Photo Hunters - Blue

These blue poison dart frogs look like toys, but they are real! From Atlantis Marine World in Riverhead, NY.





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Thursday Thirteen - Things I didn't have ten years ago that I can't live without now

Here are thirteen things that I didn't have 10 years ago that I can't live without.  Some are sentimental, some are geeky, some are gadgety.  That pretty much sums me up!

1. My husband Doug - He just squeaks under the wire as husband because our 10th anniversary is coming up next July.  He's been in my life for over 14 years now.
2. Adam - Turning 8 on Saturday!  How did he get to be so big?
3. Dova - Turning 5 in December.
   
4. Central air conditioning - We put this in when I was pregnant with Adam because I refused to deal with the heat.  Now we are all spoiled in the summertime.  It has actually helped me enjoy summer more than I have in the past (usually comes last with me in terms of seasons).
   
5. Garage - We built our 3-car garage in 2000 while I was pregnant.  I sure don't miss digging my car out of the snow and scraping frost in the morning.
6. My 15 minute commute - I was able to zip to Adam's school in 7 minutes because he was having asthma problems once.  Can't imagine having another job further away.
   
7. High speed internet - We've had it since around 1999 through cable and now through fiber optic.  Loving FiOS, not a single glitch since it was installed in June.
8. Podcasts - It is extremely rare that I listen to radio anymore with tons of podcasts available (including radio shows like This American Life, Radio Lab and NPR).
9. iPod - I gotta take the podcasts with me, can't sit at a computer and listen to them.
   
10. iPhone - Still loving my slow first generation Edge iPhone.  Just wish my company would grant me external wi-fi access because I can't get reception at work.
11. DVR - Kids shows, car shows and one knitting show for mom.  I don't watch as much TV as the rest of my family, but I wouldn't watch without the DVR.
    
12. GPS - Can't imagine taking a vacation without it now.
13. Blogging!- Didn't even exist 10 years ago and now it's such a big part of my life!
    

Will they start counting sheets of toilet paper next?

Image from viva verde.

My company is experiencing some hard times as a result of the economy but so far no lay-offs are in sight. Instead we have a hiring freeze (boo, I really need a SQA contractor and a full-time systems engineer replacement), a travel freeze (yea, no more trips to Toronto for me, and just one more trip to Seattle next month) and other cost-cutting measures. One of those measures is having people turn off the lights to the bathrooms when they leave. I have no problem with this, except for the fact that it is one more germy thing that I have to touch. I've finally resorted to taking the paper towel with me after shutting off the lights and grabbing the door handle, because I'm sure that my aim isn't any good throwing it out in the dark. Apparently, there was backlash against this proposal from other colleagues because of this email:

[My esteemed company] Employees,

Some employees have e-mailed me thinking that turning fluorescent lights off cost more because the cost of the electronic ballast restart. It takes 20 seconds of fluorescent light run time energy to restart the ballasts. I did a study observation yesterday of bathroom use, it was an average of 1-20 minutes between an employee leaving the bathroom and another employee using the bathroom. From the information of the study it shows that there is a large electrical savings obtained from shutting off fluorescent lights because we have 6 bathrooms. Please keep your ideas and thoughts coming or disapprovals that there might not be actual savings through the tactics we are taking. I have had many ideas e-mailed to me and appreciate them very much.

Thanks

Facilities
[Facilities head honcho]

Watching the bathroom so see how often people are going in and out? What next? Checking to see how many sheets of toilet paper we use? And yes, they will be installing motion detectors in the bathroom when the company "has more money".

November 3, 2008 Edited to add - Just got this email at work. Someone must have been beaned in the head from the dark.

[My esteemed company] Employees,

Until the time we install motion sensors in the bathrooms please don't shut off lights for safety purposes.

Thanks
[Facilities head honcho]

And I will definitely be forwarding Mommytime's comments to him.

WW - Glowing leaves

Glowing trees


Leaves from below


My first attempt at selective desaturation for this tri-colored leaf.  Check out the simple instructions here.

Ruby Tuesday - Dova as a redhead

Last year, Dova was Ariel for Halloween so we sprayed her hair red. It was quite spectacular! Thankfully it all washed out easily. This year she is going as Barbie, so we can keep her naturally blonde, I mean brunette.

Photo Hunters - Scary

ImageChef.com Poetry Blender


Adam loves Halloween and pretending to be scary. Sorry for the obnoxious header graphic, I couldn't resist!

Speaking of Halloween, I've given up on the notion of taking Adam to any haunted houses or scary Halloween activities. Two years ago, when he had just turned six, we went to Walt Disney World and he completely freaked out at the Haunted Mansion. There was no line so we dragged the whole family into the ride, as it is one of our favorites. Adam didn't like the looks of the first room and started to pull away. We assured him that it would be just fine and dragged him in as the doors were closing. As soon as the room started to "grow", he couldn't take it and buried his head in our clothes. When we got onto the ride chairs, I went with Dova and Grandma, and Adam went with Doug in the next car. Unfortunately the ride kept stopping and we were often stuck in the dark with loud spooky noises. Grandma shot this picture of the haunted clock while we were waiting.



I could hear Adam whimpering in the next car and Doug trying to calm him down. When I finally saw him in the mirrored ghost room, he was obviously crying and I felt so bad that we forced him on the ride.  After we finally exited, Adam sat on my lap on a bench outside and cried hysterically for twenty minutes.  He is such a sensitive boy and it scared the bejeezus out of him.  Dova, at two, was not fazed at all, but she waited patiently while her brother calmed down.  After that, he refused to go on any remotely scary rides such as the Pirates of the Caribbean.  He's seen all the movies, but there is much less impact from the small screen than life-size drunken animatronics leering at you.  We are heading back to Walt Disney World again in December and we are definitely steering clear of the Haunted Mansion this time.

Last year, I took the kids to a local haunted house put on by mostly high school kids.  They did a great job of acting out gory scenes, but once again Adam got spooked by the darkness and the loud screaming.  There was one small dark room that they wanted the group to enter where they performed some stunt that ended in a lot of screaming.  Adam refused to go inside again, so we waited it out.  We managed to get through the entire house with both kids clinging to me.  When we exited, there were boys revving chainsaws (without chains of course) to scare everyone away.  Adam grabbed my hand and ran for his life.  Thankfully he realized that they weren't really going to cut up the audience and managed to stop after 20 feet.  Dova was a little scared, but not nearly as spooked as Adam.  So much for scary activities for his favorite holiday.  Maybe there was a reason that he was born on All Saint's Day (the day after Halloween), instead of Halloween itself (besides his mom's insistence that she would not have a Halloween baby).

Technology Team Leader? Nah, Call Me Goofball

My co-worker sent this photo to me and I nearly fell over laughing. We were in the middle of a series of brutal 3-hour long DFMEA meetings (design failure mode effects analysis - snooze!), where we would paste hundreds of sticky notes on the wall. We used blue painter's tape to help the sticky notes stay up. Apparently they make good fake eyelashes as well.

Are you ready for NaBloPoMo?

My NaBloPoMo page

I have a week long business trip in the middle of November, but I still pledge to get a post a day up! Don't be surprised to see a lot of Wordless Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays... It'll still be worth your while. So what are you waiting for? Join us now!


Visit NaBloPoMo

WW - Swan Lake

A picture perfect shot of from Wachusett Mountain in Princeton, Massachusetts.

Ruby Tuesday - Foliage at work

There was a gorgeous maple tree peaking last week right in my parking lot at work in southern New Hampshire.

How to fix your Delicious toolbar in Firefox 3

Not long after installing Firefox 3, I started having trouble with my Delicious add-on. The buttons disappeared from the address bar and the Delicious toolbar became blank or did not display favorite tags. I tried uninstalling, re-installing and clearing any local cache to no avail. Working Delicious from the menu alone was extremely painful. Miraculously, the toolbar came back on one of my computers, but only temporarily. At one point, all my toolbars became wonky and I had to rebuild a bunch of buttons. And then I stumbled upon the fix for the blank Delicious toolbar.

If you're struggling with a blank Delicious toolbar, do the following:

1. Make sure that your Delicious toolbar is visible.
2. Click View > Toolbars > Customize.
3. Under the icons, find "Delicious Toolbar" with a double icon.
4. Drag it onto your blank Delicious Toolbar.
5. Click Done.

At this point, you can change your view to Bookmarks, Favorites or Tag Bundles. You can use the same procedure to put the main Delicious buttons back on your Navigation toolbar as well.

Photo Hunters - Family

I had every intention of photographing our annual family portrait holiday card for this week's photohunt, but it didn't happen. So here are some family shots from the summer.


I have camera in hand, of course (50mm f1.8 lens for the fish photography).


Here's what we are thinking:

Dova:  I'm so scared!
Adam: This is a little scary!
Doug:  Uh-oh, here we go again!
Angela: Yay!

I purposely sat in the back so that I wouldn't block Doug when I put my arms up in the air.

How we named Dova

Baby girl Dova at two days old.

After naming our son Adam with a fairly common name, people wonder where we came up with Dova (it sure as heck wasn't going to be Eve). Here's the story. When Doug and I became engaged in 1998, we went to a custom jewelry shop to pick out a ring in Cambridge Massachusetts. I had been cutting out pictures of gorgeous rings in the Boston Globe magazine and they always came from this place. The jeweler, Daniel Spirer now has his own shop. So after we picked out a ring and stones, Daniel scrawled out the order. He must have written out Doug's name something like this:

After we got the ring, we started getting mail from the jewelry shop. Except it wasn't addressed to Doug, it was addressed to Dova. They also mangled his last name. So we figured out that someone must have transcribed Doug's name wrong from the order. They got the D and the O of Doug right. The U became a V and the G became an A. Doug became Dova. We thought, hmm, that's pretty, it might be nice as a girl's name someday, so we kept it in the back of our minds.

When I was pregnant in 2003, we checked on the internet and found only one person with the first name Dova, a "B" movie actress (i.e. p0rn), so it probably was a stage name. There was a company with that name, as well a few last names (although Ben Dova would not be a real name ). But it was unique as far as we could tell. Now when you search online, you can find other real Dova's out there that are older than our daughter, but chances are that she will never meet one. Here's a funny post and a serious article about unique names, as well as Julie's post that got me started on this whole thing (you can see how long this draft has been kicking around).

Before our baby girl was born, we had a few girls names in the bucket. It was down to Sarah, Sophia or Dova. I didn't want Sarah, because there was another Sara in our family daycare. This is totally a ridiculous reason not to name a child, but it concerned me that she wouldn't be unique. So a week before she was due, we asked Adam which of the three names he liked. He picked Dova. Hmm, it's so different. Would people think it was weird? We waited and asked Adam again and he consistently answered Dova. So this time, it stuck and we actually had a name before we headed to the hospital. When she was born, we were so proud that she had a name, but they tagged her "Baby Girl (my last name)". Which was a disappointment because we had a name this time, and Adam's hospital tag said "Baby Boy (Dad's last name)" so their tags don't even seem related!

For Dova's middle name, we wanted to honor Doug's late cousin Beatrice who always went by Bea.  Dova Beatrice sounded too long and formal, so we just used the shortened name, Dova Bea.  Often times people hear us call her Dova Bea and think that we are just using a pet name like Dova bee, but we are actually using her real name.  She does have a lot of bee accessories because of the name, bee stuffed animals and a bee purse.  And sometimes we call her Dova beans or "the B".  She also shares her middle name with her cousin Lyla Bea(trice), who was named after the same person, her late grandmother.  They were born 2 months apart but are separated by a generation.

And true to form, I mulled over the letters of Dova and found that it also had an D and an A in it for Doug and Angela, just like Adam does. And both their names have four letters, so they are a matched set. So glad that our kid's names appeal to my sense of order!

The only downside to having this name in New England, is that we always have to spell it out. Whenever we introduce her, people inevitably ask, "Dover?" because if you had an accent, you would say Dova and Dover in the same way. But the overwhelming response has been positive and I'm pretty sure she likes it as well.


Hosted by Cecily and MamaGeek

Thursday Thirteen - BlogHerBoston Edition

Here are some of the fabulous bloggers I met at BlogHer Boston (Burlington, but let's not split hairs). I was a bit nervous and tentative about going, but after arriving, I suddenly felt like I belonged amongst the hundreds of Twittering, passionate blogging women! I even put up two posts delayed by travel last week during the first session. Check out the twemes of the event (Twitter and Flickr!).

1. Sandy at Momisodes. We live in the same state and we finally got to meet! And yes, she really is that pretty in real life.
   
2. Christine Koh (center) of Boston Mamas and Posh Peacock. Christine liked this photo for the Asian girl power.
3. Candelaria Silva (left) of Good & Plenty and Susan Getgood (center) of Marketing Roadmaps (new URL). I've worked with Susan before with HP Photo Books and it was great to finally meet her in person.
4. Tania of ChickyChickyBaby. The one and only!
5. Catherine at Her Bad Mother. Another famous blogger with baby in tow.
6. Katie aka MotherBumper, fellow kirtsy editor.
7. Meredith at Picket Fence Post among many other blogs, who I met previously at her book signing.
   
8. Charlene at Crazed Parent.
9. Annette at Catnip and Coffee.
10. Megin at GNMParents.
11. Megan at Megan's Minute.
12. Alice at Do the Yak. She works at MIT!
13. Lydia at The Perfect Pantry. I know nothing about food blogging, so if you're interested, go check her out.
    

View more Thursday Thirteen participants.

WW - Dova is always breaking out into dance

Visit by Wordless Wednesday or 5 Minutes for Mom for more participants.

Ruby Tuesday - My Ride in the Saturn SKY Roadster

At BlogHer Boston, Saturn offered test drives including the Saturn SKY Roadster. You don't need to tell me twice! Of course, I even took pictures of myself with my hair flying while I was driving.

Conversations with Dova, 4-Year-Old

Dova in her turtle shirt from Grandma's trip to Hawaii.  She looks just like the girl on the shirt.

Dova's sayings have now evolved into Dova's conversations!  Here are the latest installments from our hysterical 4-year-old.

If you didn't have bones in your knuckles, they would be all wobbly.  And if you didn't have bones in your spine YOU would be all wobbly.

---

I wish I were a swordfish so I can pick your nose.

---

Why do numbers never end?

---

Dova:  What is Columbus Day?
Mom:  It's when Columbus discovered America.  No wait, maybe it was his birthday.
Dova:  Mom, you're not very smart.
Mom (laughing):  Oh really?  Why not?
Dova:  Because you can't remember anything!
Mom:  (I guess you can fool most adults, but not a 4-year-old!)

---

Dova:  When you pour water on the computer, will it explode?
Mom:  Well, it could spark and catch fire.
Dova:  Well, then we shouldn't put the aquarium on top of the computer.
Mom:  (What on earth gave her that idea!)

---

Dova: Shick
Mom: What? (hoping that I heard it wrong)
Dova: Shick!
Mom: WHAT?
Dova: CHECK OK? What did you think I said?
Mom: Um, nothing, check!

---

When I'm a teenager, will I like having boobs?

She continues to crack us up as well as the teachers at her school.

I'm on the Manic Mommies!

Kristen, me and Erin at BlogHer Boston '08.  My shirt says "fight like a girl".

My highlight of BlogHer Boston was definitely meeting Erin and Kristen of the Manic Mommies. They were so down to earth, and genuinely hysterical in real life. After having this photo taken, they asked me whether I'd like to be interviewed for the podcast. What? Me? Ack!

They were so easy going that it was a breeze. I can't bring myself to listen to the interview, but you can tell me how it went. They also interviewed Christine Koh of Boston Mamas and took a test drive in a Saturn Vue hybrid.  Here's the link to the podcast.  We had a fun discussion afterwards about whether or not they should put the "Silver Bullet" vibrator into their Escape '08 goody bag.  The comments in their Big Tent discussion are hysterical!  From "Hi Ho Silver and away" to "My 77 year-old mom is coming on the cruise."  My vote goes with the gal who suggested that they should go to the moms who can't go on the cruise who said, "We can enjoy multiple 'escape-asms' at home for free."

Photo Hunters - Lazy

Adam at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He "hates" museums and lets everyone know it.

How we named Adam

Baby boy Adam at 2 days old.

We are definitely the type of parents that have to know the sex of the child well before they are born. Since we had about 20 weeks notice, you'd think that would be enough time to name our son. Doug and I both had a few requirements. Since Doug's last name is three syllables, he wanted a first name that was two syllables so the full name wouldn't be too long. And he didn't want a name that was gender ambiguous or had nicknames. He also wanted to honor his late father by incorporating his name Irving or a derivative into the first or middle name. So he suggested Isaac. I immediately thought of Isaac Washington of the Love Boat, and then Isaac Hayes. Of course Isaac Newton would have been a good thought, but those pearly whites of Isaac Washington kept haunting me. I didn't want any biblical names like David, Joseph, etc. And it had to be a name that my Chinese parents could pronounce easily, so no R's and L's like Aaron or Allen (these would be identical!). So we were kicking around names like Evan and possibly Adam (except for the biblical part). We weren't really thrilled by either choice so we left it up in the air. We were still tossing up names on the way to the hospital at 3am and there still wasn't a name after 20 hours of labor. When he was born, they tagged him Baby Boy (Dad's last name).

After our baby boy arrived, I called my mother on the phone to tell her the news. She immediately asked what his name was. I said, "I don't know, we were thinking about Adam." My mom exclaimed, "Adam!! I love it!!" And suddenly, this name which was so elusive for us became solidified. For his middle name, I just couldn't go with Isaac, so I suggested that we simply use Irving. And together, Adam Irving, became the perfect name, extremely dignified, masculine, and fitting all our criteria. He could be an author, like Washington Irving (or Isaac Washington Irving, as I often kid). The big joke of course, was that despite my wishes not to have a biblical name, we picked the most biblical name of all!

And here's another far-fetched reason. I have a friend named David who has two younger brothers Adam and Seth. I've always felt that his parents named them in the wrong order. Adam should have been the first son because he was the first man. But they correctly named Seth, because that means third son. So this way, in naming my first son Adam, I could fix their incorrect naming order.

Another colleague at work has four sons, Matthew, Adam, David and Aidan. Again, they named their sons in the wrong order!! When I heard these names, I said, "Cool, the first letters of their names spell ADAM." He looked at me puzzledly and said, "You know, we never noticed that. I'll have to tell my wife." And then I had to tell him that he named his kids in the wrong order, that Adam should be first. His response was, "Do you have OCD?" I laughed and replied, "I try not to." OK OK, maybe I'm a bit compulsive, things must be in the correct order!

After settling on Adam and mulling over the letters of the name, I also noticed that it had an A and a D in it for Angela and Doug. How perfect that he is a product of both of us and the first letters of our names are in his name. Who would've thought that naming a child would be such an arduous process?

Next week, Dova.


Hosted by Cecily and MamaGeek