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Claire, Personal, Relationships

More Family Resemblances

Jan 10. 2012

A couple of weeks ago, J's relatives in China found this old photograph and sent it over: Can you guess who the little girl is? It's J's mother when she was about 3 years old! Everyone immediately noticed how remarkably Claire resembles her grandmother in this picture. Here's a recent picture of Claire for comparison: Even my mother did a double-take when I showed her the old picture. "Claire's going to look just like that in a couple of years," she predicted. And we couldn't agree more. As stated in a previous post, Claire currently resembles her uncle (J's brother) the most of everyone in our family. Sometimes, you could even swear that she's a carbon copy of him! And because J and his...

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Geek in Heels
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Art/Design, Baby, Books, Cute, Giveaways

Giveaway: L’album des trésors de bébé [Gorgeous French Baby Book]

Jan 09. 2012

Update:  This giveaway has ended. Congratulations to Elisa T, who entered via Twitter! If you are anything like me, you would probably agree that most baby books out on the market are crap. They are usually pretty cheesy and most do not have anything extra special about them. This is the primary reason I was thinking about forgoing the baby book route when I was pregnant with Claire. (That, and the fact that I'm a complete idiot when it comes to scrapbooking.) And then I read about L'album des trésors de bébé on my friend Kelly's blog...

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Geek in Heels
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Blogging, Geek, Reviews, Web

Site Downtime, and a New Host

Jan 08. 2012

If you tried to visit this site yesterday or earlier today, you were probably met with a big fat error message. :-(  I thought that the problem had resolved itself by Saturday evening, when the site briefly came back online after my web host reset the server, but the reprieve only lasted a couple of hours. This was the second time in less than a month that this had happened. (Third, if you count the reset on Saturday.) Add this to the consistently sloooow loading time I had been experiencing in the past half year, and we had a problem on our hands. It wouldn't have been half as bad if my host's customer support: Hadn't taken seven hours to respond to my first email, then...

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Geek in Heels
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Art/Design, Books

Fairy Tales Get the Architect Treatment

Jan 07. 2012

How would fairy tales look from the lens of architecture? This is precisely what Fairy tale author and editor Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer sought to find out. Rapunzel, designed by Guy Norden and Associates: As structural engineers we were instantly drawn to the "tower that stood in a forest and had neither a door nor a stairway, but only a tiny little window at the very top" featured in the Brothers Grimm version of "Rapunzel," and we looked to our previous design for the Seven Stems Broadcast Tower for inspiration. We were able to meet the Grimms' strict design requirements by employing a slender tower design of vertical cylindrical stems that are joined by intermittent outrigger beams with a reinforced space at the very top for Rapunzel's...

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Geek in Heels
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Finance, Personal

More Thoughts on Money, and Small Steps Forward

Jan 06. 2012

As stated in an earlier post, 2011 was not the best year — financially — for my family. This does not only apply to my parents. While J and I are by no means poor, we have been on a very tight budget. Yes, we were able to hire a part-time nanny for a few months. Yes, we are able to dine out once in a while. But these luxuries do not come easily, as we have made numerous sacrifices to achieve them (e.g., not purchasing clothes for ourselves for the entire year). And as much as it pains me to not be able to afford toddler classes for Claire, or not be able to immediately afford a new couch despite the...

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Geek in Heels
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