Even now, there’s so much more I want to say, but I just don’t have the time. I know if I wait any longer it’ll never happen. So I’ll just put up the pictures… here goes…
This one made it to the front page of the Herald. Below is a close up.
The next one is from the third page of another daily, The Gomantak Times. She made it to the 3rd page.
Here’s the close up. That’s Mario watching over her. They were having a ’sand fight’.
We’ve all been pretty busy these past couple of weeks, Thaïs included. I’m not going to bore you with all the details. In short, our Italian group (which I’m the secretary of) celebrated its first anniversary, so I was busy helping out with all the arrangements. We had to get all the paperwork ready for Thaïs’ school admission which is still not complete. We have to go back to the school after 10 days. And, as always, I’ve been plagued with ‘net access problems. In fact I don’t even know if I’ll be able to post this. Keeping my fingers crossed because there are a couple of pictures I want to put up. These are some of the ‘better’ drawings Thaïs has produced in the recent weeks. Here goes:
She’s learning the alphabet, so there’s a ‘T’, a few ‘A’s, an ‘I’, an ‘O’ which changed to a zero and then became an egg.
There’s a new quiz show on TV. Actually I think it’s more like a competition where you have to send in the correct option by SMS. The question changes every week or so.
Last week’s question: ‘Which animal is also known as the Ship Of The Desert?’
The answers: 1) Horse 2) Ass 3) Camel
The first time Thaïs heard the options she was shocked. She knows ‘ass’ is on the list of ‘bad words that she must not use on other people’. Eyes wide, she asked, “Did he say ‘Ass’?”
“Yes, he did. But in this case it’s allowed because ‘ass’ is another word for ‘donkey’.”
“Okay,” she said, and there were no further comments.
The next time she heard the announcer she stood up and at the top of her voice she yelled out, “Option 1, Horse; Option 2, Ass; Option 3, ASSHOLE….!”
===000===000===000===
Another advertisement for designer bath fittings shows a man soaking in a tub, drink in hand. Then he gets out, wraps a towel around himself and walks past what I assume is a designer bidet and a designer commode. Thaïs watches the ad, then asks, “Now why didn’t he sit on the pot? Is he feeling shy?”
Thaïs is normally extremely polite. She says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ with no hesitation. Getting her to say ’sorry’, however is another matter entirely. It takes a lot of coaxing which sometimes doesn’t work. So we just threaten her ;-). Unfortunately for us, she is not easily scared. Needless to say, we’re still working on that one. The coaxing, I mean.
Another thing we’ve been trying to teach her is to not interrupt people when they’re talking. To be fair, we have had some success on this front.
Here’s what happened yesterday. Mario and Thaïs were arguing about something. Mario said something to her, she said something back to him, and it went on. Suddenly she wags a finger in his face and says, "Daddy, stop talking. Don’t interrupt me. I’m talking now. Wait till I finish."
Practise what you preach, Mario.
The best part of it all? She’s only three years old!
I’m finally feeling well enough to post again. I’ve been down with the ‘flu for the last 4 days. With my clogged sinuses and throbbing brain, everytime I sat down in front of the computer it felt like my head would explode. In the midst of this all, I had my insurance exam to answer. How I managed I’ll never know, but I did and I’m glad it’s over. I should know the results in a couple of days, but if I don’t mention the exam again, you’ll know I failed it!
And now, here’s something that happened yesterday:
I walked into the TV room where Thaïs and Mario were sitting and found Thaïs scowling and rubbing her eyes. I asked her what had happened.
“My eyes are burning. Daddy farted.”
A few seconds later my eyes started burning too. I’m not kidding. This really happened. It must have been some fart!
My experience with Windows Live services hasn’t been that great so I won’t be signing up anytime soon. I don’t know what it is, but their sites take so long to load, I usually end up just closing the browser tab in disgust. I groan every time I see a Microsoft-related link, and think twice before clicking it.
From the same blog I found that AOL offers a similar service called XDrive, again with 5 GB free space.
Found out through another of my favorite tech blogs about yet another free online storage site called MediaMax. I signed up yesterday. They’re currently offering 25 GB of free space. I haven’t had much time to play around with the service, but so far it seems good. The first thing I’m going to do is check if the free version offers FTP access.
The first (and only)time I signed up for a free online storage account was over 10 years ago. That was before I had a computer at home. Pen drives were non-existent. We had those flat square-ish things… What were they called? Oh yes… floppies. But even those weren’t good enough for me. At that timeI had an assorted collection of stuff that added up to a ’staggering’ 5 MB, which would have meant that I’d have had to carry about 5 floppies around with me. So you see why I had to rely on such services for file transfer. And then, all of a sudden, the service/website/whatever-you-want=to-call-it just vanished. OK.. so maybe I hadn’t logged in to the account for a few months.. and maybe I hadn’t checked my associated mail account either… but the end result was that I lost all my data stored there. I didn’t even think of making a backup, so I guess I deserved it!
Anyway, I’ve learned from my mistakes and this time I’m going to be prepared with backups. Actually, I’ve got a backup of the backups of my favorite stuff now!
After much deliberation I’ve finally decided. I’m moving. My blog, that is. To my own domain. If all goes well, I should have the new site up and running in a few days. I’m planning on continuing with Wordpress.
Any tips on moving a Wordpress blog to a new host?
The last 5 days have been rather hectic, hence the lack of activity on this blog. I’m attending a week-long training course for life insurance agents which ends in another 2 days. At the end of it all, subject to the fact that I clear the examination, I hope to be a licensed insurance agent.
The only hurdle, as mentioned above, is the examination. Feels strange, preparing for one, after so many years. And to make matters worse, I’m the second-oldest student in the class Such a difference from my school days where I was usually the youngest in the class.
That’s about all I have time for now. Have to get back to those books! I am trying to clear the exam, you know…
Took Thaïs to her first carnival parade yesterday. She did enjoy herself for the first hour or so… until she began to feel sleepy and started dozing on Mario’s shoulder. Well, not exactly…
Unfortunately I lost all the pictures because of some problem with the memory card in the camera. That was so disappointing. There were some really good pictures in there. So much for Olympus xD picture cards. And I thought Olympus was a reliable name in the market… BAH! This is the second time I’ve had problems with the card. I formatted it the first time it happened and thought things would run smoothly. I guess I was wrong. I wonder if this sort of thing happens with all so-called brands? If not for my camera phone I’d have absolutely no photographic memories of this ‘mile stone’. The picture quality isn’t that great, but it’s better than nothing, I suppose
