rit

What do we have here? Two blog entries in one week. I think I deserve a cookie.

As I mentioned, we were looking forward to going to Imagine RIT this weekend, and it did not disappoint. Pat was able to take off from his exhibiting duties for part of the day, and we got to have lunch with him and walk around for a bit with someone who knows the campus very well. I am notoriously good at getting lost and have a horrible sense of direction, so even though I am at RIT multiple days of the week and really should know my way around by now, I still find myself bumbling around, even when I have a map in my hand. Luckily for Greta and me, there are enough fun things to do in every square foot of that festival, my crap navigation skills are moot.

Highlights include sharing a lunch table with some RIT old timers and hearing some great RIT history, listening to some nerdy (I use this adjective in a completely affectionate manner) college boys singing an a cappella version of "Fat Bottomed Girls," watching a quidditch game, professing my love for the RIT publication Reporter to an exhibitor for the publication and getting a free Reporter t-shirt, watching Pat sort of diss YNN's Getaway Guy, getting a photo with YNN's Dan Eaton, and seeing Greta's maturity and good sense when we went to the area where there were a bunch of bounce house things and when G saw the lines, she said, "Those lines are too long. Let's go do something else." I love seeing glimpses of sensibility in my child.

An honorable mention goes to Greta's heavy petting session with some blue cotton candy.

In case you don't believe we met thee Dan Eaton, here's your proof.

As we were walking up to the YNN table, Mike O'Brien (commonly known as the Getaway Guy) gave us a big hello, and Pat didn't recognize him and said, "We're here to see Dan." Haa. Maybe you had to be there.

Here's a picture from the quidditch game. Although they didn't fly, they did use brooms.

Overall, it was a great day and lived up to even my lofty expectations.

It was such a nice day with Greta it felt like that was my Mother's Day, but then we had special Mother's Day plans as well. We went to see my parents and went out for linner, or dunch  if you prefer, at Elderberry Pond. It was Greta's first sort of long meal out at a restaurant sans crayons. She had some ants in her pants, but she didn't try to set the place on fire or anything like that, so she gets points for that.

Ooh, it's getting late and I will hopefully have another update tomorrow, but I will leave it at this for now and just mention that after some friendly nudging by Pat Reed and Taryn, I feel like it is finally time to get back to the book project and start phase one of editing, which means I have to start getting up early again. So I bid you adieu. Night!

Fran

Oh, hello. I can't help but notice that my formal favorite outlet has gone down the crapper. Sorry about that. 2011 has been unpleasantly busy and just, well, unpleasant. The last thing I want to do at night, when I finish work around 11 PM or so, is collect my thoughts and write a blog. Also, the internal narrator I've had for the last 8 years or so has left the building. (Seriously, usually it's like an episode of Parker Lewis Can't Lose in my head.) So even on the rare occasion I've had time to write, I've had nothing to say. So there's that. But the last two weeks have finally calmed down, and while my internal narrator is still at large, I think I have enough things going on I can piece something together.
 
Birthday parties galore. We had two really fun parties for Greta, and there are some fantastic pictures that I really need to post somewhere to share. For Greta's friend party, her favor bags contained whoopee cushions, fake mustaches, and nerd glasses. Seeing the nerdy, mustachioed kids having fun was the highlight of my life. So cute. What is not so cute is that we have six kid birthday activities in the month of May. Ridiculous. The party we went to this past Sunday lasted entirely too long and there was a clown—a very rude clown. He bounced back and forth between hitting on me and insulting me. He insulted everyone at the party, I think. He called certain kids stupid and ugly. He told inappropriate jokes about religion, politics, mothers-in-law, and death...not to mention boogers and farts (the latter of which are usually hilarious), and his delivery was atrocious. Also, he had the worst case of dry mouth I have ever seen. He was literally frothing at the mouth. It was so...uncomfortable. Lesson, kids? Don't hire a clown under any circumstances...unless it's a nice, normal, good clown. (Is that an oxymoron?)
 
Greta had her first semi-legitimate modeling gig! When I say semi-legitimate, I don't mean like in college when you'd get $50 and someone would photograph your feet for three hours (not that I did that). I mean like in the sense that it was just for fun and no money was exchanged. Anyway, a friend of a friend was looking for kiddo models, and Greta had the opportunity to pose for her. The photographer, Hannah Betts, was great, and we can't wait to see the finished product at the opening of the show later this month. She posted a sneak peak of the show on her blog, which happens to be a photograph of Greta! I am SO excited. Does Greta make a great mad face or what? I love it.
 
This past weekend Pat helped make history by playing in the world's largest dodgeball game at RIT. Greta and I got to cheer from the stands, and it was quite a sight to be seen (and quite a smell to be smelled) with more than 2,000 playing for about two hours. It was quite impressive. There is a really cool video of it here. I love watching the time-lapse video of how the sides moved in waves. It was even cooler in person.
 
Okay, I guess I'll leave it at one more thing for tonight. This Saturday is Imagine RIT, aka my favorite festival in Rochester. Pat is going to be an exhibitor again this year, and he's been working like crazy to prepare. No exaggeration, he came home at 1:30 AM two nights ago and I woke up, looked at the clock, and said, "You're home early." And the sad thing is I was being sincere. The good news is I'm sure it's going to be a great exhibit and also, for Pat's hard work he, Greta, and I were all given VIP status for the festival. We get high-roller parking and get to wear fancy badges with brains on them and get to get free high-roller food from Mario's in some high-roller tent. High rollers! Woot! Woot! It's a really fun event, whether you're a high roller or not, so you should come. (I had a blast slumming it as a commoner the last three years.)
 
All right, that's it for now. I will try to upload some recent pictures soon and I've got a few more stories in my pocket. I'm sure all two readers left are thrilled.
 
Honk if you...like honking!
 
Fran

I'm back. Fran forbade me from posting. She wanted all the comment love for herself. She's tried to keep me out of this game, but I can't leave all the Pat Reed fans hangin'. 2009 is my year.

As you can plainly, see we have revamped pnf.com. It was long overdue. We launched the site in November of 2002, and we really hadn't updated the back end or look of the site until now. Ooops. Hope you like it because we are not due to update it again until March of 2016.

If you like the nerdy crap and want to know about the site development, keep reading.  If not, skip it.
I ditched the old home-grown blog platform in favor of a Drupal-based site. Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is developed and maintained by a community of thousands of developers (and it kicks @$$$$). I started messing with it about a year ago when RIT Libraries was looking for a CMS for our sites. RIT Libraries now has about 12 sites running on the Drupal platform. I am definitely partial, and when I decided to ditch the home-grown system, it was the clear pick for me. Porting the content from the old site to the new one was a bit of a biatch. We had roughly 700 blog posts and almost 6,000 comments. I had to spend several hours understanding the database differences and working on the scripts to massage and port the content. Now that it is done, I am really excited about all the possibilities. I created the custom site template. It is based on the Genesis framework. I'll be prettying it up some more over the next few days/weeks. I wrote most of the JavaScript on the site using the jQuery library. I plan on writing a lot more Ajax-y site functionality soon. I configured Drupal to work with the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. Our home-grown CMS required us to write the HTML for the posts, so this is a welcomed addition. I think that about sums up the majority of the technical aspects of the project. If anyone wants any more information on any of this stuff, please don't hesitate to get a hold of me.

The things that I am excited about:

• A stop to the daily hate mail demanding an RSS feed
• Relief from the shame and ridicule that I had to endure for the outdated site look
• The ability to easily reposition site elements
• Easier site updating
• Larger images in blog posts
• Keyword tagging
• Picture of the day
• WYSIWYG editing during blog posts

-Pat

A picture of my girl.

The Bean - 1/2/2009

Hey, at least it's something.

I got a 114 (a perfect score) on my last test for my medical terminology test. That seems a little ridiculous that it is even possible to get a 114, but I'm glad I got a perfect score. (People were doing so badly in the class that I think the professor figured she'd better start giving extra credit questions, this after about half of the class already dropped; it's definitely a challanging class.) We have a test every week and we are more than halfway through the class, and my lowest score is a 98 (which is also my only score under 100). This next test is going to kick my booty, though. I will admit that the class so far has made me think I could totally be a doctor, but once we got to the cardiac section this week, it kind of put me in my place. Super extra big props to my favorite cardiologist duo. Meanwhile, I can't even handle the Reader's Digest version of cardiology....

On Friday, Pat and I participated in a chili cook-off at RIT. I made my chili recipe, which I think is the bee's knees. Unfotunately, though, I can't say that it's award-winning chili, because someone obviously rigged the competition and awarded an inferior chili the top prize. Yeah, I'm a sore loser. Anyway, I hope the presidential election goes much better than the chili cook-off. GObama!

My brithday is Monday and I'm turning 32. I'm so not interested in getting older. Blah. I've been trying to pretend it's not happening, but my friends and family are making it hard. Pat got me/us tickets to go see Wilco in December, and I'm busting at the seams about that. I can't believe I get to see Wilco! Then Kensey, my BFF from college, also sent me a great gift - one I'm almost a little embarrassed I like so much: a variety of cleaning products from Mrs. Myers. Have you heard of Mrs. Myers Clean Day? I was giddy when I saw them. I hadn't even heard of Mrs. Myers (the day after I got the Mrs. Myers products, I saw a review of them in Cookie; Kensey's so hip), but I immediately liked what I saw and what I smelled. I love anything that makes the dreaded task of cleaning fun, which is kind of a reminder that I'm getting old, but it's a good reminder at least. Yeah, so, I opened my birthday gifts already. It's not that I need immediate gradification, I just dislike suspense and I'm not big on ceremony.

Oh, we watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It was way better than we expected. So funny.

I made a great recipe today, and I wanted to share. It came from Nancy Pearl Wannabe. It made me so happy to see my whole family enjoy it. I highly recommend you try it. Nice work, NPW! Carrots in lasagna: now I've seen everything.

Fran

We had a long but fun day today. Here's one photo of Greta from RIT's Brick City Festival. Roar!

More tomorrow. Now off to bed!

Fran

Best

Easy: We went to the Imagine RIT Festival. Pat volunteered for a while in the morning, so Greta and I were on our own to walk around. Considering how many times I've been to RIT (hundreds, literally), that campus is still quite a mystery to me. It's just SO BIG and my navigation skills are just SO BAD. Walking around with a toddler and likely getting lost (and with bad weather predicted), it really could have gone awry. It all turned out great, though. There were about a gajillion activities going on, and we ended up doing this scavenger hunt thingy, where you had to walk all over campus and find different sculptures, and for each one you found, you got a sticker. The first 500 people to finish got a nice book about the art and architecture of RIT. After I got a couple stickers, my competitiveness kicked in and we started hauling ass all over that ridiculously huge campus. Oh, we got lost, and I sweat the most I think I've sweat since giving birth, but we had a blast, and you better believe I got my free book! There are a lot of fun details from the day, but I've got to keep things brief here.

Worst

Also easy: insomnia and insomnia-related fallout. I rarely have sleep issues, and you better believe that I feel extremely thankful that this is the case. When I do have sleep issues, though, I am the biggest baby about it. If I get less than six hours of sleep, I am like a whiny zombie toddler (if you can imagine such a thing). I worked a lot of overtime last week and this weekend, and as much as i enjoy the content I work with, it is so, well, negative. I mean, reading about diseases/syndromes/conditions all day is interesting - don't get me wrong - but I guess reading all of the negativity can creep up on you. I happened to be editing a lot of our bioterrorism content in the evenings because it was the cleanest and, therefore, required the least amount of brainpower. It made the most sense, but there is something inherently wrong about reading about potential bioterrorist acts as a bedtime story. That and some other things this week kind of added up, I guess, and I feel like I barely slept last night. I'm hoping tonight will be better. I'm so tired I can only imagine I'll crash tonight. After I finish this I'll be reading something much lighter than bioterrorism; I'll just be reading about diseases in babies. Oh, awesome.

Pictures

Ah, yes, and I promised some pictures. These are nothing special, but I feel bad that the last three posts I wrote had no pictures. Oh, and the fact that the last dated pictures I have of Greta are from 4/22. I think that's the longest that girl has ever gone without having a picture of herself.

Every time I tell Greta to smile, she makes this face.

It reminds me of that Friends episode where Chandler and Monica need to get their engagement photos taken, but he makes a crazy face any time there is a camera in front of him. Until Greta figures out the smiling-for-the-camera thing, we'll be taking a lot of candid pictures, I think.

Here's our cute bunny from this morning, candid style.

Ugh, this is way longer than it was supposed to be. Baby diseases can't wait, though, so I'm out. Ooh, that reminds me, I made a dutch baby this morning for the first time (in my new cast-iron skillet). It was devine.

Fran

A few weeks ago (I know, I slept on this), our friends Tracy and Justin swung through town to say hello and see some of their Rochester friends. I had just ordered a couple prints through Happy Owl Glass, so Tracy was able to delivery them to me personally. (Screw you, United States Postal Service – joking of course.) Tracy also gave me one of her newly designed T-shirts! (It's the raccoon one - Sarah B and other haters of raccoons: you may not want to follow this link!) I love her work; I can’t get over it. It was fantastic to get out for a night and see them as well.

This past week, we had an offer we couldn’t refuse: a family photo shoot from an RIT student who wants to get into family portraiture. She happens to be a mommy of a kiddo in Greta’s class as well. She came over one night to scope out our house and to snap some individual portraits of Greta. She came back over this past weekend to take shots of the whole family (Maynard was even in one of the shots, but I’m going to guess she won’t make the cut). So far, we’ve seen the proofs from Greta’s photo shoot and we were extremely happy with what she got. We haven’t seen photo shoot round 2 yet, but we have high hopes for them. The concept she had for the family shot was right up our ally. We were so excited about making it look good that we (Pat) even painted a wall in our dining room to get the whole gestalt we were looking for. We mean business. The bad news is I don’t think the pictures will ever be posted here since she’s a photographer and they get all touchy about that kind of stuff. You will have to just assume they are awesome, and if you really want to see them, you’ll have to come visit.

Last Saturday, Greta and I kissed Pat goodbye and went to Syracuse for the evening to see some of my old high school friends. Jeremy and Carrie graciously invited us over to their huge-mungeous house for formal BBQ. I had tons of fun but realized Greta is getting to be a little bit of a two-person job. She’s really fast, really grabby, and doesn’t know her own strength. At one point, it seemed like she was trying to master the old rip-the-tablecloth-off-the-table-while-it’s-set trick. Sheesh.

Yesterday, Pat and I went to a very interesting talk at the RIT library about the “strangest book at RIT,” The book is called Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii, which I can now pronounce, thanks to the presenter. It was great to learn about this book. Without sounding totally corny, my life feels more complete knowing what I know about it now. I’ve been to some amazing talks at RIT, but this one was definitely the best.

This weekend we have some good-clean fun in store. We are planning to take Greta to the butterfly exhibit at the newly renovated Strong National Museum of Play. She is definitely ready to enjoy this exhibit. I’m just hoping she isn’t able to actually get within arm’s reach of any of the critters (see paragraph 3). We also plan to take some wagon rides (Greta’s new favorite pastime) and have the Leshers over for some parental fun. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

-Fran

A couple of months ago, I decided it was time for me to get serious about moving on from Kojak. I updated my résumé and posted it on a few job sites. Right after posting my résumé, I got an email with a job offer from a "European growing investment company looking for representative assistant in US." They told me that they would pay me a grand for a 20 hour work week. Unfortunately, they must have found someone more qualified at the last minute, because I never heard back from them after I sent them my social security and bank account numbers. That job didn’t pan out, but while I was on careerbuilder.com, I stumbled upon a website administrator posting at RIT. The position is a great match for my background. I sent my résumé in, had a couple of interviews, and I was offered the job. I start this Thursday, at RIT, as the Wallace Library Web Administrator. I am really excited to get started. The library staff seems like a great group to work with.

After almost eight years at Kodak, my last day was Friday. I think the execs must have feared that my leaving the company would have an adverse reaction from Wall Street. Immediately after my resignation, Kodak tried to recreate their image by introducing a brand new logo and announcing the release of a camera with two lenses.

My coworkers threw me a happy-hour celebration after work on Friday at the ever-so-classy Kodak Park hangout, Bathtub Billy’s. Here's a few pics.

-Pat