1. Coma Black ~ Marilyn Manson, 2. Baby Shrimp Scampi, 3. can you tie it in a knot – can you tie it in a bow, 4. Purple fingers, 5. YEE-HAWW!!, 6. Appletini Week, 7. Sunset Beach, 8. Cherry Cobbler, 9. Day 106 – I am a librarian, 10. Autumn walk, 11. Bell(AHHHH)gio, 12. Test photo

I’d like to thank Rhi for doing this and causing me to waste nearly an entire hour working on this. All the other tasks I neglected during that time thank her too.

What you do:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
2. Using only the first page, pick an image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker).

My Answers:

1. What is your first name? Marilyn
2. What is your favorite food? shrimp scampi
3. What high school did you go to? Presentation
4. What is your favorite color? purple
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Owen Wilson
6. Favorite drink? appletini
7. Dream vacation? New Zealand
8. Favorite dessert? cherry crisp
9. What you want to be when you grow up? writer
10. What do you love most in life? My children
11. One Word to describe you. busy
12. Your flickr name. callistawolf

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In other news: I have a review up over at my new review blog. But it’s not just a review, it’s a giveaway too (thanks to PBN!). GO CHECK IT OUT. You too can be considered a rockstar in your child’s eyes!

Also, this is the last day to enter to win the FREE BlogHer ‘08 registration. Better get on that!

There are a bunch of little things to talk about, but as I find is often the case, none of them warrants their own post so they’re getting all lumped into this one, along with some pictures because WE ALL love pictures. Right, guys?

Gah, the “mommy blogging” segment on the “Today Show” was yesterday, if you’ve been living under a rock and didn’t know. And it was… mostly okay. I mean, I thought all the parts where Hoda and Kathie-Lee weren’t on the screen were great, that is. Yes, Hoda DID refer to mommy blogging with air quotes. Which made me want to promptly punch her in the face. And then Kathie-Lee babbled about how she doesn’t know anything about computers. And before you knew it, she was questioning the safety of blogging about your children. Because, you know, we wouldn’t want the INTERNET to know what our kids look like, their names, what they do on a daily basis, etc. Excuse me while I introduce Kathie-Lee (hereafter known as “pot”) to the kettle. Shoot, that women is renowned for babbling about her kids on her old show. And, uhm, HOW is it any different? Oh yeah, one medium is the internet where thousands read and one is television where MILLIONS watch. Ahem. And then poor Heather was cut off before she could even form a decent rebuttal. What a bunch of morons.

We had another “earthquake” last night. It was only a 3.5 or so (last night it was a 3.8… these things are always changing, apparently). Not terribly big, but enough to get my adrenaline pumping. I hadn’t felt a shake in over a week and I think I was starting to get a good false sense of security going. Dang it.

Evie is seven weeks old today. That doesn’t seem possible, does it? SEVEN WEEKS? That’s getting pretty close to two months. And after that it’s all downhill. Where has the time gone? I can’t believe how big she’s getting every day. She’s already getting a good layer of chunk going on. Her thighs are getting downright juicy. She’s getting long too. I’m used to how puny Liam always was, and I can already tell she’s out pacing him as an infant quite easily. Of course, that’s not really hard to do. He really was quite a puny runt.

My days have a pretty good rhythm to them now. Evie is still very resistant to being set down for any length of time, but I do it anyhow. I have to, at least a couple times a day while I’m dealing with Liam. She’s getting more used to her car seat so I’m hoping she’ll get more used to being un-attached to my person as well. After all, my to-do list is getting rather obscene. On the other hand, it’s really cool to be able to watch her become more and more aware as each day passes.

So you might have heard about this great flickr backlash going on in the mommy blogging community.  And if you’ve been to my site recently (and not just hung out on Google Reader, which I understand because I do that myself), you may have noticed the pictures in my sidebar from flickr and in my header have changed.  If you’ve been keeping track, you probably know why.  I’m not going to go back over the details that others ahead of me have stated so well.  The short of it is: people are stealing pictures of other people’s children and using them for themselves or in marketing.  And that’s not good.

I’ve always had the strictest Creative Commons license Flickr offers on my photos; Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works.  Which means that people are free to to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as they attribute the work and do not use it for commercial purposes or alter, transform, or build upon the work.  Whew.  Sounds complicated, right?  Basically means you can pass the picture around as long as you give me credit, don’t use it to make money or change the picture in any way.  Sounds like I’d be covered doesn’t it?  And you’d think I would be.  But this is the internet and it’s full of all sorts of douchbags and you never know what someone is going to do with your pictures.  And normally, I probably wouldn’t care or even worry too much.  After all, I’m pretty small potatoes over here.  

But where my children are involved… that’s where I have a problem.  I shudder at the of anyone doing anything to my children, even if it is just a photo of them.  That I am not okay with.  And listen, I know that mommy blogging is inherently laden with these issues.  Where do we draw the line?  What is okay and not okay to share about your child’s lives?  At what point do the silly stories infringe upon their privacy, etc and so forth.

I don’t share everything about my children.  Believe it or not!  I do keep some things to myself, especially about Harrison now that he’s getting older.  That’s why it may not seem like I talk about him as much as I do about Liam.  Do I wonder if I made the right decision to share their names and pictures on the internet instead of remaining anonymous?  Sometimes.  But I do believe, at least for now, that my choices were good ones.  Hopefully I won’t learn any differently.

So in the meantime, I’ve set the viewing privileges on all my photos of Harry and Liam (or at least almost all of them) to friends and family only.   Thank goodness for Flickr’s fabulous organizer and batch operations because otherwise that might have taken me for freakin’ ever to do.  If you’d like to continue to be able to see these pictures from my flickr page (sorry, they still won’t show up in my sidebar), and you aren’t already a contact labeled as a “friend”, either add me as a friend or drop me a comment here with your flickr id and I’ll add you to my contact list.  I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do and this was a very easy decision for me to make.