Halloween this year almost didn’t happen for Gabi. Maybe it was the a years worth of build up–last year’s made such an impression–or maybe it was her lingering cold. Whatever it might have been she begged out of the festivities in my parent’s town the day before and dragged her feet almost all the way into this evening, refusing to get dressed and insisting that she wanted no treats. She relented at the last minute, after having gotten into her pajamas for the night, and began to get genuinely excited about the prospects of roaming the town green gathering sweets and looking for ghosts and goblins. We quickly dressed her, gathered our things, and bundled her into the car before sweet went sour. Thankfully, she enjoyed her night out under the moon and with leaves rustling underfoot she reveled in her favorite holiday.

:: Hello

allows me to use the photos of Gabriella in orkut? please,
it is very vtor. I hope your answer, thanks!

The individual does not have any photos posted of their own and has been adding other users with pictures of their children as a contact. Not very social and extra creepy.

Now, I suppose I have been naive and pretty cavalier with posting pictures of my family figuring that the low amount of traffic on this site and my Flickr account would pretty much leave me feeling secure through relative obscurity.  That blanket of blissful ignorance has been pulled away.  Maybe it is a knee-jerk response but I am marking all my photos of Gabi, nieces, and nephew as only viewable by friends and family.  This means that any of my prior posts that link to Flickr, like the previous two, will likely show nothing.

I am very disturbed by what parents have been talking about on Flickr how they have found their photos used by members of the Orkut community and while I’m not one to get riled up about pedophiles lurking around every street corner the thought of some Brazilian pleasuring himself to pictures of my daughter playing shirtless on a hot summer’s day has lodged itself into my brain and I cannot shake it.

If you read this site and in the short-run would like to keep seeing pictures of Gabi then feel free to friend me on Flickr. Longer term I’ll be exploring options to host the pictures I’d like to post so I can keep tighter control on their usage.  Many apologies to anyone who has been enjoying the photos.

//edit
So I think that the tack I am going to take is self hosting low resolution images for the photos I’d like to share and linking them to the high quality ones on Flickr. If those pictures are of my family then they will be marked as Friends & Family so if you have a Flickr account and we are not already contacts just add me.

The start of the new year has been a tad subpar, Management was laid off and her car needs major repairs, though I suppose with such an inauspicious start things can really only look up.  Maybe we had a feeling that this was on the horizon when we started hacking at our budget but it definitely is helping that we’ve made some radical cuts to our lifestyle before all this happened but when I honestly reflect on it the layoff is likely a blessing in disguise.

Management hated her job.  The company she worked for was demeaning and her boss was less than pleasant and far from stable swinging wildly from highs where praise was cheap currency to dark lows where her fury was a 1000 year storm.   She was depressed from the grind and angry that she put the time and effort only to feel like she was running in quicksand; at some point the place was going to consume her body and soul.  The layoff is probably the best thing that has happened to our marriage since Gabriella and the time she is getting to spend with our daughter is just what the both of them need.  As far as I am concerned, the benefits are outweighing the loss of income.

Work, however, for me is the opposite.  I love what I am doing; I am learning and being pushed to think smarter, quicker, and differently every single day.  I love that.

As you can see from the picture, I never really gave up on The Beard Project, after a couple of trims around Thanksgiving I just let it go to seed.  Management wonders when I’ll grow tired of being so fluffy, my daughter sinks her fingers into it and exclaims “Oh, Bear!”, and I love how warm it has kept me this past cold snap.

Gabi is become very much her own person.  She is a persistent communicator, hunting for the right words and when that fails appropriating or developing her own as she sees fit.  This past month she discovered Christmas and in particular those wonderfully quaint Rankin/Bass stop motion movies which we have now watched enough so that the songs are firmly gripping our ears and refusing to let go.  By far Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is her favorite character and she has gone as far as renaming him to suit her own purposes.  Kadoo is the name she gave him and largely the only one she’ll respond to if asked whether she would like to watch his movie or read his book.

She plays endlessly in the toy kitchen that we toiled for three hours Christmas Eve.  She makes soup for sipping, and pizza for snacking and it is not unusual to find a stuffed animal cooling in the freezer, defrosting in the microwave, or slowly roasting in the oven.  Her world is malleable and imaginative and I would not change that for anything.

Last year I built nothing, this year I undertake the assembly of the above kitchen.  Wish me luck, I’ll need it along with patience and many pots of coffee.