Happy New Year Salem!

Happy New Year Salem!

CommunityWalk: A Parent's Guide to Salem

Because how else can a person find out where the good baby-changing bathrooms are?

CommunityWalk: A Parent's Guide to Salem

Halloween photos are here!

Halloween photos are here!

Binging and Purging

I made a chocolate cake on Saturday for no particular reason. I goofed up and put the top layer on upside down so that when I put the frosting on, the whole thing split into 3 large chunks about halfway down. I wanted to cover up my stupidity, so I ended up eating really big pieces of cake for breakfast and lunch on Sunday. That
s the binging part.
As for the purging, fall always makes me want to make changes and start new, so I began with the bedroom. Clothes are easy for me to get rid of. My rule is, if I don't absolutely love to put something on, then I get rid of it. Luckily, there's a really great vintage store close by that's very reasonable, so I don't feel bad giving old stuff away. I even got all inspired by watching a couple of episodes of "Clean House" and "repurposed" an indian print tapestry to hang in front of the bed. (Author's note: 18 month olds love playing peekaboo with tapestries hanging in front of a bed)
So now, at least when I walk into the bedroom, it feels like a place I'd actually want to sleep in.
I'll get to my three foot high inbox one of these days...

Binging and Purging

Fun with cardstock

We had to make a room darker for a software training session where I work part time. Apparently, the manager of the building didn't even notice until people started teasing him about the fluorescent yellow and pink window panes on the second floor.

Fun with cardstock

Communitywalk.com map of farms in Essex County

Good to have if your 16 month old can't stop saying "Neigh, neigh" and HAS to hear "The Very Busy Spider" before she goes to sleep! Apple season's coming up too.

Communitywalk.com map of farms in Essex County

Ideas for Salem Google Map mashups

1) Stroller-friendly retail. You know, the kind of store that doesn't cram in everything but the kitchen sink and has a level entrance more than 30 inches wide. Although, I credit the impossible-to-navigate Ben & Jerry's doorway with helping me to lose my baby weight.

2) Playgrounds. ( I think this has been done though)

3) Safe parking for more than 2 hours at a time. Then again, if you know of a place like that, why tell people?

4) Toddler-tolerant restaurants. Where the staff won't look at you funny when your child starts acting like a chimp on crystal meth (not that MINE does ;^) ).

5) Stores open after 7:30 at night that sell diapers and milk.

6) Free tourist-y stuff that doesn't have hundreds of tourists around. (I nominate the garden next to the Ropes Mansion.)

Ideas for Salem Google Map mashups

Time for a change...

I feel like this guy...

But every time I think about interviewing, I'm worried I'll come across like this guy...


Wish me luck!

Time for a change...

And Further More...

Currently reading "Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix" in which a drunk-on-power government leader slowly wears away at Hogwarts students' rights "for their own good" all the while denying the existence of the real enemy and obfuscating a conflict that is threatening the wizarding world's existence. Hmmm...
By page 300 I was checking the publication date. 2003. Hmmm.
Anyway, here's some "Order of the Phoenix" eye candy to tide you over.
Note: if you want something that loads faster, go here.

And Further More...

Girls Rule!

Sometimes out of curiousity I go to my local Chamber of Commerce site and check up on my colleagues' sites to see what's going on. Then, I noticed something, the ladies outnumber the guys around here. Funny, I was just reading about how everyone seems to think it's the opposite(comment #68).

Girls Rule!

This Ain't No Walk in the Park

Trial and error, rinse, repeat…
Things are getting down to the wire for launching my first CSS-based design onto the web. After aeons of coding, tweaking and tweaking, and testing in Safari and Firefox, then checking IE and balling up my fists and sobbing, then tweaking again, things are coming together in a good way. It’s not going to end up on Webcreme, but hey, it’s an insurance site. I figure that people go to insurance company websites for basically two reasons; either they want to get a quote on insuring some aspect of their lives, or they need to file a claim because of some sort of calamity. They probably won’t be in the mood to marvel at pretty colors and fancy animations. So I focused on making the information as clear as possible, and putting in lots of useful links.
Here’s what I learned:
1) Just because the client says something looks fine, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to need changing eventually. A.K.D.F. Always Keep Design Flexible.
2) Bigger doesn’t always mean better. Case in point, the client wanted a form like the one on the “big” company’s site(AUTHOR'S NOTE: I was going to do the "big" site a favor and link back to them, but luckily I tested the link and it "traps" the browser so one can't go back, which further proves my point!). I dutifully went to the url they sent me to check it out and it was a sticky mess of tables, inaccessibility and non-usability. I kept trying to explain that simple was better. After all, the “big” site’s form only had room for 2 or 3 questions per page and there was no way to go forward and check to see how much the user was getting into! Plus, it was pretty difficult to locate it on the company’s site.
3) Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference. I spent 15 minutes tearing my hair out over changing a div’s border to a nicer color only to realize that DreamWeaver’s “code-hint” tool had neglected to include the semicolon on the end of the attribute. One keystroke, and everything worked again.
4) When in doubt, go to a site that you know has the format you are going for and hit View>Source.
5) When nothing seems to be working right, go take a walk.

This Ain't No Walk in the Park

An Unholy Cabal in an unexpected place

How to spot a web designers’ convocation
It’s funny how things come together sometimes. I went to this event in Cambridge yesterday, and ran into 2 people who practice the same kind of digital voodoo that I do and we realized that we all live within a triangle of Salem about 1 mile square.

At any rate, I had a great time and it was cool to talk shop/commiserate with other people who hunch over a keyboard all day. Actually, when I looked around, there were almost more people hunched over some kind of digital device than there were drinking and talking with each other. I highly recommend the Spring Training IPA.

An Unholy Cabal in an unexpected place

Making Google Cry Uncle.

I just did a search for “Harry Potter” on Google and I think I broke their hard drives. At any rate, the browser window seized up for about 3 minutes and then shut down with a faint whimpering noise.

No, I haven’t been living under a rock for the past 10 years, I’ve just been ignoring most of the hype.
But then my father was talking about the books and how they were more involved than the films and I was intrigued. After all, this was the guy who gave me“The Chronicles of Narnia”
(author’s note, take the quiz on this site to find out if you are a bigger geek than me!)
for Christmas when I was 7 and had original hardcovers of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy laying around the house.
. And then Salem, originally just a town I had moved to for spatial-economic reasons, hosted a Harry Potter convention
complete with a Quidditch tournament, played in true Hogwarts style: in the pouring rain. I started noticing people walking around Essex St. wearing cloaks and pointed hats like it was no big thing.
So now that I’m already on “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, when I walk around downtown, it’s unsettlingly like visiting Hogsmeade.
You’ve got your magic shop , your corner tavern, and you can take your pick from the dozens of stores selling anything from broomsticks to dragon figurines. Judging from the frequent sightings of people in capes and robes, (usually worn over an XXXL tiedyed ensemble), a lot of other people think so too. It’s fun to watch, but I’m like one of those people who live in NYC their whole lives and never go to the Statue of Liberty. It just isn’t done. If someone asks, though, I can tell them where to find a good deal on a crystal ball or where to find an ounce of wolf’s fur.

Making Google Cry Uncle.

PEM Guide for Parents

Thought I would expose Chloe to a little "cultcha" so I took her to the brand new Joseph Cornell exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum yesterday. If it's threatening rain, the PEM's usually a safe bet because a) it has a handicapped entrance with button operated entrances, b) the galleries are spacious enough to accomodate our SUV-sized Graco stroller and c) I can show them my driver's license and get in free since I'm a Salem resident. Unfortunately, the galleries' entrance doors are not handicapped equipped so I usually find myself relying on the kindness of strangers to manuever the Graco 2000 through the glass doors. Once I got inside, I was immediately approached by one of the guards who gave me a very detailed rundown of the Cornell exhibit and then asked me if I had ever taken Chloe to the Children's Museum. I glanced around the darkened, hushed gallery with its maze of glass cases surrounded by upper middle class baby boomers carefully studying the art works on display and wondered if he was trying to drop some sort of hint. Luckily, Chloe picked that moment to give out one of her Incredible Hulk-like yells and I told the guard that she was eager to see the exhibit and pushed on.

Some of the PEM's exhibits are fairly kid-friendly with lots of things low to the ground at their eyelevel and full of details and bright color. The Cornell exhibit, though, was a little less accessible to the stroller-set intelligentsia. The boxes, objects, assemblages whatever, were mostly displayed in cases that were decisively set at adult eye level. As Chloe's grunts grew louder and shriller I tried to steer her through the wandering crowd. One of the Graco's wheels began to squeak and in the thoughtful silence it sounded like a Red Line train pulling into Harvard Sq. We escaped to the connecting catwalk outside where I failed to spark her artistic sensibilities with the enormous silkscreened photos of post-WWII New York. From there we progressed into the film exhibit but since Cornell's found footage assemblages don't have anything resembling large rotund brightly colored anthropomorphic creatures with television screens in their midsections, Chloe's interest began to wane. Finally I gave up and retreated downstairs to the Art & Nature center where there were other little humans and things were more at her eye-level.

PEM Guide for Parents

If you have a sore throat and runny nose, GO TO THIS SITE NOW

Brought to your attention by the folks at Web Worker Daily. whoissick.org lets people track health symptoms in their area and is a great idea. I really hate staggering into CVS for cough syrup and listening to everybody else hacking and coughing in the aisles. My husband spent 5 hours in the ER at Salem Hospital last week, coughing so bad that he was almost suffocating, only to have an intern poke him for about 2 minutes before saying "Yep, bronchitis, it's been making the rounds lately." Three days before that, our daughter woke up vomiting at 5 in the morning. After 12 hours of watching her spew from both ends we broke down and called a nurse only to be told, "Yep, it's that stomach bug going around." So finally, somebody got sick of closing the barn door after the horse escaped and came up with the kind of site that the World Wide Web was invented for; a public health wiki.

If you have a sore throat and runny nose, GO TO THIS SITE NOW

You've Come a Long Way Baby!

Chloe's a one year old! It feels strange leaving the word "months" out of her age when people ask how old she is. (I refuse to join the ranks of people that say "oh, she's 45 months old.") Truth is, I'm usually too tired to do the math.

You've Come a Long Way Baby!

Bringing Up Baby

I had a flashback yesterday when I was wheeling a squealing, clapping 11-and-3/4 month-old down our winter ravaged street. I was thinking about the first time I ever took her out in the same stroller. It was a mercifully warm day halfway through April. After 4 straight days of taking approximately 5 minutes to sit down on any kind of surface, I could finally make it up and down enough to go outside. Also, I was carrying about 30 extra pounds that I was determined to walk off in a week.

As I wheeled the stroller down the street for its maiden voyage, I carefully avoided every crack and twig. I painstakingly eased the wheels over the curbs, terrified that the slightest bump would permanently dislodge her brainstem. It took me twenty minutes to go 4 blocks.

Now, we treat the same stroller like a little ATV. Running over cracks in the sidewalk and through puddles just makes her laugh harder. Maybe it's all the early, first-baby paranoia, but her sheer durability continues to amaze us. Granted, we've managed to avoid any Britney Spears-type mishandlings, but still, it feels like yesterday that I couldn't stomach the idea of leaving her alone within 20 yards of our cat. Now look at them.

As far as the child proofing goes, it's astounding how much money one can save when you just use whatever's around the house. We spent the dough on plastic outlet covers and a couple of zip-tie cabinet locks, but I drew the line at some things:


For now, we just put her now-outgrown carseats in the opening between what we call the "green zone" (the living room) and the "triangle of terror" (at least for us) that is the bathroom, kitchen and Daddy's Big Room of Chemicals. I was going out of my mind trying to find a way to block off the cat box until I realized that if I just put the cooler in the way then I could also have a convenient step stool for the cabinet.

So there you have it. Parenting advice that you won't read in any of the magazines. I know I wish someone had just told me to relax and not stress about buying every last little thing on the official "baby-proofing" list.

Of course, check back with me in a couple of weeks after Chloe's actually started walking upright.

Bringing Up Baby

Good News for Nerdlings

Finally, H.P. Lovecraft and Walt Disney have something in common besides their political views. Although the former is well known for creating unspeakable abominations from the darkest abyss, and the latter for fun loving gentle woodland creatures, both now have product lines of toys inspired by their creations. I saw one of Toy Vault's plush Cthulu dolls at the Red Lion Smoke Shop and I can't wait to get one for our little monster. If only The Necronomicon came in a board book version.

For more fun H.P. stuff, click here.

Miss sending important messages via telegram? (I don't but then again, I'm not that old)
Click here.

Good News for Nerdlings