Have you ever noticed how life in the movies is subtly different? For example, how women get out of bed and drag all of the bedding with them to the bathroom? Or how presents are never gift-wrapped, but simply come in large cylindrical boxes with overlapping lids?
Well, those aren’t the only two ways in which the world as depicted by Hollywood is subtly different.
A wedding invitation arrived from my good friend, Bas today. He and his lovely fiancée, Kylie, will be getting married in Malta this September.
Sarah and I (uh, and Eloïse) still need to try to figure out if we can make it to this, as it would be a lovely occasion and so nice to see them again (in fact, Sarah and Kylie haven’t even met before). And Malta looks so nice from Bas’s photos.
Eloïse continues to demand all of our time and attention. I can’t really tell whether she’s growing, but I assume she is. The only obvious sign to me that she is aging at all is that her strawberry blond hair is rapidly becoming more voluminous.
I had a shot at massaging her today, following up on our infant massage class at Blossom yesterday morning.
Eloïse lost patience about half way through, even though I’d put on Robin Guthrie’s Imperial album to create a nice, relaxing ambience for her. Oh well; I’ll try again tomorrow.
Gifts continue to trickle in. I had to pop into work a few days ago to pick up a couple of things. When I entered my office, I was surprised and delighted to find that my boss, Joe, and his wife, Lorah, had left a bag of baby gifts for me. How kind.
Today, we received gifts in the post from one of Sarah’s aunts. Happily, she sent us clothing for between 12 and 18 months of age, as we have lots of garments for use during the first year.
I finally took the plunge and upgraded the server blog software to Movable Type 3.17 today.
It was a fairly substantial upgrade, requiring a lot of template and style sheet editing, as well as the copying of files hither and thither, but I think I’ve got everything more or less covered now. If you see anything strange on the site in the next couple of days, please report it to me.
My own homebrew methods of dealing with comment spam in Movable Type 2.x had been starting to try my patience, so I’d finally got around to taking a long-postponed look at the MT-Blacklist plug-in during the last couple of days. The upgrade to MT 3.17 allows one to use a much more powerful version of MT-Blacklist than the one available for 2.x, so I have now installed and configured that. It remains to be seen how much more effective this proves than my own hacks, but the interface is certainly very nice and I like the fact that it automatically updates itself with the latest list of spam domains from the Comment Spam Clearing House.
We finished filing the current spate of paperwork for Eloïse this morning, with the submission of her application for an American passport. The document in question should arrive around six weeks from now. Even if her Dutch passport arrives first, it’s illegal for an American citizen to enter or leave the US on a non-American passport, so we really need the evidence of Yankeedom before we can move a muscle internationally. We have no travel plans before August, anyway, so that should be fine.
Once nice thing about the paperwork has been that it’s been getting us out of the house. The days pass by in such dissatisfyingly nondescript fashion if one doesn’t get out of the house at least once for an hour or two. Besides, it’s been a great opportunity to push our Bugaboo Cameleon around town.
We’ve uploaded a few new photos from Eloïse’s third week of life, but they’re not terribly interesting. I need to take more photos without using a flash, as the flash discolours her hair and accentuates her pigmentation, which ends up making her look like a little goblin. She’s a lot better looking in real life!
