General

I found out last weekend that somebody had stolen a bunch of Carrie’s pictures, put them up on a web page, and was claiming that she was Carrie’s mom. (Well, she renamed the child and gave her a different birthday, but that’s about it.) It’s been a week of tracking down all the places (discussion boards and such) that these pictures were being used, writing to the site administrators, and trying to get everything removed. Some things still aren’t resolved yet, but we’re working on it. I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to blog about this, but I need some help.

I’ve been trying to decide what to do. I’ve lost a whole week of blogging about all the little important things Carrie’s doing. I’m worried about posting more of her pictures, and angry that I have to worry about it at all. I’ve thought about password protecting my blog, or the parts that pertain to Carrie, but I don’t know that I want to do that. Let’s face it – some small part of me is worried that nobody would request the password! But then I wonder why I’m doing this at all – is it for the network of virtual friends I’ve made over the years, or for Carrie’s grandparents, or just for myself? A lawyer friend of the family advised me to “go dark”. Take down the site. End what is just four days shy of a 5-year-old journal. I don’t think I can do that.

If you were in my situation, what would you do?

I’m sick. Like, stomach bug sick. For the first time since junior year of high school. So between that and a few things I have to take care of over here, it may be a few days before I get back to posting regularly. If I do at all. There’s something going on that’s making me really angry right now, something I won’t blog about until I decide what to do. I’m sorry.

Last night I was at my mom’s house watching a movie, and when I came home my purse had mysteriously migrated to the kitchen table. It was quite late, and Denis was snoring loudly resting his eyes on the couch. I woke him up to tell him I was home, and asked why my purse was sitting on the table. His reply? “Your phone started beeping. It wanted more power.” For some reason I found this hysterically funny…

Tonight after my concert we all went out for ice cream with my parents. Last time I got Carrie strawberry ice cream, and I got my favorite: mint chocolate chip. Carrie ate my ice cream and ignored the strawberry. So this time I got her the mint chocolate chip and I ordered myself a root beer float – figuring I’d get at least a taste of hers since she wouldn’t come close to finishing it. She freaked every time she got a chip in her mint chocolate chip ice cream and scraped it out of her mouth. With her fingers. And then tried to wipe it on me, my mom, the table, wherever was convenient. Eventually Carrie ended up eating the vanilla soft serve out of my root beer float and I ended up with sticky green ice cream everywhere. Sigh. Next time I’m ordering us both vanilla soft serve. At least it will be easier to clean up! (The really bad part of all this is that it’s nearly 10 PM and she’s nowhere near asleep yet.)

I was at a restaurant in the mall today for our monthly book club – we didn’t even try to talk about the book this time, we just spent the whole two hours chatting about kids, husbands, doctors and food – and I noticed a soon-to-open restaurant called Bonefish Grill. Apparently, it’s a chain. Looking at their menu online, it will probably have very tasty food, especially since I like fish.

But…Bonefish Grill? It sounds like you’re going to get a plate with a fossilized fish on it! Mmm. Fossils. It’s what’s for dinner.

I skipped band tonight. I didn’t actually really want to go all that badly in the first place, but I was going to – honest! But Carrie was incredibly cranky, over-tired from getting up early and missing her nap, teething…the works, and it seemed only Mommy could make it better.

I would have felt guilty going because I was leaving my unhappy toddler, and I feel guilty for not going. There’s no escaping feeling guilty, is there?

(A.K.A. The Longest Blog Post Ever!)

I can’t believe it’s Monday night already. The past few days have been packed with so much craziness I’ve barely had time to think, let alone blog!

So, to sum up…

The new toy:
I bought myself a refurbished Kodak V550 camera to upgrade my Canon SD400. This is my carry-it-everywhere camera. It will definitely not replace my digital SLR, but I think after a weekend of playing with it I’m comfortable with it being at least a few steps up from the other camera. The video is incredibly better, the outdoor shots are also better. The inside shots…not so much. They’re probably better, but not so much of an improvement that it would be worth the upgrade. However, the shot-to-shot time and the initial shot time are incredible in comparison. It would literally take my other camera 30 seconds to start up, and then 10 seconds to recycle the flash in between shots – I timed it. Not to mention shutter lag. The new camera – if I didn’t have the D-SLR to compare it to I’d say there was no shutter lag, and the flash recycle time is just a couple of seconds.

Here’s a picture of Carrie I took with it indoors, using the camera’s built-in red-eye removal. There would have been major red-eye in this picture with the old camera, but if I zoom in a bit (to the original, this one’s been resized for the web) I can see a lot of noise in the background. For a snapshot camera, though, this will work just fine!

The back-breaking labor:
We started staining the deck this weekend. We’re completely changing the color, from weathered gray to cedar. You can see a corner of the weathered gray in this picture. All we have to show, after approximately 18 person-hours of work (12 of which were all Denis), is the railing going around the deck – inside and out.

The crafts:

I finished the woven tumbling blocks table runner! I love the colors, and the construction was interesting. It wasn’t very complicated, but the instruction packet I got from the class is…well, terrible. I don’t think I’d be able to make another based on those instructions, which is too bad. Since there’s no actual quilting it could be a fairly quick gift to make. I also started another pair of socks. They’re out of Koigu, which is always super yummy to work with. I started them Wednesday night and finished the first one this afternoon, so the pattern’s pretty quick too.

Today is our 7th anniversary! We know each other so well at this point that we each nearly bought the other the same card. Next year we probably will!

Over the past few weeks I played the Da Vinci Code quest game on google, and I ended up being one of the 10,000 finalists who moved on to the final puzzle challenge. There’s a 48 hour window to play the final puzzles which started this afternoon. So after I was sure Carrie was asleep for the night, and after restarting Safari and making sure nothing would distract me, I loaded it up. It’s 5 consecutive puzzles, and the person who takes the shortest amount of time to complete them all wins the grand prize.

Wow. I thought I was pretty good at puzzles, but this was…well, I know for sure I didn’t win the grand prize. I think it took me somewhere close to an hour to complete it – I forgot to look at the time when I started. Four of the five puzzles were things I’m generally pretty good at, but they were sadistically difficult. The fifth…well, if being able to play this particular game is a requirement to enter Heaven I am totally destined for Hell.

But based on all the snippets of movie previews and such we had to watch during the first phase to get clues to answer those puzzles, I really want to see the movie! (I also want to see X-Men 3. I don’t imagine that we’ll actually get to the movies twice in one month, so now I have to decide which one I want to see more…)

In my former life, when I was a software engineer, I had grand plans for my site. And for various reasons, most of which I don’t even remember anymore, I had decided to convert the whole craft section of my site to be database (MySQL) and PHP based. Mainly I think I was planning to make it easier to keep updated. I started the process two years ago, lost interest, had a baby, stopped working, lost touch with any and all web and programming knowledge I might have ever had, and, well, now it’s two years later. I have no idea what made me decide to start working on this again two nights ago, but now it’s become an obsession. (As in a “stay-up-late, who-needs-sleep, just-one-more-line-of-code” kind of obsession.)

So far I have a few test pages working, including a page to update the vital information about each project. The lines of code are slowly appearing out of the teeny-tiny little corner of my brain that survived the sleep deprivation and the invasion of nursery rhymes and lullabies. Actually, that’s somewhat impressive considering I’d never actually worked with PHP except for the few days I started trying to do this two years ago. I thought then – and apparently I still think this way – that if I just wanted it badly enough I could write PHP code. It seems to be working so far.

If I don’t get sidetracked by something else (no guarantees on that obviously) I might even have this running by the end of the weekend. Of course, the goal is for it to look exactly the same as it did before – just the way the information is stored and updated would be different – so nobody will ever notice if I don’t finish it!

We stopped in Stride Rite today because I wanted to get Carrie a pair of sandals for summer. I didn’t think she’d outgrown her shoes yet, because I just had them checked a few weeks ago and her feet still measured 5 1/2 – and her shoes are size 6.

Apparently, her feet grew quite a bit in those few weeks, and now measure 6 1/2. So we bought her some size 7 pink sneakers. They’re cute, but not the adorable fisherman sandals I wanted, because the store was sold out of her size. I’m very tempted to buy the other pair online and let her have two good pair of shoes for the summer. Especially since she’s now getting into all kinds of dirt and mud – it might be good to have a backup pair when the other pair is desperately in need of cleaning. Plus I’m feeling really guilty about letting her walk around for weeks in shoes that were a half size too small! (Like how I justify these things?)