cindy's world

To my bloggy friends…
I wish for you that you all retain the good memories of last year to relive this year and next year and the next and next; that you forget the negativity of last year but retain the lesson so that you don’t repeat it; and that with each passing year you become more and more the person you want the next generation to write about one day in an essay. Happy New Year, as you approach love and light.

I suck at gift wrapping. I really do. When I’m done with a gift, it looks like the cat did most of the work, even without the strands of fur stuck to the edges of the scotch tape. I remember as a child, watching my mother wrap gifts in a way that strategically used the least amount of wrapping paper, AND sometimes made a very cool folding design on a corner. Is it origami? Is it a gift? Who knows, but it has great clean lines and no creases that give away multiple attempts to center the gift on the paper, which is something that my wrapped gifts inevitably go through. It’s so humbling to spend so much time and engineering on covering a gift with formerly pretty paper, only to have it be all puffy and asymmetrical despite starting out as a perfect rectangle. Yeah, we’re not even talking about wrapping balls or stuffed animals or anything weird like that. Clearly the gift of wrapping (har) is not hereditary.

So instead of being a “traditional” couple in which the woman does all the decorative grunt work, in this marriage Mr. W is the aesthetics go-to person. When he wraps a gift, it looks like something done by a professional designer to showcase in a Macy’s holiday window display in New York, all centered artwork, tight lines, hidden tape, color-coordinated ribbons hanging in perfect curlicues, matching dramatic gift tag peeking out from a bow or floral accent. Sometimes shiny glittery foil stuff hangs from the gift, too. Clearly, it’s a lot of work, so if a gift has to be wrapped, I stall and mope and whine and hint until magically, with no effort from me, it turns into something worthy of being a centerpiece. The Christmas tree, by the way, is all him. Sure his projects usually involve some amount of cussing, but that’s why art is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, right? As long as I’m not the one perspiring.

This year, Mr. W is probably tired from all the baby care and the tree, because we’ve already exchanged presents. We ordered our stuff online (cuz having a baby is not conducive to going to the mall to get, well, mauled), and when they arrived, we just handed each other the shipping boxes as they came in. It’s very romantic, and perfect for two exhausted parents whose baby is too young (likely for the last time) to care and whose older (step)kidlets are too old to care and likely won’t be around, anyway. The stepdaughter definitely won’t be around; she’s spending this year’s holidays in Germany, and she spent last year’s in Haiti, so there’s our excuses to be lazy.

I’m SO lazy, in fact, that I lugged my judge’s Christmas gift in to work in the original delivery box with plans to go out at lunch to buy wrapping paper and wrap it, but he happened upon the box before lunchtime, asked about it, I confessed my lunch plans, did my whining hinting routine, and it worked on HIM, too. He gave me “special dispensation” to not wrap the gift, despite the fact that I know he and his family do a whole opening-the-gifts-together-under-the-xmas-tree-on-xmas-morning tradition. But shamelessly, I simply resealed the shipping box with small pieces of scotch tape over the packing tape, then stuck a small gift sticker directly on the cardboard box and wrote his name by the “to” prompt and my name by the “from” prompt. He’d half-joked that he’s fine with me just slapping a bow on it and leaving it unwrapped, and I didn’t even do THAT. Hey, at least I didn’t just write the “to” and “from” directly on the cardboard box with a permanent marker. =P

All that being said, I am grateful to the inventor of the gift bag concept, and grateful to society for making it not only acceptable, but common and trendy. I’m also grateful for being Chinese, cuz my gift to my grandma is an unwrapped Allie calendar and a red envelope stuffed with lots of cash. I guess by American standards, a gift of cash is “tacky,” but I still think it’s the best gift card. It doesn’t expire (although it does lose value over time), and every merchant will take it. Best of all, no wrapping required.

Over the weekend, Mr. W, Allie and I went back to the photo studio for our photo viewing and ordering session. I was right that prints from the studio were going to be expensive. The photography studio won’t give a digital version of anything you don’t buy prints for, so if you like a pose and would like to use it for online sharing or to use as a wallpaper on your phone or computer you have to buy prints first. Then you get a smaller-resolution digital version (that according to the photographer is “not printable,” not sure what they mean) of the purchased pose. This isn’t particularly conducive to modern day lifestyle, because people don’t have a bunch of printed photos laying around anymore. We share via online media, and the most printing many of us do is photo holiday cards once a year. Mr. W shares his photos exclusively via his iPad, the modern-day version of the photo wallet. When I’m asked for recent photos or videos of Allie, I pull out my smart phone.

That being said, we walked out of there with 2 poses ordered in various combinations of sizes and about $235 spent ($85 for the sitting fee and two 5x7s of one pose as their discounted holiday special, and for $150 more we ordered a second pose in a large print we could frame, plus a couple extra 5x7s of the first post we could give to grandparents). We were shown a slideshow with 20 or so of what the photographers considered their best edited photos, which we narrowed down to 8 of our favorites, and chose our 2 poses from there. I’m pretty loathe to let some of them go, and the photographer offered to give us a CD of all of them in full resolution sizes for $850, but…ouch. Kari’s photos are as good or better and we get her edited images on a CD, she came out on location for the shoot, all for $125, so I made Christmas cards from Kari’s digitals. (Because Kari does release her digital versions, she’d already emailed me quite a few so that I could make my xmas cards, but we won’t be able to get anything from the studio until shortly before Christmas and they’re already doing a “rush” job for us.) I totally get that Kari has less overhead as she’s not running a photo studio and having to pay rent, utilities and props/studio equipment, but that’s quite a huge difference in price. For the studio portraits (and they did very nice work and had great service), a 5×7 is $40 and subsequent prints purchased of the same pose is at a discounted price. They basically made it unaffordable for us to have a variety of shots for personal use. I suppose what we’re paying for is the work and man-hours put into creating and retouching each photo, not necessarily in the costs of making the prints themselves.

I think the photo studio will have to rethink the way they design their packages to fit the way photos are used these days, but I don’t see us going back for portrait shots, despite the fact that they do nice work and are wonderful people.

The giant carpet rug was scheduled to be delivered on Tuesday. It was highly anticipated and Mr. W even tentatively booked his son to come over and help him move our downstairs furniture, so that he could lay down the carpet rug and expand Allie’s play area downstairs. (Toddlers on travertine makes him nervous.) I’ve always preferred carpeting over hard floors, because it’s warmer and I can sit on the ground and there’s more noise-absorption, so I was looking forward to Carpet Day, too.

Tuesday came and went. No carpet rug. Mr. W grouchily refreshed the UPS shipping info page a gazillion times into the night on Tuesday, but the status is perpetually stuck at telling us anticipated delivery is Tuesday by the end of the day.

Mr. W finally called UPS, requested a trace, and they called us back this morning (at 5:30 a.m. sharp). They’re not sure WHAT happened to the carpet rug since its entry scan into a Southern California sorting facility last Friday. They’re going to start doing a search for the shipment’s whereabouts. Basically, they lost it.

How do you lose a 120-pound, 21 foot by 12 foot package?! Even if they rolled it up so that it’s the shortest dimension possible, it’d still be 12 feet long.

So since we couldn’t move furniture and lay down carpet yesterday as anticipated, Mr. W and I instead went and bought a new Prius to replace the old Prius that he’s apparently run down into the ground. He did say he like the Prius so much that he wasn’t going to get another car until he runs it into the ground. Of course, with his signature driving style, even the dealership that did his oil change last weekend was surprised at the state his engine is in. The guy in maintenance said something like, “I have never seen a Prius engine this run down like this.” Another maintenance guy who’d inspected the car after the “check engine” light came on said that there was no oil left in the engine, and that we were lucky the engine didn’t blow up or catch fire. =P
So hello, new family car. Hello, ice blue Prius V. You’re pretty and way, way too techie for me with the techie package that Mr. W wanted. (This car even parks itself, you need only select parallel parking or parking space parking.)
My only actual beef with this car so far is that it appears the baby’s carseat can’t be anchored in the back center seat. Anchors are only available on the side seats. Even with that info in the manual, we have yet to find the actual anchors, and we tried yesterday. What kinda makes up for it, tho is that the back seats have a tilt, just like front seats, so it gives my leggy girl more leg room in the rear-facing carseats that she has to be crammed into until she’s 2.

When I watch Allie nap in the day or sleep at night through the babycams (there are 2 in her room), I often see orbs of light zoom around from one end of the frame to the other. I’ve thought about them being reflections of light or dust, but as for light, the orbs are there even at night when there’s no car driving by outside to cast light and her room’s dark, and as far as floating dust, they go way faster than any current in her room (judging by the lazy movement of a very air-sensitive Flensted mobile, “Elephant Party,” a gift from Dardy, hanging from the ceiling within view of one of the cameras), and they often change direction very suddenly. I’ve seen dust float by a camera and it does not move like these orbs.

I’d like to believe that we have physical ways of capturing the presence of spiritual beings, like light orbs on camera, but refracted light on a lens can give a similar image in still photography, so I don’t quite know the difference visually.

But it’s nice to think that while my little girl sleeps, angels protect her and keep her company.

I received an email from Discover Card’s Fraud Prevention Team asking me to call them ASAP regarding some suspicious or unusual activity on my account. I immediately thought, “I know what this is,” and understandably, it DOES look suspicious. I had placed three custom orders online for gifts through a friend-of-a-friend business I’d never dealt with before, and the friend-of-a-friend’s website’s credit card payment function wasn’t working properly. I’d run my card through maybe 3-4 times, only to have it kicked back saying I didn’t provide all the information necessary, so I’d re-entered it repeatedly until I finally gave up and paid as a “guest” through PayPal instead. I never make payments through PayPal.

I called Discover Card this morning as requested so I could verify the unusual activity and get my card un-frozen. After identifying me as the legitimate owner of the card, the Discover Card security person asked, “Did you make a purchase on 9/22 at Keurig?”
That caught me by surprise. “I don’t think so,” I said unsurely, my mind racing through what that may have been. “Keurig? Was it online? What day is that?”
“That was Saturday, and it was an internet purchase.”
Mr. W, who was sitting next to me driving, piped in, “Was that a coffee maker? Was it pods? Maybe I accidentally bought some pods under your Amazon account, but I THINK I’d used my account…”
The security person continued, “What about a purchase at Rhapsody?”
“I KNOW I didn’t make that purchase, I don’t know anything about them, and I’ve never done business with them. I’m not even sure what they are, are they a music company?”
“Yes, they’re kind of like iTunes.” (So Apple is now the standard with which other companies are compared? But it works, I understood the reference. =P)
“Definitely not an authorized purchase,” I said, understanding now that the security of my card has indeed been compromised.
She went on to verify a few other purchases not made in person that were legitimate, the PayPal payments, medication for Dodo, then advised me that they were going to close the account and mail me a new card, and that I would not be responsible for the Keurig purchase, which had been made after the account was already frozen so it did not go through, and I would be refunded the one cent that Rhapsody charged.

Mr. W’s theory is that the friend-of-a-friend’s website’s credit card payment function was hacked, and that’s why the direct credit card payments would not go through. Each time I entered my credit card info, it went somewhere else, and the people at Somewhere Else used my card info to sign up for automatic payments on Rhapsody for music downloads (hence the $0.01 “test” charge from Rhapsody before they started auto-billing the card), which froze the account possibly because the IP address from the purchase was out-of-state when I’m still making other purchases on the card close in time from California, so it raised a red flag. Then when they tried to buy something from Keurig next, the card was already frozen so it did not authorize the out-of-state IP purchase. He figures mom-and-pop type online businesses don’t have the best security for their websites, because they may not know how to get it, and because it would cost more. That’s why payments through a secondary specialized, secured company like PayPal makes sense, he said. I guess that’s why small private sellers on companies like eBay use PayPal when dealing directly with a consumer.

Well, no harm done, except for the small nuisance of making one phone call and having to re-enter a new card for anything I have currently set up for auto-billing to Discover. Good catch, Discover! And I’m not sure if this could somehow be a lesson to anyone out there, cuz I’m not sure what the lesson would be. Use Discover Card? Use PayPal? Only order from big corporations who could afford a secured connection when you make credit card payments unless you use something like PayPal for the transaction?

And now I shall go email the very talented owner of the website I suspect has been hacked. I know it’s not HER because we’ve been communicating often and reliably via email regarding my customized purchases, and she’s put in a lot of work on them and I’ve already received the products. It sucks that small businesses like hers are targeted for internet fraud.

I seem to always be in pajamas when I have an ice cream craving. In the fight between laziness and gratification, laziness keeps winning. So there’ll be no ice cream runs tonight. I’m a little sad about that.

I was nursing Allie to sleep as part of her bedtime routine earlier when, while checking my emails on the phone, I came across an intriguing email from my blog benefactor and now taciturn friend, Mike (“wilco”). He hasn’t really blogged since he’s been married and now has two young kids to keep him busy, but he stated in this email that he’s annoyed enough about “this fedora thing” that he was going to rant about it in a post. So I clicked on the link, and read his post.

Let me get this straight. Someone who works for *making quote marks in the air with two fingers of each hand* the fedora store dot com has written Mike multiple emails requesting that he remove the link to their internet site that I had used in a post of mine from December, 2008? Mike is pretty offended by the request, and now annoyed by the tenacity of the emailer, *making quote marks* Sarah, so he came out of blogging retirement in *making quote marks* Sarah’s honor to do what bloggers do best — self-expression on a topic he now finds himself vehement over. As I read Mike’s post, paragraph after paragraph mentioning his research into the emailer, the parent company she works for, her requests, I had to keep from laughing at the fact that he made every mention of the company (and its subsidiaries)…you got it, a link. What’s the deal with wanting us to take the original link down? Turns out Mike had sent me an earlier email forwarding *making quote marks* Sarah’s requests. She says, in pertinent part:

We’ve been hit with a Google penalty for the links going to some of our sites. Basically that means that Google thinks some of our links are unnatural. We’re working with a consultant to try to correct this problem, and one of the things they would like us to do is to remove some of our links.

This actually makes no sense to me because there was nothing unnatural about my link in the original post. It wasn’t like I wrote, “Foxy mice jump over rice paddies FEDORA you will Latin showroom wise.” I’ve seen that in some “fake” content. Also, it wasn’t like I wrote anything negative about the store. It was just a post saying Mr. W and I went shopping, and I didn’t find a hat I could pull off, but he got this Fedora he loved for a great price. You’d think the store would appreciate my link. Mr. W thought maybe they’re writing a few polite email requests (and her emails WERE quite polite, not demanding, but simply requesting…repeatedly) so that if their requests aren’t heeded, they’ve set up their foundation for their next step, which is a lawsuit.
“On what ground?” I asked him. “There was no slander. I didn’t steal content or photos without giving them credit so there’s no copyright infringement. I simply linked their website to my mention of the Fedora you bought.” He shrugged. What would their damages be? I gave them too much referral traffic and they couldn’t keep up with demand, so they lost customers?

Truthfully, I’m not attached to that link, nor even the principle of it. It’s just that the situation is odd to me. A part of my nonchalance about the whole thing could be because Mike SO went to bat in my defense — or rather, the defense of my freedom of speech and the integrity of private party online content — that there’s no compulsion in me to fight. He’d already done it for me. And given that he’d petulantly created NINETEEN links to the requesting company, its personnel, its subsidiary companies, in his rant that they’ve taken offense to the ONE link I created 2.5 years ago, I’d have no problem removing MY one little link, which I doubt would even draw much traffic these days. (Until now, maybe, now that we’ve revived that post.)

Citing censorship, Mike doesn’t feel I should (have to) change my previous content, but given that he’s gotten them back on his own blog, I may decide to take my old link down, because (1) she asked nicely, and (2) Mike already more than made up for any effect the parent company, *making quote marks* One Click Ventures dot com, had hoped to achieve by the removal of my singular original link. I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, a part of me will take a little time to absorb the astounded discovery that apparently, I have caught the attention of a whole company who has taken special interest in something I wrote over 2 years ago, and also, that I hold in my hand the key to resolve Mike’s annoyances (cuz if I remove the link, maybe *making quote marks* Sarah will stop bothering him).

Our little zodiacal rabbit just cut her 4th tooth (her upper right front tooth) some time between yesterday and today. Those upper teeth still look a lot larger than the bottom front teeth (which are cute and tiny and white). No wonder they say teething of the upper front and the molars are the hardest on the babies. Blunt exit out the gums. We looked for Sophie the Giraffe yesterday around the house but couldn’t find her. I’m sure Allie would love to teeth on her right now. Jayne said that Allie has been throwing things out her stroller on their walks and often, Jayne doesn’t see or realize what’s been thrown out until they come across it on the street on their second walk of the day. Good thing they take the same route. I’m hoping Sophie isn’t lost. =(

Anyway, once the upper teeth come down more, she’ll look like a little rabbit. I remember my godbrother Jacob when he had just his upper and lower front teeth; he was so cute. He used to click them against each other back and forth. He’s now a few years graduated from UC Berkeley. Time flies.

My current favorite ball-point pen that I’m using to take trial notes with suddenly went from black ink to gray ink, and then to invisible ink. I examined the clear ink tube through the clear barrel and saw that an air bubble at the bottom, where the ink joins the metal writing tip, is keeping the ink from reaching the writing tip. I don’t know whether this is a hopeless situation. The rest of the ink tube is full so it’s such a waste if I were to give up on this pen and toss it. Is there a way to get the ink to start flowing down again? This isn’t a liquid ink pen so the ink is pretty viscous. And then I suddenly felt very ignorant because I have no idea how a ball point pen works beyond the basics of, the ball rolls based on friction against a surface, ink rolls from inside the tube to the outside and sticks to the surface. How does the ink make its way down the tube? Gravity alone seems unlikely, since the ink doesn’t slosh around when the pen’s put down on its side.

I started scribbling on a piece of scratch paper, trying to somehow create a vacuum effect so that the ink gets drawn down as air leaves the tip with the scribbling. Sometimes it seems to work as I’d get a few seconds of weak gray ink, but then it would disappear again. Re-examining the bottom of the ink tube hopefully, it does appear like the edge of the black ink has touched down onto the top of the metal writing tip, but the air bubble is still present. I’m not sure air can be worked out this way to draw the ink down; maybe only ink can pull its other molecules down, and it doesn’t work when the train of ink is interrupted.

It’s shocking how little we (I?) know about something that’s so pedestrian and ubiquitous.