out of your fridge. I wrote the recipe assuming you were making it from scratch, but if you've already got leftovers, warm 'em up and throw 'em in the bowl.

Directions:

1. Start cooking the rice (1/4 to 1/2 cup of dry rice per adult). It usually takes a while to cook, so do steps 2 and 3 while you wait.

2. Cut the sausage into bite-sized pieces and brown in a skillet. Sausage usually comes in precooked links, so brown it just enough to make it a little crispier and not taste microwaved. My friend used chorizo, which tastes (to me) exactly like super spicy kielbasa. I thought it was too spicy, so I used kielbasa.


3. Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and throw it on the skillet. (One chicken breast was enough for my husband and me, and leftovers.) I had baked a chicken breast the night before, so it just needed to warm up. You could sautee the chicken while you're browning the sausage.

4. By now, you should have finished cooking the rice, so put it in a serving bowl. Add salsa and mix it in. The salsa should coat the rice like a sauce. This is where much of the flavor comes in, so use tasty salsa! If you want to spice it up, chili powder and cilantro are good choices.


5. Add black beans. If you use canned beans, it's easy; if you use dry beans and do the whole soak+boil thing, it's extremely inexpensive. Do what works for you.

6. Add the sausage and chicken.

7. Mix it all together and serve.