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Robots are Freaky

Robotic babies and toddlers
the “Kissinger” could be just the love bug needed to bridge human-robotic relations

Looking up to the sky from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden

It’s hard for me to believe that in a few months I’ll be married to Mike for 5 years. My wedding was unbelievably better than I thought it would be, but here I’m going to discuss one of the lovely events that took place before my wedding – my bachelorette party in Brooklyn.

I lived in Brooklyn for a combined total of 3 years, but those three years impacted me more than my 4 years in college. I felt it only natural to hold the bachelorette party in Brooklyn after having lived in Florida for 8 months because I still felt such a strong connection to the friends and places I got to know during my time living and working in NYC.

Let’s go a little further back to when I was working at Forbes. I met a CSS wiz that was getting married in a few months, and she asked me to go to her bachelorette party. There were a few things that happened at her party that impacted my notion of the golden rules of what not to do at my bachelorette.

a) Don’t impose expenses on your guests, especially if they don’t know ahead of time.
b) While we were waiting to eat our dinner in Times Square, we saw a different veil-clad bachelorette scream out of the top of a limo’s sunroof “I’M GETTING MARRIED, WhoooooWHOOOO!” while waving around a gigantic dildo. My first thought was ay, she’s so silly! Second thought was, that will not be me.

Here was the itinerary for my bachelorette:
1) Picnic in in Park Slope’s Prospect Park (complete with white wine and Hello Kitty picnic ware).
2) Walk around the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens (lilacs and cherry blossoms on a sunny spring day, does it get any better?!)
3) Tea and Coffee at the Tea Lounge
4) Dinner at a French Restaurant called Quercy
5) Belgian Ale at a friendly neighborhood bar
6) Electronica show with my sister in Williamsburg (where did we go again? I don’t remember, but we danced a hell of a lot!)

I made it clear that nobody was required to go to all the events. People were free to show up and attend what they found interesting or what was convenient for them to go to. Aside from my sister and good friend Liz, who bravely stood by my side for most or all of the events, most people just went to 2 or 3. Did I tell you that my Mom and Grandma went to half the events too? I dig older ladies, it’s true. It was cool, and perfect, and worked out well.

What I didn’t get. I didn’t get advice about dildos or fishnet stockings from a strange middle-aged saleslady. I didn’t get grinded by a stripper with a sock in his underwear. I didn’t get a suitcase full of sex toys or wave a dildo from the roof of a stretch limo. I didn’t wear a veil or tiara while handing out condoms or chocolates to strangers. Most of those things either weren’t me or reeked of college silliness. A woman I worked with in Florida who thought she was cooler than cool said that she needed to show up to my bachelorette with her friends and “save it”. Reality TV show in the making or something like that. Bitch, please.

I was a satisfied bachelorette, doing what I thought was fun and totally me with a bunch of people I loved. Ladies, that’s what I believe you should do for your own bachelorette. Be who you are, be considerate of your friends and family.

Finally, if most of you love doing the things I didn’t do, more power to you. Just don’t tell me I didn’t live it up!

I have a map of San Francisco circa 1963 hanging above my living room fireplace. This map is very sentimental to me, as my father passed away recently and I sorted through all the maps he saved the last time I was at my parent’s place. I became attached to this particular map due to a few things:

• The San Francisco of the 1960’s just feels romantic and wild and new to me. Call me a fan of beat literature.
• My Dad’s handwriting is in the corner, detailing a couple of restaurants he wanted to check out.
• Every time I visited San Francisco Dad was very interested in all the details.

One of the restaurants that is listed in the corner of the map is “The Golden Spike”. I decided to look it up online and it turns out Dad probably meant “The Gold Spike”, a family-style Italian restaurant that closed its doors in 2006.

The restaurant was named after the last spike driven into the transcontinental railroad across the United States. According to the National Park Service, the Golden Spike Ceremony took place in 1869. One side of the spike bore the message “May God continue the unity of our country as the railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world,” likely a reference due at least in part to the fact that the civil war was still so fresh in everyone’s memory.

Part 2: The Golden Record

My feelings on staying at home for the first two years of my daughter’s life are something I have no regrets about. There are things that I learned and experienced that I treasure more than anything. However, I recently got the feeling that it’s time to move on a bit with my personal ambitions, so my little girl will soon be going to school 3 full days a week. I am revamping my websites, refreshing my memory on technical details, looking for contract work, and thinking more about how I need to earn money and want to exercise my mind again.

I’m a fan of Jessica Hische, and saw that she recently read a book from A List Apart. I checked out their current offerings, and decided on a purchase of the CSS3/HTML5 ebooks as a refresher and to check if I know what I’m talking about. I’m still at the beginning of the CSS3 book, but I just want to highlight a section where the author Dan Cederholm makes a great reference to the Golden Record on Voyager spacecraft. In case you don’t know, the Golden Record is a gold-plated copper disk that has artifacts about the human race encoded on it for the aliens that might be outside our solar system. It also has cool graphical instructions on how to play it. So, Dan said that web design is like the golden record, because you create something and you don’t know who’s going to view it. It’s a message in a bottle. Maybe the person will have the right browser version to see what you created, or maybe not.

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“If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity,” she said, “I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade.” from Jane McGonigal’s video Gaming Can Make a Better World

Leila can’t eat veggies yet. Not unless they’re pureed. I thought felt food toys might be a cute way to teach her the names of some foods.

It’s never too early to get my kid hooked on junk food.

Felt Ravioli works for me.

Cute little anime egg tart.

Breakfast, Fruit, Pizza

The Cranberry Sauce kills me, and you’re selling a pattern?

Simple gift-giving involves giving something that is needed, but with extra meaning or a little flair. Even though I’ve known Mike for a very long time, I only recently found out that oatmeal raisin cookies are one of his favorites! So I told him I’d bake him a batch for Valentine’s day, and he said he’d cook me dinner.

Sausage and Linguine dinner. There was a *lot* of garlic! :)

Taking photos of food has made me more curious about presentation in general. How often is food morphed and enhanced into something delectable via photoshop and good lighting? Hard to tell. The result was me getting fed up with my perfectionist placement of cookies on a tray, and I just started snapping photos around the kitchen without moving anything. Here’s the result with a little explanation.

Leila’s sippy cup next to a ficus plant I bought last year made a nice contrast. She still needs to master drinking water, as it usually ends up all over her outfit. The wine bottles are usually kept next to the spice cabinet, as they are usually consumed within week.

I don’t have the time to catalog all of the drawers and cabinets, but almost every one in my kitchen is slightly askew. No matter how many times I close all of the drawers, they all just pop open or don’t line up properly. This glass-front cabinet is particularly naughty, as the one door always gets a bit in the way when I’m making coffee. How did I not notice when we were looking to buy our home? The kitchen is imperfect, but it definitely has personality.

To the right, just a bunch of notes and cards on the fridge.

Finally, and I suppose randomly, most parents will tell you that kids love to play with anything that isn’t actually a toy. Here we have Leila with a hard-boiled egg. No doubt its odd movement when pushed around is what kept her amused for 10 minutes.

I recently took a trip to Vashon Island to see Karen, one of my former coworkers. Karen offered to show us the best of the island, and I took her up on the offer.
I didn’t know much about Vashon, except for 3 things:

1) It’s very rural

2) You have to take a ferry to get on the island

3) Alex Borstein lives there

One of the highlights was a trip to the Monkey Tree Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant in the heart of Vashon’s small downtown. If you read the reviews on Yelp, there are lots of complaints about having to wait in order to get a table. This is true, but to be honest I find this to be a phenomenon with almost any good vegetarian restaurant, from East Coast to West. My theory is that there just aren’t a lot of really good vegetarian restaurants, which very simply leads to a bottleneck whenever it’s prime time for eating.

The waiter really cared about us. For example, I ordered the cherry soda. He said, I just want to warn you, it’s sweet. That’s cool, I said. He said, just checking, but it’s sweet, like cherry life savers sweet. OK, got it, I’ll take it! We had a theory that one other customer ordered it once and gave this poor guy a hard time.

I knew what I was going to order instantly. The fig and gorgonzola sandwich. Here it is:

Fig and gorgonzola sandwich

It was good. It showed thought on the part of the staff to try and come up with a good sandwich. However, there weren’t enough figs in the sandwich to balance out the cheese. (Could it be because fresh figs are expensive and were possibly out of season?) Gorgonzola is a very powerful cheese, so leaving it as the main flavor without other flavors to properly balance things out can be unpleasantly overpowering. But everything was very fresh, the salad crisp, and the soda sweet.

View from western edge of the island – thanks for the photo Mike!