This year, Lily turned two years old. Gosh, that went fast.  She’s out of the toddler room, and has moved into the preschool prep classroom. It feels so recent that Josh himself was in that room. Time flies. Now Josh is in Kindergarten Prep, and Lily is drinking from a cup. In another year, I think she’ll be out of diapers. Two kids and no diapers? One can only dream.  

On Saturday, we celebrated Lily’s second birthday with a party at Josh’s gym, which was the same place we celebrated his 3rd birthday (March 2008.) We invited her classmates from her class, and kids from among our circle of family and friends. As usual, a lot of the parents were very late with the RSVPs. What I found ironic was that we received an RSVP for a child we didn’t remember inviting, but we figured the more the merrier.

Lily's 2nd birthday party

The party went well. As usual, my sister and my BIL showed up early to (again) help us with running errands before a party, which included picking up the birthday cake and balloons today. If they didn’t keep swooping in to help us, I think we’d be even later for every major Ipe event. We arrived about 10 mins late to our own party, but since it was at a fully-staffed gym, parents and children were occupied with activities.

Everything went well, and Lily had a very good time. We had Papa John’s (again), because hey, you can’t beat that “$10 per pie with any toppings you want” deal. Nope, you can’t beat it. I think we’re officially done with parties for another year, which is a relief. I’m not a fan of throwing lavish birthday parties any more. Especially with young children, going overboard is pointless. The children themselves enjoy running around, eating their pizza, and drinking from their juice box. They don’t need much more than that.

So to bring this story to a close, remember that family that we didn’t invite, but left a voicemail that they would attend the party? Yeah, they didn’t show up to the party after all. We’re still confused about that one.

Has this happened to you at work? Some email goes out and it includes a few hundred other other individuals in the organization. Most of the time, it seems to be simple mistake when the sender chose the wrong distribution list. Unfortunately, while you might realize the email wasn’t meant for you and simply deleted it, the rest of your colleagues decided to announce to the world that they also shouldn’t receive it.

What do you end up with? Instead of one incorrectly addressed email message, you have potentially 500+ messages from random people who are annoyed that they got the message, with a wide range of responses. . From what I’ve seen, you have everything from the simple ”Please remove me” type emails to ongoing conversation threads between 2-3 people in the distribution list. Not to mention the enormous strain on capacity that the email server is attempting to handle.

Why do supposedly intelligent people do this? I can understand the plight of the original sender — sometimes you will send a message to the wrong person. I don’t understand the 500 foolish people who need to reply all.

I read that the U.S. military would be removing commercial restaurants on U.S. bases in Afghanistan, such has Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Dairy Queen. To a degree, I understand the point of view that it’s a mission, and the troops are there to fight. However, come on, if these men and women want to enjoy something other than mess hall food in a dusty and dangerous land when they aren’t getting shot at, why not let them enjoy a little slice of home when they need it?

Regarding the picture below, I thought it was ironic to see a large military transport plane like the C-17 transporting a Burger King truck. Is it going into battle with their tasteless chicken sandwiches? 

Burger King supply truck

This week, my friend (and coworker) Sayali had her last day in the NY Metro offices. She is transferring to London, moving with her husband in another week. I organized the lunch party with the help of some of my coworkers who were gracious enough to help me.

When you go to the office and have some coworkers to be friendly with, it helps the day go by. When you go to the office and find your good friends there, it makes your whole day better. When you go to the office and find your good friends gone, it makes you feel lonely. Ah well, such is life.

Last day in the office with Sai and I

Toyota has loaned me a Corolla. Meh, but I'll take what I can get.

We’re at the 5 1/2 week mark, and the car is still at the body shop. We’ve run through our options on borrowing various cars from family, rental cars, and working from home. This week, I have a loaner car from Toyota, a newer Toyota Corolla. The good news is that all the initial and 2nd round of work on the car is done. We’re now waiting on our insurance company to send someone to examine the car, and pay for the supplemental repairs that needed to be performed. I’m hoping that means the car will be ready on Friday.

Monday night, we drove to the Toyota dealership to pick up the loaner car, and we spotted the Highlander parked outside. It was raining heavily, so we didn’t get up close and personal, but it looks pretty good. The front license plate appears a little twisted / banged up, but nothing we can do about that. Otherwise, the car looks good.

I’m glad they offered us a loaner car, but I have the sneaking suspicion that they only offered me the loaner so that I would stop calling them daily for a status. It’s true what they say — the squeaky wheel gets the loaner car. The Corolla is ok, but the brakes suck. I wonder if I have to fill the gas tank before returning it?

I'm scared it will conquer my arteries, but at least my moblog photos have a new home.

Something is up with Flickr, and I can’t figure it out. I’ve been using a free Flickr account to host my moblog (mobile blog?) for only God knows how many years now, and it’s been fine. I lie — I started on March 16 2006, but you get the point that it’s been a long time. It was free. I used to have a Flash badge on the old site that rotated a new picture with every reload. It worked, and life was good.

Starting January 2010, Flickr won’t show any of my 2010 photos. If I log in, I’ll see every photo, but if you-as-a-casual-visitor click on the moblog link to Flickr, you won’t see any photos after Dec 2009. What gives? I’ve checked the Support pages and looked online for additional information, but I got nothing. I have a grievance!

Since I can’t figure it out, and I have all these stupid non-entertaining and random photos accumulating on my Blackberry, I’m going to start adding them to the monthly photo gallery. I’ve already gone back and added them to the Jan-Feb-March 2010 galleries, and uploaded the revised albums. Keep in mind that the captions will come later, but for now, it’ll do in the meantime.

Flickr, you’ve angered me.

I hung up some pictures today. It’s a momentous occasion. Why? Lemme ‘splain.

Picture it. Sicily, 1942. A young Mussolini had come to power…… let’s try this again.

Picture it. Christmas, 2008. I bought a set of 10 shadow boxes for my wife for Christmas. I selected various family photos, got them printed at our local CVS, and placed them within each frame. My wife is happy, and we decide to hang them up in the stairway landing upstairs. Since we’re planning to have the house painted, we decide to hold off on hanging the frames up. Why hang them up, when we’ll just have to do it again after painting the house.

Months go by, as we continually postpone painting the house. Hanging the pictures becomes an inside joke. March 2010, the house is painted, and I finally hung up all 10 frames. I couldn’t do it myself. Joshua was my assistant, and he did a nice job handing me my hammer, holding the laser level, and handing me each new frame.

It’s not complete. We have to replace one picture with a better landscape photo, and we need to find a better photo for the frame in the center (professional family photo?), but it’s up!  Sorry for the low quality cameraphone picture, but it’s all I had available. It’s probably strange to you that I’m elated to hang up picture frames. The reason for my elation is simple. We’ve been “on hold” for a long time with redecorating and making other little fixes to the house. Some things have changed here and there since 2005, but we’ve just started making the bigger changes. Waiting to paint the house has delayed making the living room nicer, hanging up family photos, and other stuff too small to mention. Minor in the grand scheme of things, but to me it always felt like part of our life was in a holding pattern, forever waiting. Now, it feels like life is moving again.

And that is a good reason to feel elated.

Josh helped me hang up these picture frames

Every month, a circle of our close friends get together to celebrate those celebrating birthdays that month. In March, it’s just both of our kids. To celebrate, we hosted a party Saturday night for the kids, and invited some of our friends. We (really, just my wife, but shouldn’t I get credit too?) had planned a sumptuous home-cooked middle-eastern meal, but various snafus occurred this week, and there was simply no time to get all the ingredients and cook. Instead, we placed a last-minute order to our local Indian restaurant for some delicious entrees.

Party at our house	Catered dinner
Plexy & Sheba	Lesh & Lily play Pictionary

We don’t have a lot of people over very often, and always forget how much work goes into hosting a party. It’s not easy to get the house all clean and spiffy (our kids certainly don’t help), and there’s a lot to do! After some of the guests started to arrive, I drafted Vijay and Sunil to accompany me for a liquor and grocery store run. Later, I made a separate run to pick up dinner.

Apart from the leftover tasks that we had after guests started arriving, our friends helped out with some stuff, and everything else fell into place. The weather was great, the house was nicely decorated, most people could make it, and the food was delicious. Along with the great dinner party conversation and tasty food, we all played Pictionary for entertainment. I think the party broke up around 12:30am, so I think it went extremely well. Photos are posted for your amusement. We should have people over more often.

The window treatments are officially up. The top of the living room window is 12′ off the ground, and oh, we don’t have a ladder. After pricing out buying a ladder or hiring a handyman who owns a ladder, my friend Doug offered to drive over to our house and install it for us with his ladder.

Eureka! I worked from home, occasionally helping out where I could. Between the new interior paint, the new slipcovers and accent pillows, and the new light fixtures, we’re finally catching up on all the remodeling that we’ve had on our list. You can’t do everything, so we’ve always done little things here and there. The recent work was a big chunk of the to-do list.

The living room itself is not yet complete, but we’re damn close. What’s left? Duh, my flatscreen HDTV, of course. Say it with me. Mwahahahahahaha.

Our window treatments are installed

Proving myself right yet again, here’s another example of my stuff crumbling to dust in my hands (or in this case, on my feet.) My black dress shoes. Earlier this month, while I was walking inside the Pavonia Newport PATH station, the black dress shoe on my right foot made an audible PFFT! sound, and squeaked with every new step. I discovered that the heel of the sole had crumbled open, and the inside of my shoe was exposed. Also, I had a very audible walk now.

Grumble, grumble. Time for new shoes.

My wife took the liberty of ordering me some new Kenneth Cole dress shoes from Macys.com, where they were slightly discounted and easier to find. I still had to wait about two weeks, but they finally arrived in a very nice box. I normally don’t care, so you can imagine the how nice the packaging was for me to actually make a comment here.

So far, they’re nice, and haven’t crumbled into dust….. yet.

My new dress shoes