How I Met Your Father (or When Geeks Fall In Love)

My baby brother recently started a blog called “How I Met Your Ex-Girlfriend” in which he's decided to chronicle his search for his future wife. It's not at all inspired by How I Met Your Mother title got me thinking about how I met the hubby.

Since the two of us are geeks, our “how we met” story falls a bit out of the norm. Instead of writing a gushy, tedious story of how I met my husband, I thought I'd break the story down into easier to digest, sometimes amusing, bullet points. So here goes, step by step, what I went through to meet my husband and the father of my child.

• Go to college
• Get bored and surf stupid sites on the internet and find a site where people rate photos based on “hotness” and post a pic just for grins.
• Get a personal message from a hot, though kind of hippy looking, guy that appears to have excellent taste in music. 

• IM with the hot guy regularly, discussing music and geeky things we like 

• Become good internet friends with hot guy, but never consider dating because hot guy has a girlfriend 

• Date a few guys but break up with them or get broken up with because they aren't “the one” 

• After a couple years of being internet friends, decide to meet hot guy in person. Make him drive an hour to meet me in a Taco Bell parking lot (because I worked there and I figured if something was hinky and I needed help my male co-workers would come out and give a beatdown) and then drove another half hour to meet up with some of my friends to watch Hidalgo. 

• Find out on the car ride to the movie that he's currently single and inwardly rejoice. 

• Have such a good time that I let him come and visit me some more at my parents house, where he's subjected to the parental 20 questions. The next morning I'm treated to the “what if he were an ax murderer” lecture. 

• A couple months later, invite him to come down and see the super awesome fireworks show that my parents' neighbor puts on every year the weekend before the 4th of July. 

• On the 5th of July go to out to eat at a Mexican restaurant and see the Garfield movie with hot guy. Decide after the fact this is our first date, since that's when we held hands the 1st time. 

• Get completely freaked out because I knew down in my gut that if I continued to date this guy, he'd be the last guy I'd ever date, and I wasn't sure if I was ready for the whole getting married thing. Also, I was afraid that dating would ruin our wonderful friendship, since over the last two years he became that best friend I could tell anything to. 

• After a couple days get over the freakout because I realize that I can't picture the rest of my life without him in it. 

• Get engaged the following October. 

• Get married a year to the day after the first fireworks show I invited him to. 

• Just over seven years later get knocked up and have an adorable baby girl 2 days before the hubby's 33rd birthday. 

And that's the short, hopefully slightly amusing, story of How I Met Your Father.

Lasso of DOOM

I am possibly one of the laziest graphic designers/photo editors ever.

I was in the middle of doing some work to some photos for a client when my lasso tool in Photoshop wigged out. The lasso appeared roughly 8-10 pixels below the cursor. So what did I do?

I just compensated for the wigged out tool and finished editing the batch of images I had open so I don't have to go back through and re-open the un-edited files.

THEN, and only then, did I decide to restart Photoshop. :P

Parental Vocabulary Changes

I have noticed some new words creeping into my vocabulary since having a baby. I'm pretty sure some of them aren't in any dictionary. So I'm starting my very own “new parent vocabulary dictionary”.

Noms – Adopted from the world of Cheezburger.com, it is used to refer to baby's food

Urp – A shortened form of the word burp, it is an onomatopoeic word for a baby spitting up.

Hiccurp – A hiccup that ends in an urp.

Poot – Another onomatopoeic word, this one refers to when a fart in a diaper comes with a bonus.


Please tell me that me & the hubby aren't the only parents that have done this. ;)

My Mini-Me

There are days where I feel like Dr. Evil due to the simple fact that I have my very own Mini-Me. My daughter, though her features are a good mixture of mine & the hubby's, has inherited many of my mannerisms, in a short 4 months.

She sleeps in the same positions that I do. It amuses the hubby to peek into the bedroom when baby & I are sleeping in and see that we are in the EXACT same position. I've lost count of the number of times this has happened.

The most recent thing that I noticed is that she's picked up the habit of chewing on her lower lip. Until she started doing that, I didn't realize how often I do the exact same thing without even thinking. When I concentrate or am lost in thought, inevitably I end up unconsciously chewing on my lower lip. And Apparently I've been doing it most of my life, because I opened up one of my photo albums the other day and saw a picture of me as a baby, close to the same age as my daughter is now, with my lower lip in my mouth...

Cooking without GPS

The other night, as I splashed balsamic vinegar into a bowl for caprese salad, I realized, I can't share this recipe with anyone, because I'm not following a recipe. As a matter of fact, even when I do use a recipe, odds are, I don't follow it strictly, unless it's a baked item where very specific measurements can make or break the finished product. So I have decided to call my method of cooking “cooking without GPS.”

For example, a pot of pasta sounds straight forward, right? Wrong. If I use canned sauce instead of make it from scratch, I'll add a dash of this and a pinch of that to make it taste better. Often, when I'm cooking, I'll add stuff that may not necessarily be in whatever recipe I'm loosely following just because it smells good.

Last winter I made chili from scratch to take for the fellowship meal at church. After lunch someone asked me what my recipe was. It's not very helpful to tell someone, “Well, there's not exactly a recipe. I just threw stuff into the pot until it smelled & tasted good.” 

Just tonight, while eating supper, I had an idea. We had huevos rancheros, and I thought, "Hey, I bet putting chicken breast in the same sauce I used for huevos rancheros would be REALLY tasty!" So sometime soon I'm going to have to try that idea, maybe with a little sour cream.... And now I'm going to go to bed hungry after typing this out!

Still Not a Ginger!

Recently it was announced that Peter Capaldi would be taking the reigns as the 12th incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who. This announcement, of course, caused quite the brouhaha.

There were the “Oh, that's awesome, he's a talented actor, he'll do a great job” camp, the uber-annoying “OMG HE'S OLD AND UGLY, I WANT DAVID TENNANT BACK” camp, the “But he's been in Who before. Why could't they pick a new face?” camp & the “We wanted a woman Doctor” camp. Each camp, since this is the internet after all, trying to prove their point was the most valid and that the other camps were dead wrong.

I, for one, am disappointed by only one thing. One great, glaring thing. Peter Capaldi, though he is a talented actor who will undoubtedly put a wonderful spin on the iconic Doctor, is NOT a ginger. At the rate it's going, the poor Doctor will never get to be a ginger. And that's my only problem with the casting of the 12th Doctor.

My Longstanding Feud

I have a nemesis. An unrelenting foe that dogs my steps and makes my life miserable.

I have a longstanding feud...with gravity. Unfortunately, I am almost always on the losing end. I even have the scars to prove it.

There's the scar on my nose & hairline from losing a battle when I was around 6 or so. Numerous ones on my knees. A particularly spectacular one on my right forearm when I was in my early teens.

Gravity has a nasty habit of sneaking up on me when I least expect it. I can be walking along a nice, perfectly flat surface, and BOOM, trip. So either gravity is jumping up and tripping me, or I'm stumbling over the Silence.

Somehow, I doubt I'm going to get any points on the scoreboard in the battle against gravity anytime soon.