Aw

You'd never know from this picture that she's been fussy all day long, would you?

The Foreman

We finally found some patio furniture we liked, so we spent some of our tax return on it last night and it was delivered to the house this morning. (Nice store, to deliver so quickly, huh?) It was nice outside this afternoon (just a touch windy, but the house pretty much blocked it from our deck) so the B and I retired outside to put it together.

She was enjoying the sights and sounds, together with her sweet massage chair, as I cooed to her and turned the wrench. She's a harsh taskmaster, my little foreman the B. I got everything but one of the swivel rockers together before the B needed some chow. After the mister got home, we got the last of the chairs constructed and then moved the glass to the table (hey, I'm macho, but I can't do that on my own) before we came in and enjoyed some mucho tasty tacos for dinner.

Here's the furniture (we also got a wooden gliding rocker, but that isn't even out of the box yet) that got put together today. Now that the weather is getting nicer (finally) we can soon eat outside and admire the view of the common area, which is actually pretty nice.

I just have to go buy a new propane tank for the grill first. Sigh. It's always something, isn't it? We couldn't move the old one to the new digs back in September (not safe in the moving van) so now I must pay the piper and take care of that last detail.

By the way, it didn't actually take until it was dark to put it together. It only just occurred to me to take a picture of it a few minutes ago. Note the beginnings of rain in the picture. Figures, just when I'm talking optimistically about the weather...oh, well. Shouldn't be too bad. Can't rain forever, can it?

Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?

A cute little quiz to see of you know whether a name is the domain of one-a those new-fangled Web 2.0 companies or a Star Wars character. So this is the quiz and this is a link to the Google cache in case it's still down from being linked to by Digg.

I got a 37. Can you best me without cheating?

I'm a Total Showoff

So, not only does this post feature another of the more and more ubiquitous pictures of my tiny little offspring, but in this picture, she is sporting a hat I recently sewed for her. This picture is an ultra-rare, as she is smiling while she has a hat on her head. Typically she is not so delighted to have something on her head, but her dad was playing with her at the time, and I suppose daddy > hat crossness.

There is someone who reads this blog occasionally who might know someone who wants a (another?) bear hat. You know who you are. If you think she might like one like this, just shoot me an email and I'd be glad to make another one for her. I can enlarge the pattern, no problem.

I will soon be testing my sewing skills even further and attempting to make a pair of pants that matches this hat. Send me good booga booga for that, if you wouldn't mind.

Pics for Bucks

HP and AMD are donating a dollar to the Lance Armstrong Foundation for every picture uploaded to this collage at the LAF website. The cap is $25,000 but there are only three hundred pictures there now. Help a great cancer-related charity and show off your photography skills all at the same time.

In the interests of full disclosure, you can't really reserve any rights on the photo you upload. From their legalese: "All submissions become the sole property of Sponsor, may be used by Sponsor for any purpose and in any media whatsoever (without further compensation or review), and will not be returned. Sponsor reserves the right to crop, alter, modify, or distort any submitted image or description."

So, keep that in mind when you are selecting a photograph. Don't send in that image of you in your jockey shorts or they might crop, alter, or modify you!

Do You Suck at Geography Too?

Find out. Scores in the comments if you dare.

Sigh...More Links

So, that's a picture of Link from the Zelda series over there. Get it? (I'm running out of "link" gags.) Update: Picture now with Link left-handed goodness.

Coming to a Flash Player 8 plugin near you, the Murlock RPG. Apparently it takes about an hour. It's averaging a 9.13 out of 10 rating after more than a thousand reviews at the moment, so I gather it's rather good. I haven't, you know, played it myself or anything, but I thought some of you Murlock fans out there might be into it.

This Star Trek machinima video can perhaps not be described in words. Maybe you have to experience it for yourself. (Read about Machinima on wikipedia if you dunno what it is.)

Another Spore/EA article, this time from a little more of a business perspective.

My Perplex City cards came and I've solved about 4/5ths of them, including a couple of the hard ones. I'm ranked in the two-thousands somewhere, tied with someone who calls themselves "Truffler". I think most of you who are likely to be reading this would really like the game, especially all you trivia people out there. You can buy it in the US from Insound, who I can attest is a reputable dealer. I got free shipping, too, and they came pretty quick. You can also solve some cards for free online. Two on their site, and one from Boing Boing that I blogged about before. There was a fourth one I found, but now can't find it again. I could have sworn I found a link to it on the PPC forums, but I can't find it now. If anyone else finds it, feel free to add it in the comments. Anyway. Fun game. Fun puzzles, and an overarching mystery behind the cards to solve. Good for all that pesky free time...that we have none of.

I bought this baby monitor, that has a built-in movement alarm. If twenty seconds pass and the baby doesn't move at all (the monitor picks up breathing and all those tiny little movements) then an alarm sounds on the parent unit (their term, not mine). This is either the smartest thing I've ever done, so I can sleep more soundly and less worriedly, or it's the most paranoid thing I've ever done.

Perplex City Wave 3 Solvable Preview

I threw in a mention to Perplex City a couple of posts ago, and lo and behold, the fine folks at Boing Boing just posted a solvable preview card.

I have a few packs on their way to me via my old pal the USPS, but now I have my first point early!

(To solve it, click on the link at the bottom of the Boing Boing post. Took me longer to figure that out than it took me to solve the card. Ha!)

Second Day of Spring

Rest Areas I Have Known and Loved

Look everyone, Mkae started a meme. Somewhere in the wild, Shocho is cringing. My day is complete.

Doesn't Kentucky look out of place?

Like I said in the comments on Mkae's post, you can see the car trips I've been dragged along for taken across the country, north and south. You can also see that I've been to Disney World, and that we stop to pee often enough that all those states count. I also traveled by car several times up to college in Boston, and I've also driven from Virginia into Canada.

This is a losing battle for me, I'm afraid, as I have no desire to ever go to Alaska, and I'm not sure I have any special need to fly all that way to Hawaii, either. Like Lewis Black said (but about New Zealand, instead), "If the good people of [Hawaii] want to be a part of our world, they'll jump off their islands, and push 'em closer."

I nearly forgot to cross off Colorado, and as many of you know, I went to the 1996 Star Wars:CCG championships (no, didn't play, just loitered) in Vale. I'm also about 50% sure that I could honestly cross off Louisiana, but since I can't remember, I'm leaving it out.

Just for grins, here is a map of states I've stayed overnight in. Not bad, actually. Nearly forgot Tennessee, but I remember clearly going to the Grand Ole Opry with my parents in Nashville when we moved from California to Virginia when I was 12.

First Day of Spring

It's this cold here today. Please note the severe weather alert. It's there because tomorrow, it's going to snow.

Spring should be nicer than this.

I want my money back.

Links to Stuff I Think Is Notable

Welcome to this episode of link-o-rama.

First up, These two Star Wars geeks are my heroes. This video of a lightsaber duel was produced, including some really good effects, by regular joe Star Wars fans. Stuff like this helps me forget those scripts and Hayden. Almost.

What is the deal with Target having some really ridiculously expensive stuff all of a sudden? I know it's not a "discount" store per se, but $90 trash cans that are on sale? Are you frakking kidding me? We bought two ceiling fans at Lowe's yesterday, and when you add the prices of those two items together, they were only $50 more than one of those trash cans. And they move the air in the room, have a light kit included, and have the side benefit of entertaining the baby. (One fan is for the baby's room, and it is the cutest freaking thing that she will hate when she's fourteen.) But really, Target, I veto your $90 trash cans. WTF. $10 Rubbermaid cans with a flip-up lid FTW.

A video of Chuck Norris reading some Chuck Norris facts. Unfortunately, it's from the worst sports show, period, but still funny. To quote Dodgeball, "Thank you, Chuck Norris."

Good news, everyone! For those of you who care, there's a very good chance there will be at least one brand-new, 26 episode season of Futurama produced. Info from Billy West, who damn near does half the stinkin' voices on the show, so he should know. Oops...crap.

Stuff is changing at Disney parks. Not only are they updating Pirates of the Caribbean, but they are also changing the Haunted Mansion (search for "Here Comes the Bride"). I have mostly negative feelings about this, but still mixed. I loved those rides so much as a kid (we used to go once a year and visit my brother in L.A.—we'd go to the park all together, and I have very nice memories of those trips) that any changes to them go straight to my solar plexus. But the mister asked me when I was kvetching about this to him, "If the changes they make give today's kids a better park experience and make them enjoy it as much as you did when you were a kid, isn't that better than freezing the park at some random earlier date just so old people like us enjoy it marginally more?" I just don't know. I bought a DVD of someone's old home movie they took inside Mission to Mars (an old, now closed, ride at Disney where they pretended to fly you to Mars in a big spaceship—until I was six, I thought we really went) for nostagia, so I clearly want to hang onto the past but if the updates make B love it when we take her, I guess that would be okay.

Has anyone tried Perplex City? I fear it's too late to get involved in any sort of meaningful way.

For you 24 fanatics, there is a pretty good 24 wiki.

Brought to you by the sea of humanity on that "other" blogging site, here are the last 40 images posted to Live Journal.

Try this flickr game if you're bored and have 300 seconds to waste.

I have a couple more links I'll save for later. The B needs a diaper change!

Aw, now I'm glad I had the onesie made

I'm just getting my St. Patrick's Day post in under the wire. When your daughter has an Irish name, you have to spring for the holiday onesie.

This is her wishing everyone a happy St. Patrick's Day weekend. Hoist a green beer for her, because it'll be years before she can touch one.

The Jinx

I realize I'm inviting the jinx by mentioning this, but my angelic little child is stretching the bounds of credulity. I put her in her bassinet last night at 10:45 or so, after I got her settled down. She spent a lot of time (for her) awake yesterday, and she was a little wide-eyed and overly awake. She dropped right off to sleep after a little food and her bedtime story, once her white noise was turned on and she was swaddled.

It is now nearly 8:00 a.m. my time, and she's still sleeping away. She's just a tiny bit restless (for her, this means the occasional little noise and some sucking on her fingers) but she is still quite definitely asleep. She didn't wake up during the night either, which she did two nights ago, but only because I didn't have the heart to wake her to change her diaper before I put her in her bassinet.

I'm taking bets as to what the limiting factor will be. There are three choices, any of which could be the thing that wakes her:

1) Tummy (food)
2) Rear (diaper)
3) Eyes (finally gets her fill of sleep)

I think it will be a combo of 1 and 2, but probably more 2 than 1 at this point. Diaper technology is pretty good, but asking this much of a Pamper may soon be too much.

Watch the B

Hopefully this will work...I see no reason it wouldn't...

Update: the original video I linked appears to be having some issues. Here is a replacement until I figure out what's up:

An Admission

After watching The Cutting Edge a couple of times (watched it again while I was on my exercise bike this morning, while the B took a little nap) I thought about how it always reminds me of a massive screw-up I made when I was in my senior year of college. I never want to think about it, and I don't really want to write about it, but I feel like writing about it will get it out of my system a little. You can read this or not, really, this one's just for me, but maybe someone out there can learn from my mistakes.

My college degree is the oh-so-useful in everyday life Classical Voice Performance degree. In order to get it, I had to give a senior recital. I'm trying to think of something analogous to it that someone who got a "regular" (useful) degree, and I'm not sure there's anything similar. It really boils down to this: you get two hours to prove that you're deserving of the degree you've spent four years of your life working toward. They're not fooling around either. You really have to prove at that recital (and to a lesser degree, each of your year-ending juries) that you won't embarrass the school by having it on your resume. They can boot you at any time by failing you on one of those juries, although I had always heard of people getting a second chance to pass.

Well, enough background information. My senior recital was coming up (it was March 6, 1994—that's one of those dates that you don't easily forget, and I notice it every year on the anniversary still, twelve years later) and I took more time than I should have choosing the last "set". (You have to sing in four different languages, and use music from four different time periods.) I chose a set of devilishly difficult Schoenberg Cabaret Songs to give me something in German and from the 20th century, which rounded out my selections nicely. The problem? The piano part is as hard or harder than the voice part, and my accompanist was already extremely busy. He did say he could do it, but that he couldn't guarantee how well he'd play them because it would take more time than he could commit to really get them into his hands.

I mentioned my predicament to one of my wackiest teachers, the guy who taught Microtones. He started talking about a guy he knew who didn't go to the Conservatory, but was a great pianist and was looking for gigs around town and would do my set gratis for a copy of the recital tape to use. I agreed, gave him my extra set of music to pass on to this kid, and put it out of my mind. I didn't honestly think Joe (the professor) would recommend someone who would suck. In a supreme moment of idiocy and tunnel vision, I didn't schedule a practice between myself and this guy until three days before the jury I had to do for the entire voice faculty leading up to the recital.

Jump forward in time to that practice three days before the jury, and this guy was a train wreck. He sped up, slowed down, and played notes that had only a passing similarity to what Schoenberg put on paper. He promised me that he would practice day and night for three days and get them down pat, apologizing profusely for misjudging how hard the parts were and how much time he should have spent practicing them before that night. Like a moron (and someone who had no one else to turn to) I agreed and (though I can't believe it) I didn't immediately start looking for a replacement after that disastrous practice.

Another jump forward now, to the afternoon of my jury. Picture me and my main accompanist standing by the guard's station at the main building, waiting for this tool to show up. He was five minutes late (yes, five minutes past the time I was supposed to walk into the jury room!) but we had to wait for him because he wasn't a student at the Conservatory and had to be signed in by me in order to get in. We ran to the jury room and I breathed a sigh of relief that they were behind schedule (they were hearing all the voice majors giving recitals in March that day) and I still had some time. I started to pace, doing nothing to cure my shortness of breath from the jog, but dissapating my nervous energy a bit. This dude apologized over and over for being late, but assured me he had the piano parts down.

They finally call us in, and the eldest and scariest member of the voice faculty (think Elrond, but with more power) decided to ask for the Schoenberg first. I don't think I was actually hearing every word she spoke through my nervousness, but I remember she said something about looking forward to hearing something nicely different from the standard fare. They picked a piece at random from that set (the hardest one) to hear, and my new accompanist and I took the stage.

I gave him that little singer "okay, start now" nod and he started to play. Haltingly. Terribly. I wasn't even sure when to come in, and I knew these songs backward, forward, sideways, and in the fourth dimension. I swear, I must have blacked out. I know I tried to sing and he tried to play, but the only thing I remember is the horrified look on my own voice teacher's face as we tried to navigate from one measure to the next. It was awful. I know lots of people say this, but that was the most embarrassed I can ever remember being.

That's when I did the thing that you just don't do. At a jury like this, you keep going until they stop you. I don't care if the building starts to crumble around you, or if you accompanist goes into labor, you keep singing until they stop you. Well, I stopped.

And then I burst into tears.

Two minutes into the most important moment of my college life to that point, in front of more than six hundred years of professional singing experience. I think I was actually hysterical, as in the medical use of that term.

I think I turned my back and wiped my face off, once the reality of how badly I'd screwed up hit me. It was one thing to bring in a bad accompanist and sing poorly because of it. It was another thing to completely lose my shit in front of those ten people. One was dumb. The other was the worst thing you can be. Unprofessional.

I turned and I think my teacher came to my rescue, dismissing the disaster accompanist and then telling the jury that I'd obviously made an error in my choice and that it would be rectified before the recital. They let me go on and sing four other pieces from the rest of the recital with my good, reliable accompanist, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I would have to come back and sing the entire jury again, and if I didn't have an acceptable pianist for the fourth set, I would be failed. And that means you're gone. No degree. Everyone's nightmare.

I walked out of the room and fired the disaster accompanist, and my regular accompanist gamely offered to play the set. I knew asking him to learn it in a week was stretching things beyond reality, knowing his schedule. If he played them poorly because of a lack of time to practice them, I'd be out on my ear. I left the option open but I honestly didn't know what I should do. I really just wanted to quit. I'd completely screwed up in front of the ten people who could decide my future. Metropolitan Opera alumni. Singers who'd seen the green room at La Scala and Covent Garden. I had wasted their time and made them watch me bawl like a child.

I think I set some sort of record for Kleenex usage that night. I couldn't think of anything to do with myself. I walked around my apartment, staring at things and trying to pretend it hadn't happened. I'd just gotten a care package from home the day before, and a copy of The Cutting Edge (bootlegged from cable onto videotape, I'm sorry to say, but I have made up for it by purchasing a copy of it on DVD once it came out) and I popped it in hoping it would distract me.

When I got to the part of the movie where Kate admits the mistake at the Calgary Olympics was hers, I think I started to bawl again. She looked up at those people, her father, her coach, and someone she was secretly in love with, and admitted that she was a screwup, not just in Calgary, but in the short program they'd just done. I know it's cheesy, but in a moment when I couldn't imagine walking into that room and facing those ten people again, seeing her lace up those skates again and face the crowds was exactly what I needed.

In case you want to know what happened, I found a brilliant accompanist who attended another music school in town who had played these pieces before. I don't even remember how I found him, but he was awesome. He also played my encore to take even more pressure off my main accompanist. The next jury, though the moment when I walked up to the stage and had to look down at those people again was hard, went really well. I got good scores from them and got the green light to do my recital, which also went as well as I could have hoped.

The important thing, though, was that Kate and the Minnesota Machine were there for me when I needed them. Thanks, guys.

Toe pick!

Someone Call Child Protective Services

From my search referrers:

The Cutting Edge 2: Oh My God, My Eyes, Put Them Out

So, on my top 50 is The Cutting Edge, which is, admittedly, not Casablanca. Yet, it is an enjoyable enough movie with some goofy, quotable dialogue, and came into my life right when I'd completely screwed something up and this movie talked me into going back to the plate and trying it again. It has a special place in my heart. We all have movies like that.

So it was with great dread that I welcomed the commercials for The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold. On the one hand, I love the original. If there could be more like that, I'd be all for it. Plus, who didn't want to know if they actually won the gold medal at the end of the original, a fact that wasn't important to the main story arc and was left out to underscore that it had become unimportant to the two main characters by the end, yet still drove me nuts with wanting to know what happened.

The best thing I can think of to say about the sequel is that it did, in fact, answer that question with a poorly-Photoshopped picture of the two hacks they hired to play Kate and Doug standing on the medal stand in the Gold position.

Oh, the dialogue. So bad.

Oh, the plot. So bad. Contrived arguments. Main characters so flat that you honestly couldn't figure out how they could either like or hate each other, because they were just little cardboard cutouts.

Some shots of the skating were copied directly from the original, as well as some of the music/transitional footage. This was probably meant as a heartwarming homage to the original, but it felt like a tactless lift of material from something good and given to something so so bad that it taints the original just by referencing it. I was so mad when they re-used "Toe pick" and screwed it up.

It's on the TiVo upstairs, and my fingers are itching to go up there and get rid of it. It was so bad. I wish I'd never seen it. Oh, so bad. I'm watching the original now to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

Weird to see Terry O'Quinn not playing Locke, though.

Late-Breaking Note: Now that I've watched the original again, the timing on the movies is also way off, which is another level of suckitude for the sequel. In the original movie, they compete in the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France. In the sequel, their daughter competes in the Torino Olympics of 2006. My math might be rusty, but that's 14 years in between. Now, even if we assume that Kate gets pregnant the day after they win their gold medal in 1992, she'd give birth late in 1992 or early in 1993, and their daughter would be 13 at the oldest, which is way too young to be nancing about unattended, meeting tattooed in-line skate rats and going to the Olympics. I suppose they might have chosen to adopt a 10 year old in 1992, but they make jokes about who she takes after and is clearly meant to be their biological offspring.

This reminds me of another beef I had with the sequel, that the Kate and Doug characters were nothing like the originals, even given that they would change over the years. If the names hadn't been the same, no one would ever guess they were supposed to be the same people.

I can only assume they found the script on fanfiction.net and filmed it on a dare over a drunken weekend. The suck! Avoid!

Zoo: Part Deux, Electric Boogaloo

You just can't keep us away from the zoo. Only this time, it was all three of us.

The weather was nicer than it's been, other than that freak 71 degree day the last time I went to the zoo. It was around 60 or 65, a little breezy. This first pic here was taken of the B in the Penguin and Puffin house, the only place she displayed any consciousness at all during her first trip to the zoo. She was much more awake this time, and she, I think you'll agree, was certainly spry enough to make some funny faces at the sight, sound, and smell of our arctic friends.

Of course, she doesn't look as awake here. Babies get to take little two minute naps whenever they want. How is it that I can't get away with that?

Anyway, it was a nice day, filled with all the same "whoa, that's a cheetah" stuff from my last trip. It's still novel enough that two trips in a little over a week weren't really too much.

I would write here about what we saw one of the bears do, but I wouldn't want to be indelicate. Suffice it to say, I was glad the B wasn't older, because I didn't have to explain it to her, and an apt comment that could have been (and was, but not by me) made in response was, "If I could do that, I'd never leave the house." I should note at this point that this was a boy bear, and leave the actual act that we witnessed as an exercise for the reader.

I was going to include a pic of Tom and the B to prove that we were all at the zoo, and then I realized that you can't see any of the actual zoo in the picture I chose. Well, tough luck. I like this one and I already cropped it for inclusion here. If you'd like to see photographic evidence of this that includes a very zoo-oriented giraffe, you'll just have to clicky clicky on one of the pictures here to see it. Come on, my photostream can use the views.

The B decided she was hungry not long after we set out into the zoo, making the sign for food that I wrote about a couple of posts ago. With every passing day (all three of them so far) since I began to suspect that she'd caught on, I'm more convinced that she truly is using the sign to communicate. I'm not saying she's a genius or anything like that (not SAYING it) but she certainly is good at making her wishes known. We sat on a bench right outside the very excellent carousel, which I didn't take any pictures of, but someone else did so now I don't have to, and she had some nosh. I can still hum the three songs the carousel plays, and we also had the delightful experience of watching a young father hold his (approximate age: three months) small baby out from the animal they were riding and then get kicked off by the kindly old man whose job it is to wave at the kiddies and lay the smack down on rule violators.

There are worse ways to spend a half hour than watching excited little kids ride around on carousel horses, puffins, storks, and just about any other sort of animal you'd care to name. If I was juvenile, I'd add that there is also a "wild ass" available to ride, but I'll also leave that as an exercise for the reader.

All in all, I give our day a 10/10.

Because I Talked About This Before...

I feel I should note that Blizzard fixed it.

$250 to See How They Run

Designer mice?

Hooooo...howoooo

I swear, the B has started trying to communicate with us.

All manner of squeaks and coos and other assorted noises have begun to emerge from her little gullet. She had a one-sided conversation with the elephant in the mobile over her bassinet last night before she went to sleep. Tonight, while Jacky B was kickin' ass and takin' names, she was making this amazing "hooooooo....howooooo" noise at the mister over and over, and she was grinning at him when he did it back. I realized too late that I should have gotten out the video camera (it was actually within arm's length, but I was too busy trying to stifle my giggling so it wouldn't distract her).

Also, and I realize this is dangerously close to that "my child is a genius on the scale of Bean from Ender's Game" post, and I'm absolutely not certain that this isn't just a big coincidence, but, well, it's possible that she might be picking up the first of the baby sign language I want to teach her.

The argument for: I've only ever used one sign with her...for "food" or "formula". I haven't done it every blessed time she's gotten a bottle, but I've done it a lot and I've explicitly connected it with the bottle. I have started to use it when I think she's starting to get hungry, and in the past two days, she's started to sign it back to me...but only when she's actually been hungry. The couple of times that she was whimpering because she was wet or just lonely, she refused to sign it back and kept whimpering until I figured out what she wanted. The sign she is doing is, in my opinion, as close an approximation of what I've been signing to her as she is possibly capable of, given her level of control over her arms and her hands. If she were actually trying to use the sign to communicate, this is exactly what it would look like. She is not just chewing on her fingers, as she does sometimes to comfort herself. When I think it's possible she's doing the sign, she puts her little fist to the corner of her mouth without actually chewing on it, which is very close to what I've shown her.

The argument against: She is, by everything I've read, too young to understand what I'm doing and too young to connect the concept with the gesture. They don't even advocate that you start signing to them until they're 4-6 months old, for heaven's sake, and she's barely three months old. Also, I realize that my desperate desire to communicate with her could easily be manifesting itself in a delusion that she is beginning that process.

I reserve judgment on whether she's actually doing it or not, but I see no reason not to introduce a second sign to her. You can't start too early, and even if she's not really signing back at me yet, it's only a matter of time as long as I'm consistent.

Not Bad, Huh?

Just finished the hat for B. I also made a red one, but it is silly too big for her and this one photographs better with the pattern.

As it turns out, this one is also a bit too big for her, so I'm going to use the third remnant I bought to make another hat, but smaller than this one.

I think it turned out surprisingly well, considering how long it's been since I've sewn. Maybe I'm ready to try to make her a new puffy suit or something like that. I feel like I'm on Project Runway, but they would probably say my hat is simplistic and derivative, and then I would tell them to shove it.

It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp

WTF? Did that fucking song just win Best Original Song?

I no longer give a rat's ass who wins an Oscar ever again.

I honestly don't even think that (good) rap is without merit, but that wasn't even good rap (which is few and far between). Repetitive rhythms, simplistic rhyming structure, stupid lyrics.

W.T.F.

Must-Read Books?

From those wacky Brits and a link from Fark, a list of books British librarians think you should read:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

The ones I've read are in italics. Before I looked at the list, I hoped there'd be more of them in italics, but I suppose there are worse scores than 15/31.

But here's the big question: what's missing from that list? I'd say:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (quoted Meaning of Liff a few posts ago and I almost forget HGttG?)

And now that I've finished my supplemental list, I read the Fark comments and discovered all the books I added were also added by Fark commenters, which makes me worry for my immortal soul.

What's missing from your list?

Our Sleepy Angel (Thank Goodness)

Ever since I mentioned how I discovered why our B was waking in the middle of the night when she wasn't all that hungry, she has slept through the night almost every night since. She woke for some food last night at about four a.m., but other than that, she's slept at least seven hours on that first nighttime stretch for nearly a week.

We're blaming her wake up last night on a slight weekend variation in her schedule and bedtime routine, something we are going to avoid from now on while we're solidifying her sleeping pattern. I really don't want her to have to wrestle with the myriad sleep problems that I have. Please remind me of this when she gets older and doesn't want to let the day go and I have to leave her crying in her crib or her bed until she accepts that it's time to go to bed.

Tonight I brought her up at 11:00, which is a little later than we've been coming up, but I did read to her at the right time and she was asleep in the bassinet we have downstairs at the same time that I normally put her down in the upstairs bassinet. She didn't even awaken for the transfer from one to the other, so I think that almost counts as sticking to the routine. I realize she can tell it was a little different, but she seems to be sleeping really soundly so far, and I hope it rolls on for another five hours or so from now.

Which reminds me, I should go to sleep RIGHT BLOODY NOW. I had the loveliest three hour nap this afternoon, but I'm starting to get tired again and I should probably grab some shuteye while I can.

(Oh, it's not really related, but I am, in the most Martha Stewart of ways, sewing some hats for the B because I can't find cute hats in colors other than pink and yellow in the stores, and she pretty much has to be in a hat when we go out to keep her warm and keep the sun off her face. I will post pictures as soon as I finish one, assuming it doesn't look like a jurby.)

Site Advisor

Let me just give a ringing endorsement to a Firefox (you can also get it for IE, but, you know, why?) extension called Site Advisor.

The web has become an iffy place. You can decide to do something innocuous and end up with a load of Spyware or Adware, even if you do use Firefox and anti-virus software. A few years ago, I innocently looked up the lyrics to a couple of Queen songs and went to the wrong site to get them, ending up with three bits of Adware that took me about ten hours and the help of the guys at the Computer Hope Forums to extricate from the system.

If you install Site Advisor, you'll see little icons next to your Google searches, letting you know if their testing of each of those sites turned up anything "funny". And you Mac users, before you tell me that you don't have to worry about this kind of stuff, you will eventually. Someday those bastards will come for you too, and you should be prepared. Anyway, do you want to visit websites that are willing to download crap onto Windows OS-based machines anyway, even if it won't affect you? If nothing else, this is a good way to identify the crap sites in your search results.

If, like me, your Firefox refuses to install extensions (and this is a good thing, as this setting also blocks the installation of software that you don't want) the easiest way to reset this (temporarily, anyway) is to edit your settings using about:config. I include these instructions here because I once wasted an otherwise perfectly good half-hour figuring this out, and why should you have to do it too? Just type 'about:config' (without the '') in your location bar. Filter for 'install'. You should have a boolean value that turns software installations on and off. For XP, it's xpinstall.enabled. Just tick that to true for the length of time it takes you to install the extension, then open about:config back up and turn it off again. Restart your Firefox and you'll have a Site Advisor menu in the bottom right-hand corner of your browser window, and icons on your search results.

An interesting way to see some "bad" sites is to Google for stuff like song lyrics or AOL buddy icons. You'll get lots of iffy sites offering stuff like that. I just had an enjoyable ten minutes or so reading about the spyware SA found on a few of those sites. After installing this extension, I now feel just a tiny bit safer than I did.

And, oh yeah. I hope you bastards who wasted ten hours of my time getting rid of the crap I got for looking up the lyrics to Don't Stop Me Now rot in Hell.

Heat Wave

Yesterday, it got up to around 80 degrees here. On March 1st, no less. It was just a bit overcast with a nice breeze. If I could have ordered a day, I think the weather would have been exactly what I got yesterday.

After my morning routine of feeding, changing, exercising, and doing just a bit of primping, I thought quickly about where I could go with a baby where I could walk outside, have something interesting for me to look at, but wouldn't be so formal that if she completely blew up it would really disrupt everyone around me. I'm not sure why it popped into my head, but I decided the zoo would be a good idea. A quick check of their website gave me directions and confirmed that they were open, so I dressed B in a springy outfit and headed out the door.

Part of the directions put me on 64 East, which made me unbelievably sick for Virginia Beach. I miss it and those of you who are still there a lot.

Just before that, I'd passed the exit for the hospital where I delivered the B. Even though I go there once every other week for the new mom's club, I always think of the nurse who came in and helped me through the only really tough moment I had at the hospital after I had the baby. She helped me so much, and I can't really pay her back personally. I mean, what am I going to do? Hunt her down and follow her until she has a tough moment in her life, and then try to talk her through it? Yet, I can't get it out of my head. I feel like I owe some sort of cosmic debt. In a lame attempt to pay it off, I let every car in who needed to get into my lane over in front of me. This was hardly much of a sacrifice, but it was the only thing I could think of to do with that feeling at the time.

I got to the zoo and discovered that their parking kiosks weren't set up to take credit or debit cards, and I was short $6 on the parking fee. The older man in the booth looked at me and quietly asked, "Are you short on cash, dear?" Without thinking, I answered yes, because I was indeed short by $6. He waved me through and told me to enjoy the zoo with my baby, and it wasn't until I was parking that I wondered how he'd meant his question—did he mean "Are you short on cash at the moment?" or "Are you short on money in general?" As the zoo is free admission, I expect it's a great destination for families without a lot of disposable income, so he could well have assumed that I didn't have a lot of money at all. I then felt bad that I might have mislead him, not to mention that I now owed the world another karmic debt!

Once inside the zoo, I realized that I'd forgotten the digital camera (DOH!) but I just couldn't not take pictures of her very first trip to the zoo. (Not that she will remember it, nor was she conscious for more than five or ten minutes of it.) I bought some sunscreen for her and a disposable camera in the gift shop, and added a $10 donation to the zoo to my payment. With that done, I breathed a sigh of relief that I no longer felt that I owed the zoo the money for my parking and that I could capture a few still moments of our zoo trip.

The zoo was a good idea for a place to take the B, because while it wasn't packed, it wasn't sparsely populated either, and everyone there had a child of some younger age with them. If aliens had landed at the zoo yesterday, they honestly would have had the impression that everyone on the planet was the parent of a child under five years old. Before I had the B, that might have been a different experience for me, but now it's a bit of a relief to be surrounded by other parents who have a much greater chance of understanding if she cries or won't look at me funny for giving her a bottle on one of the park benches. She didn't cry and didn't need a bottle as it turned out. As I alluded before, she slept like a little angel most of the time, and spent about five minutes awake in the penguin house making funny (but silent) faces at all the strange noises she was hearing.

I had forgotten, as it's been years since I've been to a zoo, how odd it is to be walking along and suddenly look up and see a GODDAMNED ELEPHANT! It's so strange. You know it's going to be there. There are signs that you're following...this way for the leopard, that way for the penguins, but they don't prepare you for the shock of oh-my-god-it's-a-hyena-right-there. I got several pictures of B in her stroller, sleeping near the fence separating her from the different animals of the world. They'll be on Flickr and I'll add one to this post as soon as I get the film back from the drugstore today. Forgetting my camera will turn out to be costly. The camera was $10 and the developing and CD will be another $15 probably. Oh well, there are worse things I could have forgotten, like diapers or my wallet or something horrible like that.

My only real regret is that it was a week day and the mister couldn't come with us. We won't see weather like this again for awhile, but I'm really looking forward to the first weekend day that comes along that's even close to that nice. We'll all go out and enjoy her first trip to some other landmark that she can completely sleep through, the three of us, all together.

Onesie Pillow

I think I said in some post awhile back that I was going to keep one of the B's first onesies and make a pillow out of it or something.

Well, pillow? Check. This was my favorite of her 0-3 month size onesies. It says "Baby Bunny" on it and has a little bow, if you can't see it well enough in the picture. I kept calling her baby bunny when she was wearing it, and I got a little attached to her in it.

This might be a little too sentimental, but I feel better still having it than giving it away. The used baby clothes store only gives about a quarter for used onesies, so that wasn't a big loss.

I swear I will not be making pillows out of the clothes she outgrows at 14. I'm keeping this and her holiday outfits for the first year, and that's it.

Probably.