zoomaru

Ruby love love LOVES the cats.

She's begun making this purring, trilling noise when she sees Meep or Sancho. She has also discovered that dogs are pretty dang cool too, and gets so very excited to see them. cooing and purring at them.

Gravity is apparently very cool as well. she's been dropping things on purpose and looking down at them in amazement. Apparently it is my job to pick them up and return them to her. but i think i'm gonna give up that job.

P.S. When will those damn teeth come in? she's been teething for over a month. they're SO close to popping in.

Well. Graphic design, in principle is lovely. But the day to day reality as a graphic designer will beat you silly.

I went to a four year college for graphic design and have been practicing it for 14 years. I'm what you could call a PRO-fesshunal. When you first enter the field, it's an art and you are the artist, my god. you MUST be original. You MUST push the envelope. But the real world will soon teach you that clients don't LIKE to be out of the box, they LOVE their box, don't mess with their box, dammit. And amazingly enough, clients with no design training and no experience, see no problem micromanaging color and layout.

I still try to be original, but if you could see how many truly original ideas have been discarded for the "safe" option. or so compromised by clients who helpfully request that you combine elements of 3 completely different designs, you'd understand why there seems to be so few hands-on designers over the age of 40. they all move into management positions where they can turn around and ask someone else to bend over backwards.

It may sound like I don't enjoy my job, and that's not true. I enjoy it very much, but lord, some days I'd rather sell widgets. If you like my widget, you buy the widget. If you don't like the widget you go somewhere else and leave me alone. you don't tell me how to change my widget.

there I feel better. could you make that logo bigger?

"How mundane" you must think to yourself. Yet another self-involved, navel-gazing blog taking up web space. But I'm afraid if I don't start jotting things down, i'll forget how cool this age was...

Ruby was born November 19, 2003 which makes her now about 7.75 months. To tell you the truth, this keeping track of age thing is complicated. Do you count the weeks? and divide by 4 to figure out the months? I've offically given up on that, and am going by calendar month.

She has acquired several new tricks recently. For a while now she has been making raspberries and rolling over and sitting up with assistance. but more recently she has begun clapping her hands!!! to you childless masses, I'm sure this is a "so what" kinda moment for you, but when all you started out was a pooping, eating, sleeping meatloaf, small things learned mean a lot. she has also been rolling to her stomach and back again over and over again, she still occasionally gets her arm trapped underneath herself, which really pisses her off. Other changes include more frequent laughing which is easier to solicit from her, a "ga ga ga" sound and also a fake coughing that when imitated sends her in to paroxyms of giggles.

I'm a bit conflicted about ramblihg on about the baby. having spent most of my adult life single and unchilded, I've been bored to tears on occasion by the exultations some parents go into about their kids. one person that shall remain nameless has repeatedly answered the question "how is your baby?" with "she is so fucking CUTE!!!!" ugh. really. i think she believes that she is the first person to be in love with her own child. we're hard wired to be in love with our progeny. to adore and worship them. To not realize that we are one of BAJILLIONS with babies is just weird and a symptom of not being particularly self-aware. I could ramble on about this particular person's frailties, but that would just be churlish.

My main purpose is to be able to look back at my blog and see "oh wow... that's when she learned that..."