avablog

I received a CD in the mail yesterday that was to be a gift for a family member. I ordered it used through a reseller at Amazon; I don’t see much point in buying new CDs anymore, since they’re just going to get ripped within 90 minutes of hitting my door. But I digress.

I opened the disc’s packaging to discover I’d been sent the wrong CD. Luckily, the disc in the case is one I wouldn’t mind having. I’ve contacted the seller and let them know about the mixup. It’s been 24 hours, and I haven’t heard anything back. So, if it were you, how long would you wait before going on Amazon and leaving this guy some negative feedback? Maybe you would’ve done it already…?

UPDATE: I sent another e-mail to the seller after not hearing anything back by noon today. Still no response.

Now I understand what that means, and we were only cooped up inside for six hours or so on Saturday. What a nasty day! I did, however, manage to get outside and take some pictures of all the ice. Leah likes this one

and this one:

One thing the bad weather was good for was messing around in the kitchen. I’d roasted a couple chickens on Friday evening, and after deboning them Saturday morning, I threw the bones ‘n stuff into a pot with some herbs and spices and made some stock for soup, which we had for dinner (along with some homemade croutons).

Ava created a whole pile of new watercolor pictures, including one that features a set of rambling deer tracks all along the edge of the page. I’ll get those scanned and online this evening. Thank God for crafts on rainy, gray days.

Yesterday was nice, but friggin’ cold. I suppose we may as well get used to it. I took advantage of the inside time again to caramelize some onions and make pizzas for dinner. I had my food processor out and ready to go to knead the dough, but at the last minute, I just threw the dough on the counter top and kneaded it by hand. Man, that’s a satisfying feeling. I think I’m going to knead by hand from now on, or at least until I’m crippled with arthritis.

Ironically, I wasn’t super pleased with how the pizzas turned out, but I was probably being overly critical. Ava ate two or three pieces of the one I made for her, which is a pretty good seal of approval. It had black olives, ham, and fresh mozzarella. The one I made for Leah had olive oil, salt, caramelized onion, diced tomato, and fresh mozzarella. I think it was the prettier of the two:

As I typed this, the friendly mail room guy dropped off the replacement PSU for my Infrant. Add that to my list of things to do this evening.

Here’s Ava decked out in her swim/sunwear for our Mexico trip in January.

After this shot was taken, she bounded upstairs (at least as much as she’s able to bound at her size) and hopped into the tub, pausing only to remove her hat.

These duds are supposed to provide UV protection. Leah ordered them from Coolibar (the sales rep on the phone was nice enough to kick in free overnight shipping. Happy Holidays!). She nabbed herself a hat in the process, but nothing for dear old dad! Not even a bandana/minicape! That’s fine. I already have a nice sun hat I can wear, and I’ll probably be under the awning at the beach bar most of the time, anyway. Still, it’d be nice to have some sort of roomy, flouncy beach-type shirt to wear when I help Ava make sand castles. You know, the kind of garment that transitions smoothly from the playa to the cafe to the dance floor. Maybe for Christmas.

It’s only 8:30, and I’ve had enough bad luck already to fill an entire day. Maybe two days.

First, Ava kicked me in the face bright and early at 5:30 this morning. Rise and shine! Then I got downstairs and discovered that a DVD rip I’d started before bed had hung up and had been running the fan on my MacBook full tilt all night. Not good. Fortunately, pouring a bowl of toasted Os and a glass of OJ went off smoothly.

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I debated posting this, because a blogger pal does such a better job covering this show, but Leah and I just about wet our pants last night watching Project Runway. It’s the same kind of laughter you get from watching merry mishaps in which someone ends up rolling down a steep embankment in a shopping cart, eventually splashing into a lake. Nobody’s really hurt at all, other than in the pride dept., but it’s a hoot to watch the events unfold.

We don’t normally watch this show, but these early-season episodes are fun, because you can really enjoy some frickin’ terrible outfits. Pretty soon, the pretenders will be gone, and it’ll get all serious and end up looking like any other reality show full of backstabbing contestants (in fact, it looks like that’s going to start in earnest next week, if the previews are accurate at all).

Sheesh, the poor models who had to don this stuff last night. I’m not used to feeling bad for people who make a living by walking and having their picture taken, but I had an honest-to-God pang of sympathy for the guy with the badly-tailored shirt and the mammoth tie. Why did he have to die for his designer’s sins? I blame Tiki Barber’s wife (at first I thought she was Kimora Simmons, which would’ve made more sense, at least to me).

I’m so blissfully unaware of the tough times ahead as I help raise a daughter in the U.S. I know I should be more thankful that I don’t yet have to worry about what Ava wears (or doesn’t wear) when she leaves the house. Maybe I never will have to worry about it. What the hell am I going to do when she brings home her first date? Wait. Kids don’t date anymore, at least not outside of a group. I keep forgetting.

Anyway, the WSJ has a story today about the TV that’s playing in Iraq these days. Not a lot different from what’s playing here in the states, of course, which is the really unfortunate outcome of the war to oust Saddam (or whatever it was for). I was particularly struck by this exchange:

They watch “Desperate Housewives” and reality shows like “So You Think You Can Dance?” They also see the news about Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and some say they are worried about the way young girls grow up in America.

“Do you think it’s a good place for daughters?” one Iraqi friend asked rhetorically.

“If I go to America, I will leave my wife and daughter here,” replied another.

No doubt. I live one block from a high school and am married to a woman who bathes in MTV programming like it’s a tub filled with downy feathers plucked from rare exotic birds. I see what goes on with women around here. Between Audrina’s bewildering relationship with Justin-Bobby, Julia Roberts parking in handicap spaces, and Britney being pregnant AGAIN, well, it’s a wonder any girls ever make it out of puberty in this country. Where are the role models?

One of my only successful lobbying efforts as a parent thus far was my effort to let Ava have a little more autonomy at bedtime. For a long time, Leah had been lying with Ava in bed, telling her stories and rubbing her back until Ava (and often Leah) drifted off. Then Leah had to creep off of Ava’s creaky old bed and out of her room without waking her up. Sometimes this would take longer than an hour, after which Leah would come downstairs and grouse about how she never had any time to herself in the evenings.

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Actually, it’s just my curse, I’m sure. I only ever get good (subjective, I know) ideas for posts when I’m nowhere near a computer. And it’s rare for me to be nowhere near a computer. So I end up writing posts about how I always fail to write down my good blog post ideas. Riveting.

And I really don’t have a good excuse for yesterday, either. I was on the computer most of the evening, up to my bottom hole in network file protocols. See, a recent update to the firmware on my network attached storage (NAS) ruined the perfectly fine NFS friendship it had with my AppleTV. In fact, with any computer running OS X Tiger. So I needed to find another way to mount my network share on my AppleTV. I went through AFP and straight SMB before settling on a little cross-platform app called Sharity. It seems to be working really well right now. In fact, it’s working better than the NFS method ever did.

In another tasty bit of AppleTV news, some mad genius has created a kext that lets you control the ATV using any device with a Web browser, even an iPhone! I can’t wait to try this out.

I was giving Ava a bath last night when, out of the blue, she stuck her hand out toward me and said, “Pull my finger!” I obliged, and the moment I gave it a tug, a little “pflup!” reverberated off the bottom of the tub, its accompanying trail of bubbles wiggling to the water’s surface shortly thereafter. The devilish smile of accomplishment on Ava’s face was perfect. I was thrilled by Ava’s timing and impressed by her degree of control. Leah, who was folding laundry down the hall and was listening to these events transpire, wasn’t nearly as taken with Ava’s trick. But Ava and I had a good laugh over it, and that’s the main thing. I think it’s important sometimes for a little girl to leave the world of pony tails and pink shoes behind to take a walk on the other (right? wrong?) side of the tracks with dear old dad.

Ava got a lot of painting done while we were in Madison. I don’t know if any of it is ready for the Met yet, but she sure seemed to have a lot of fun splashing color around.

We did end up leaving Madison on Saturday, at Rachel’s gentle prodding. The drive home was much nicer than the drive to Madison through snow last Wednesday afternoon. And we experienced a first. We stopped for gas in Dubuque, and Ava slept through the stop. Usually she’ll snap awake as soon as we start slowing down for a light, but she snoozed right through the pumping and everything. Which was good, because she had a busy weekend.

I wanted to post one of the pictures I took yesterday of Ava and her aunt Rachel. I wish I could have natural light with me wherever I was.

Sounds like Rachel’s actually thinking about braving the mall today with Leah and Kevin’s mom. I wish them all the luck in the world.

Yes, I’m blogging on Thanksgiving. We’re done with dinner and first round cleanup and are waiting for pie. I thought I’d drop a quick image of what we had waiting for us when we walked outside this morning.

Ava was thrilled. But man, is it cold. And windy. And it’s supposed to be colder tomorrow (but no more snow). We’ll go out for Rachel’s birthday (which is today) tomorrow evening, and then we’ll probably head home on Saturday. It’ll be nice to have a day to decompress before work starts again.

OK, so the name isn’t the best. Granted. But my front-runner for tastiest tech bauble of 2007 was reviewed today by Walt Mossberg’s protege Katherine Boehret. Originally only available in an SD version, my friend Andy alerted me last week to the news that the Eye-Fi now comes in a CF version, too. It’d be interesting to give one of these a test run before buying it. I take so many pictures of Ava, I’m not sure I’d want to upload them straight to Flickr without first changing their privacy settings. Also, I do all my photo manipulation on my MacBook, but I imagine I can specify its IP address somewhere so all the images end up on that computer. But then it would have to be awake, I guess, to accept pictures. Hmmm.

Also on the photography tip, an early resolution for 2008 is to take more pictures and save/upload fewer of them. I was going through my archives the other day, and I have a lot of crap photos clogging up my NAS, not to mention Flickr. A rough appraisal reveals that I could probably get away with uploading one out of every six or seven shots I take. A lot of them shouldn’t even make it off the camera. In addition to saving space and time, I’m hoping this new regimen also forces me to take more care in setting up my shots in the first place. Wish me luck.

I’m in a real pickle (heh) about shopping for Ava’s Christmas gifts this year. For Pete’s sake, the kid’s only 3, and she already has rooms full of toys. She hasn’t touched some of these things in months, so I’m disinclined to add more to the heap. That said, I think this looks fun. Ava loves to take pictures, or at least she did until the old Canon A70 I was letting her use up and died after being dropped on the hardwood one too many times. This model looks like it can take a beating.

In other holiday news, we’re off for Madison this afternoon. The weather looks less than ideal for driving, but isn’t that what traveling for the holidays is all about? I’d rather be stuck sitting in an A&W attached to a gas station out in the middle of nowhere than in an airport somewhere. Besides, Ava might get a chance to see her first snow of the year.

Now that it’s widely available here in town, I thought I’d mention that I recently had a couple pictures selected for the annual Friends of Hickory Hill Park calendar. They are July and August, and the images are, respectively:

and…

Leah and I were married about 20 yards from where I took these shots, so it’s doubly neat to have them featured like this. If you have a couple extra bucks, grab one or two of these calendars. Not only does the money go to support a really great local park, but the size of the calendar makes it prefect for sticking on the fridge. They’re quite handy and make great stocking stuffers.

We went to a colleague’s for a party after work on Friday. The host’s teenage daughter was nice enough to sit with a couple of the younger kids while the adults chatted and drank champagne. Sophie, the sitter, was competent and sweet, but she wasn’t fast enough to keep Ava from running across the basement and tripping face first into a chair.

So this is her first black eye. She cried for a bit, but she was over it pretty quickly. I think it helped to have other kids around; Ava had to save face, at least figuratively.

Flickr says I took this picture (with my beloved A70) on November 13th.

I used to carry Ava around like this all the time. She was so tiny. She’s still pretty tiny, though she seems to be growing. It’s weird to look back on this image and try to impose her current personality — what I know of Ava now — onto that little baby.

We’re having a tailgate party here at work today, which is something we do every Friday there’s a home game. For each event, a couple departments hook up and bring food for the entire building, and we all meet up downstairs about 10 o’clock and eat. It’s nice.

So, it’s my department’s turn today, and I made pickle wraps. “Pickle wraps?” you ask? See here:

Dill pickles, cream cheese, and corned beef.

There’s a sign up sheet on our intranet to let people know who’s bringing what, just so everyone doesn’t bring a bag of potato chips. I dropped my tray of snacks off in the downstairs catering fridge this morning, only to find another tray already sitting there, piled high with pickle wraps! This must be what it feels like to show up at the ball wearing the same dress as the hostess.

I don’t know if I almost never have dreams, or if I simply never remember the dreams I have. Seems like the latter is more likely. When I do manage to remember one, it feels like a special event, even when the dream is stupid, like the one I had last night.

While every other red-blooded male was tucked cozily in his bed dreaming of wardrobe malfunctions at the upcoming Victoria’s Secret fashion show, I was having visions of attending a party with my brother-in-law Kevin. We were sitting in plastic lawn chairs in someone’s living room, and sitting across from us was Kevin Rose and some other guy I didn’t recognize. I asked Kevin R. what it was like to be the brunt of negative criticism when you’re such a high profile figure in the tech world. Just after the question left my lips, someone came up behind Kevin and whispered in his ear, and he got up and left. The end.

What, Steve Jobs couldn’t even have made an appearance? Welcome to my inner life.

A colleague sent me this image and accompanying headline earlier today. They’re from Yahoo!

Perfection fantasies to avoid
Could you be setting expectations so high that your partner can’t live up to them?

General consensus is that this fellow is a ringer for me. The closest comparison I could find is this:

Leah points out that, in addition to the photo resembling me, the headline seems to be written just for us. Oh, and don’t ask whose baby that is with me in the second picture, ’cause I don’t know.