I should either feel that i have failed as a parent that my kids are boobytrapping the house, or i should be proud of their skills at home security. Who am I kidding I am so proud.
Photos
Mojitos Box is Open
I keep forgetting we have fresh mint in our garden. Finally M reminded me while we were out so i could remember to get fresh Lime and club soda so I could try making Mojitos. We love them and it is one of the drinks i have been meaning to try at home. Our first two test drinks were both pretty good.
That means that Pandora / Mojitos box is open. I am told and can independently confirm we have a good supply of mint in the garden so my only limiting factor is how many limes we have on hand.
Now I have a good use for our Tiki glasses. Next up is trying to make Pims now that i got real British lemonade.
W Sister Shorts – Selfie’s
I opened my photo stream and noticed selfie’s from my iPad. The problem was I didn’t take them. It seems that my youngest got a hold of it and took a bunch of photos while i was at work.
My Return to Facebook
It was a nice long run. Since the beginning of 2017 through the middle of September I might have logged onto Facebook all of a handful of times. During that time I might not have posted anything. I don’t count blog posting since I write them and it auto magically gets posted to my twitter and Facebook feeds without me logging in.
This week all that changed. I started wading back into what sometimes feels like the cesspool of Facebook. Why after calling it “sometimes cesspool” like would I return? I did not really want to. My not using Facebook has taught me a few things. For one sharing photos to a limited number of people is challenging. I have an iPhone. My wife has an iPhone. My parents have an iPhone. My in-laws do not. If I want to share photo and use iCloud, I have to call them and let them know they should turn on their iPad to look for an update. That is a technology fail. Finding a tool or service that a large number of people use is hard. Getting people to start using the tool because you want to share information is challenging. Especially if that’s the only reason they’re going to use it is for you. Using Facebook I lower the barrier to use significantly since many people are using it already.
Facebook’s not quite secure however. Photos on Facebook aren’t out on the Internet for everyone to see however they are also not securely locked away that virtually no one sees. That basically became my trade-off. For the past nine months or so I haven’t really shared what’s going on and I was ok with that. I am not self-centered enough to assume that everyone that is a friend of mine on Facebook is missing photographs and updates about what’s going on in my life. There are some family and friends that are interested and are not set up technologically to connect in other ways. Those people I do miss the connection.
That brings us to why I’m back. During roughly the same time I was radio silent on Facebook a lot is been going on in the “real world”. When not posting on social media I could relatively easily meet up with someone for dinner or an afternoon to hang out to catch up. I could talk to someone in the family who talks to someone to pass on details of whats going on, etc. In the near future that will change a lot. Starting on or around new year we will be moving. There will be significantly more distance between close friends and family and where were going.
We are moving to London. Yes I said it correctly, London England. If you have read five paragraphs in to this blog post you earn the right to be one of the first (ok maybe twelveth) to know that were moving overseas.
I plan to write a lot more about our planning, reasons why were going, and the experience in the future. This post really is about my return to Facebook. Why I returned is directly related to our move overseas. The way I’ve been updating friends and family limited who got photos of my kids and what was going on in the world with us. Becoming more “normal and oversharing on Facebook will be away for those close to us to know what’s going on since will be thousands of miles further away.
I still have issues with Facebook’s facial recognition of photographs. Especially of my kids. On the other hand my wife does post photos so the exposure is already there. Commenting about what we are doing goes to my blog that is completely open on the Internet. I do that deliberately however I know I need to be mindful of what goes up there since there is no restrictions.
The other aspect reading about what other people are up to and having quick discussions with soon to be faraway people. The challenge is doing that while weeding through all the other stuff on Facebook. The other stuff being political commentary, news articles, etc. That’s what drove me away in the first place.
In the end that’s the price I I am willing to pay to have some more level of connection with those friends and family. Because of that Facebook wins. I am back. I might not be happy about it however I’m glad to have a medium where I can share what’s going on in our lives while we are 5000 or so miles away.
Amelia’s Photo Shoot
Today we took Amelia to a photographer for her 1 year birthday photo shoot and cake smash. We did the same thing for Teagan last year and we loved the photos. For Amelia we went to the same photographer (Amanda Saldarelli Photography) we used for Teagan. We also used Amanda for our holiday cards. We have been very happy with her photos so we were excited to see what she could do with Amelia.
Going into the photo shoot we had a feeling Amelia would be more challanging. She has a “slightly” more demanding personality than Teagan. I didn’t stay for much of the shoot. We first took some family shots with both girls and then I took Teagan away so Amelia could get some personal time to get her photos.
Teagan and I ended up at a Starbucks nearby. She was happy since she got a snowman cookie. I was happy since i got a cappuchino since i hadn’t had coffee at all that day till then. After a little one on one time with Teagan we headed back to see how Amelia and MC were fairing. I got back in time to see the cake smash. Amelia at first was super excited to see cake. That was until she touched it. Then it was like we poured nasty goo on her hands because she got very upset. Teagan on the other hand had a blast at her smash. So much so that we can proudly say Teagan’s smash photo (one of our personal favorate photo of the shoot) is hanging on Amanda’s studeo wall.
All is not lost however since the first teaser photos of Amelia from the shoot looked fantastic. We are patiently waiting for more.
The rest of the day was a nice day at home. The girls slept in the car on the ride home but then wouldn’t take regular naps afterward. They were tired by the time it was bedtime. MC & I were also pretty tired too. I am a huge fan of nap time and I think MC is too.
Family Photo Shoot
Today I took the day off because we had an appointment for a photo shoot with the girls. We found a fantastic photographer (Amanda Saldarelli Photography) last year that we used for Teagan’s first year photos. We booked her again this year for a smaller session for photos we are going to use for our holiday photos. We went to the grounds of a museum near Great Neck. I didn’t even know that place existed but it was very nice backdrop for our photos. Thankfully Teagan survived the car drip without getting sick. The past month or so we have completed several trips without having to give her any medication so we have our fingers crossed that she is over her car sickness phase. As recently as our Maine trip in August she had trouble so we very happy she is doing well traveling.
Both girls were awake and in a good mood for the session. With two kids that young you have to be grateful for that. Besides Teagan running around a lot the session went well. We are hoping we got some really good photos.
Besides the photo session the day was generally uneventful day at home playing with the kids. It was nice to have a 3 day weekend.
iLife 2009
I have been using iPhoto as my photo editing and archiving software of choice for several years now, and although it isn’t perfect it is the best that I have found. Earlier this week I got iLife 09 specifically for iPhoto 09. The two main features that got my curiosity peaked is the faces and GPS features. With my iPhone I am capturing the GPS coordinates of all my camera photos so the GPS feature in iPhoto seems cool. I am still a bit gun shy to post GPS coordinates on all my photos to Flickr, but for me to have them and publish to my friends is cool.
The really interesting feature in iPhoto 09 is Faces. That is what is hopefully worth the cost of the software. I have been tagging and labeling my entire photo album for a while. It is always a work in progress. With the Faces function I can label all my photos in one shot. As I write this post I am letting iPhoto scan my library to look for faces. Hopefully it will be easy to label after that.
The one downside I have with iPhoto is that all the photo detail (EXIF) data is not stored in the photo. That means if I export a photo it won’t have any tagged details that I put in iPhoto. Since I am a fan of data portability I don’t like that. Since I have started using iPhoto I keep a copy of all photos I put into iPhoto in a separate folder in case I have problems with my iPhoto files. I am glad I did this since I already have damaged my iPhone DB once and had to restore a several months old version. Without my regular backup I would have been out of luck.
So far the new version of the app looks decent, but I am not so sure if it is worth the cost? Only time will determine that.