Blogging like I’m famous.
As of tomorrow, Jaimie and Jimmy will have been wed for a year. Happy first anniversary, you guys!
It’s a holiday weekend, so September’s desktop (a sleeping Care Bear) and illustration (Elias Eagle) are striking early. (See sidebar for links, I’m lazy.)
Dana (fellow SHS class o’ 96er): “How’s the baby?”
Me: “He’s good. We started him on ‘real’ foods.”
Dana: “I’ve been meaning to get on your website and take a look at him. I’m sure you’ve got lots of pictures.”
Me: “Yeah, like a hundred.”
Dana: Laughs, possibly like I’m exaggerating.
Me: “Actually, it’s more like 103.”
Now, it’s 105.
Ben came to visit the Times on Friday, and Eric was here with his camera. Donna���s daughter Sophie was also here, and oh, the laughs she elicited from Ben. She���s a peek-a-boo champ.
That evening, he got to hang with Meredith Licht, and she told us that she���d fed her girls homemade baby food. We���d been inclined to go this route and her endorsement led us to go ahead and get started.
So over the weekend we procured some ice cube trays, avocadoes, peaches and plums. Sunday, we pureed the tasty, tasty plums, goopy avocado and smell-o-riffic peaches. We sent Ben with his first serving of avocado when he went to hang with Dad and Patsy.
In this pic Dad took, you can see the Benster chilling in E-town���s exersaucer, hints of much-enjoyed avocado still present on his chubby little cheeks.
Monday, in addition to his bottles and apple juice, I dropped him off at daycare with a frozen cube of avocado. The report was that ���he did so good!��� with it. Also, one of the ladies said in all her years, she���d never fed a baby avocado, but he didn���t waste a bit.
Makes us feel good about our fruit puree adventure.
Joss Whedon comic: robots in a band. ‘Nuff said. See it at MySpace.com/darkhorsepresents.
“I’m not saying that I’m better than you, I’m better than you, I’m better than you, I’m not saying I’m rubber, nor did I in any way suggest you’re glue…”
Sugarshock by Joss Whedon
This week you really discovered toys that rattle. Sure, you���ve been holding them for weeks, but now you���ve got the idea that if you grasp this plastic object and swing your arm like crazy, it makes noise. You also realized you can hold it in your hand and bang it on another surface to create a racket.
And just like that, you went from a baby to a baby boy. Attention everybody, there���s a boy in the house now. Kris took you to visit your grandmother���s salon Rococo yesterday, because the ladies there (specifically Kayla) hadn���t seen you since you were about 5 weeks old. Kayla commented on how you were all boy.
It���s happening so fast, Ben. I am very excited by all the new things you���re doing, but at the same time, there is a bittersweet aftertaste. Your baby days are slipping through my fingers like sand. (The perfect kind of sand you find on the beaches of Pensacola.)
Last night, your dad and I were having fajitas, and I asked if we could mash up some of the black beans for you. Bean casings aside, you seemed to enjoy them. We enjoyed getting to share another part of our world with you.
Another small milestone: my ���Ben��� set on Flickr now has 100 photos.
Ten years ago, I had one e-mail address, laura@internetpro.net, and one password I used for everything: 7750. It was the last four digits of Jaimie’s phone number, which I had been calling every day since the 7th grade.
Today, I have no less than six e-mail addresses and twice as many passwords. Of the passwords, only one of them is less than six characters and contains no numbers. The only reason it is so simple is because I have not changed it since I opened the account in 1999.
In the last couple of months, I have begun paying a lot of my bills online. As a result, I save 41 cents per bill, and I filled the part of my brain that stores passwords. I cannot remember any more.
I want the internet masterminds to merge security questions and passwords. When I set up an account, ask me a few questions. And then every time I log in, instead of asking me for a password that is eight characters long, with at least one digit and one uppercase letter, ask me a random security question.
Hi, Laura, I see you’d like to see which checks have cleared. May I have the name of your first pet?
Hi, DameCatoe, it’s time to pay the power bill. What was your high school mascot?
Hi, LAURABENTLEY2 (old account), what would you like to do today? First, tell me your mom’s maiden name…
You can argue with me that anyone who went to Southside High will know the answer is Panther, defeating the purpose of security. I will argue in return that security is already defeated when I have so many passwords that I have to write them down and keep them next to my computer to remember all of them. Ask me questions that I can keep the answers to in my head.
This vent brought to you by a new company policy that will password-protect our screensavers, with passwords that expire every 90 days.
Taking suggestions of clever, complex eight character passwords with “both upper and lower case letters and at least one number or special character.”
From Kris’ blog:
balance the work load.
listen for him.
look for his signature.
weed out the unnecessary.
be open.
Yes, look for His signature. I need to do more of that in my head space.
A container of Gerber Stage 1 baby food stays good in the ‘fridge for three days. Ben, not being much of a solid food eater, would take these three days to consume such a container, if he consumed any at all in the midst of spitting so much out. First, we did prunes. Next, sweet peas.
What I’m saying is that we saw feeding him more as a chance for him to get acquainted with the idea of a spoon than for any sustenance. Last week, however, we mashed up some banana and he seemed to actually eat it. Hmm, we thought.
Yesterday and today he got some real live sweet potato mush. The smacking sound he made during a good portion of last night’s worship kinship really came in handy for gumming the taters.
Is the difference all in a couple of weeks time? Or is it that actual food is preferable to baby food? The mysteries of a soon-to-be five-month-old.
Thank you, Abigail Nussbaum for a week’s worth of reading on your blog and in sites you linked to. I found her site by Googling Un Lun Dun (she didn’t like it as much as I did), but while I as there, I noticed she had whole sections for Whedonverse, Harry Potter and Veronica Mars.
Nussbaum Posts of Note:
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Fanny Price? Thoughts on Mansfield Park, Novel and Films
Mr. Darcy in the Fields of Bethlehem: A Shavuot Post (Compares Jane Austen novels to the Book of Ruth)
Well, Maybe You Can Take That Part of the Sky (About Joss Whedon and Serenity/Firefly)
Nussbaum references many books I’ve read and even more movies I’ve seen, and does it all very eloquently. If I ever delve into Doctor Who or further into Battlestar Galactica, I need to go back to her site and read those entries.
She (and her readers) spoke highly of Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle, so I scribbled a note to ask Jaimie if they have it at the library, but then I noticed the movie version was coming on Wednesday night, so I recorded it. I enjoyed it the way I did movies as a kid.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJlFFQpnb5g]
days are the sunniest, jokes are the funniest,
rabbits are the bunnyiest
hives are the honeyiest, elephants are the tonniest,
troubles - they’re the none-iesteverywhere i go!
straws are the bendiest, time is the spendiest,
cards are the sendiest
books are the lendiest, fun is the pretendiest,
friends are the friendliesteverywhere i go!
berries are the fruitiest, shoes are the bootiest,
puppies are the cutiest
treasure is the lootiest, teams are the rootiest,
horns are the tootiesteverywhere i go!
birds are the tweetiest, candy is the sweetiest,
socks are the feetiest
tricks are the treatiest, drums are the beatiest,
lunch is the eatiesteverywhere i go!
flowers are the smelliest, jams are jelliest,
rain’s the umbrelliest
tales are the telliest, wishing is the welliest,
buttons are the belliesteverywhere i go!
skies are the bluiest, cows are the mooiest,
gum is the chewiest
ghost are the booiest, goo is the gooeyiest,
you can be your youiest
