I have two cell phones. I have an iPhone and a Nexus 1 Google phone. You have the iPhone number, even my mother is unsure who is calling when I use the droid Google Phone.

I lost my iPhone at some point on Wednesday. I made a halfhearted attempt to find it because I have the droid Google Phone. By the time dinner rolled around on Wednesday I not only stopped looking, but seriously considered canceling the service.

It’s now Friday morning, and I’m happy that my iPhone is gone. I’m supposed to miss being hyper-connected.

I don’t.

Enjoy. Lady Gaga and Beyonce are about to take you a bit out of your comfort zone, and you’re going to love every second of it.

I didn’t know I could like laundry until I tried a Kenmore Elite. Obviously I still hate the parts of laundry that we all hate, the folding, and the putting it away. But I want to show you what happens when you turn on Kenmore Elite Dryer.

Every time I turn the dryer off and on, I smile. It makes me think of the Jetsons, and that I’m living in some sort of super shiny space age house. I’m not, I’m living in Los Angeles, but please let me have a fantasy while I’m doing laundry.

Here’s the bottom line. The folks at Kenmore were incredibly generous and they’re letting me test out an Elite Washer and Dryer set for a few weeks. When they first approached me I was excited for a number of reasons. I was also a bit unenthusiastic, because I have a washer and dryer. They wanted me to review their washer and dryer when there was absolutely nothing wrong with the washer and dryer that I already owned.

Or so I thought.

Everyone knows that I love things clean. My kids know, my husband knows, my readers know, the other moms at little league know that I love clean clothing, and I’m not afraid to pull out the big guns to get it there. Well, I don’t really need the big guns anymore.

When I did the first few loads of laundry I noticed that my clothes were different. My whites were whiter, so I stopped using the laundry boosters. My whites were still whiter. What I never expected to have happen is that my towels got a new life. My bath towels are not new, they were coarse and old, with the new washer and dryer I’m noticing that my bath towels are fluffy and absorbent again. I don’t know if I can attribute this to the washer or to the dryer. I know that a full load of jeans is dry within 25 minutes. That is amazing. My old washer and dryer would have taken an hour after I’d hung the clothes out in the sun for a preliminary drying.

I used to unplug my washer and dryer after my chores were done. The older models use electricity even when they are shut off. The Kenmore Elite Washer and Dryer does not. I love that. I love it from an economical point of view, and also because it’s how appliances should be.

Someone was asking me about mildew and black mold. Right on the front of the washer is a sensor that lights up when it’s time to clean your washer. All front loading washers need to be cleaned now and again. Also, I’m told that because front loading washers have to have a very tight seal, you don’t want to be leaving wet clothes in them for extended periods of time (like days folks, not hours).

If you love the web, you’ll love this set. I know, weird right? Wrong. Take a look at all these buttons! Buttons and lights and chimes. Really? What more could you want?

It’s very intuitive and it’s smart. After you put your clothes in, there are a few little fake spins (did I mention it wiggles in different directions?) and I guess it must weigh things, because after that the little laundry cup gives you one, two or three bars. Accordingly, you add a small, medium or larger amount of laundry detergent to your machine. I suspect, though I’m not sure, that this feature is one of the reasons my clothes seem cleaner. Less residue if you’re using the right amount of detergent?

I know that my friends at Sears don’t want to hear this, but the Kenmore Elite Washer and dryer is Home Economics for geeks. The washer moves in a million different directions, or seven… I can’t recall which. There is no vampire electrical use, it weighs your clothes and it greets you, and I smile like Pavlov’s dog because it reminds of the startup sound of a 14k modem.

Mostly though, my clothes are cleaner and my gas bill has dropped significantly. I’m happy, and you can be too.

This set is not inexpensive, but the way I see it, you extend the life of your clothes and drop your power bills. The set is near $2,500 and I think it’s worth every cent.

Tomorrow I’ll upload a video about all the features of the Kenmore Elite washer and dryer, but in the interim I want you to know that you can win them. Go to KenmoreEliteSweeps.com and enter to win your own set. I promise you, you’re going to love it. This isn’t just another washer and dryer.

*This post is part of a relationship I have with Kenmore. The relationship will never influence the content.

This morning Jane was in tears. She couldn’t get her hair into a high ponytail. My eleven year old daughter was crying because she is having a bad hair day.

I get it.

Finally! Something about parenting that I can understand and that I can fix. Jane has hair like mine. If you see me taping Momversation you’ll see that my hair does not grow longer, it somehow manages to grow wider. I realize that you are going to try and interject logic and reason to this discussion, however you are not a Jewish woman. Trust me, we’ve got hair. We’ve got big, fluffy, thick, coarse, ethnic hair. Girls like me who grew up in lily white suburbs spent our childhoods looking longingly as the blondes who complained that their hair was too straight.

My daughter’s hair is much straighter than mine, but it’s thick. It’s too thick for a single pony holder from Goody, so she uses two at a time.

Survey.com asked 2,000 women on behalf of Pantene if they would give up 10 IQ points for a lifetime of great hair, 57% said yes. Holy crap. I asked Jane if she would give up one IQ point for great hair, she and I both smiled, because we’re smart enough to feel conflicted about our answers either way. I couldn’t bring myself to ask if she’d be willing to give up 10, that’s not an answer I want to hear.

I’m mostly happy with my hair, but I’m 39 and I know my way around a blow dryer. I also know that great products give you great hair. I’m also giving up my hair color and shampoos as both are L’oreal. Since L’oreal is owned by Nestle, I can’t buy their products any longer. My friend Lisa calls it my “Joan of Arc moment”.

Everyone should have a friend like Lisa. Someone who understands that giving up your hair color is much more difficult than giving up Pellegrino or Perrier (which will also hurt).

I feel bad about some of my parenting, we all do. I’m not sure I’m sending my daughter the right message, but I’m going to take her for a Keratin treatment. I’ve had it done twice, it’s not affordable and I don’t care. I know that I can buy Jane some good mornings, and that’s what I’m setting out to do.

As for me? I’m back to my Ole Henriksen products, and I’m experimenting with hair colors. Let’s hope no one notices.

Would you take your eleven year old daughter for a chemical process on her hair?

Linkbait is when you post to your site, link to someone else, and hope and pray that you get their attention (and even better, their traffic).

Bloggers (and many webmasters) try and keep track of their statistics. In the year and a half that I’ve had this blog, I’ve gotten comfortable with my statistics and I can sort of feel the trends. My traffic comes from search and returning readers. A tiny piece of my traffic (less than 3%) comes from links from other sites. Now, you can interpret that in a few ways. One way might be to say that this site is not really part of the community, and that my readership suffers for it. Another way to interpret this would be to assume that my readers are sending more readers, and the search results are helpful. I know the answer to this, and it falls somewhere in the middle, perhaps about an 80/20 split.

I want to point you to a perfect piece of linkbait. The opening sentence of this article makes it so I must respond.

A long time internet player, eBay power seller, Jessica Gottlieb burst into the ‘Mommy Blogging’ world as the woman behind (or was it in front) of the Motrin Moms debacle.

To be clear, I don’t have to leave a comment, but I do have to keep reading. I want to know what it is Debbie is about to say. How did I know that Debbie was talking about me? I had a google alert set up, and I can see it my blog’s statistics. I highly recommend using Statcounter, the code is easy to install and the information it provides can be very helpful.

If you’re going to really use linkbait, may I suggest linking to a specific post? Debbie, of course, is bright enough to do just that. See this paragraph?

By creating a link to a single blog post, my site automatically issues a trackback, sometimes referred to as a pingback.

Again, when you linkbait someone, you can be critical. I wouldn’t say Debbie was trying to be my BFF, but it was honest, kind and effective. I’ve had a rash of not-so-kind things written lately. You know what? I’m not into helping them out, so the pingbacks? They get deleted. Everyone else does the same thing, they just haven’t told you yet.

Be critical, that’s fine, be mean and it won’t work.

Just you wait and see. I’ll talk about my friend Nina, her fabulous dog and super sweet husband. I betcha one of the three of them will show up here and ask you to donate to WFMU.

Because the first day of Little League was rained out, my husband had a great idea. Shopping. We, as a family would go shopping. Well, since you can’t get a root canal on a rainy Saturday, a family outing to Bloomingdales is a fine runner up.

Mr. G. was (in theory) liking the layered look for springtime. He needed a few pair of pants and some work shirts, so off we went. My father had Jane so Mr. G, Alexander and I made a beeline for the Ralph Lauren section in the men’s department. Quickly we found a beautiful linen shirt and some khaki pants, classic Lauren. Then it was time for slim cut sweaters, jeans and shirts. As we three crossed the aisle to the premium denim section, Mr. G. stopped for a moment and looked at a mannequin that can only be described as feminine, and exclaimed, “I think we’re in the women’s section.” Our son Alexander shouted in agreement, “Only girls wear stuff like that.”

I smiled with my lips, and found a salesperson to help us. After two hours of clothing flying in every direction, Mr. G found a few suitable choices. When we got to the “white jeans” it was my turn to cause a scene.

“Excuse me.” I said to the sales clerk, “do you have a pair of these jeans that aren’t dirty?”

“They’re not dirty,” was her reply.

“Actually, they are filthy.” And I pointed to the streaks of gray running down my husband’s whitish pants.

Turns out that market research shows that men won’t buy white pants because they’re scared of getting them dirty. This year premium denim is made to look dirty. Every inch of me rejects this. Mr. G got the pants, he looks great in them, he looks great in everything.

Understand that I am the woman who hides detergent from her daughter, I am the woman that is so in love with clean clothing that I’ll be posting a love note to Kenmore later this week. I am that woman, and my husband… he bought dirty jeans.

I shrieked in the men’s department. I was loud.

At about the two hour mark Mr. G and Alexander were ready to go home, Jane had joined us and I’d run into a few friends. We went to the cashier and realized we were at bloomies for a huge sale. When she rang us up his total was $1740 before discounts (don’t froth at the mouth, this is not a typical shopping for us), and we’d get $250 discount. I noticed that if we spent $2,000 we’d get a $500 discount. On top of that, neither of us had a Bloomingdale’s card, so if we opened one there’d be another 20% off.

I made my family sit still and I ran up and down escalators finding my final items so I could hit the magical $2,000 mark without going over. I raced around like a TV contestant, and yes, if you look at the pictures below, you’ll see the shoes I got for myself. I do appreciate irony.

The good news? Fast forward 15 minutes and I added a few things for myself. Total cost? About $1350.

That is all.

The ever fabulous Marsha Collier sent me this.

Hashtag Spam and twitter parties (they are synonyms). If you are not familiar with Twitter, you might not be familiar with hashtags, surely you are familiar with Spam.

Twitter is a microblogging service. You can update your status using just 140 characters. It’s not quite a bulletin board, but it’s not a blog either. In order to maximize your very brief updates, you can add a hashtag to a word and twitter will make is searchable. A hashtag is the number sign #. When groups of people use a hashtag it makes it easier for them to find each other. Quite often at an event there will be a predetermined hashtag in use. The 140 Conference uses the hashtag #140conf take a look at how helpful an event hashtag can be. Shortly, we will all be able to see SXSW emerge as a trending topic, and, for lack of a better term, get the back channel of the conference and it’s parties (or is it the parties and the conference?).

Hashtags, like anything, can be used well, or can be the source of spam. Spam is defined by wikipedia as “the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.” Hashtags are free to create, and could be a marketing dream. Marketers appear to have forgotten that a “free hashtag” isn’t a one way street. Remember when Skittles thought that they would build a platform based on a simple feed? Walmart tried selling mom jeans just two short months later with a “twitter party” (more on twitter parties later), that ended with this (click the picture for a close up):

What’s most shocking though, is that all these months later businesses still haven’t learned. Recently Maria Bailey used the hashtag #WashThemGrow to sell Suave baby soap, but when people asked about the toxicity and the facts surrounding some of it’s ingredients, the twitter party shut down and this was posted about 24 hours later (*eyeroll* I know). I know that Corporate America moves slowly, but this chugging along is ridiculous. Learn something, learn now.

Hashtag parties are spam. Jessica Smith recently wrote that “hijacking a hashtag” is spamming people. I would disagree. The corporate creation of a hashtag is incredibly intrusive. Businesses should be thrilled and honored if they get mentioned on twitter, why on earth would they feel like they have the right to a free focus group? Further, I’d argue that if you actually look at these “parties” it’s the same group of 100 women every week. Can’t you just send them an email? It appears that they are willing to sell just about anything to each other.

Every Friday Twitter becomes unusable to me. I love the way #FollowFriday began, but (to borrow a phrase from Scoble) it has devolved into a mess. I can’t see through the lists of names to actually get to the content, and I don’t want to unfollow people for just one day. May I kindly suggest that if you use #followfriday that you limit it to just one person and also give us all a reason that we should follow them?

I’d like to suggest we all take a page from the Twitter Handbook, listen and love. It’s incredible that Jack’s interest in the routes of New York City messengers could bring about Twitter. I know some of y’all don’t recognize the import of Twitter, but those newfangled telephones were considered pretty intrusive too. In 1876 folks just hated that darned thing. Much like twitter, they started out as a party line. I think twitter lists and DM’s have brought us closer to the Baby Bells.

Again, if you can look at the internet and see it as one gigantic party line, well, you’d see that Hashtag Parties alienate more than they embrace. They serve the same small circle of potential customers each week, and they are seen by the rest of the community corporate sponsored spam.

The reason that people are hijacking your beloved hashtag is because it irritates them. I know that sometimes we look at our own work, and can’t see the flaws. This isn’t bad, it’s normal. Sometimes an outside observer is needed. #Journchat is never spammed, why? Because #Journchat brings immense value to the people who participate in it, and (people like me) who simply read the stream either live or later. The world doesn’t owe you anything, and Twitter is a place that recognizes and quantifies that.

Have I said it enough ways?

If you’re having a party conference, by all means let people pick a hashtag, but if your party only lives on twitter… well, congratulations, you are a spammer.

UPDATE: AdAge has an interesting and related post: Do People Tweet About Brands More Out Of Hate Than Love?

I got an email about a nanosecond ago. This is the subject line

Caught!!!!

The email is from my mom, and included no text, just a link to this story.

An anti-gay California state senator was placed under arrest for drunk driving after leaving a gay bar. A male passenger was in the vehicle along with the lawmaker was not arrested, reported Sacramento CBS affiliate Channel 13.

State Sen. Roy Ashburn was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol at about 2:00 a.m. on March 3 when his state-issued vehicle was observed being driven erratically. The driver, identified as Ashburn, was taken in and charged for driving under the influence. Channel 13 reported that unidentified sources said the senator had been at Faces, a popular gay nightspot, prior to his arrest.

You can read the whole story here.

This week on Momversation Asha, Karen, Maggie and I got to talk about sexual abuse. Yeah, lucky us.

I can’t just present this video to you without some back story. I grew up in Manhattan Beach, Califrornia. In 1974 my mother took me to The McMartin Preschool for an interview. Something dropped or broke (that I don’t recall) and I said, “oh shit”. My brother and I were not accepted into Manhattan Beach’s best school, and instead we went to the co-op nursery school.

The Manhattan Beach of my youth was a very small town.

In 1983 and 1984 my friends were questioned about abuse. There were dolls, and police, neighbors’ yards were dug up. Every parent who ever buried a pet rabbit was worried, and McMartin was whispered everywhere. My neighbor was two years younger than I, in the weeks between her “interviews” she pulled out all her eyelashes. She was twelve.

Ultimately the McMartin’s were convicted, parts were overturned, some were dismissed, and everyone’s lives were ruined. The entire South Bay lived under a shroud.

Right now the town of Lewes, Delaware will experience the same issues my hometown did. Every time you look at a child of a certain age, you’ll think, am I allowed to touch him/her… hug, handshake, wave? In addition to the unspeakable pain of the children and parents directly involved, Dr. Earl Bradley raped his hometown. He stole their ability to trust, even if he didn’t touch their children.

With that, I present to you, this week’s Momversation.

Sexual Abuse: How Do You Talk to Your Kids About It?

I would love your thoughts in the comments.