The Trixie Update

Long story short, I lost a bet with my boss.

Long story: A lot has changed over the last 9 months. No - not that kind of 9 months. I launched a commercial company. I started freelancing again, hard-core. The free-lance turned into a full-time technology job in Raleigh. Trixie started a full-time preschool. We moved to our first house (still living in Chapel Hill). I’m also still actively running and working on Trixie Tracker in what little spare time I have. It has been a busy time.

The people I work with are extremely technology saavy. I’m the designer in a room full of super-smart folks who can all be simultaneously considered engineers, programmers, developers, coders and general technologists. It’s a pretty cool seat to have at the table. My boss in particular is a very smart guy who is extremely interested in all aspects of technology, education, information organization and social systems.

During a recent conversation with my boss, he prodded the non-blogging employees (there’s only 2 of us left) to start bloggin again. He’s been working on a blog himself which is steadily moving up in the technorati ranks.

I got curious about the Trixie Update’s rank so I checked it out. I out-ranked his by about 7,000 points. I proudly decided that I would start bloggin again when he outranked me on Technorati. I like competitions.

However, during the process of setting my technorati profile, I had to create a post to get pinged. That single ping caused technorati to recalibrate my ranking (which had been frozen for the last 5 months or so). Within an hour, my rank dropped about 20,000 points. It’s always good to keep bets with your boss, so I’m back in business.

Question: What the hell is Technorati?
Answer: It’s a service that ranks the popularity of blogs.

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This is a post to force me to follow through with plans to start blogging again. However, it’s not necessarily going to be a continuation of the Trixie Update. (but I’m sure there will be some Trixie stuff.)

It’s probably going to deal more with professional stuff or business stuff or design stuff or social stuff or chapel hill stuff or maybe even the perennial favorite, ‘what my cat did today’ (assuming I can actually get my hands on a cat for blogging purposes). Anyway… the goal is start something up and the best way to do it is to just do it.

For the die-hard visitors, I do promise to get a few new Trixie pics up soon. Thanks for sticking around!

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This isn’t anything real special, but they look pretty nice if you are in a bind (like me). Print on a regular piece of white paper using any old ink jet. Trim at 1/8″. Feel free use and share. Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

Snowman Present Tags: Download (PDF format, 250k)

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Trixie went crazy in her room this past week. There’s really no other way to put it. It was one of the days when I thought she was having some quiet time, if not an actual nap. Instead she had systematically taken everything not bolted down in her room and created an enormous pile in the middle of her floor. She emptied her closet, stacked every book, grabbed toys, stuffed animals, blankets, pillows — everything. We’re talking totally pulling a Richard Dreyfuss, and assembling a soft Devil’s Tower in her bedroom. Thankfully she did not have access to any garbage cans.

The mess was so enormous and complete that I didn’t even attempt to clean it up immediately. We just cut a path between her bed and door and let it go for a while. However, it quickly reached the point that we couldn’t find anything in her room. I couldn’t dress her in the morning. I would have no idea where a certain book or toy might be. Finally, we couldn’t find Silky. That was a rough night for Trixie. She’s gone to sleep with Silky every night of her entire life as best as I can remember.

Saturday morning we started cleaning up. It took 3 hours to get everything back in place. But I didn’t even really mind cleaning up all that much. This is largest scale, most unpredictable thing she has ever done. It makes me curious to see what else she has up her sleeve.

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Jennifer and I have been married seven years today.

While living in Chicago we made the decision to get married on Tuesday.

We flew to Las Vegas on Friday.

We were married at 1:15 pm Sunday, June 20, 1999, at the Little Church of the West, the oldest existing structure on the Las Vegas Strip. The ceremony was presided over by Rev. Jim Hamilton who also conducted the ceremony in the 1992 film “Honeymoon in Vegas”. It was 108 degrees.

In attendance were a handful of good friends, but the only family was represented by Jennifer’s sister (now the proud mama of Baby Roma). Since that time, I’ve come to understand and respect the duress and disappointment (to say the least) we caused family and friends by maneuvering outside the conventional path of wedding planning and preparation. I want to thank everyone for forgiving us! With age comes experience. We’re thinking maybe we can make it up with a more formal 10-year anniversary celebration.

I’m so lucky to be married to someone as beautiful, intelligent, caring and dynamic as my wife. And for her giving me Trixie. Happy Anniversary Jennifer!

How does Subway sound tonight? (They have that two for Tuesday deal!)

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I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but I felt like sticking up some sketches. (These were done by me, not Trixie

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This past weekend Trixie was helping Jennifer make pancakes. But she wouldn’t stop trying to eat the batter. (Don’t worry, no eggs. We only use mixes around here.)

Jennifer politely said, “I wish you wouldn’t eat that – it’s kinda gross.”

Trixie replied, “I LIKE IT,”

[long pause]

“But it is kinda gross.”

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The big event of the past week was the Sesame Street Live on Saturday evening. The tickets were actually courtesy of Trixie! She entered an Elmo coloring contest in the Raleigh News & Observer and received 4 tickets for some pretty good red scribbling. She did do a good job, but I think the winners were chosen at random.

Needless to say, Trixie loved the show. We had heard that some kids have a hard time when they see the characters jumping around in the real world, no longer contained by the TV screen. So we prepped her ahead of time by telling her that they are going to be bigger than they are on TV and that they may walk up to her. She didn’t have a problem with any of those issues and sat rapt the entire time. It’s probably the longest she has ever sat still — except for when she got up to dance a little bit.

On the other hand, I did have a hard time sitting still. I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for kid’s TV shows. Matter of fact, I love Sesame Street and I always start every weekday morning with Dragon Tales. But the live show was painful. It would be like Trixie trying to last through an episode of Law and Order.

We also found a tick on Trixie about 2 weeks ago. We discovered it after the bath, and it was a pretty panicky feeling. We know there’s a billion nasty diseases that could potentially result from tick bites, so we’ve been keeping watch for fever and mouth foaming. Thankfully nothing has come up. I’m just going to have be more careful the next time I roll her around in that tall unmowed grass.

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Trixie has become such a big kid, and communicates so well about so many things that it’s easy to forget that there’s still a vast world of cultural knowledge that rest of us of take for granted, and that she hasn’t experienced once. This showed up a couple of times this past week.

First we got a soda can out of a machine. She’s seen plenty of vending machines but we’ve never used one before. The drink in question was a delicious peach flavored Fresca. I stuck in the money, she pushed the button. When the can dropped — ka-KLUNK! — she jumped back four feet and came awfully close to landing on her ass. After thinking about it some, I bet she expected it to open up like a regular fridge. That would be the more civilized approach to dispensing beverages, but vending machines are not a high society item. Didn’t I mention, we were getting a Fresca?

Next we were rolling coins. You might expect that rolling coins had some sort of relationship to the aforementioned vending experience, but alas, it was just coin rolling day. The coins in question were an overflowing bucket that dates back 5 or 6 years. I figured I could get Trixie to help me with the counting and sorting. In exchange I told her I would share the profits.

She got into the idea of sharing and wanted to go get her piggy bank which is full of coins and a single dollar bill. She came back with the dollar bill ripped in half and declared she was going to share it with me. That caught me off-guard like crazy. Ripping up money. To be fair, Trixie hardly ever sees paper money. We don’t use it. Not at the grocery store, not at restaurants. Sometimes at Thee Dollhouse but Trixie isn’t usually there with us.

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Trixie’s hand is doing much better. But that doesn’t mean she’s letting the incident go. Showing off her almost completely healed digits, she matter-of-factly asked Jennifer, “Remember when you tried to cut my fingers off?”

That’s respect. That’s some serious respect. It’s also an ill gotten spoil that Jennifer didn’t ask for it, but she’d be crazy not to use it as a force of positive change.

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