PSF - Catching Some Air

If there's one thing that Dova loves, it's jumping on a trampoline.



Whoa, girl, stay in the frame!



I'm a frog!



Spread eagle? No problem!



Is this high enough?



How does my hair look?  Beautiful as always, darling!


Hosted by Cecily and Carissa

WW - Thank you for calling. How may I direct your call?

Apparently I am losing control of all my digital assets as I happened to find this picture from last May and it wasn't uploaded to Flickr!  Here I am working the phones at my company's reception desk with All. Those. Buttons.  Why are they paying me the big bucks to work the phones?  Because all salaried employees are still taking two mandatory days off a month, including our regular receptionist.  Of course the phones and the front door shouldn't go unmanned and it doesn't make sense to pay a temp to work the phones, which would defeat the purpose of saving money through unpaid days (a temp still comes in for vacation days).

So they recruited several of us to cover an hour each on the receptionist's unpaid days.  I figured that I've worked the phones (with no buttons) at my dorm's desk in college, so I could hack it.  What I didn't figure on was juggling multiple calls, people willing to wait on hold for hours, and having real nightmares that our company was losing money because I was routing the calls to the wrong place. But hey, I'm a team player!



I dug up this photo of me working McCormick desk at MIT in 1987 in my BIG HAIR. Exactly the same right?

Totally not wordless today, I know!

Adam loves his baby cousin

While Dova was busy playing fairies with her cousin, Adam took to playing with his 11-month old baby cousin in June. I would think that Dova, being a girl and always playing with dolls, would love a chance to play with a real baby. In fact she seemed totally oblivious that there was a baby around.



Case in point. Adam built block structures just so that his cousin could knock them down.





He also showed him the ropes on the spinning toy amongst the discarded fairy wings.



I love that Adam was so great with his cousin. Don't get me wrong, I had my baby fill as well...

Dova makes an excellent fairy

I finally got around to tagging some photographs from June(!!), when I came across these gems. Thanks to her cousin, they make a wonderful fairy pair.








This reading fairy shot is my favorite!

PSF – Climbing out the Window

Angela?  Oh, Angela?

While we were staying in Newport, Rhode Island, for our 10th anniversary celebration, Doug was looking for me and was greeted by this open window.  I quickly scampered around the corner and snapped this picture of him.

 

Where the heck was I?  On the fire escape of the third floor of our Inn.  Here's some more perspective. 

Way up there.  We usually stay in the round room to the right with the turret (called the Tower Room), but this time, I convinced Doug to revisit a room on the third floor.  I just couldn’t resist going out on the fire escape to take some photographs.

The front steps from above.

Sycamore tree out front.

Up close and personal with the turret.

The garden and our car.

It was so much fun climbing around!

Hosted by Cecily and Kelli

TMT - Back in 26-100 with MIT Mommy

Although I live not to far away in Massachusetts, I rarely get the opportunity to visit my alma mater, MIT. The real MIT Mommy came by to visit last month, and I longed to walk the hallowed hallways again. After a nice lunch at Legal Seafoods in Kendall Square, we first headed to the new and unusual Stata Center, which we both had not seen and longed for the familiar creaky floors of the old Building 20.

We tried to take a photo of ourselves in the round reflective surfaces that cut across the structure.

Obviously this is a little to obscure to be the obligatory blog friend shot. And what is that strange headless version of me standing next to myself???

So we took to leaving our mark on the blackboards.

But how many people would see that? We suddenly thought of a better idea. Why don't we write on the blackboards of 26-100, the largest lecture hall where MIT undergrads have most of their freshman and sophomore classes? I was a freshman in this very lecture hall in 1983. And true to form, it has not changed a bit. MIT Mommy brought some chalk along just in case we needed it (she's a smart one!).

Here she is drawing the gear head kid that appears on her logo. She can even draw! I tried and tried to draw a hippie flower next to my blog name but failed. They kept looking like amoebas. We wrote in the blackboards in the dark to avoid attracting attention, but that didn’t make for good photos. Then she figured out how to turn on the lights from the console in front of the blackboard. She’s a genius, I tell you! She even put up her post the DAY AFTER we met. Prompt to boot!

But it was I who snagged someone wandering into the lecture hall to take pictures of us together. I’m good for something!

It was great to meet you, MIT Mommy!

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WW - Writing on the walls

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Sit around a bonfire and watch the stars

Silky Smooth Dove Milk & Dark Chocolate Promises Collection

I’m a sucker for Dove Promises Chocolates. Every time I open the foil wrapper, I look for the promise written inside, even though I’ve read them all a hundred times. Most of them are platitudes about the goodness of chocolate, some are amusing, and some make you scratch your head. Hershey has a similarly shaped Bliss chocolates in foil wrappers, but there are no sayings inside. It isn’t the same without the words!

This fall, Dove came out with an Autumn edition, with all new promises. Promises about watching the leaves fall, about the harvest moon and all the goodness the season brings. I stopped when I came across this one, “Sit around a bonfire and watch the stars.” Immediately, I recalled doing exactly that this summer while visiting friends in Wisconsin.

We sat around a bonfire, made s’mores for the kids and looked at all the stars that we don’t normally see in our wooded area of Massachusetts. But of course I couldn’t savor that peaceful moment like a normal person, I whipped out my iPhone and geeked out.

I had just come back from BlogHer ‘09 and one thing that really impressed me was an iPhone app that someone showed me called Pocket Universe, or pUniverse for short. On the iPhone 3GS, it uses the compass to track your position and will show you the constellations in the night sky as you turn around. You can move and zoom and have astronomy literally at your fingertips. It gets a little wonky if you look straight upwards, but otherwise it works really well.

As soon as our friends looked skyward and tried to point out the constellations to the kids, I said wait – and downloaded the application right on the spot (even shelled out $2.99, which is something for the tightwad that I am). It was simply amazing how it worked, no guessing where constellations were or which stars made them up. It even pointed out the planets. For a second, we thought it was wrong when it pointed out Neptune instead of Jupiter for one bright spot, but upon zooming, the planets were actually almost right on top of one another. (Queue the music – the planets are aligned!)

Last week we went to a Halloween party where there was another bonfire. This one was really cool because they erected a structure over it holding a huge cauldron of ghost chili.

Unfortunately, this only an iPhone pic, but it was the real deal. You had to step into the fire pit to scoop out some piping hot chili, but it was well worth a bit of smoke in the eyes.

Chocolate, autumn leaves, bonfires, stars… Life is good! Except for the snow.

10/21/09 - Edited to add... No free chocolates were given to me for this post, but I would gladly take some!

PSF – Dova really plays soccer

Last year, we painfully endured Dova’s soccer season and vowed never to do it again. Of course we wanted it to be her decision, so in the spring we asked her if she wanted to play again. Thankfully, she said no. Even as she watched her brother play through the spring season, she had no interest in trying it again. In the middle of the summer, I got the last call email for fall registration and asked her one last time. She said yes. What? YES, MOM! We tried to talk her out of it, recalling all the troubles from last year, but she emphatically said yes, this time it will be different. Of course, I had no faith in her so I volunteered to be an assistant coach for her team. If I’m out on the field, she will have no excuse to loiter on the sidelines.

But miracles do happen. She was a completely new person this season, getting right out there at the beginning of each practice. She absolutely does know herself well! I think she was also thrilled to have “Coach Mom” on the field.

It also helped that she had some of her Kindergarten classmates on her team. She immediately bonded with her new friend over water.

There was even a boy from her class. Doug caught her flirting with him. Just look at that posture!

From what I hear, he is a bit of a troublemaker in school. She always seems to pick that type. We are going to be in so much trouble when she becomes a teenager!

The only thing about being coach Mom, is that I can’t sit on the sidelines with my huge camera (all these shots are courtesy of former coach Doug). For once, I am actually being there instead of being behind the lens. Mostly, we are just happy that she is finally enjoying herself at soccer. This season, she has even scored a few goals! We are so proud of you Dova!

Hosted by Cecily and Carissa

WW - Shiny Shiny, Necklace Edition

Do these necklaces outshine last week's Shiny post from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum? This time I looked up many of these shiny beauties and updated the previous post.



Napoleon I Diamond Necklace
In 1811, Napoleon I gave this 275-carat diamond necklace to Empress Marie Louise to celebrate the birth of their son, the future king of Rome.


Spanish Inquisition Necklace
A sparkling emerald and diamond necklace of the Spanish Inquisition period.


The 98.6 Carat Bismark Sapphire
One of the world's largest, this 98.6 carat Bismark Sapphire is exceptionally large and well colored.



The Anna Case McKay Necklace
The 168-carat Columbian pendant of the Anna Case McKay necklace may be the largest fine-gem emerald that is set in a piece of jewelry.

My photographs outshine the ones in the links, if I do say so myself ... Complete with rushing from being jostled from other photographers claiming that I was cutting in line. It's a museum, people! I am a random access person!

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