It Happened One Life

Dim Sum through a 9 year old lens

2010-03-05T04:30:53Z

Katie and I are driving home tonight from Tae Kwan Do, when we pass the place near us that used to do a nice Dim Sum brunch. They've been closed more than a year now, so Katie was reminiscing.

K: You know what I liked that they had? There was this one thing that had sort of wet meat in soft bread.
D: Um...wet meat?
K: Yeah. It was sweet and the outside was white sort of?
D: a roast pork bun?
K: Yeah! That was it.
D: Wet meat....ew.

Bet that description would NOT do well on a menu...

Birthday Cake

2010-01-09T14:41:40Z

Seems like every year for the past few years, I've made Ellen a crazy birthday cake layered over this snowman mold we bought around 8 years ago. Going through my iPhoto, I was actually surprised to find that i've now made 8 varieties of snowman cakes. It's odd that the only vaguely artistic mediums i seem to work in are food related (Pumpkins and cakes...). Perhaps, knowing me, it's not that odd.

Anyway, in what I believe is chronological order, here are the past 8 years cakes, with small descriptors:

Orignal Frosty cake, for her 5th Birthday. Just followed the cake-pan instructions to frost this one:

First full body snowman:

Second full body snowman:

After this last one, I decided to try fondant, which is a soft, rollable sheet of frosting that can be molded much more than icing. It's like sweet play doh. The rest of the cakes are fondant cakes.:

At this point, I started getting bored with snowmen, per se, so I started putting personalities on the snowmen cake molds. This one is a knight from Ellen's game Runescape:

Next, we have a Harry Potter version of the snowman:

This one is Ang, from Avatar (the TV show, not the movie):

And, finally, this year I decided to hit up the video game world for Mario. I liked this one the best:

If I do another one next year, I think i'll have to make it hover or something...

Happy 12th Birthday, kiddo.

Generous Bug

2009-12-15T04:42:25Z

Recently, I had to take a piece from Katie's computer to fix a client's machine that was down completely. When I got home, I had to explain to katie that it could be a week or so before her computer was working again. She said it was OK, and proceeded to use a laptop, and Kim's computer, and pester Ellen a bit who barely let her touch her computer.

However...at no point did she complain, or whine, or get angry. She was very appreciative when I hooked her computer back up and thanked me for doing it.

This is a message to my little katie-bug. Thank you, sweetie, for being so generous and so understanding. I think you get a special treat this week, and you deserve it. I'm proud of how you behaved.

Report Card

2009-11-25T17:37:45Z

Ellen's first report card for the new, big, scary 6th grade school. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Macsupport.com

2009-11-22T17:28:08Z

I haven't blogged about this yet, but thought it was about time. About 6 months ago, Tony and I decided to take the "macsupport.com" domain name he owned and form a new company, creatively titled "MacSupport.com". He says it was my idea, although I don't remember specifically. I'll take credit if it's offered because, even if we fail, I think it's a good idea.

With a loan from his dad (thank you Tony Ricciardi, Sr.!), we founded the company as 50-50 partnership. We lucked into finding a brilliant web developer, Francis, to create our site and ecommerce system, and, after finding a nice space on 7th avenue right near Penn Station hired a terrific young, eager first employee, Liam.

I've never been a "boss." I've been an employee and a consultant, but i've never had "staff." I realize that one of the things that I didn't expect to feel with "staff" is proud. Proud that i'm paying them to work for me. I think that feeling goes across the board for Macsupport.com, actually. I look around our small office and can say "this place is mine." That's a GOOD feeling. It's a SCARY feeling, but it's a good one. Knowing that if I (or Tony) don't do the work, it simply won't get done has kept me on edge for months now, and much more so since we went live, November 6th, 2009. It turns out that all of the complexity of getting a company up and running is nothing compared to getting people to come give us money. Although I KNOW we offer a great service, at what I think is a pretty good value, advertising is not something i knew, or really know, anything about. However, hiring a firm, or even a person, to do the advertising for us is really out of the question financially. It's us or nothing.

We've made some spending mistakes, to be sure, but I think we're making some progress. The questions seems to be: Can we survive long enough for people to know we're available? I hope so, because even though it's a lot of work, I'm really enjoying being an integral part of the team that makes it grow.

So, without further ado, tell everyone you know that uses a Macintosh to head over to www.macsupport.com and buy an incident and use our service. We'll help you. It's what we do.

Pumpkin Time, 2009.

2009-11-01T01:26:34Z

Welcome back, loyal readers, to this year's Halloween edition of It Happened One Life. This year, we have a bit of a reversal. Usually, MY pumpkin is the most complex and the kids do simpler pumpkins. This year, with how busy we've all been, we literally didn't decide on pumpkin patterns until yesterday, and we carved them today, ON Halloween. The nice part of this was that everything was very fresh when put outside. That's the bonus of Halloween on a Saturday.

Also, this year, the kids did the pumpkins completely on their own, even when they had some trouble. Both of their pumpkins came out very impressive, especially when you consider that the transfer of the patterns to their pumpkins mostly didn't work and they both had to freehand the majority of their pumpkins. They did a great job!

First, my pumpkin, appropriate to the game 3 of the Yankees/Phillies World Series:

Next, Katie's terrific puppy dog:

Finally, Ellen decided to do Edgar Allen Poe, and when we looked at it after she was done, it looked...well, terrible. But, as is the wont of pumpkin carvings, the proof is in the lighting, and I think it came out really well:

All in all, another successful year of pumkining!

Uncertain math teacher

2009-10-21T20:50:31Z

Ellen just told me that, for some reason, she brought up Schrödinger's cat in "math enrichment" class today. Her teacher, Miss Corrino, had never heard of it so Ellen, fairly accurately, explained the experiment, and the point of it.

So, my 11 year old is explaining quantum mechanics to her math teacher.

Perfect. She's so done there.

Use your imagination

2009-10-10T04:37:56Z

Imagine sitting in a theatre, watching your favorite movie again.

Now, imagine that theatre is Radio City Music Hall, and there are 6000 other people, all HUGE fans of that movie sitting around you, clapping and cheering.

Now imagine further that not only are you getting to watch your favorite movie at this incredible venue, but there's a full live orchestra and chorus performing the entire Oscar-winning soundtrack right there on the stage in front of the film as it's playing.

Further imagine that that movie is The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and after the movie, and after the lead vocalist sings "May It Be", the Oscar-winning song done in the film by Anya, that Howard Shore (the composer of the soundtrack), Billy Boyd (Pippin) and Elijah Wood (Frodo) come out to wave to the audience and take a bow, as if the characters were just walking off the screen.

Lastly, but definitely not least, imagine that you get to do all of these wonderful things sitting next to your geeky, wonderful 11 year old daughter who is seeing this movie for the first time ever in this way, next to her dad, and absolutely loving every minute of it.

If you can imagine all that, you have a pretty clear idea of what my evening was like. Magical, wonderful, and full of imagination.

Sometimes, life just gives you lemonaide right off the bat.

The End of an Era

2009-09-22T01:20:25Z

Tonight marks the end of a long time era. My parents are moving away from the east coast, a place that has been their home for their entire lives (apart from when they were at school). Never before have they taken residence outside of the NYC area, and I know they're nervous about what they'll find and how they make out.

Despite the smart-assed comments i've made about their returning within a few weeks, I think they can make a go of it anywhere, so long as they have family (they're moving near Rachel, Jon, Sarah and Henry), a Starbucks and a Barnes and Noble. In Columbus, they'll have all this, but they'll have something much more valuable that they need to make their lives work--each other.

Good luck, Mom and Dad. We love you and will miss you, but we'll see you often, I'm sure.

Word for Word

2009-09-13T23:53:36Z

This is the conversation I JUST had with Ellen remotely from my desktop to hers:

Me: are you there?
Ellen Meyerson: Yeah
Me: I thought I said no more computer...
Ellen Meyerson: The issue was sort of open ended because I had an argument that you didn't respond to in a clear way..
Me: about 20 mintues ago...
Me: oh, my. I said no more computer. that was clear enough. consider it clear enough for future, lawyer-girl.
Ellen Meyerson: But after that, I said it was not eight o'clock. But you responded in a sarcastic and joking manner
Me: and I said I didn't care.
Me: that you were done.
Me: when do I ever respond in any other way?
Ellen Meyerson: Occasionally.
Me: uh huh.
Me: Are you ready to get back to LOTR?
Ellen Meyerson: Yes......
Me: OK. are you ready for bed?
Ellen Meyerson: uh huh.
Me: ok, I'll be up in a minute and we can get a good read in.
Ellen Meyerson: A minute and a half.
Me: k

It's just going to get worse, I swear...

Quickie

2009-08-02T23:26:32Z

Ellen declared to my friend Kevin that her bedroom was "Where cool goes to die."

Take Us Out to the Ball Game

2009-06-15T02:30:46Z

Greetings loyal readers! Been a long time since I posted, so I thought I'd share a fun day today.

Ellen and I got to go sit in a suite at Yankee Stadium (the "new" Yankee Stadium) for a great (if you're a Yankee fan) game against the Mets. Yanks crushed them, 15-0, and seriously needed a win, but that was just a small part of the day. Today was a true Daddy-Ellen day, and we just had a ball.

We arrived early (around 11) and wandered the Stadium, stopping first to get some Garlic Fries, which were seriously garlicky but good! We walked around the ground level, munching our fries, getting as far out as center field (and watching batting practice) before we realized that we were supposed to get to our seats to watch the paratroopers by noon (yes, I said paratroopers).

So, we hustled upstairs to our seats, nice, cushy, seats with a terrific view and watched as an Army plane circled overhead about 10 times before finally disgorging 6 separate paratroopers who spun in for landings in the middle of Yankee stadium. It was pretty amazing, honestly.

Shortly thereafter, we got up to check out the suite that came with the tickets, the Jim Beam Suite, which was a nice, glass enclosed, air conditioned room with a bar, lots of stand up tables, a made-to-order brick oven pizza place, and a food network kitchen serving some more exotic fare you'd get at a ball game. Today's special (which I didn't get to try) was chunks of smoky kielbasa dipped in fresh corn batter and fried crisp. Sounds good.

After the Suite, we perched back in our seats to watch a good, old-fashioned drubbing by the Yanks. Burnett had it; Santana did not, and the game was quickly out of hand, but much fun. Along the way, Ellen and I wandered downstairs to grab a big, crazy chocolate-caramel apple, which she got all over her face as we peered onto the field for a big, 7 run inning. It was great coming back from getting our apple repaired (the stick broke as we were eating it!) to a home run and seeing Ellen jumping up and down, absorbed in the game on her own. Warms a sports-fan-dad's heart, I can tell you.

After further wandering, we perched back in our squishy seats and Ellen wanted to stay for the entire game, even though the game finished 15-0. We listened to Sinatra warble New York, New York and drove off into the sunset.

Honestly, one of the best days I can remember. Thanks for a great time, El.

The World of the Real

2009-04-22T11:28:46Z

It's been awhile, but I had to relate these two Ellen stories. Remember, Ellen is 11 at the moment...

------
Kim and I are in the kitchen last night. Ellen decided it was time to ask random questions, so here's our exchange:

E: Who is your worst enemy?
K: Time.
E: Ok, but can you give me a TANGIBLE worst enemy, please?

--------
Same night, at the dinner table. We're talking about failblog.org posts we find funny:

E: I like the ones where there is juxtaposition.
P: Uh...do you know what juxtaposition means?
E: It's where two things end up next to each other in a way they aren't normally.
P: That's close enough.

I forgot to post this...

2009-03-19T23:55:54Z

Ellen came to me before and said:

dad! I just remembered what amnesia is!

Old Aang's Time

2009-01-04T21:45:24Z

For this year's birthday snowman, I decided to do Aang from Avatar. This cake was done in fondant and funfetti underneath in the traditional snowman mold. I'm no pro, but I think it came out fairly good.

Happy Birthday, El!