Sentimental Seadragon

The Hurricame... and Went

Occasionally I find myself sifting through the archives here, usually looking for details about something I've since forgotten.  Like, when did Squeakles start putting two words together?  Because as big a deal as that was at the time (and it wasn't that long ago, really), I already can't quite put my finger on it.  As I search around on the site, I usually find myself getting lost for about twenty minutes, taking a stroll down memory lane.

That usually prompts me to think about taking up blogging again.  And that's as far as it gets, until the next time I look something up.

I feel like writing here again would require that I catch you up on what's happening since I left off, but since I don't have time to write an autobiography, here's the quick summary, with the important details to be filled in as we go.

I've changed jobs and I'm currently working as a professor at a big university.  My job is primarily teaching oriented and I think it's going to be perfect for me, though it's been a tough start - prepping for a huge course load with no previous experience or materials o speak of.  I basically didn't sleep at all last year.

J got a tenure-track job that just started this year and he's still settling in - his lab is being constructed from scratch and he's busy doing all the start up things that need to get done before research can happen.

We moved to Newark (DE) to be closer to J's new job, so the kids have started at a new preschool.  Last year at preschool was really tough for Squeakles.  More on that later maybe, as details are needed, but in the immediate, I was really apprehensive about how he would do at the the new school.  Well, I am completely blown away - the school is wonderful and Squeakles' demeanor is *completely* changed.  He's pleasant, funny, and compliant, both at home and at school.

Weeble is also doing great.  She talks all the time and has a really persistent but loving personality.  She's the littlest one among us but refuses let herself get overlooked!

In other news, we just had a hurricane blow overhead ("hurricame" if you pronounce it the way Squeakles does).  We haven't actually left the house since it happened, but we never lost power, the basement didn't flood, and everything from the windows looks just fine.  There was massive flooding in New York and New Jersey (I don't need to tell you that), but I'm headed back to work in Philadelphia tomorrow!

Suspended

Well. So that's what I get for having a paid blog account. (Yes, paid, I know it is totally ridiculous, and I swear that in no longer than a month I will finally have moved this blog off of Typepad and onto my own domain where I only pay something like a $10 yearly fee and will use some free blog software.) Anyway, long ago I set myself up on Typepad because I suspected I would too greatly enjoy tinkering around in the html (either to make the blog work just so, or to prettify it), so I purposely chose a level of service that gives me slight bit of flexibility in the design of the blog, but otherwise no real access to the html code behind the site. To be honest, it's been nice. But it's also clearly ridiculous to pay every month for a service that the rest of the world gets for free and they are managing just fine.

This is actually related to where I've been for the past (more than a) month.

So there I was, procrastinating moving my blog, and thinking about posting, when all of a sudden my blog was suspended. Because my credit card was cancelled. Because someone had fraudently charged $4500 in pipe material to the card. And although my credit card company didn't bat an eye at the obvious fraud, they also didn't send me a replacement card. Or maybe they did, and it ended up in someone else's hands, in which case I will get to experience fraud on my card for the third time in my life. Anyway, eventually my company did send me a new card. But in the meantime, Typepad tried to charge my card and were unable to do so, so they suspended my account. (You could post comments, but I couldn't make new posts.)

I have a backlog of about a million things to post about, but don't have the time to do it now, but at least now I can post again!

Nuggets

Um, hello? Is this thing still on?

(I hear a grumbling in the background from my husband who points out that we've been paying to keep this blog active over the 19 months that I haven't been writing. So yes, this thing is still on.)

Last night we were looking back at old posts about Squeakles and thinking how wonderful it is that we have this record of his baby days. So why did I stop writing?

For one thing, life was just busy and it's hard to keep up. For another thing, Squeakles was getting bigger and better at so many things that sometimes I felt like I couldn't adequately capture it all.

But the main reason was that I got pregnant. And tired. And then had a baby. Who is now six months old. Hey, we can still be friends, right? In spite of the fact that I completely omitted telling you that I grew and birthed an entire new person? Sorry about that.

It's a girl, by the way. I don't have a blog moniker for her just yet, since I only, three minutes ago, decided to start updating this blog again. So I will wait until the next post to give you a proper introduction to her - pictures, birth story, and all.

In the meantime, I leave you with a funny little story about Squeakles.

Over Thanksgiving, J and I were visiting his family. As we were all tumbling out of the car to go out for lunch one day, my diaper bag tumbled too and with it my dSLR. Fortunately, my father-in-law was right there and he quickly moved himself so that he'd block the camera from falling to the street. Delighted and amused with his quick maneuver, he exclaimed "oh, you're lucky, your camera almost fell, but I caught it with my nuggets!" I responded with something equally odd, telling him that I had never been so glad for his nuggets. Amber half laughed and half grimaced at this conversation. But this phrasing really amused my FIL, so he retold this story at lunch several times to anyone who would listen. Squeakles did not seem to be paying particular attention, but sure enough, a day later, he piped up at lunch the next day, saying somewhat tentatively, "... nuggets?" He got silence in return, but might have noticed me stifling a laugh as I turned towards J. Emboldened, Squeakles said louder, "I caught it in my nuggets!" He got the reaction he was hoping for, so he told his joke several more times until we all finally pretended it was no longer funny. At some point I think that someone asked him what nuggets were and he answered something to the effect that they were something to catch with. His comments about nuggets occurred a few more times over the next days, but eventually faded away.

Until the other day, at home, he randomly said it again. During a Skype conversation with J's parents that night, we told them that the "I caught it in my n-u-g-g-e-t-s" story had resurfaced. Well, apparently Squeakles is on to us with the spelling because he immediately figured out what we were talking about. So he tried the line out again, but this time he joined us in "spelling" it - "I caught it in my b-s-t-s!" he cried out with a bit of a shriek at the impending hilarity he imagined.

We still haven't told him what J's father meant by nuggets, and we're just waiting to see whether Squeakles tries out his joke on my family in the next couple weeks.

If I Wrote Blogging Software

I would create an option that would let readers go back to an earlier post and then read later posts in regular chronological order - without always having to start from the bottom of a page and read up.

(And if I wrote iPhone software, I would make it possible to go back one page (or more) in the web browser even if you exit out or turn the phone off.)

What's a Lactating Cat To Do?

While my parents and J's family now read my blog regularly, for a while I think everyone just thought it was this weird thing I do, posting my life online for strangers to read. In truth, not that many strangers read it and I don't actively go seeking new readers - it would take too much time and it's not really who I'm writing for anyway. Mostly this is an outlet for myself, logging my daily life and experiences. But I'm also writing for family and friends who follow along, and even though I don't feel like I'm writing to them directly, they make up the "audience" of people who would actually care about the things going on in my life. But I do have some "strangers" who read regularly - most of them are people I've found online or through blogging communities in Baltimore and Philadelphia, but after a while they don't really feel like strangers anymore and some have become friends.

But it's about this line that gets crossed, and on the other side of that line are true strangers who find my blog via Google searches or perusing random blogs looking for something interesting to read. I think some people think this is strange and wonder why I would put my life out there for anyone to see. Well, first of all, like I said, I don't get that many random visitors to this site. And if strangers read my site, I don't really care - it's not like I know them. And I actually think it's sort of cool, that my experiences may be informative or interesting to other people.

I started thinking about this today because I noticed this hit to my blog in my stat tracker:

Click the image above to enlarge.

When I saw that, I stopped to wonder, what in the world made this person not only wonder whether a cat could use a breastpump, but actually to sit down at the computer and look it up. I'm sorry I don't have the answer.

(Well actually, I'm sure it could be done, but you'd have to adjust the flanges - the part that goes on the breast - to fit cat nipples...)

So there you have it - it's not that weird that I write about my life and post it online for all the world to see and then strangers can search for information about cats using breastpumps and they end up at my blog. ... Wait, yes, that is weird.

I Just Wanted to Leave a Comment

Recently I ran into some trouble trying to comment on Blogger blogs. It seems that, without notifying its users, Blogger suddenly changed its default comment system and now the default doesn't allow people to comment without using a Google/Blogger account. Think you can just log out when Blogger tells you what Google/Blogger account you're currently signed in for and it's not the one you wanted to use when you left a comment? Well, if you click log out, expect to also be unceremoniously logged out of whatever gmail account you were currently using in a separate window. And no, you don't now suddenly get the option now to sign your comments with your own user name and URL. You still need to use a Google/Blogger account if you want to do that. Which means you'll actually be linking to a profile page, not your own blog. (At least, I think that last part is true. Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Anyway, tonight I got fed up with this, so I Googled to find out what was going on. A regular Google search didn't bring up anything helpful, but searching through recent blog posts, I did find that this is a "known issue" with Blogger. See here and here. Apparently this is a "feature", but since it's in beta, they didn't actually tell bloggers what was going on.

So I convinced my two Blogger friends (ianqui and jkirlin) to change their comment settings to allow me to sign comments using an OpenId, which apparently I signed up for a while ago when I was looking into Zooomr (I ended up not using that site). If you need an OpenID, here are other ways to get one.

And then I needed to set up OpenID to link back to my blog, and here are some straightforward instructions. Basically you have to edit the header section of your blog's main template.

Hope that's helpful to anyone who has recently found themselves in this same situation...

Microsoft Seadragon

Something seems to be up with Microsoft and Seadragon today. I'm not officially in the know, of course, but I do get some spillover from people all over the world who are searching for "microsoft seadragon" today. This post I wrote last year shows up on the first page of search results, and so now I'm getting hits from all over the world. I usually get a few hits here and there for this search, but today there is basically one per country - looking down the list, I see Hungary, South Africa, Sweden, Canada, France, Scotland, Poland, Belgium, Indonesia, Holland, England, Germany, Australia, .... (I can only see the last 100 hits at a time.) Anyway, I am so curious. One person's search was for "microsoft seadragon stock". Is there something I should know and jump on?

If you don't know about Seadragon, you should definitely watch this. I have visions of a much prettier and more usable web after watching that. (And think of what I could do to my photoblog...)

CrAsh

There was a major database error at Typepad yesterday, and my blog was one of the ones affected because I was posting as they were crashing. When I loaded the page this morning, I could see the two posts I'd made, but only half of the comments and my photo album was missing from the sidebar. Reloading the page half an hour later, I saw all of the comments, but now only one of the posts. The photo album is still missing from the sidebar and I can't access it from within my account, but it apparently it still exists.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to fix everything now. I'm hoping some of these things just rematerialize (like the photo album, especially since Typepad won't let me recreate it since it thinks it exists).

It's sort of ironic that I decided to stick with Typepad when I moved my blog because of the convenience. :)

Update: The photo album and yesterday's post are back!