Emma

Our good friends Sheena and Erick had their baby girl, Emma, on Friday. Here's a (really bad) pic from this afternoon when they got home.

 

Another of our good friends, Mike and Annette, just got home late last week from Korea, where they adopted their son, Garrett. Pictures are on their blog.

Cranberry Delight Spread

I made this cracker spread for my birthday party last weekend and it was a huge hit! I could see putting this on bagels for breakfast, too.

Ingredients:
1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened
2 tablespoons frozen orange juice concentrate, thawed
1 tablespoon sugar
Zest of 1 orange
1/8 teaspoon cinnmon
1/4 cup finely chopped dried cranberries (Craisins)
1/4 cup finely chopped pecans (optional)

In a small mixing bowl, beat cream cheese, orange juice, sugar, orange zest and cinnamon on medium speed until fluffy.

Stir in cranberries and pecans. Refrigerate at least 1 hour.
Makes 12 servings.

Work takes its toll

I guess I'm getting old. Or working too much. I've been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome -- in both arms. After almost three months of pain in my right arm, and more recent pain in my left arm (after I switched to a left mouse to relieve my right hand!), I finally went to my doctor. she recommended I get rid of the mouse and use a touchpad instead -- so I got one of those -- and I've got wrist braces. She wants me to wear them all the time, including in my sleep, for at least two weeks. If the pain doesn't go away by then, I'll have to go to a hand surgeon. If it does go away, then I can just wear the braces while I'm on the computer. UGH.

Not quite what I'd call journalism, but...

I just spent the better part of the past week building this web application to search and "rate" the entries in the Pioneer Press' annual Marshmallow Peeps Diorama contest. Yes, that's right. Peeps. We got more than 500 entries every year! The ones here are just the ones that were submitted electronically. We probably have another 50 to 100 that came in via snail mail. This database will get more traffic in 1 hour than most of our pages will get in one whole day! So it's paying my paycheck for this month. :-)

UPDATE: The database had more than 200,000 page views in its first three days online and it continues to go up. My boss was thrilled, needless to say.

Living locally

I'm reading an interesting non-fiction book right now by one of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver. The book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" is about how her family spent a year attempting to eat only foods grown either on their own farm or within the local community. It's an interesting chronicle of growing your own food -- including chickens and turkeys that they butchered themselves -- and a reminder of how different grocery store food is from the home-grown variety. It's got me to thinking that I should try to freeze or can vegetables and fruit that I buy this summer from the local farmer's markets, and save it for next winter when good produce is in short supply. Here's the website that goes with the book.

Bad contractors

Today's Pioneer Press has a story about problems with bad home building and remodeling contractors that I originally suggested. We tried to analyze data on the state's enforcement actions against contractors, but their database was in such bad condition that we couldn't do much with it. But it did help inform Deb's reporting and helped make for a better story.

Sweat Equity update

Well we got a response on our application to the DIY television show, Sweat Equity. They said they've filled all their slots for the current season, but will keep us in mind for the future. I guess that's a polite way of telling us to go away. :-)

We also submitted an application to a Canadian show called "Holmes on Homes" where the guy goes into homes that have been screwed up by bad contractors and he fixes them up. Our case isn't quite as extreme as some of the ones we've seen on his show, but we figured it was worth a shot. Also, it isn't clear if they will come into the States to shoot an episode (although the form you filled out on their site included pull-down menus for the US and its states). So we'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, last weekend we started installing a closet organizer in the guest room closet. We bought the materials a couple months ago and never got around to installing. Of course, once we got started, we changed our minds on the configuration and ended up returning a whole bunch of pieces to Home Depot and buying a whole new set of stuff! Hopefully we can get that finished in the next few days.

Home assessments story

I've got a big story in today's edition of the Pioneer Press about how the system for assessing home values is inherently flawed -- thousands of homes in the Twin Cities are either over-assessed or under-assessed, meaning they pay more or less in taxes than they should. By industry standards, the counties here are doing fine. But from a homeowners perspective, it's a different story. Here's the main story. Here's the "how we did it" piece. And here's some data that I put online to accompany the story (this is the really geeky stuff we didn't put in the paper). The reporter, Jennifer Bjorhus, and I have been working on this off and on since the end of last summer.

My sewing success

I don't consider myself the most talented at sewing, however I'm proud of one of my most recent projects. Watch the slideshow below to see the fabric book that I made for my best friend's daughter's first birthday. I can't even begin to tell you how many hours this took and how painstaking the work was! I have many friends with kids that age who I'd love to make more of these for, but I'm too exhausted from this one. My reward was that Eden absolutely loved it. And so did her parents.

Dictionary.com/Word of the Day Archive/rara avis

One of the more interesting words I've come across....
Dictionary.com/Word of the Day Archive/rara avis

CAR conference

I spent the latter part of last week and the weekend in Houston, Texas for the annual computer-assisted reporting conference. This is the one time all year when I get to see all my fellow journalism geeks, and it's always exciting, exhilerating and exhausting all at the same time.

I have attended every conference since 1999 (my first was in Boston, and remains one of my all-time favorites!), and I'm still amazed that I always learn something new and that I always come away feeling like I have so much yet to learn! How is that possible?! There are always a handful of the uber-geeks who are racing out ahead of the rest of us learning something newer, better, faster, cooler, etc. They just stun me every year.

Thankfully I count most of them among my good friends and can call or email them at any time and get a flood of help whenever I need it. :-) They are my saviors.

My other favorite part about the conference is that I get to teach people who are newer to this than I am. For the last few years I've taught an advanced Excel class that is hugely popular. This year after the class, I got stopped in the hotel lobby or outside the conference area or wherever by at least a half dozen people telling me how fabulous my class was. Then when I got back to my office I had three emails from people thanking me! Makes me feel really good to be able to help them. After all, there are so many other people in the CAR world that helped me along the way.

Amazing that this August will be 9 years since I started at Mizzou, which is also the point in time when I really started doing CAR full-time. I can't believe it's been that long! But the conference also reminded me that there are others who have been doing CAR for 20 years. Wow.