ibbunee.com

word association

we've started talking about baby names. here is the extent of our discussion so far.

me: what do you think about 'adelaide'?
chad: sounds like marmelade.
me: what about 'tatum'?
chad: reminds me of tater.

i stopped there. but had i further pursued the conversation, i imagine that it would have continued like this:

me: esther?
chad: molester
me: margot?
chad: fargo
me: phoebe?
chad: smelly cat

seriously?! is there such a thing as a name that doesn't trigger some kind of word association? hannah sounds like banana. chad is just THE_CHAAAD.

guess i know what i'm NOT getting for xmas

excerpt from a recent email from hubby:

"By the way I saw this dress in the magazine on the table last night I wanted to get you. And I looked and saw the price and was like mmmm I don’t think I can swing $600 for a dress."

"Then I realized that was for the shoes – the dress was 2,500. Why the hell are those magazines in our house?"

maybe i'm not that nice afterall

my birthday was last friday, march 9th. surprisingly, 30 doesn't feel as OLD as i thought it would. not that i expected to wake up friday morning feeling instantly decrepit, but i imagined that bidding a final farewell to my blithe, carefree 20's (even if just a perception) would be somewhat depressing. but it was actually kinda nice. i'm in a very good place in my life right now. i've become a much happier and nicer person in my advanced age.

we went to tahoe to snowboard last week. can't really say it was for my birthday because had i been given the choice, we would've been somewhere like tahiti or malives. but it was chad's turn since last trip was "my" trip (italy), and he would've been devastated had the winter passed without a single snowboarding trip out west. lucky we didn't wait any longer. they had been dumped with 8 feet of snow right a few days before we arrived, but it was in the 50's the entire time we were there. snow was good, but we would've been carving the dirt had we waited even one more week.

here's a short clip that i shot of chad riding. you must have the sound turned on to get the full effect.

upon seeing this video our friend surmised that chad must have one helluva life insurance policy with me as the sole beneficiary. i guess he mistook my cry of concern for wicked glee.

brontosaurus

chad went to a LAN party this past weekend. right. i had never heard of it either until i met him. it's where a bunch of geeks rendezvous with their computers hooked up together (hence LAN), and play games for like ten hours straight. not entirely sure how that qualifies as a party. but the way i see it, there are far worse ways that one's husband could spend a saturday night out with the boys.

i do have one complaint, however. my dear husband came home from the party with an acute case of pc envy. according to him, he was the laughing stock of the group due to his inadequate equipment. i tried to explain to tell him that, contrary to popular belief, size does not matter but he wasn't convinced. apparently our computer, which i bought brand new and top of the line 3 years ago, is a dinosaur in the pc gaming world. to chad's utter humiliation, it didn't have enough juice to power one of the games so he alone had to sit it out.

weird... i never noticed any problems while shopping online or checking my email ;)

so anyways, now he is lobbying for a new macbook and mega monitor to match. how do i break the news to him that i already allocated the funds to a new handbag?

so i married a geek

i can't claim ignorance because i knew what i was getting into from the onset. from the first day we met, chad has never bothered to camouflage his geekiness. in fact, he wears it like a badge of honor. and i have to admit that i find it quite endearing (kind of in the same way i find the dog's snoring endearing).

during the height of his geekdom, chad owned no less than eight working computers (that he built himself), attended "LAN parties" on a very regular basis (sometimes held at the local denny's at 1am) and read big fat programming books for leisure. he still does all of these things, but on a smaller scale. it's cool, though, because i get to learn something new and geeky almost every single day.

today i was introduced to the world of "x10". recently, chad's friend, william - who is also a geek (they tend to band together) - suggested that we set up an x10 alert that will let you know from inside the house if the garage door is up or down. apparently william was thinking about this during his downtime. me personally, i would have been satisfied with looking out the back door with my own eyes to check if the door was up or down. but i guess that's the kind of banal thinking you would expect from a former high school cheerleader. anyways, chad took the idea even further, adding that it would also be nice to know if the doors are locked and if the dog is in his cage.

and then, he got really excited about the infinite possibilities...

William: you would be amazed what all you can do. I was reading an article where the dog door would only unlock for their dog

Chad: you know what i was just thinking.. it would be nice to let the dog out from work. we were talking about having a dog door on the side of the house where the door leads to the basement. but would be also cool if we had webcams set up and could lock and unlock the dog door :-) and signal him with a flashing light if the door was unlocked. train him.

Hannah: wait. what's an x10?

Chad: its a system you can use to 'automate' your house.

Hannah: is that what the jetsons had?

Chad: you buy little gadgets that control lights, your thermostat, tell you when doors are open or closed etc. and they all feed in to your pc and you can control from there or over the web. people do all kinds of cool stuff with it

Hannah: uh

Chad: geeky

Hannah: like spy on their spouses? in the shower?

Chad: :-) no that's just webcam hehe

Chad: you know how the cool kids on fast and furious did all that shit to their cars
ground effects body kits etc? this is what geeks do to their houses

Hannah: oh. how about you work on the doorbell first (our doorbell doesn't work). i think that's the best way to know if someone is at your door. or is that too low tech for you?

Chad: ah nice. so it can be wireless or the signals are just sent through the powerlines. no i think we need a trap door with face recognition cameras that cross references the sexual predator database so if a bad guy comes to the door, the system automatically traps the person in haha

Hannah: OMG what??? why would i want a sexual predator trapped in my house?

Chad: no it would be cordoned off to a section of the basement.

Hannah: you know this conversation is total blogworthy

Chad: oh shit

Hannah: and you're going to come out looking like uber geek

Chad: i have to get back to work

so i read this wikipedia entry on x10 ... and i still don't really get it. what i want to know is, will it cook dinner?

O-H! I-O!

i've lived in ohio for almost my entire life. i spent nearly an equal duration plotting my eventual escape. for obvious reasons, no? i think i felt the "stigma" of being from ohio at a young age. when i was 11 years old i traveled to los angeles to visit my aunt and uncle. upon meeting their friends and their friends' children, i was inevitably asked where i was visiting from. at best, my answer received a lackluster, unimpressed reception. at worst, and more often, it was met with comments like "have you ever been cow tipping?" or "is your dad a farmer?" or "what else is there besides corn?" and with those questions, there was an implied naivety and lack of sophistication, which really irritated me because even at the ripe old age of 11, i thought myself to be quite worldy.

my parents were not keen on the idea of moving just to boost my self-image. so i didn't get an opportunity to carry out my "cut and run" policy until after i graduated high school. when applying to colleges, my selection criteria included proximity to home. that is, any school within a 300-hundred mile radius was automatically out. ironically, i ended up at cornell university in ithaca, ny - in the middle of nowhere. hardly the cosmopolitan epicenter that i had imagined for myself! but it was there that i cultivated my interests, made the best friends of my life, discovered $1000 handbags, and learned to call coke soda instead of pop. all events that would have turned out differently had i stayed in ohio.

four years later, i graduated from college and moved to new york city. finally! this was more my style! but sadly, my father had passed away during my senior year at cornell. and being near my mom and sister during the toughest period of our lives became a priority over fabulous shopping. at the time, i was convinced that it would be for one or two years tops. but other than a year in washington, dc when i was 25, i've lived in ohio since.

i've had a couple opportunities to move back to ny during that time, but something has kept me here all these years. i learned the definition of home. my mom, my sister, my husband, my dog, all the things i love most in life... these are the elements that make a place home. or maybe it was that i came to the realization that there's more to life than going out to the hottest new club or seeing the hip new broadway show or shopping at the trendiest boutqiues...

there's ohio state football! go bucks!

i guess i'm a true ohioan now.

he captured my horsey

chad taught me how to play chess about two years ago. surprising that i never learned before then because i usually love any kind of mental gymnastics, and chess is the roundoff back handspring layout with a full twist for the cerebral cortex. i guess i just never had the opportunity to learn when i was younger. chad, however, learned to play when he was a wee lad. in fact, i believe that "check mate" were his first words other than "hobbit", which he learned while still in the womb. anyone who knows chad knows of his obsession with tolkien.

and anyone who knows me knows that i have a competitive streak. okay, truth be told... i play til death. so you can imagine how extremely humbling and frustrating it has been for me to lose game after game of chess to chad. actually, i did win once. it was sometime last year and we were playing online (yes, we're geeks). i was at home and he was in atlanta at his mom's house. oh, the taste of victory was so sweet. but i had prove that it was no fluke. and more importantly, i needed to see the look of defeat on his face in person. last night i caught a glimpse. this is what it looked like:

note the pieces remaining on the board. i am black, and i have my king, rook and four pawns. chad is white, and he has his king, bishop and two pawns. i believe i am set up to win at this point, and chad is evidently perplexed. so of course i had to pull out the camera to document the momentous occasion.

but then... somehow... things went awry. so terribly terribly wrong. and this was the final outcome:

i am blaming it on the three glasses of chianti that i had. however, chad thinks anyone who calls her knight her horse is not a real chess player, and thereby cannot beat him.

man, i was so close. i almost cried.