Everything is Unfinished

Although he made us work, we managed to wrangle some great smiles out of Jack yesterday. And although the 45-minute trip to Akron was worth it for the photos, we won’t be using Picture People any longer. Oh, they gave me the 20% off the promised (they even gave that ON TOP of the 20% off coupon I had) and the photographer we had was very good. But the first thing that put me off a bit was that this particular location still uses film. Not that there’s anything wrong with film, but it meant that we had 15 shots to choose from as opposed to the 85 we would have had if they had used digital cameras. Film also means that they have to scan the prints and as you’ll see if you look at them (link below), most of them were scanned in crooked. And then there was the woman who “helped” us place our order who was obviously doing us a favor by taking time away from the pictures she had taken of her own sons who were tearing around the waiting area while their dad sat and yelled at them. Classy, lemme tell ya. Anyway. On to the pictures!

This last one was our favorite, hands down. I love it when he shows his teeth off like that! To see all of the pictures, follow this link: Jack’s pictures from March 28. If it makes you sign in, use my email address (amy AT peelio DOT com) and the password babyjack.

Although barely, after today. I woke up at 7:30am really hot and proceeded to wake Jack up by thinking about breathing near him. The sound made him literally jump 6 inches off his matress. After taking him downstairs and getting him his bottle, I realized that I felt like ass. My throat hurt, my temples hurt, and I was completely wiped out despite having been up for only 15 minutes. Long story short, it’s a good thing Jack can entertain himself in his playpen these days, because I slept all morning and actually had to have Johnny come home at 11:00, then take Jack back to work with him in the afternoon. I’ve never had a migraine before, but I’m pretty sure that’s what this was. And a sinus-y one at that. I’ll thank my body never to do that again.

So we were down in Columbus on Sunday and Monday. As usual, we made lots of plans for various errands to get the most of the visit. This time, that included a trip to a portrait studio, The Picture People, for Jack’s one-year pictures. It became obvious that I was going to be late for the appointment, so I tried to call them to let them know and see if they wanted to reschedule. When I called the local number, I got a phone company message saying the number had been changed, and it gave me an 800 number to call. I called that, and got the Picture People national number. I followed the prompts, found the location, and pressed 1 to be connected to it. And then, I got the phone company message saying the number had been changed to this 800 number. Interesting - I pushed the speed limit a bit more and wondered if they knew their phones were messed up.

Got to Polaris, parked, dashed through the mall, and came face to face with…an empty store. The location is closed! Another woman was there with her daughter too, and we both kind of stood there, dumbfounded, staring at the doors. Just then a guy from Flash Photography, another portrait studio a few doors down, came by to hang up a sign saying hey, come to our place, we’ll honor your coupons or something like that. He said the PP closed last week sometime! There was another sign on the door saying to call this other 800 number for customer service, so I did that.

Twenty-five minutes later, I was taken off hold. I explained that I was here for my appointment, but the store had apparently gone out of business. The rep did apologize, but told me that since the employees don’t know UNTIL THE DAY THE STORE IS CLOSING, they don’t have time to call people and cancel their appointments. He said they do that so the employees don’t badmouth the company and tell customers to go somewhere else. What?! So having the customers take the time to show up and find out then that the store is closed wouldn’t have the same effect?? I’m not really happy about that shady business practice (and unfortunately a LOT of businesses do that, especially restaurants), but I asked him what he was going to do to keep me as a customer. He ended up rescheduling my appointment and telling the store manager to give me 20% off my order. The appointment is tomorrow and I don’t think that’s enough to compensate me for the hassle. I suppose we’ll see how ticked I still am then, and if they give me any trouble about using the three coupons for free sheets that I have. One thing’s for sure though, tomorrow I’ll have a link to some cute baby pictures!

It took all of my Photoshopping prowess and a good bit of digging through html code, but I have successfully turned my pink blog purple! Maybe even too purple! As if there could be such a thing! And now I’m overusing exclamation points!

Ahem. As promised, I am posting from Wooster, back home with my TiVo and my comfy bed and my enormous mess but right now, mostly my comfy bed. I’m off to enjoy it.

I’m traveled out. We got back to my parents’ house about 2 hours ago after a few days in Eastern Washington. Spokane was a lot different than either Johnny or I expected: a whole lot bigger, more trees and mountains (like Western Washington) and less desert-y scrubland like the city Johnny grew up in only 2 hours south. Like Springfield, it has everything we need to survive, like Target, Gymboree, and Sonic. We may have set some sort of record by going to Sonic 5 times in the 48 hours we were there. We didn’t get food all 5 times, but I did learn that Vanilla Dr. Pepper = yum.

Anyway, I’m very happy to be home. I really missed Jack, and I’m anxious to get back to our house tomorrow. Lately it seems that as soon as we’re home long enough to get into a routine, we’re off and running somewhere else. I’m ready to sleep in my own bed, cook my own food, and watch TV like a civilized person, with TiVo. I also have a first birthday party to plan, even though it pains me to think that. So I’ll talk to you again from Wooster, and then in a week I’ll have forgotten all of this and will be planning another trip.

My blog turned 3 yesterday! On Pi Day, no less! For its birthday, I gave it a new theme. A rather pink theme, as you can see. I’m trying to turn it into a purple theme, but I’m having a hard time with Wordpress, mainly because it tries to make everything so easy for you. For instance, after adding all my blogroll back (see it over there on the left?), I could choose to order them by name, link ID, address or rating. But what I’d really like to do is go into the HTML and order them the way I read them, and I can’t find the place to do that. And although I successfully changed SOME of the pink to purple earlier, I’m going to have to do some more digging through theme files and CSS before I get it all.

I shouldn’t complain though, because I was getting tired of the old look and ready for a change. And WordPress is really nice to use. I especially love that the little tag buttons show up in Firefox - I’ve been typing out my tags like a sucker all this time! I just wish I had more time to futz around with things, but life gets in the way sometimes. For now I’ll be content to post when I can and hopefully have people who read my blatherings. :)

So we drove today to the capital of Illinois and I realized that I’m not a road trip kind of person. It was about 7 hours all told from my parents’ house and that is the upper limit of my car driving time. And I didn’t even drive! However, I did learn well from my mom and packed plenty of snacks, drinks, and activities to keep me busy. Unfortunately, I get mildly carsick if I’m not looking out the window, so while I was trying to knit I kept having to stop and look out at the horizon. I did make some progress though!

So far we have found all of the requisite commerce in town: Target, Meijer, Michaels, Hobby Lobby, Old Navy, a mall with a good selection of stores, and of course SONIC. Cherry Limeade, I have missed you. And that banana pudding shake really does taste like banana pudding. Tomorrow I’ll be trying the new flavored iced teas. If we move here, I may have to get a part-time job to support my Sonic drink habit.

I have downloaded a new theme to try out here, so hopefully I can get that working soon. But for now, it’s off to bed.

This weekend I went to a scrapbooking retreat. My local scrapping group, Columbus Scrappers, which I am very active in, has done 2 of these retreats a year for the last 4 years. I’ve been to every one so far. And finally, this one was actually pretty productive! I did 15 pages start-to-finish, finished 7 pages that I had previously started, and started 4 more that I will need to finish later. I also got some much-needed Amy Time, i.e. time out of the house and with my friends. I stayed up late, ate lots of bad-for-me food (can you say white chocolate nestle crunch bars?), and laughed a lot.

Then I came home and immediately re-packed my bags! We’re leaving Jack with my parents for a few days and driving to Illinois to check out our potential new hometown. Then we might be flying out to Washington next weekend to check out our other potential new hometown. I’ve already had my requisite freak-out about the moving far away from Ohio part, so hopefully I can give these places a fair, logical look. If nothing else, both cities have Sonic so I’ll be gorging on cherry limeade and have you seen the commercials for their new banana pudding shake? It’s going to be bad to live close to Sonic, yet oh-so-good.

Looks like I was wrong - obviously there have been some changes around here! But this afternoon I’m off to a scrapbook weekend, so you’ll have to live without my witty commentary until Sunday. I hope you can survive.

As a result of recent unplanned downtime (ie, iPowerWeb hosting sucks), the Peelio Family of Blogs is moving to a new web host. There will probably be some planned downtime on Monday or Tuesday, but then we’ll be back up and running and if I hadn’t said anything, you probably wouldn’t have even noticed. So until then, au revoir!

It’s pictures of Jack time! Hooray!

And here’s a series I like to call “What Is Jack Trying To Eat?”