By Julie

Today I read about this violent hate crime against an Asian guy in nearby San Dimas. Kevin and I lived there for about a year before the kids were born. It was a very homogeneous place. Aside from the employees at the one single decent Chinese fast food place in town, I rarely saw another Asian face. There was a passable coffee house where we hung out along with the other college kids, but the jeering from the loud drunk faux cowboys who went line-dancing at the bar upstairs sometimes made it a less than pleasant experience. By the time Alex was born we were living elsewhere, thank goodness, and when we started house-hunting we didn't even bother looking in San Dimas. In my ideal town, no ethnic group would be in the majority, and while Walnut looks like it's headed to become yet another Asian 'burb, at least for now it's still fairly diverse.


Here's a picture of the nursery as it looks now. Kevin has installed most of the chair rail (slim piece of wood in the middle of the wall) and base moulding (wide piece of wood at the bottom of the wall). He did an amazing job. Trust me when I say the picture doesn't do it justice.

Today was going to be my last day at work before going on leave, but I called in sick. I spent most of the day lying on the sofa in a daze. I figured it was my body's way of getting me some rest before having to deal with the exhaustion of labor, which incidentally has not started yet.

Labels: home improvement, lusers, news, pregnancy, work

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By Julie

The nursery currently looks like this. No flooring yet. At my doctor's appointment yesterday, I was told it's still going to be a little while. I guess the baby is waiting for Daddy to install the flooring in her room.


Meanwhile, here are some seeds that I'm sprouting in my kitchen window: bell peppers, jalapenos, tomatoes, cantaloupe, and corn. They're all growing like crazy, especially the corn. It's as if the seeds can feel spring just outside the window. I'll need to transplant them outside very soon, just not sure where yet. There is no spot safe from Daisy in the backyard. She likes to eat plants, vomit, then lick up the vomit. I wish I were joking.

I would consider planting them in the front yard, but our nosy neighbors (the ones that steal flowers off my rose bushes) have an unhealthy interest in everything we grow in our front yard, and if they see crops growing, I suspect they'll either steal the fruits of my labor or report us to city hall.

Other than the delight of seeing my crops growing I have little reason to like spring. Right now I have a giant wad of tissues stopping up my nostrils because they won't stop bleeding, and the reason they're bleeding is because I've been taking Sudafed nonstop, and the reason I've been taking Sudafed is because I can't take Claritin, and the reason I wish I could take Claritin is because my allergies are driving me INSANE.


By the way, here's a picture of the belly. It's not a video, but it's more bare skin than I've shown in a while...


... and here's a picture of Kevin getting some fun in before the baby comes. He didn't get shot until several matches into his day, which is quite good considering this is his first time paintballing.

I'm officially out of the office as of the 24th whether or not the baby comes, and Kevin's starting paternity leave as of the 25th. Yay! That's only 9 more days for me and 10 more days for him!

Labels: allergies, games, gardening, lusers, pets, pregnancy, work

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By Julie

Even though Alex gets his school picture taken in October and we receive his portraits only a couple of months later, every year it takes forever for the class portrait to get delivered. This year we finally got it on Friday. I've been pondering it curiously ever since. There are 17 kids shown. Alex says there are actually 19 kids in his class, one having enrolled later in the year, so I think the last one must have missed picture day.

The racial breakdown of the class is hard to miss. Kevin chuckled over the fact that there's only one obviously white kid in Alex's entire class. Counting Alex and a few other mixed kids, I guess you can say there are 3.0 white kids in the class. The rest are about 1/3 Hispanic and 2/3 Asian or Pacific Islander. This year there are no black kids in his class.

What I noticed though was the gender breakdown. It's about 50/50 male-female, and as I learned back in January, if you invite all your 2nd grade classmates to your birthday party, you can safely assume no one of the opposite sex will show up. Even though Alex sometimes mentions the girls in his class when he recounts his day, for the most part he plays only with the boys. At age 7 or 8 these kids are already self segregating by gender.

The reason this is on my mind is because they're only 6 months away from becoming 3rd graders. That was the age I found out many of my classmates already knew about the birds and the bees. Here's how it happened: I asked my mom for a box to take to school to turn into a mailbox for my Valentine's Day cards, and when I took the empty tampon box she gave me, several of the kids laughed and made interesting gestures. Despite both knowing very little English and nothing about sex until that point, I quickly figured out what they were talking about.

Kevin thinks there must have been an extraordinarily large number of younger siblings in my 3rd grade class as the only reason he first heard about sex at about the same time was because of his same-aged cousin who had an 11-year-old brother. Either way, time is of the essence. We've got an 8-year-old son whose closest friends all have older siblings, and we want to take advantage of the fact that he's still willing to talk to us about anything, including stories about stuff the girls at school keep doing that have way more subtext than he realizes.

Back when I was a kid I would have loved a book about sex, love, and relationships as I knew no adult was going to tell me anything worth knowing, and fortunately there are plenty of kid-friendly books on these topics now. But frankly, now that I'm a parent, I think it's going to take more than a book to do this right.

For starters, Kevin is wondering whether he should stop skipping over certain parts of the Piers Anthony book he's been reading to Alex at bedtime, stuff like his eyes lingered on her alluring curves -- excuse me while I giggle madly... okay, I'm done -- because including them might draw out questions from Alex. Hmmm.

In other news, I discovered to my great annoyance that someone has stolen our code and posted it on this website: http://senibudaya.blogspot.com. From clues in the source code I'm guessing it's a guy, and he seems to have done it sometime ago as the stolen code resembles Juvin.com circa 2005. So I sent the following message to Blogger, hoping they would contact the user:

Subj: Blogspot user stole our content

The blogger at http://senibudaya.blogspot.com/ is hosting our content on his site without our permission. This includes the Flickr badge as well as other files referenced in his source code.

We have always had a clear copyright notice posted on our site http://juvin.com, i.e. (copyright symbol) 1998-2008. We have allowed individuals to republish our content twice in the past. This was not one of them.

We request that our content be taken off this site immediately.

Blogger replied with a very long and tedious message that began with

Hi there,

Thank you for your note. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office website: http://lcWeb.loc.gov/copyright/ ) and other applicable intellectual property laws, which may include removing or disabling access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity.

To file a notice of infringement with us, you must provide a written communication (by fax or regular mail, not by email) that sets forth the items specified below. Please note that pursuant to that Act, you may be liable to the alleged infringer for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees) if you materially misrepresent that you own an item when you in fact do not. Indeed, in a recent case (please see
http://www.onlinepolicy.org/action/legpolicy/opg_v_diebold/ for more information), a company that sent an infringement notification seeking removal of online materials that were protected by the fair use doctrine was ordered to pay such costs and attorneys fees. The company agreed to pay over $100,000. Accordingly, if you are not sure whether material available online infringes your copyright, we suggest that you first contact an attorney.

So the burden of proof is on us, and if we can't adequately prove it, we might have to pay the loser attorney fees??? What the hell?!

Incidentally, the two people that I had allowed to use content off our website were both authors. One wrote a book on fortune cookies and cited my fortune cookies page (it's no longer up), and another was writing a college textbook about the Internet with a chapter about blogs. They even showed me how they were going to use the content so that I knew they were going to present it in a professional way.

I guess what bothers me other than the fact that this loser didn't bother asking for permission is that he's totally mangling our content by presenting it on that hideous page. It's as if he was trying to learn HTML and failing very badly. Someone get this guy an HTML for Dummies book, please!

Labels: books, kids, lusers, parenting

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By Julie

For a good part of last year we kept finding other people's dog droppings on our lawn or driveway every week or two. Finally about a month ago I got fed up. Instead of cleaning up the droppings, I grabbed a broom and swung furiously until they all ended up in the middle of the street, and I asked Kevin to do the same if he should see more. I wanted to send a clear message to the perpetrators, that if I should ever catch them in the act, I will take my broom to both them and their stupid dogs.

Then this morning Kevin caught sight of more dog droppings, except they were in our neighbor's driveway on the other side of the street. I should go lend the neighbors my broom.

My doctor's office called with some bad news. My one-hour glucose tolerance test came back a little high, so I'll have to take the three-hour test to make sure I don't have pregnancy-onset diabetes. For the uninitiated, the three-hour test goes something like this: I'll have to follow a stupid diet for a few days, fast the night before the test, then drive to the hospital first thing in the morning through evil traffic, drink a nasty glucose solution, and try not to vomit or black out while they take several samples of my blood over the course of three long hours, leaving scary track marks all over my arms that make the coworkers wonder.

I had to take this test the previous two times I was pregnant, so now I'm three for three. Maybe the epidurals have done strange things to my memory, but I do believe this test is worse than giving birth.

Labels: lusers, pregnancy

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By Julie

Today as I was waiting for my lunch at the counter in a diner, an elderly woman sat down next to me. After she placed her order, she watched intently as I sent a text message with my cell phone.

"Is that an iPod?" she asked. No, it's my cell phone, I explained.

The conversation went on longer than I would have liked, with her playing the part of the self-righteous luddite, demanding to know why there's so much unnecessary technology in the world, and me being respectful to my elders and trying not show my annoyance.

She owns a business, she bragged, and she still banks the old-fashioned way - by walking into the building. She doesn't want a computer because of hackers. She doesn't want cable television when her TV antenna works just fine. Yada yada yada.

I was polite. I didn't tell her that evil hackers wouldn't be interested in her computer; they would much rather hack into her bank's servers. The only thing I did allow myself to say was that many municipalities do not allow installation of unsightly TV antennas. She muttered that wasn't the case in HER neighborhood. That's when I bade her good bye.

I consider myself to be a reluctant technophile. I don't automatically lust for every new gadget on the market. Heck, I don't have cable TV OR an iPod. But I do embrace technologies that obviously enhance my life. (I LOVE my cell phone!!!) What annoyed me about this woman was her outright rejection of individual differences, her ignorant belief that there is no need for new-fangled things like computers, and most of all, her lack of reciprocation in the manners department.

I mean, really, old people these days are SO rude.

Labels: lusers, toys

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