27

We like 27. Kate's birthday is December 27th, my birthday is February 27th, and my dad's is May 27th. So when Kate turned 27 months old on March 27th, it seemed only appropriate to take some pictures to commemorate the occasion. (Not that I need an excuse to take pictures of my cutie!) We went to a nearby park and had a fun walk.

Kate has a new phrase--"It's the wrong one!" She still doesn't say yes, which has made it difficult to figure out what she wants sometimes. "You want this one?" "That one!" "This one?" "That one!" "This one?" I think she know what yes means but she won't say it. We'll hold whatever it is up to her, and if she wants it she taps it. And now if it's the wrong one she'll let us know.

At this moment Kate is sitting on the floor singing loudly and wordlessly to herself, and waving a couple of small fir branches that we brought in yesterday. She sings a lot, and she likes to hold things and make them walk around or dance (that's what she's doing with the daffodil in this picture). We'll have to take these branches out before they start dropping needles on the carpet.

Baby Blue-Eyes and a Crash

I've got this digi kit that I've been working on, off and on, since about last June. It's based around the baby blue-eyes wildflowers that we found at the park in this post. So I finally finished it and got it all packed up, got the previews made and everything (which always takes longer than it seems like it should) and NDISB's server got overwritten by their host. Ack! The whole site is gone. Theresa is working hard on restoring what she can from an older backup. In the meantime, I wanted to share here.



There are some complicated transparent and glassy effects that I had fun with, and a handmade-style paper with petal and leaf inclusions. Hopefully I can get it up in the store soon!

Rainy Day Kate

Spring is here! We've had some lovely sunny days interspersed with clouds and drizzle. Kate is loving spending more time outside, even if it is a bit wet out. On this particular day she was intrigued by a puddle outside our complex where the water drips down from the roof. She didn't want to come in, so I got the camera. It's been a while since I posted some good screen-saver material for Grandma, anyway!

Our friend PDR sent us this cute pink coat for Kate. It brightens up our cloudy days! And it's big enough that she should be able to use it for at least another year. I especially like the hood, which stays up well.





After sitting, and rolling, in the wet grass, Kate had to have a full change of clothes, but she had a good time. In one of those pictures she's yelling at a seagull overhead.

Beware the Ides of March

I just wanted to say that.

"It's a Russian Inwention."

A couple of Doug's students (one from Russia, one from the Ukraine) brought him this for his cough. It's a jar with two pieces of tubing through holes in the lid. The long tube ends above the water and the short tube ends in the water. You put hot water in the jar with garlic and olive oil, and then breathe in through the long tube, which pulls in air through the short tube and makes it bubble through the water. (Doug says it's the same principle as a water bong. I didn't ask him how he knew this.)

We were all sick before the move, then mostly recovered, but Doug was out in the rain loading the U-Haul and had a relapse. He got this annoying cough that hung on for over a week. (Which makes things very difficult, when you make a living by speaking to classes every day!) He tried a lot of different things and the garlic jar seemed to finally kick it. He's feeling much better now, and has started tackling the mountain of papers that piled up during the past few weeks.

The new place

This is what our kitchen floor looks like. There's also a mottled brown shag carpet. Let's just say our ugly couch and our harvest-gold kitchen chairs fit right in.

We are missing our little yard, and our two bathrooms and our walk-in closet. The washer and dryer here are also not quite as nice. But there is quite a bit more storage space in the kitchen, which is great. On the whole, it's not bad. We're probably in the worst spot in the entire complex as far as being surrounded by parking lot on all sides, but there is some nice grass not too far away.

Kate doesn't seem particularly phased (err... fazed. I have been corrected. I knew that. Yeah.) at being in a new place. (She was upset by the old place after we got everything moved out.) It's like, "All my stuff is here, I guess this is where I live now." She's got her little plastic animals all over the living room.

This is the stack-o'-books in Kate's room. What's going to be Kate's room. We found the diaper boxes very useful for moving books (they have handles!) but we only had a few, so we loaded up the boxes, took them over to the new place, stacked the books against the wall, and took the boxes home to get more books. I have since made quite a bit of progress in getting the books back on the shelves, but I wanted to take a picture of the pile first.

36 years (oink!)

My birthday came in the midst of chaos. We're surrounded by boxes, and certainly not settled, whatever that means, but we took the time to go out to lunch at our favorite Indian buffet. (And then came home and took a nap!)

I was born in the Year of the Pig, which has rolled around again. Next time the Year of the Pig comes, I'll be 48. And the time after that I'll be 60. In addition to the twelve animals, the Chinese zodiac also cycles through the five elements (the year I was born was the metal pig--this year is the fire pig), so it takes 60 years to get through the whole cycle.



Here's the "Year of the Pig" kit that I finished up in time for the Lunar New Year. (That's what my cute little papercut piggy was for.) It's been fun to see what people do with it. I wanted to share a couple of links:

Marci's "Only in Vegas" (I really like the way she cut the flowers out of the paper and layered the other stuff on them.)

Kat's "One Month (Very cool strong graphic design!)

My birthday sale!

Prolonging the agony

This was going to be the weekend we moved. It didn't happen. Kate is still sick, I've been sick, and now Doug's got it. We all stayed home from church today, convalescing. Rebecca brought us over some yummy lemon chicken soup (thanks Rebecca!)

We've been dreading this move for a while, and the delay is not helping. Unfortunately it's not one of those things that'll go away if you stop thinking about it. We have started boxing up our books, but it's a small dent in everything we have to do. (We have six bookshelves. With books on them.) Kate has been having fun getting into things that we're trying to pack. I've seen her a few times pick something up, and she gets this look on her face like, "Wow, we have this? I didn't know we had this!"

Kate has started asking to have her nose wiped. Wow.

The answer is 42

The question: How old is Doug today?



Kate has been sick. She was feverish on Sunday, threw up twice on Monday, and has in general been needing a lot of comfort and care. We haven't been getting much else done. This morning I looked at the date on the computer and thought, "Oh yeah, it's Doug's birthday!"

Kate was much better today--not completely well, but much better, and going stir-crazy from being cooped up inside--so we all went out to I Love Bento for a birthday lunch. Kate got her own bowl of miso soup with extra tofu, which she was just gobbling down. That was good to see. It's so hard when she's sick.

It's also my sister Barb's birthday, so we called tonight and sang to her and then she sang to Doug. It's a tradition in my family that we always call and sing Happy Birthday to each other over the phone (often as badly as possible, holding out the "toooo yooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuu!" at the end, like the stork on Dumbo). As the family has scattered it just means we get more phone calls and more songs. It's fun.

Happy Birthday Doug!

Footprints

(I can't help it, this makes me laugh.)

One night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonging to him and the other to the Lord.

When the last scene flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that for many times in his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened to be at the very lowest and saddest times in his life. At still other times in his life he could see only a single footprint, with a circle-print where the other foot should be, and a straight line between them. This really bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it.

"Lord, you said that once I decided to follow You, You'd walk with me all the way. But I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, there is only ONE set of footprints. I don't understand why when I needed You the most You would leave me."

The Lord replied: "My son, my precious child, I love you and I would never leave you. During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, It was then that I carried you." The man felt much better, but was still perplexed.

He asked: "But what of the footprints with the line and the circles? Where did they come from?"

"My son," said the Lord, with compassion in His voice, "that was when we were joined by a one-legged pirate with a wheelbarrow."


(I am compelled to add that if you google footprints pirate wheelbarrow you get Princess Bride references.)

This Little Piggy

I've been trying to come up with a Chinese-papercut style pig. I like this little guy.

Say Uncle

I found a cafepress shop recently where somebody has some adoption-themed shirts with words like mother, grandmother, etc, in different languages. Including Korean. Some of it is right, but some isn't. The word they have for uncle is actually the word that you'd use to address a bus driver or some guy on the street. The problem is that family words in Korean are pretty complicated. The word for uncle is different depending on whether you're talking about your father's older brother, your father's younger unmarried brother, your father's younger married brother, your mother's brother, your father's sister's husband, or your mother's sister's husband. "Aunt" is similarly complicated. That would be a lot of different T-shirts to offer!

On the Move

It's that time of year again--the time when colleges start posting their job openings. Doug's been after that elusive full-time job for years, but the market is very seasonal. It's kind of ironic that we're getting ready to move now, and if all goes well we'd be moving again. Though one of the schools with an opening is a school that Doug already teaches at, so that would be ideal. And we wouldn't have to move again till we want to. (So we could use all the good hiring vibes you can send our way!)

We found an apartment at a complex right across the street. Initially we got a second-floor unit, and were going to have to move in January, but then we found out that they had a ground-floor unit opening up in February, so we switched. We feel much better about it now. A little more time to prepare, and no stairs to deal with. We haven't really done anything to get ready yet, though we did get a bunch of boxes. I called a friend whose husband can get boxes from work, and asked if he could bring us some. He brought us all the boxes in the world. We now have stacks of them (flat ones) leaning against the wall in various places around the house. Kate likes to lean them up against the wall and make tunnels, or slides for her stuffed animals. If we had the space we could make one killer box fort.

Our little reader

Kate has loved books for a long time. She's always coming up to me with a book and saying "Read this! Read this!" (It was a great day when we got her to stop dropping them on our faces in bed.) She's interested in the words. When we read Hop on Pop she always wants to read the lists of rhyming words on the end papers. Several times, even. A few weeks ago she started pointing to the words herself and saying "fast past last, it bit, upside down." Sometimes she even gets fairly close to the right words that she's "reading." (We've done it so many times she's memorized where they are.)



We've had Mo Willems' stirring The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog out of the library before. It is currently visiting our home again, along with the adorable Knuffle Bunny. Kate loves both of these books. The last time we had the pigeon book, she was intrigued by the page where the pigeon loses it and yells "THAT'S IT!" Perhaps it's the big letters. Or the pigeon's crazed expression. Or the way that Mom yells "That's it!" when she's reading it. Kate would point to the letters when we got to that page. This time she's reading it with us.



We made an audio file yesterday. Kate's squalling a bit at the beginning, because she wanted to play with the microphone, but she still says "That's it!" right on cue.

Click here to hear Kate

And just for fun, we'll throw in some animal sounds too.

The cold wind doth blow, and we shall have snow

I used that phrase in a kit recently, and I wasn't sure if it was "cold wind" or "North wind." I did some googling and found lots of hits for both, as well as "the March wind doth blow," which was definitely not what I wanted. I decided to go with "cold" for maximum flexibility.

We had a snowy week. Doug missed a whole week of school, since his morning class kept getting canceled. Now he has to rearrange his syllabus.

The first snow was lovely and fluffy and sticky. We went out right before lunch time and made a snowman. It was the kind of snow where you roll the snowball and all the snow comes up off the ground, leaving a swath of bare grass behind you. I used up most of the snow in the yard making that snowman. We didn't have anything to put on it for a face, though. I think the reason Kate likes snowman is because of their cute faces. She didn't seem much impressed by this one.



The snowman slumped a little in an afternoon thaw, and then fell over that night as the wind picked up and temperatures dropped. The roads were bad. Schools closed. Sunday morning Doug tried for an hour to get the icy locks on his car open, and ended up walking to church for his early meetings.

It's been warming up and drizzling the past couple of days and the snow is mostly gone. Kate seems relieved to get out of the house again. And of course, we are happy that she's happy.

Vrooom!

Coming to you via my new graphics card. We are speedy! We got some more RAM for the computer a little while ago (bumped it up to a gig), but I wasn't really noticing a difference. Then Doug, poking around in the machine's innards, discovered that it didn't have a graphics card at all but was just running off the motherboard. So we ordered a card. He got it installed last night (after minor difficulty which did not quite devolve into cursing) and now everything is so much faster. Wheee! Not just the big graphics programs like Photoshop and Painter, but even things like opening up windows in the file browser. This should be a major boost to my productivity. When working on graphic stuff I tend to do a lot of zooming in and out, and it would often get hung up just re-drawing the screen.

Now I can start saving my money for other things. Next on the list: Adobe Illustrator, and a professional membership at sharedink.com.

Happy Birthday TWO you!

Yes, it's true--we have a two-year-old. We knew this was both inevitable and imminent, but it's still a bit hard to believe.
For Kate's birthday we took her to the zoo. It's been cold but it was a nice day for it. She got to ride the carousel twice, once with Dad and once with Mom, and we spent a lot of time in the Kids' Zone, as has become customary.

They have this long double slide (the otter slide) that Kate can go down all by herself. It's never a very fast slide, and people often get stuck halfway down, but the cold seemed to slow it down even more. Kate had to pull herself along with her feet the whole way. She sure enjoyed it, though--I think she went down maybe four times.


Kate is growing, learning, adding to her vocabulary, and stringing more words together. It's sometimes a struggle to communicate, but we are often impressed by her resourcefulness in getting her point across. She's rather opinionated and strong-willed, and we are doing our best to try to teach her and enjoy her at the same time. She loves all animal toys and is firmly convinced that any animal toy she sees, anywhere, is there for her to play with. She had a brief meltdown at the zoo when we prevented her from swiping a stuffed monkey off someone else's stroller.

Kate dances. There are a couple of movies that she watches that have songs that she always has to dance to--usually with one of us, but she'll dance on her own if necessary. In Bambi, it's the part where the bucks are racing around the meadow, to very exciting music. She knows when that scene is coming, and she'll run over to me, hold up her arms, and say, "Dance! Dance!" Then I pick her up and we whirl around the living room, bouncing up and down. When it's over she points at the TV and says, "More dance! More dance!" and we rewind and do it again. (I have a feeling she would be content to rewind and repeat all day, if she could find a dance partner with that much energy).

Kate makes us laugh. Sometimes at inappropriate moments. Last week in church, she was sitting on the floor near my feet and bonked her head (not hard) against the leg of the pew. She clapped her hand to her head and said, "Oh! That hurts!" And then she did it again. Bonk. "Oh! That hurts!" (Actually it was more like, "Das Huws!") I could almost see her thought process--"If I do this again, will it still hurt? Hmmm, yep, still hurts. Let's try it again. Ow!" She did it about six or seven times in a row, clutching her head dramatically each time and exclaiming loudly. I was laughing so hard I was wiping tears from my eyes.

Happy Birthday, Squidgit! We are blessed to have you in our family.

Merry Christmas!

Here's Kate on the horse that Scott got her for Christmas. She loves it. It's bigger than she is. We have named the horse Bucky. (Doug says his full name is Buckminster Fuller.)

We had a nice Christmas at home. Kate got some more Schleich animals to add to the herd. (She is loving the deer family, especially.) Doug got me another 1 gig memory card for my camera (yay!) and I got him Creature Comforts on DVD. We also got the game Apples to Apples from my parents. We'll have to round up some friends to play.



Kate seemed like she kind of got the idea of opening presents, but she did need help. She's been enjoying the Christmas tree and always wants it plugged in right away when we get back from being out of the house. She hasn't been too bad about pulling things off the tree. If she wants to play with a non-breakable ornament, then we'll get it down for her for a while.



That's our tree! Some of the ornaments are ones that I had growing up. Others we got this year. I had a fun time tying ribbon on them. (Kate had fun with the ribbon too--she kept walking off with it and unwinding the spool.)

We hope you all had a great Christmas!

Computers can DO that?

All the learning, doodling, and playing around finally coalesced into me, the graphics tablet, and Painter getting together to create a finished product. The moment at which this happened was not entirely convenient, as it was right in the middle of Christmas. I haven't been at this designing thing for too long, but two particular things that I have learned are: A) Stuff always takes longer than I think it's going to, and B) Trying to get something done by a specific deadline leads to a lot of stress and to other things getting neglected. I've spent too many Saturday nights frantically trying to finish something up and get it in the store before Sunday. So I'd told myself that I wasn't going to do that anymore. But, well, when the inspiration struck, it was Christmas inspiration, and I wanted to get it up in the store at least before the end of Boxing Day. So maybe there were a few things that didn't get done--like some additional planning for Kate's birthday--but I guess it all worked out okay.

I was thinking back to the first computer my parents got, when I was maybe eleven--the old Mac with 512K of RAM. It had a graphics program called MacPaint that I spent hours playing with, awkwardly drawing things with the mouse in big pixelly patterns. All black and white, of course. I was fascinated by it. I remember there was a horse head that I spent a lot of time on, looking at a picture in a magazine and then trying to reproduce it as best I could with the program's limited capabilities. There was also a program called MacDraw that we could never figure out. Years later, after I learned to use Corel Draw, I realized that it was a vector graphics program. If my eleven-year-old self could see the stuff I get to play with today, she would be completely freaked out, enthralled, astounded.... Doug recently found a sound clip of Homer Simpson saying "Computers can DO that?" which he added to his machine (to play on a certain action). I feel that way a lot. Holy cow, computers can do that? Amazing. (I think I need to get some more RAM, though. Painter stumbles a bit. It should be happier with more RAM.)

I call this one "All Aglow." It was all done with the tapered chalk in Corel Painter IX.5. I love this program. I love my tablet. Sigh.



(Here's a link to the product in the store.)