leetle peeg, leetle peeg, let me in

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We’re having a lot of fun with the in-laws, except for the fact that Dave and I seem to have come down with whatever cold Catie had last week. So we wake each other up coughing all night, and I’m losing my voice. Good times.

Of course, this is in keeping with our tradition that it is impossible for my in-laws to come for a visit and not be felled by some sort of plague or accident. Seriously. Let’s recap:
1.) Their first visit, December 2007 – we all came down with the flu.
2.) Second visit, December 2008 – Catie wound up in the hospital with a major asthma episode.
3.) Third visit, March 2009 – My mother-in-law fell in the grocery store & wound up in the ER with a concussion.

So, you know, by comparison, Dave and I being sick is not a huge deal. It could be worse. Lord knows it has been in the past.

But, since I’m feeling cruddy and hacking up a lung here, let me leave you with this (short, less than a minute) video of Catie telling the story of the 3 Little Pigs. Because it cracks me up everytime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLXTLI0otYw

You can also hear just how awful my voice is. It’s totally hot, right? Blargh.

Halloween round-up

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Forgive the quick entry, I only have a few minutes to type this up.

1. My in-laws are coming today! Catie is super-excited and keeps saying, “Grandma and Grandpa Roger are coming to see ME!” With her hand pressed to her chest for extra “ME!” emphasis. Yes, sweetie, they are. And now excuse Mommy while she panics and tries to clean the whole house from top to bottom.

2. I’m not doing NaBloPoMo this year. I thought it was fun in previous years, but with the visit from my in-laws and my entire family coming for Thanksgiving, there’s just no way on earth that I’m going to have time.

3. Halloween was so much fun! We went over to Cat & Tony’s neighborhood so the kids could trick-or-treat together. Catie had so much fun getting to hang out with her cousins, I think she’ll be talking about it until next Halloween.

And since I have to get to my last-minute frantic clean-up-a-thon, here are some of my favorite pictures from Halloween. The whole set is here.

Catie the dinosaur

Elizabeth the cowgirl & Catie the dinosaur

this picture makes me laugh every time I look at it

Elizabeth as a cowgirl riding a unicorn

Trick-or-Treat

Elizabeth in her chariot-wagon, Catie running alongside

Hey, Orkut? You suck.

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Fair warning: prepare to be outraged.

I don’t know how many of y’all who use Flickr have had this problem, but here’s the thing. Occasionally I get people who add me as their contact who speak very little English, and who have no pictures available in their photostream. If I ignore it, a couple of days later, I’ll get a Flickr message like this (honest to God, I’m copying & pasting one of the emails I’ve gotten):

Catie I found very beautiful, and I can use the photos of her. Please think well. The Catie is the most perfect little girl that I ever knew, I am photographer.
I found this very beautiful little girl, and in my opinion should be a model. She is simply nice, beautiful, sweet … I would like to know her better, and thus allowing me to use the photos of his daughter.
Many people use the photos of her daughter in ORKUT, if you want I can help it.
Kisses, good week and good night.
-name removed-

The first time I got one of these, I wondered what the hell Orkut was, so I did some investigating. Turns out, it’s a social networking site, sort of like Facebook or MySpace, but the users are predominantly in Brazil and India. It’s run by Google, and appears to be a legitimate website from what I can tell.

So, whenever this comes up, I always respond that NO, you may NOT use the photos of my daughter, and then I block them so they can’t see my Flickr pictures anymore. Lately, I’ve been even more proactive: if someone adds me as a contact and they have a vaguely foreign-sounding name and nothing in their photostream? I block them. No questions asked, they’re just gone.

Then, the other day I got an email from someone on Flickr with a link to a profile on Orkut. I followed the link and found this.

WTF?!?!!
(Click to enlarge.)

Somebody set up an account, claiming that they’re me, using my daughter’s picture as their profile pic, and acting all outraged that people are using Catie’s pictures on Orkut. And they add that “Bianca and Daph” (who??) are the only people authorized to use Catie’s pictures. What the ever-loving eff?!?!!

First, I reported this person to Orkut for identity theft. Then I started doing some investigating. Orkut is sort of like Facebook in that you can post a message called a “scrap” (sort of like writing on someone’s wall in FB). I left a message that was borderline hysterical, sort of “who the hell is this? You’re using my daughter’s picture and acting as though you’re me online? TAKE THIS PICTURE DOWN IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND ARRRRGGGGHHH HULK SMASH!!!” Or, you know, something to that effect. I’m pretty sure I dropped an f-bomb. (Which probably has less effect on someone who speaks poor English.)

This is the response I got.

No I have not got it very badly and I really apologize, is that I see many people using photos of her daughter Catie and I decided to do this to stop using his daughter, if you are aware already found 5 girls who wore the daughter and she stopped using because I asked, even though I did wrong I have done something right, sorry about that

So… you’re just pretending to be me in order to protect my kid? Um, sorry, but NO. If you think someone is doing something unseemly with pictures of a stranger’s child, wouldn’t you, I don’t know, try to CONTACT the parent of the child whose pictures are being used illicitly? Maybe?

I took this screenshot & posted it on Flickr, and the person immediately contacted me and asked me to remove it. HELL NO, jackass. I responded and said that I would not be removing it because I wanted to warn the other parents I know to be on the lookout for this. Meanwhile, the profile appears to have been removed, so yay for that, I guess.

So, now I’m left with questions:
1. Why on earth would anyone have any interest in these pictures? It’s not as though they’re naked pictures of her that could be construed as p0rnographic. I don’t post anything like that. What’s the motivation for this? A quick search on Flickr shows that I am definitely not the only one having this problem. But why? What’s the purpose? Do I need to be worried that some Brazilian child sex ring is going to come to North Carolina looking for my daughter? (That’s what my mom thinks. She advised me to shut down my Flickr account AND my blog when she heard about this. And Mom, I love you, but no.)

2. What do I do now? I don’t want to set my Flickr account private, because then I won’t be able to use the pictures on my blog. How do I keep this from happening in the future? Do I stick a watermark on my photos? Would that even help? I mean, if they’re going to steal so blatantly, I doubt a watermark would be much of a deterrent.

3. How do I use my tiny little space on the Internet to try to make this stop? I doubt I can make huge websites like Flickr or Google listen to me. I’d love it if Flickr had some sort of option to block incoming links, so I could have an option that blocks anybody who’s clicking over from Orkut. But I doubt they’re going to make a major site design overhaul based on the complaints of a few people. So, what to do? I know some of y’all are way more clever than I am with this type of thing. If you have any ideas, please share them.

new camera! Squee!

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I’ve been frustrated with our point-and-shoot camera for a while. It seems like I’d only get one good photo out of every 10 or so that I would take. Most of them were blurry, or washed-out, or the shutter speed was so slow that I’d totally miss whatever great face Catie was making at that exact moment. So I decided it was time to upgrade.

So, I just got my very first-ever DSLR camera. It’s a Canon Rebel XSi. I think I’m in love.

making out with my new camera
(I would’ve slipped it the tongue, but I’m afraid it doesn’t like to get wet.)

The camera arrived yesterday, and I swear it was like Christmas morning for me when the UPS guy rang my doorbell. I sat on the kitchen floor to open the box, I couldn’t wait. And since my muse was napping on the couch, I did what I had to do for my first picture.

first picture with my new camera

She didn’t even stir.

Later, when she woke up, we had more fun with the camera.

just woke up from her nap

Then we went outside to take pictures of the flowers in the yard. It’s an odd season here, some flowers are still blooming, and some plants are definitely making their autumn transition.

flowers in the backyard
My mom says these flowers are annuals. Too bad, because they’re pretty, but I have no intention of re-planting anything next spring. It’ll have to be replaced with something that has a bit more longevity.

fall colors
No idea what kind of shrub this is, but I love the color gradation on the leaves.

maple tree in fall
Sigh. Maple tree. My favorite.

Then it was back to taking pictures of my kid. As usual.

happy running girl

mmm, PB&J, nom nom!

check out the pink boots

So yeah, I love it. I can’t wait to learn more about how to tweak the different settings and make my pictures fabulous. CANNOT. WAIT.

Also, I have to give a big thank you to Rick at Tiny Prints for selling his camera to me. And another thank you to Casey, without whom I wouldn’t have known that Rick was selling his camera in the first place!

a different sort of ending

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Subtitle: How Facebook F’ed Up My Day, Again

In 1999, I met a guy. His name was Stowe. He was a bouncer at a bar, but he wasn’t at all like your average bouncer. He was a big guy (6’3″), but he had sort of an intellectual, nerdy look about him. I saw him across the room and immediately liked his face. I commented to my girlfriend that I thought he was cute, and it turned out that she knew him (he was friends with her boyfriend), so she introduced me. We talked a little – it’s hard to talk in a loud bar, plus he was supposed to be working – but he asked us to hang around and go get breakfast with him after the bar closed… at 4 a.m.

My girlfriend left. I waited for him.

We started dating immediately.

The odd thing was, we started dating in July, but we both knew from the get-go that our relationship had a pre-determined shelf life. At the end of August, I was moving to Wisconsin, and he was moving to Chattanooga to go back to college. So we never officially broke up, we just ended it when we both had to leave town. We saw each other a few times over the next few years. Weekend visits here and there, that kind of thing.

During my many single, lonely years (read: before I met Dave), I would fantasize about how if only we both lived in the same town… but we never did. And really, who knows if things would’ve worked out if we did live in the same town? I kind of doubt it. We never went through any true relationship trials because there was never a chance that it would turn into anything long-term.

We’ve stayed in touch off and on over the past few years. The last time we talked, it was after I moved to North Carolina. We had an IM conversation, he mentioned that he had relatives in the Raleigh area and he might come visit me the next time he was in town visiting them. I joked that I was sure my husband would love that idea. And he talked about his car collection. I teased him for being the douchebag who was all about cars. He laughed it off. I think he liked it when I gave him a hard time like that.

The new Facebook layout has a section where they list friends who you haven’t talked to for a long time, and suggest that you get back in touch with them. I saw Stowe’s name there, so I clicked on his profile just to see what he’s been up to lately. And it turns out, he died a few months ago.

I was stunned. I saw all of these “Rest in Peace, Stowe” messages on his wall, and I was confused. I thought maybe it was some elaborate practical joke and I just didn’t get it. So I googled his name and found his obituary. I have no idea how he died. He was 35 years old.

I don’t want to get all shmoopy and romantic about an ex-boyfriend here, because I don’t think it’s appropriate. But I just wanted to use my little space here to say: Stowe, you were a really great guy. I honestly did love you for a tiny moment there. I’m sorry I wasn’t better about staying in touch more often. And I’m really going to miss you. I hope heaven has a chess club.