avocado8

The Moral of the Story

At breakfast the other morning, the Beaner held up a book with an orange cover (yes, we allow books and magazines at the table, though I sweep them away if I notice he's not eating) and announced, "Mom, it just occurred to me what Green Eggs and Ham is about."...

Bad Blogger, Great Kid

OK, so obviously I fell off the NaBloPoMo wagon. I found that I just didn't have enough material to write about every day—at least at length. I have things on my mind, but that doesn't mean I want to sit down and expound upon them anymore, apparently....

Damn Hackers

Instead of blogging about the connection between work and Richie Cunningham tonight, as I had planned to do, I spent the past couple hours cleaning up even more crap files left on my site by hackers. (I cleaned up a ton more the other night.)...

Good Day, Few Words

Even though nothing spectacularly good happened (in fact, a few things went wrong on the deployment front at work), today felt like a good day. I walked home happy. I got two giant and soothing hugs from the Beaner. I ate a lovely arugula salad and drank a pineapple-banana-Korean pear smoothie for dinner. I finished off some work e-mails, placed a drugstore.com order, uploaded a few photos from the Princeton trip, and now I'm calling it a night. That's...

A Lesson in Refactoring

Shawna gave the Beaner an enormous marble run as a combined birthday/Christmas gift, and I finally got to see it in action the other day. It took up the whole play table, involved two conveyor belts, and had innumerable tubes, chutes, flaps, lights, and whistles. Very cool....

The Glow

Still have a glow from a lovely weekend in Princeton... or maybe it's the cold-mulled wine I've been drinking for the past couple hours. Hard to tell. It could also be the cheery feeling that reading A Frog in the Bog to the Beaner gives me, and the happy memory of buying that book in Pittsburgh this time two years ago....

Show Excitement or Emotion

Enjoyed a lovely, if bitterly cold, day in Princeton with Al and the Beaner. We spent the morning exploring and photographing the Princeton University campus (photos to follow; I shot a few with the 10D and a couple with the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim), then warmed up with tea and apple cider at Starbucks....

Janus

Wow, it's hard to believe that we're 10 years away from Y2K now... and yet somehow I'm not sure that a century really gets rolling until about 20 years in. Perhaps because it's so awkward to refer to the 00s and the 10s? Much easier to point to the 20s, 30s, etc. (Speaking of which, I wonder if the 20s will be "roaring" this time around?)...

Short-Term Resolutions

It's not quite New Year's yet, but I already have a couple resolutions that I want to make. One is to spend the three days that I have off this weekend taking photos. It's been too long since I've just walked around, looking for the beauty in everyday things. And the women at the Walgreens photo counter are starting to miss me and my negatives only + CD orders, too....

It's Automatic

The Beaner's been talking a lot lately about getting a little sister. (He projects with his Mickey and Minnie dolls; Mickey—or the Beaner—is the big brother, and Minnie is the little sister.)...

Five: The Beginning

I've been thinking lately about how little I've been blogging, especially on the parenthood front. It's bumming me out that I'm going to have little or no record of what age 4 was like... but obviously not enough to make me sit down and write. The impetus to do so now comes from seeing my friend (and the Beaner's former nanny) Jess and her 11 week-old baby today. It really brought home how little I remembered of the early...

Something's Gotta Give

I'm not sure whether the fact that I haven't been able to get past the opening

tag in a blog post until now is because (a) after being extroverted all day long I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT; (b) I just plain don't want to talk about it, it being work and all; or (c) if all I'm going to do is write about how long my to-do list is, I'd be better off doing it than...

Sprint 1 Retrospective

Regular readers may have noticed that I'm not coming up in their RSS feeds as often these days. It's partly because I haven't felt like blogging, and partly because I've been too busy. I'm responsible for some OpenAjax editing (we're *still* trying to finish up 1.0 of the metadata specification), hockey season has started, and I'm trying to plan birthday events for both me and the Beaner. Oh, and I went back to work (on a contract-to-hire basis, which...

I Got The Drop on You

The Beaner, at Weaver's Orchard last Saturday: "I want to get some Golden Delicious apples. [pause] You know, there's a singer; his name's Mike Doughty? He has a...[here he struggled to find the right word, since the concept of "album" is unknown to him, and yet he knew "song" wasn't right]...he has a thing called Golden Delicious. I have a song from it on my iPod: I Got The Drop on You."...

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others