Suck It, Switch-Offers

Apparently there's a move afoot for March 24, 2007 to be International Shutdown Day, a day in which all of us will sever our link from the intertubes and actually go out into the sunshine and do stuff.

Well, I've never been for that sort of all or nothing kind of thing. I like to consult the tubes before I do certain things, say to get directions, or check the weather. I have no plans to unplug the Wii and tell it that it can't use the tubes to get updates and magical Wii-y things. I, similarly, have no plans to unplug the wireless doodad from the TiVo and keep it from getting updates and generally being on my home network and making me smile.

The internet, to a lot of us, and computers in general, are an appliance. A utility. This is like International For God's Sake Don't Use the Toaster Day. What did toast ever do to you?

So you can have my intertubes when you pry them from my cold, dead hands. My hands, the hands of my Wii, the hands of my laptop, and the hands of my TiVo. Distributed computing FTW.

Apparently She Had a Secret

So, as you may have read elsewhere, we ventured out to a St. Louis Blues game with the B last night. She did really well. Even on the walk to the arena she was excited at being out around so many people.

As there was also a big Mardi Gras party going on downtown (but not really along our path) we ran into some people heading back to their cars, festooned with beads and funny hats. One of the guys we passed handed us a few strings of beads for the B, which she happily played with until she'd managed to throw all of them on the floor in the Savvis Center. I made a rule that once something touched the ground she couldn't have it back until it got washed. Who knows what goes on those floors?

We finally saw a cotton candy vendor during the second period and I got my treat, which I had to attempt to share with the baby several times before she indulged. I'm not sure she identified it as food, which proves that she's smarter than I am.

In a moment of technogeekery, I took a few pics and posted them to Flickr via my camera's mail function. I was amused to see that I'd managed to do it correctly when I got home and pulled up my photostream. Wish I'd had our better camera, as she was in a great mood at the arena and many smiley pictures could have been snapped, but I didn't feel like trying to negotiate security with a baby, a diaper bag, and a camera. The camera obviously is the one of those three that loses out.

Oh, and I hear they played some hockey down on the ice, too. I saw a little of the game, but the entertainment up in the stands was a little more interesting to me.

Battlestar

I have been slowly tiptoeing toward coming back to BSG, as someone clued me in that the "parent's worst nightmare" storylines might have come to a point of resolution where I could go back to watching the show.

So I've been turning it on while I am mostly concentrated on doing something else for the past two weeks, and decided to just watch this last episode.

Imagine my (spoilers)







initial regret when I saw that poor little baby (who is growing at the rate of a snail...is it really that recent that they were all on New Caprica? that baby is no more than five or six months old!) might be orphaned.

I stuck through until the end, to the happy resolution, and I felt better.

(But I might now be one of those crazy parents who insists, if we ever take a plane flight without the B, that the mister and I take separate planes so we won't be together on a crashed flight to leave her alone.)

(And yes, I know that driving in a car together without her presents more danger, statistically speaking. Try telling that to my subconscious.)

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hope everyone is having a good day.

It Struck Me As Odd

I couldn't work out what looked so strange when I braved the ongoing snowstorm to take an important letter out to the mailbox, but it finally occurred to me what it was after I got back in the house.



The snowstorm started about 7 or 8 a.m., and I took this picture at noon. No one has driven on the street in front of my house since the snow began. It's completely flat, undisturbed snow. I felt weird putting footprints into the snow in front of my house, making my way to the mailbox, but I wanted to bring the trash can up to the house anyway.

A Quiet Baby Moment

At what age are you too old to become overwhelmed with the world, slump against a wall, grab your sleeve, and suck on your fingers?

Because I think the world would be a better place if we didn't put an age cap on that sort of thing.

An Essay on the Morality of Pretend People

The wonderful Jane Espenson (who many of you are familiar with because you saw her name in the credits for BtVS, if you can't place her name) wrote a very interesting post a little while back about giving characters "wrinkles". Good aspects, bad aspects. Making them complicated.

Part of it bugged me, though, and since I couldn't get it out of my head, I felt if I wrote about it, maybe it would go away.

As one of the examples she used, she cited President Roslyn on BSG being the closest thing to a moral compass that BSG had, but then the writers put her in a situation where she attempted to fix an election.

I just can't see Roslyn as being the moral compass for that show. I think Roslyn has done absolutely detestable things, just like almost every character on that show. Maybe in the beginning she was much more sheltered and naive, but now she's done things that more than rival anything the cylons have done. I've had to step back a bit from the show (I still try to watch it, but I've had to turn it off a few times and I'm not 100% sure what's going on anymore with everything I've missed) but the intensity of some of the storylines, as I've written about here before, just don't have a good effect on my emotional state since I've become a cream puff post-Brigid.

Is Roslyn really supposed to be this wonderful person? Ever since she took office after the massacre and she was the highest-ranking person left, I've thought there was a lot of moral ambiguity there. Am I really that far off base? I think she's one of the more despicable characters on the show.

Running From Camera

This blog of run like hell pictures is lots of things a photo blog should be. Coherent, simple, interesting, and oddly compelling.

I could never do this. Too many pictures of my ass.

Superbowl Ads

So far, they SUCK!