When Worlds Collide

Hello all. [Place obligatory apology for not posting lately, along with reasons/excuses, here].

A few weeks ago, M took PG in for her annual dentist appointment. Afterward, they called me from the car on speakerphone so PG could tell me her big news. As is often the case when PG is asked to say something on the phone, I was given some time to anticipate what, exactly, would be said once the kid actually spoke up. And I could not, for the life of me, think of what could possibly be big news after a routine dentist appointment. I ruled out cavities - the mood on the other side of the phone call was far too upbeat for that. Perhaps they were giving away Dora toothbrushes now? I had no idea.

What happened was that the hygienist discovered not one, but two loose teeth. I was not prepared for this news. PG wasn't even five yet! Are baby teeth supposed to come out so soon? I lost my first one when I was almost six. Nevertheless, there were two loose teeth, with their permanent replacements already poking out behind them.

Thus, I was called to my Tooth Fairy duties a bit earlier than expected. I got the job because my stealth skills are more developed than M's. The first tooth came out a few days after the dentist visit, and the tooth-for-money exchange was pretty straightforward, though I did doze off after PG went to bed and had to be woken up to go take care of it. PG was very excited to get her money and disregarded the social conventions associated with waiting until morning to spread the news, rather than spreading it upon discovering the money at 3:00 AM.

The second tooth came out the night before Easter, which meant that our house would have two visitors that night, since the Easter Bunny would be making his rounds too. That's what one might call "an opportunity."

Sure enough, PG awoke in the middle of the night to find that the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny had crashed into each other, leaving a jelly bean in her tooth pillow and her tooth money divided up into three different plastic eggs, one of which was left on the floor of her room. Naturally, she let us know without delay that this had occurred.

Perhaps next time, the Tooth Fairy will also leave a note urging PG to not bug Mommie and Daddy until morning. Assuming, of course, that the next tooth holds out until PG can read.

You'll Bounce Your Eye Out!

Friday morning we went to the Festival of Trees over at the Fairgrounds. M had scored some free tickets that got us in a few hours before the official opening, so it was reasonably uncrowded, and the kids' rides were free for those couple of hours. Breakfast was also included, and we certainly got our money's worth there (I'll take this moment to remind you, the reader, that we didn't pay anything.) They had a band there doing a Christmas show. They looked more like the type to be doing Stone Temple Pilots covers instead, which made me wonder if this is the direction the band had hoped to make in their career. If not, they were at least cheerful enough about the paying gig.

Though PG had her pick of any free ride or activity, she remained pretty exclusive with the Moon Bounce. The kid does like to bounce. We eventually dragged her away to do some face painting. Kid likes to get painted up too. This, however, turned out not to be free, but rather $12. But they were selling lollipops for a buck a pop, and there was a slight chance of winning a free face painting if you bought one.

While M was mulling this over, I wandered back towards the band, because it sounded a lot like they were playing "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister, and that is a development that cannot be ignored when at a Christmas shindig. It turned out they were singing the words to "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" over the music. So, points for making the best of the situation, guys and girl.

When I returned, I learned of the happy news that PG scored a free face painting on her first lollipop. So she got all painted up. Then she went back to the Moon Bounce, which, by this point, was no longer free, as 10 AM had rolled around, and the general public had entered the building. We got her a $5 wristband that gave her unlimited moon bounce opportunities, and she did about $8 worth of bouncing, so it was money well spent.

Also included in this Festival of Trees were, coincidentally enough, Christmas trees, decorated by various groups and up for sale at the Festival. Among the trees was a Christmas Story tree, festooned with Christmas Story themed ornaments. You think I got pictures? You bet I did.

Yodel-lay-de-Haiku!!

Happy Thanksgiving
Lots of turkey and stuffing
If you're into that

Went to see Muppets
Not too bad, really
Got kinda slow at one point

Ah, my chai/green tea
Is there nothing you can't do?
Happy times ahoy!

Getting hot in here
Gonna take off my sweater
I blame the chai tea

So, that's pretty much my day so far.

Haiku-lio

Rainy day today
It got my groceries all wet
Tea brewed in transit

Almost Thanksgiving
Why do you have your lights up?
Wait 'til day after

Isn't she lovely?
Isn't she bee-yoo-ti-ful?
Yup, indeed she is!
(Inspired by the Stevie Wonder ringtone I have for when M calls. She just called.)

Got into test group
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Yet another game!

Save Community!
Best show on TV right now
Please do not cancel

Fingertips 2: Electric Boogaloo

* Operation Avoid Getting A McRib was a success! I finally caved in and went to McDonalds today, only to discover that the Limited Time had come to an end. I heard that one of the ingredients in the McRib is also used in yoga mats, so I consider that a bullet dodged.

* I've said it before, and it's been said by many others, but here it is again. If it's before Thanksgiving, I do not want to see Christmas decorations. I flat out declined M's request to drive by a neighbor's house that had already been decorated and lit last night. I don't know why, for sure, why it bothers me, but it does. No Christmas until the day after Thanksgiving, kthxbye.

* I almost didn't post anything tonight. Way too tired to write much on the various topics I have in mind. Finally decided to just go to the short thoughts well again, as that is better than nothing.

* Went to my nephew's piano recital with PG today. I give PG's behavior a B+, overall. She managed to stay distracted for a while by the sketch book I gave her to draw in and the comics I gave her to read. But eventually she started getting squirmy and asking when it would be over. Quietly, thus only getting docked down to a B+. She also showed interest in the actual recital for a while, which was nice of her.

* Made pancakes with mint M&Ms in them this morning. Sometimes you have to experiment to know what you like, don't like, or find yourself indifferent about. For me, mint M&M pancakes fall into the third category.

* I've had a graphic design business for about three years now, and I still have just the one client. I may elaborate on this topic later, most likely when I have the energy for it.

* My mom departed this world for the Great Beyond 18 years ago today. Things would have been very different if that hadn't happened. For one thing, my kid would have a different name.

* I'm having problems again remembering if conversations I've had or things that have happened actually happened or if I dreamed them. Must remember to ask M if she suggested seeing Gone With The Wind or if I dreamed that. It would be easier to figure out if Gone With The Wind wasn't, in fact, going to be showing at a local theater next month.

* Is this enough to make a decent-sized post? Is is? Super. Time for bed.

Vegas Vacation: A Review

We're back from Vegas (for over two weeks, now.) I spent the past week, off and on, writing up an excruciatingly detailed account of our trip. And then I decided to scrap the whole thing because it was mind-numbingly boring. So now, here are the highlights...

* No sleigh ride, as mentioned in an earlier post. Parking was lousy, and none of us were particularly in a sleigh riding mood anyway. We went up to a ski lodge, had hot chocolate and chili, and then called it a day.

* They say that Christmas is a time of self-discovery. Well, maybe nobody says that, but I did discover something about myself on Christmas Eve - it doesn't take much at all to get me drunk these days. Specifically, it takes about a glass and a half of wine. Maybe being up in the high altitude earlier that day weakened my system or something, but the fact remains that I was fairly drunk before dinner. I'll tell you what - A Christmas Story, a funny movie on its own, is funnier when you're drunk.

* We went to my sister-in-law's friend's house for Christmas dinner (heavy on the pasta - Italians know how to do a Christmas dinner!) While there, I showed up the older boy (about seven years old) at Guitar Hero, which made me feel a little bad, and made a fast friend of the younger boy (about five,) due to our shared love of Transformers, which made me feel good. So it was a wash, pretty much.

* PrettyGirl got presents from lots of people we didn't even know. Almost every one of my sis-in-law's friends that visited with us had presents for PG. It was nice! Having an aunt that loves to tell people about her pretty niece, and has plenty of pictures to back up that claim, probably helped PG bring in a nice haul.

* As you probably know, there are a lot of shows in Vegas. It's kinda one of the big draws the town has. During a recent blood drive there, the Red Cross was offering a free pair of tickets to Penn and Teller if you gave blood. My sister-in-law's husband gave blood and got the tickets (vouchers, really, but they resulted in actual tickets with no problem,) but he isn't really all that into Penn and Teller, so he gave them to us. So we left PG with M's sister and went to see Penn and Teller at the Rio the day after Christmas. And a good time was had by all.

* M and I explored the Las Vegas Strip a bit one afternoon while her sister watched PG. We found the whole experience to be overcrowded with other tourists. We weren't all that impressed. We prefer the old and historical to the new and flashy.

* We went to see Cirque du Soleil O at the Bellagio, which was very impressive. And the seats were great. We were in something like the 10th row from the stage, and it cost us nothing, because my sister in law knew somebody! We also watched the fountains do their thing in front of the Bellagio. The first time wasn't all that great, since they played that godforsaken Proud To Be An American Where At Least I Know I'm Free song, but the second time was nice and a bit classier. And a lot less jingoistic.

* Our last full day there we we went up to the Valley of Fire National Park, and that really knocked my socks off. It was truly awesome. I've posted a few pictures in the most recent PrettyGirl web album, and I have a lot more coming soon. Keep an eye out!

* We also went to Boulder City, near the Hoover Dam. The original plan was to go to the Dam itself, but traffic was backed up for over a mile or so, so we went to Boulder City instead and had lunch. As it happened, we were in the same building as the Hoover Dam museum, so we got our Hoover Dam fix without having to wait forever to drive over it.

* I finally did some real gambling about a half-hour before we went to the airport to leave. Well, I did a few slots at the Rio the night we saw P&T, but that doesn't count. We went back to the Rio on our way to the airport to partake of their supposedly world-famous buffet. It was a very comprehensive buffet. So on our way out of the Rio, I stopped at the roulette wheel to put a dollar on 26, per my dad's request. Since you had to buy a minimum of $10 in chips, I also put a dollar on nine other numbers. One of those numbers, 36, hit on the first spin, so I became $35 richer just like that. Then M convinced me to play again, so I played another 10 numbers and ended up only $25 richer than I was when I walked in.

And that's pretty much the Las Vegas trip!

Merry Christmas

A Merry Christmas to you and yours, from me and mine!

Leavin' On A Jet Plane

Just a quick post, since we're leaving soon, and I still have to pack a few things.

We're flying out to Vegas tonight! This is it! We'll finally see if PrettyGirl is as good a girl as we thing she is! Not that I would blame her if she yelled a lot. That's what babies do on planes, after all!

The other night, after having just gotten PG to bed and asleep, the local volunteer fire department came through the neighborhood with Santa Claus atop an engine. Blaring its siren and honking its horn. At 8:30 PM. PG was livid at being woken up.

So we got PG to settle down and go back to sleep. And the the fire engine came down the other side of the block and started the whole thing over again. It took even longer to get PG back to sleep that time, but it was the last we heard from Santa that night.

M sent out an angry e-mail to the President of our neighborhood association, since we thought it was the neighborhood Santa visit. The next day, she got a reply profusely apologizing for our daughter's inconvenience, but also letting us know that they had the neighborhood Santa last weekend in the afternoon on a pickup truck. That's how we found out that it was the fire department, over whom the neighborhood has no control, Santa-wise.

That's about it for now! Hopefully I'll be able to post from Vegas!

Finally, A Finale

Today is the last day of NaBloPoMo, and I, for one, am most relieved. So much so that I may delay PoMoOftMo until January, just so I can take a break. In fact, now that I think about it, that's not a bad idea at all.

Today will be the first Pandora Friday here at the ol' blog. It's like an iTunes Friday, except that I'll be using Pandora instead. It's an internet radio thing, wherein you request a song or group, and it plays it, then plays something similar, and then something similar to that, and so on. If you like the songs it picks for you, you can give it a thumbs-up, and it will continue along the line of reasoning that got you to the song. If you don't like it, you can give it a thumbs-down, which will stop the trend and make it play something different. Or you can just let it play without doing anything, which I guess is like a thumbs-up, only less emphatic.

So I'll have the list of songs that play at the bottom of this post, with thumbs-up and thumbs-down noted, when applicable.

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PrettyGirl was taking a hiatus from clapping this week, but she started doing it again this morning. She thinks it's so cool that she can make her hands do that. For a while, M and I were making a big deal of it when she clapped, to encourage her to keep doing it because it's so cute, but it looks like the clapping itself is reward enough for PG. So that's less effort for us to keep getting the Clapping PG Show!

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I'm probably jinxing things by mentioning it, but PG has started sleeping through the night again. Such a good girl!

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I may be jinxing this too, but it looks like I'm about to get my first paying freelance gig. M's friend's boyfriend is running for judge, and I've been asked to design some campaign materials. No details have been worked out yet. I'll keep y'all posted!

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We took our Christmas card picture this evening. It turned out pretty well, though there's an outside chance there will be reshoots tomorrow. Hope we don't forget anybody when we send the cards out!

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M went up to the attic this evening, before I got home, to bring down some Christmas stuff so she could decorate around the area where the aforementioned pictures were to be taken. While up there, she saw the damage that the local squirrels have been wreaking up there lately. Parts of our insulation have been stripped down to the bare wood floor. There are probably a few well insulated squirrel nests in the area this winter. It would appear that one of those nests might actually be right there in the attic. A pile of ripped up insulation was moving suspiciously while M was up there. PG was napping, so she refrained from screaming. That's the kind of sacrifice she makes for her daughter, and I, for one, appreciate it.

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Here comes the Pandora playlist, compiled while I was at work today. The starting point is The Rolling Stones - no specific song from them. Let's see what happens!

1. "One Hit" - The Rolling Stones
2. "About A Girl" - Nirvana (Thumbs up)
3. "Rock You Like A Hurricane" - The Scorpions
4. "Refugee" - Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (Thumbs up)
5. "Enter Sandman" - Tommy Victor, Nuno Bettencourt, Joey Vera & Scott Travis (lousy cover of the Metallica song - Thumbs down)
6. "Shades of Grey" - Billy Joel (Thumbs down)
7. "Something Better Beginning" - The Kinks
8. "Let's Spend The Night Together" - The Rolling Stones
9. "Wait" - The Beatles
10. "Deliver Me" - Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
11. "Jet Airliner" - Steve Miller Band (Thumbs up)
12. "Time Is On My Side" - The Rolling Stones (Thumbs up)
13. "Sweet Jane" - Lou Reed (Thumbs down)
14. "Bad Case of Lovin' You" - Robert Palmer (Thumbs up)
15. "Wild Thing" - The Troggs
16. "Needles and Pins" - Searchers
17. "She Loves You" - The Beatles (Thumbs up)
18. "Spirit In The Sky" - Norman Greenbaum
19. "Rebel Rebel" - David Bowie (Thumbs up)
20. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" - U2 (Thumbs up)
21. "You Really Got Me" - Van Halen (Thumbs up)
22. "If I Needed Someone" - The Beatles (Thumbs up)
23. "Daily Records" - The Who
24. "Such A Shame" - The Kinks
25. "Gonna Get Ya" - Pete Townshend (Thumbs down)
26. "Listen To Her Heart" - Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
27. "Funk #49" - Joe Walsh
28. "Please" - The Zakary Thaks
29. "Go Your Own Way" - Fleetwood Mac (Thumbs up)
30. "The Same Old You" - Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
31. "Woodstock" - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Santastic!

A clever title made up by the author? Nope. It's the actual name of the Santa setup at the local mall. M and PrettyGirl went there while I was in class tonight.

I wanted M to write about the experience herself, as a guest poster, but she declined, so I'll try to do justice to the story, as told to me about an hour ago.

Santastic is more than just a guy in a Santa suit (and a real beard,) sitting in a big chair letting kids sit on his lap. It's a full-blown experience, giving the kids something to do while they wait for an audience with the big guy. First, you pass the Naughty or Nice Meter, an arrow on a gauge that, as you might expect, points either to Naughty or Nice or somewhere in between. The Santastic employees were urging PG to look at the meter, which perplexed M until they took the picture of PG next to it. Then a Santastic employee asked PG if she'd like to write Santa a letter (at the Letter Writing Station) or just make a Christmas wish for Santa. M reminded the Santastic employee that PG is, in fact, seven and a half months old. But it's part of the process, so M and PG went along with it. After writing your letter or deciding to skip the Letter Writing Station, you go to the mailbox and either put your letter in there or blow a kiss in there, representing your Christmas Wish. M went with just a Christmas Wish. She opened the mailbox, and the mailbox puffed out some snowflakes, causing PG's jaw to drop. And another picture was taken.

Finally, PG sat on Santa's lap and had four pictures taken. The picture featured here was Pose #4. Other poses showed PG staring at Santa like he was the most interesting being on Earth. Considering that the man had Christmas baubles in his beard, you'd be hard-pressed to argue her assessment of him.

Finally, it was time to buy the pictures. In addition to buying prints of various sizes of any of the four poses and/or the pre-Santa events, you could also buy a CD containing a low-res digital copy of whatever pose(s) you bought prints of or a CD containing high-res copies of every picture in the portfolio, with or without buying actual prints. M went with a 5x7 and a couple wallet-sized prints and the low-res CD of the above picture. I was initially disappointed to not see the other five pictures available, but they were asking a whole lot of money for those high-res CDs, so I'll live with picturing them in my head.

This post has been reviewed, corrected, and approved by M, our Santastic correspondent.

Just A Blah Day

It was nice and sunny today, but we were all feeling kinda blah. Nobody's sick, other than PG's teething (well, we assume that her crankiness and screeching today was due to teething -kid still hasn't gotten the hang of English yet,) but all three of us just didn't have it in us to do much of anything. I got a new web album posted. But the Christmas stuff remains in the attic, and the cupboards remain somewhat bare, not having been replenished by a trip to the store. In fact, I couldn't tell ya if it was cold or warm today, since none of us went outside.

There was one highlight, though. PG seems to have learned to clap her hands. I don't think she knows when she's supposed to do it, since she claps her hands at random times, but she's definitely clapping her hands together on purpose. She's also been waving at random things (side-to-side, not up-and-down) for a few days now. Silly girl.

That's about it.

Thanksgiving: The Post-Game

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. Mine was one of the better ones I've had lately.

You'll be happy to know that leaving the house before 7 AM worked out just fine, traffic-wise. Some had said that 7 wasn't early enough to beat the traffic. Those doomsayers were wrong.

My aunt and uncle always get up bright and early, so our early arrival was no problem. My baby cousins were another story. The older one had just flown in from Arizona State, where he's a freshman this year, and had proceeded to go out with friends until 3AM the night before, so we didn't see him for a couple of hours. And when he did get up, the following conversation occurred between M and him:

M: [PrettyGirl] is napping in the TV room, so I hope that doesn't interfere with football.
S: Who?

Apparently, all the talk of M being pregnant and having a baby had gone in one ear and right out the other. But having been clued in to the fact that I had a daughter, he was pleased to make her acquaintance. Once she woke up from her nap, of course.

Fun fact: My cousin, who was born a couple days before I started college, has roughly the same age difference with PG as he has with me.

We spent the day throwing around the football, trying to do trick basketball shots (my brother managed to chuck the ball from behind the shed and into the basket right in front of the aforementioned shed - nothing but net - I didn't have my camera with me at the time,) watching football, and playing Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero is sweet. If I had the money, I'd buy an XBox (or PS2/3) just to have that game.

Dinner was awesome. The appetizer soup was excellent. It had watercress and shallots and... well something else that was really good in it. The salad had croutons that had been soaked in bacon grease. So deadly, and yet so good. And the usual turkey, mashed potatoes, etc. were everything you'd want in a Thanksgiving meal. Top scores!

After our lunchtime Thanksgiving dinner, there was more football and Guitar Hero and napping, because, as you might remember, I got up at the crack of dawn and had just ingested a lot of turkey.

M has a friend from college who is currently living in Philadelphia, just 15 minutes from my uncle's house, so the plan was to spend the night at her place and visit with her the next day. The trick was determining how to get there. We had Mapquest directions, but my uncle looked those over and deemed them inaccurate. He showed me the map on Google maps and started explaining to me how to navigate the twists and turns in getting there. He quickly thought better of it and offered to drive there himself and have us follow him.

But there was some question of whether or not we'd find a parking spot close to M's friend's house. Coupled with the fact that she lived in an area that was sketchy (at least, the last my uncle, who used to live in Center City Philadelphia, had heard,) it was finally decided it would be even better if he drove us in our car and then take our car back to his house for the night and bring it back when we were ready to go home the next day. Not liking the idea of driving in an unfamiliar city or trying to keep up with a lead car or leaving M's car parked far enough way to give the scofflaws plenty of opportunities to mug us, I voted for that last idea, and that's what we did.

Of course, there was a parking spot right in front of the friend's house when we got there. My uncle considered leaving us with our car and taking a train back home, but the trains were on a holiday schedule and he didn't bring his jacket to stand in the cold waiting for a train. So we got all our stuff out of the trunk and he left with the car.

About 10 minutes later, I realized that we left our jackets in the back seat of the car. So we had to call my uncle and have him come back so we could get them. It turned out I also forgot my backpack and M forgot PG's bottled milk, so it's a good thing I remembered about the jackets. Would have been better if I had remembered them when we first got out of the car, of course.

We spent the rest of the evening in the dining room talking. Mostly M and her friend talking about their college days and where so-and-so ended up while her husband and I listened. I was so exhausted that by 10 PM, the fatigue was actually painful. But the stories were interesting, so it was a trade-off. PG must have been exhausted too, because she was sleeping in the next room and didn't wake up when the conversation got noisy.

The next day, we went down to Independence Hall to see that and the Liberty Bell. Because there was only one car to work with, and that car's back seat was occupied by a child seat (M's friend's 2-year-old son's) and a baby seat (the 2-year-old's old seat, occupied by PG - we left PG's seat in our car. On purpose,) the moms and the kids went down in the car, and the dads walked to a major road where a cab could be flagged down. We ended up walking a good ways, because the view of City Hall, topped with the William Penn statue, is spectacular on Broad Street, and he thought I might like to see it and get a picture. He was right.

We went to the Liberty Bell first and then got tickets for Independence Hall. Unfortunately, the tickets weren't good for another two hours, and the crowds were growing quickly. So we decided to forget about that. And by "we," I suppose I really mean "me," since I was the only one that had been particularly interested in it to begin with, and it was my call to make. And I made it quite gladly. I can just look at pictures of the inside. I did want to take some pictures around the outside, and it turned out that you can't even be on that side of the street without a ticket. So I took pictures from across the street.

We proceeded to Jim's Steaks to get cheese steaks. Word was that Jim's makes a better cheese steak than most places in Philly, and apparently that word was widespread, because the line snaked outside the building and around the corner. It took about 30 to 40 minutes for us to get to the counter. Not being dummies, M and her friend took the kids home for their naps and left us guys to take care of the ordering and getting the cheese steaks home by cab. We took a cab too. The same one as the cheese steaks did, in fact.

After lunch (verdict on cheese steaks from Jim's: meh) and a quick nap, we called for our car, and my aunt drove it over. We packed it all up, said our goodbyes, and headed back to New Jersey to drop off my aunt. We were on the Ben Franklin bridge when M's friend called me from M's cell phone to let us know that M's purse was still at their house. So we had to turn around, go back to their house, get it, and drive back to New Jersey again. I ended up seeing the outside of Independence Hall four times during my Philly visit, because it's on the way out of Philly (and on the alternate way in, which we chose to take the first time we entered Philly, last night.)

The rest of the trip was blissfully uneventful.

And now I'm going to bed.

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Here's some iTunes for y'all, compiled while I was writing this self-indulgent rambling.

1. "Now They'll Sleep" - Belly
2. "Real Real Real" - Jesus Jones
3. "You Belong To The City" - Glenn Frey
4. "Hash Pipe" - Weezer
5. "Strut" - Sheena Easton
6. "Bittersweet Symphony" - The Verve Pipe
7. "Good Vibrations" - The Beach Boys
8. "Good Enough" - Cyndi Lauper
9. "Rumors" - Timex Social Club
10. "Keep Feeling Fascination" - Human League
11. "Touch of Grey" - The Grateful Dead
12. "Frosty The Snowman" - America
13. "Peace Train" - 10,000 Maniacs
14. "Answer (acoustic) - Sarah McLachlan
15. "One" - Creed
16. "Mississippi" - Sheryl Crow (The Trinity Church Sessions)
17. "Reaching One" - Wendy and Lisa

Turkey Day!

Just a quick note before I take off for Philly.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I really hope traffic doesn't suck. Experiences of others tell me that it will be.

There Aren't A Lot of Food-Related Songs in My iTunes Library

We're driving up to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving tomorrow (at the crack of dawn,) and I thought I'd make a CD for the trip. I usually catch "Alice's Restaurant" on the radio when I'm driving around on Thanksgiving, so that's become something of a tradition for me, so I wanted to have the song at the ready, rather than hope that I'd happen to catch it on the radio during the trip.

I figured I'd add some more food or meal-related songs to the CD, since I'd have about an hour of CD left after "Alice's Restaurant" came to an end, but I came up short on actually finding anything of that nature. The best I could find was "Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner" by Kermit Ruffins, and I had to borrow PrettyGirl's New Orleans Playground CD to get even that.

Songs that could have made the cut but didn't, because I didn't think the audience in the car would particularly care for them, include:

"Punk Rock Girl" by The Dead Milkmen, which makes numerous references to pizza places (Zipperhead is a pizza place in Philly, if I remember correctly,) coffee shops, and Sunday meals.

"I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow. Actually, that one got cut because candy isn't really a mealtime kinda food. I think M and my dad would have liked that one.

"They All Ask'd For You" by The Meters, also from the New Orleans Playground CD. There's mention of etouffe and gumbo and such, but it's mostly about zoo animals and angels asking after the person that is being sung to, so that was a bit of a stretch.

And that's about it.

I probably didn't get some of that New Orleans info right, but it's late, and I have to get up really, really early tomorrow morning, so I don't have time for fact checking.

This Day In History

Seven score and four years ago today, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. I wonder if I'm the only one who finds that interesting.

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Last night, M and I made a decision that may come back to haunt us. Or annoy us for a while, anyway.

We bought plane tickets to go see M's sister in Las Vegas for Christmas. We will be voluntarily taking an eight-month-old on an airplane for an almost-cross country flight. We at least had the presence of mind to make sure it was a non-stop flight. And we're going with evening flights both ways to increase the chances of PrettyGirl sleeping through most of, if not all of, the trip.

Right now, we're planning on having PG just sit on our laps, but I'm going to check on Infant Fares with Southwest to see if they are cheap enough to make it worth buying a seat for PG and bringing along her car seat for convenient baby sleepin'.

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Y'see, in the speech, it's "Four score and seven years ago," and now it's been seven score and four years since that speech was made. So the numbers have been switched. Which is interesting. Kinda.

Catching Up - December 15, 2006 edition

Here's what's new in the world of Trackrick.

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The ice cream incident you all know about, unless you're reading these posts in chronological order, rather than in the order in which they appear on the page.

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My boss was getting rid of an artificial Christmas tree he had no plans of using anymore, so I volunteered to take it off his hands. M and I had been going back and forth on whether or not to get a tree this year, since she's too tired to deal with it, being pregnant and all, and it's not like anyone other than us two would have much occasion to see it. But I figured an artificial tree would be easier to deal with. Ultimately, I decided that the part where I have to rearrange the furniture to fit the tree in the living room was still a bit much, so the tree is still in its box up in the attic now.

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I haven't talked about my graphics art education at JHU CCI lately. It's going pretty well. I'm learning a lot. We recently got a few new people when we started the Adobe Illustrator portion of the curriculum, and that's slowed things down a bit. By and large, they lack the familiarity with how Adobe programs are laid out, or with computers in general for that matter, that the rest of us have. It's gotten to the point where I've relocated to the other side of the room (as it happens, all of the new people ended up sitting next to me) to keep me from being distracted too much by all the basic questions they have. I tend to feel obligated to help, so I often found myself trying to walk my neighbor through fairly simple procedures instead of concentrating on my own work. Originally, my relocation was supposed to be a switching of places with another newbie, so that all the new people could be in the same place, but it looks like she's left the class, so there's an empty seat where I used to be. I've only been in my new seat for one class so far, but, aside from the computer being even slower than the one I left, I already prefer it.

We recently completed, for now, the InDesign portion of the curriculum, and we were given a project to do to show what we had learned. I selected the Apollo Moon program as my topic. I wasn't required to write actual text - just ipsum lorem placeholder text - but I wanted to because I'm a geek about that era of NASA history. Sadly, it took pretty much the entire weekend for me to get just the layout done, but it ended up looking great, as far as I was concerned.

Here's a sample page:



As it turned out, the rest of the class agreed with my assessment of the results too. A few of us presented our projects to the class, and I was first. I showed how I had done master pages and paragraph styles and interactivity (to be exact, clicking on an icon to hear a recording of the Eagle landing), and afterwards nobody wanted to be the person that had to follow that. So that felt pretty good.

And that wasn't even the best version of the project. I had done some improvements later that Sunday night, and I ended up saving it as a different file. I inadvertently showed the older file to the class, the one with the headers that don't go all the way across and without the drop-caps at the start of the sections. I ended up showing the newer file to my instructor during the break, just so somebody could see what the really good version looks like.

My instructor thinks I should take it to Kinko's to get it printed (it's a fold-out brochure, so it's not the sort of thing you can print on a desktop printer). I'm going to do that once I get around to putting some real text in it.

Oh yeah, and that whole thing about a couple of us getting some extra work because we were standouts in the class? Not a word has been mentioned about it since.

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I have been remiss in getting the latest picture of Baby 2K7 up here. I am rectifying that oversight now. The picture was taken at the November 20 sonogram, so she's three weeks bigger now.



So far as I know, this is the last sonogram picture we'll be taking. The next picture should be from her birthday!

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Since the November 20 sonogram, there has been another sonogram, where the doc finally got a good look at the spinal cord, and another OB/GYN visit. Both have concluded that everything is going fine with the pregnancy!

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M can feel the baby moving around, but so far I can't. The OB/GYN told M the other day that I can press harder than I've been, so maybe I'll feel her moving around in there soon. I'm bound to feel her sooner or later, especially when she starts kicking.

'Tis The Season To Get Memmed

Note: If you read this prior to 2:00 PM today, the answers below are slightly different from what you saw before, and there are some new questions that aren't part of the "official" meme.

I've been tagged with a holiday meme by my esteemed colleague at Chicken Butt, so here goes...

Christmas Meme

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?
   Egg Nog. I prefer hot chocolate, but I can (and do) have that any time of the year. The nog is exclusively for December. I think this is more or less exactly how Dodi responded on her blog. You know what they say about great minds.
   


2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree?
   Nowadays? Neither. The presents under the tree on the 25th are the same ones that were under there on the 24th, by and large. Now, in the olden days of my youth - it was both. A few wrapped, and a few open and ready for immediate use to keep us occupied while our parents slept.
   


3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?
   Colored. White is too sterile. You can put white lights up anytime of the year, like summertime parties. Multi-colored lights only mean Christmas to me. M prefers white lights, though, so we have both in our house. I guess it's all how you're brought up.
   


4. Do you hang mistletoe?
   I think we had mistletoe up last year. It was the first time for me.
   


5. When do you put your decorations up?
   Early December. We did put up decorations in M's apartment on November 27, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, two years ago, but I went along with that because I figured (correctly, so far as I know) that it would make for better atmosphere when I proposed to her.
   


6. What is your favorite holiday dish?
   There really hasn't been any dish that gets associated with the holidays for me. I'd say turkey, except that I've hardly ever had that at Christmas - it's mostly been a Thanksgiving-only dish. But it's also the only holiday-only dish I can think of.
   


7. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
   Which truth are we talking about? The fact that he's really Superman? (This joke courtesy of the PvP Holiday Special, the link to which I do not have here at work, but I can add when I get home.) Oh wait, you're talking about the other truth. I don't remember, actually. I know that I still believed in 1978 and maybe even 1979, and I'm pretty sure I bought it when the news said they were tracking Santa on radar on Christmas Eve 1980. I guess it was sometime after that.
   


8. Snow! Love it or Dread it?
   I believe I've gone on record that I believe that snow is punishment for our sins.
   


9. Can you ice skate?
   Kinda. I skated once or twice in college. It was easier than roller skating. I was surprised how easily I could walk on those skinny blades on the non-ice surfaces at the rink.
   


10. What is your favorite holiday tradition?
    We never really had a set tradition, really. But I guess the best Christmases were when my brother and I would get up, extricate the goodies from our stockings, and play with the unwrapped presents while waiting for our parents to get out of bed so we could get to the wrapped presents. Nothing fancy.
    

I'm supposed to tag someone else now, but the only other blog people I know that haven't already done this are BillygoatBartman and M's cousin. I don't know if either of them read this blog. But they can consider themselves tagged anyway.

Also, here are a few extra that were in a similar e-mail that M sent me a few weeks ago. All of the above questions were in that e-mail, but there were a few others too, so I figured I'd add them here in an unofficial capacity. I never got around to forwarding/responding to M's e-mail, so she's seeing my responses for the first time here.

1. Favorite Holiday memory as a child
   Getting up at 3 or 4 AM and opening every single one of my presents in 1976. That was fun. I did miss a calendar from my mom's Aunt Emily on my first sweep, so that was like a bonus present at 9 AM! Geez, I just realized that that happened 30 years ago this year. I have a vivid memory that's 30 years old. Gettin' old.


2. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?
   I did for a while, when I was in my late teens/early 20s. My brother and I would open each other's presents then. It was always a computer game, and we almost always knew what we were giving each other ahead of time. In later years, we also got each other bags of candy (mostly Jelly Bellies) from the candy store in the mall. One year (1994, I believe), I was so grinched from working the Christmas season at CompUSA that my mind wasn't into Christmas in any way whatsoever and I forgot to get candy for my brother. I felt awful about that.


3. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree?
   Standing up, unless I need to put on an ornament way down low, in which case I'll stoop.


4. Do you remember your favorite gift?
   The Atari 5200 comes to mind. I also got a Millenium Falcon (toy, not the actual ship) that got a lot of mileage.


5. What's the most important thing about the Holidays for you?
   The pretty lights


6. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert?
   If I didn't have to make it myself, I'd say eclair cake. Even so, it's pretty good!


7. What tops your tree?
   A star, typically. When I was a kid, we had a cardboard star encased in foil. My mom made it. It worked perfectly well for me!


8. Which do you prefer giving or Receiving?
   For a while, I actually preferred giving to receiving, but I got over it. Giving is still nice, though.


9. What is your favorite Christmas Song?
   The Chipmunk Song.


10. Candy Canes! Yuck or Yum?
    Yum

Best Halloween Wishes

Happy Halloween, everybody! Hope you have a good one. If you're celebrating it, of course.

I saw this webcomic today that's based on V's 100% awesome introductory speech to Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta. The link (if you didn't already click on "this webcomic") is http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=214.

M and I will be receiving trick-or-treaters tonight, assuming they bother cruising the neighborhood all the way to our end. It will be the first time I've handed out candy in a good long while. Hope I remember how to do it.

Quick school update: The teacher took me and another student aside last night and told us that we were the only two who really bothered to turn in the assignments from the previous class. We were the only two to do them well, anyway. He offered to give us some more advanced assignments, on top of the usual stuff, to enhance our education. The assignments we get now aren't too bad, so we both said that was cool by us. The moral: Do a good job, and you'll be rewarded with more work! The word "rewarded" is used somewhat loosely.

Falalalala lala la la

M and I finished the decorating over the weekend. We put up the candy lights (lights shaped like round striped mints, complete with the plastic wrapper) and the icicle lights. We decided that the icicle lights were a bit too bright. Or at least I think we did. They haven't been turned on since the night we put them up. We also got a lot more ornaments at Ikea and put most of those up. The tree looks fuller now. Mistletoe was also added to the entrance to the dining room. Oo-la-la!

M asked me the other day what I wanted for Christmas. That's a tricky question for me, because I always feel funny about asking for things. I know that the point of Christmas present deal is that you are supposed to ask for and get stuff, but I never really know what to ask for and what not to ask for. Don't want to ask for anything too expensive and make someone spend more than they can afford! It's a huge departure from my childhood days when I would go through the Sears Wish Book and jot down everything that looked remotely interesting to me. One could never have too many Star Wars toys, as far as I was concerned. I never did get that $70 Imperial Walker (as seen during the battle on Hoth!).

We finally got the stand for the TV in the basement, with shelves underneath for the DVD player, etc.. Someday, we may a baby roaming around, and new accomodations will need to be procured for the electronics. But for now, I just wanted to get something bought and set up. The set up part has yet to happen. Gotta get that done before Sunday, when the cable guy comes and gets the basement strung up with cable.

The unpacking at the house has, for my part, pretty much screeched to a halt. My evenings have been mostly occupied with playing City of Heroes on my computer and watching TV. There be many a box that needs my attention!

The Basement from Hell became more so when heater stopped working. The air was coming out of the vents thoughout the house, but it sure wasn't hot or even warm. I finally figured out that the flame wasn't coming on when the heater kicked in. I ended up having to re-light the pilot light. Sadly, it proved to be a temporary fix, as I was informed by M this afternoon that she had to re-light it again this morning. The landlady is away in the islands somewhere getting married, so we'll wait until she gets back before burdening her with yet another basement problem.

Bump On A Log

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've been feeling very unmotivated, and not really in the mood to talk about everything that's been going on, even though most of it isn't bad. I hold myself to a very high creative standard, and I haven't felt up to the challenge. I'd rather not post at all than just give a dry account of my life.

But I've got people urging my blog telepathically to update, so now I feel obliged to say something. Maybe I'll get on a roll once I've started.

The house is coming along well. M has estimated that half of the boxes have been unpacked. The kitchen is pretty much box-free (a notable exception being the junk drawer box, which apparently became the odd man out when all the drawers got filled), which is nice, though I have yet to take advantage of that and start actually cooking in there. Oven-baked frozen pizza is the closest to cooking that kitchen has seen thus far.

The screaming neighbors have been quiet since that one noisy night, which is good. I haven't seen the daughter around lately, which may explain the quiet.

The basement has been a bit of a diaster, albeit a mostly corrected one now. First, I discovered that all of the electrical outlets in the finished part (the non-laundry room part) are controlled by both master light switches - the switch at the bottom of the stairs and the switch at the top of the stairs. Each of the three ceiling lights have their own switch, and the outlets have a common switch, and there's a switch at both ends of the stairs that rules them all. So, if I want to leave the outlets powered up (and I do, since my computer, the TV, the VCR, the DVD player, and the CD player will all be plugged in down there), I have to turn the lights on and off individually at the bottom of the stairs, and ascend to (or descend from) the kitchen bathed in the glow of a couple of small night lights.

The obvious question that comes to mind is: what sort of deranged person would set up their basement to be like that? Did the original owner only plug in lamps down there? A resonable assumption, actually, except that there's a gorram desk built into one of the walls!!! Maybe I'm so technominded that I fail to see why someone would have a desk and not put a computer or a fax machine (there are phone jacks very conveniently placed at desk level for such a device) on it. But one of the outlets is placed up at desk level, fer crying out loud! Was it just for a desk lamp? Would someone want to always control their desk lamp from a switch at the top of the stairs?

Our landlady is looking into getting that fixed. In the meantime, I've taped the master switches and the outlet switch into place in the On position to avoid any accidental power outages on my electronic stuff.

Then, I decided, one fateful afternoon, to hook up the computer to the dial-up connection I was supposed to be getting from Verizon while I waited for the DSL to kick in. It became fairly readily apparent, from looking at what I was given, that the lady who took my order was sorely mistaken about the whole temporary dial-up thing. Luckily (and I use that word somewhat loosely), I had an AOL disc. The AOL that came with my computer was uninstalled long ago, so I had to re-install it.

[You're probably wondering at this point if I was actually going to start up an AOL account just to get a few extra days of internet access. The truth of the matter is, I've had a $5 a month account with them since the late 90's. It's been mostly due to laziness and AOL's labyrinthian methods of cancelling accounts that I still have that account, but it does come in handy at times like this.]

So I got to the part of the installation wherein the modem dials up AOL and tests the connection. I could tell from the lack of dial tone coming from the modem that hard times were ahead for me. I unplugged the modem line from the wall and plugged in a phone. No dial tone, though I was getting some kind of feedback. I went up to the kitchen and checked that phone. Humming along just fine. I went back downstairs and tried the other phone jack (there were two jacks on a single plate). That one was dead as a doornail. I looked around for another phone jack, but all I could find was a plate that seemed to have had a jack for a phone at one time, but had since been closed off.

So I called Verizon and, without ever once speaking to a live human being, determined that the equipment was fine, concluded the jack was the problem, and got an appointment set up for Tuesday.

About a half-hour later, I got a recorded message from none other than James Earl Jones, informing me that my DSL service was activated and ready to go. And me without a working phone jack to plug the DSL line into. Fate was looking kinda cruel.

A couple days later, on Monday, M got a recorded message from Verizon (I had already left for work), asking her to see if the problem had been solved (Verizon was under the impression that they had been able to fix it remotely and they might not need to send someone out after all). She checked the dual-jack plate, and got the same results I did. Then, she went over to the other plate, opened the little sliding door blocking off the jack, and got dial tone off of that.

A frickin' sliding door. Why didn't I think of that? Arg.

So that night, I hooked up the DSL modem and got everything up and running.

I also hooked up a wireless network, so M could have internet access at her desk upstairs. It went refreshingly well. I even got it all encrypted up without anything other than a minor problem that just required a re-boot (though, given that her computer is the Slowest Computer On Earth, I could have done without having to do that.)

We've also gotten our Christmas tree. M knows someone whose family has a Christmas tree lot (and has the mayor and state attorney general as customers), so we were able to get a good deal on a 7-foot or so Frazier Fir. We got it home and in the stand (albeit off-center in the stand). Then we pulled out the lights we had gotten at Target last week and discovered that the wire was white (more suited for being on a wall than on a tree), so we had to go back to Target to exchange them for dark green wired lights.

First of all, the exchange process went surprisingly well, given that we lost the receipt during the move. All they needed was my card, and everything went bing-bang-boom-thanksfershoppin'.

Sadly, the lights we had gotten were no longer available in dark green. They were blinking lights with all kinds of settings that I'm sure had been, at one time, available in that color, but The Day After Thanksgiving had occurred since our previous visit, so there wasn't much in the way of lights available anymore. We did finally find some blinking lights with the dark green wire, but with tiny bulbs. We figured the small lights would be nice, so we went with those.

They are nice, but I would have preferred the larger bulbs. Also, they don't remember the setting after you switch them off for the night, so, due to a lack of desire to go crawling behind the tree every evening, we've been settling for the default setting, which involves every blink setting being done in a row. Some settings are more Christmassy than others. The slow fade in-and-out = Christmassy. The disco strobe blinking = Not So Christmassy.

Still have to find an entertainment center. I'm leaning towards the low to the ground one. We can add shelves later when the babies start rollin' in.