Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Kathryn

Lego Batman – The Career Path

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Magoo recently told me that he wants to be Batman when he grows up. I can only assume he means Lego Batman because that’s the only version of the super hero he’s really been exposed to. He was real coy and shy about it. He said he wants to save people.

“When Bad Guys go into their houses at night, I’ll just go in there and say, ‘Wake up Bad Guys! I’m gonna take yeh to jail.’”

So, I guess the Bad Guys just go into people’s houses at night to find a place to sleep but since they are BGs and also trespassers, that earns them a trip to the joint.

I decided to use a teaching moment and explain that what I like about Batman is the fact that he doesn’t hurt good people and he doesn’t even kill bad people most of the time. He wants to help so he just ties the bad guys up and lets the police deal with them.

“Yeah,” Magoo replied looking thoughtful, “But I don’t even have a hat yet.”

Lesson learned.

We were sitting in the Safeway food court the other afternoon slamming some corn dogs when Magoo noticed some slightly-swarthy farmer-types sitting at a table next to us. He eyed them suspiciously.

“Are there any bad guys in Our City?” he asked, never taking his eyes off the farmers.

“Yeah,” I replied honestly, “There probably are.”

“No,” he said simply, “Bad Guys are only in Bad Guy Town.”

I might add that they are also made of Lego.

Palm Pre Plus – Too Soft For This Goldilocks

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Almost everything about the Palm Pre Plus is cooler than my previous phone, the HTC Touch Pro running Windows Mobile. I thought my phone was the hotness. I thought my phone was the greatest thing ever. The Pre is hotter. The Pre is the greaterest thing ever.
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The hardware design is sleek and lovely. The OS looks and feels fabulous. After a brief learning curve I was able to pick up all the gestures and navigational tricks and I grew to really enjoy the interface. It can do cool things like navigate with Google Maps and it can act as a mobile WiFi hotspot, serving up to 5 other devices with wireless internet – very cool for a long roadtrip.

pre 051 (2)The problem is that although it’s cuter, prettier and faster than my stolen phone, it just doesn’t do everything I’ve come to expect. While I was trying it out, I kept saying, “But it’s so cute. Why can’t it do X?” or, “I want this to be my phone if only it could…”

The Pre works with Microsoft Exchange so it syncs my calendars and contacts, which is great. However, the calendar functionality is limited. There are little things that have come to be very important to me that you cannot do on a Pre calendar. The most critical problem for me is that I can’t add attendees to a calendar appointment. Whenever I’m out and about and make a new appointment, I add Dan as an attendee and the event goes to all of our phones and calendars within minutes. This makes family planning (not that kind) very easy and I feel like I need it, although “need” is a funny word.
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Another downside to the Pre is that there is currently no way to edit documents. It comes with a document viewer installed and on the Dataviz website, there’s a page saying that a fully functional document editor will be released early in 2010. But it’s April and that’s a deal breaker for me.

pre 055 (2)Dataviz has document editing apps for every other phone and its dog but not for the Pre. And therein lies the rub. Not many people are designing apps for the Pre. Palm is up for sale so its future is uncertain. I’m sure developers don’t want to pour resources into creating apps for an OS that may be off the market shortly. They’re putting their eggs into the basket of Apple and Google and hopefully Microsoft when their new (supposedly groundbreaking) Windows Phone 7 gets released later this year.

Because we’re so entangled with Microsoft, I was hoping my previous phone would get me through until the release of The Windows Phone Hotness but with my phone gone, I need to get something now.

I wanted it to be Palm. I loved the Pre. But this Goldilocks, like my burglarific predecessor, has very specific needs and is moving on to the next bowl of porridge.

If you’re looking for a smart phone that’s beautiful, sleek, easy to use and well-designed that doesn’t have a lot of gadgets and apps but has great web-browsing and simple personal calendaring, take the Pre out for a spin.

This week I’m exploring the world of <DROID>. The <> around DROID indicates that I’m saying it like a robot. Say it with me. It’s fun.

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In this case, I’m borrowing phones to try out and then I plan to purchase the one I like best.

A New Profile Picture for Belle Babe deBoe

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Little Wanda, AKA Belle Babe deBoe, AKA her real name is getting older and cuter and possibly just a teensy bit squishier. It’s time to update her profile picture on the sidebar and I’d love your input. Here are a few pictures my sister took when we were visiting last week. Which one should I crop to a head shot and use on the sidebar?

(Mouse over the picture you like and it should tell you the number.)

The notable feature of this one is the hair. It’s like a dip cone mohawk. I’ve actually started to crave DQ ice cream while holding her and staring at it:

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And, sneer:

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Don’t let this one fool you. She’s about 30 seconds away from being able to crawl and subsequently lay waste to everything in her known universe:

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And those pursed lips say, “WHAT!?”

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A nice feature to have in a baby dress. If she’s ever stranded somewhere far away from my mammaries, she can stuff this bad boy down her pie hole and have all the sustenance she needs:

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No matter how tempting she may appear, this baby should not be eaten:

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Not even her feets:

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Ask me if I’m worried about failure to thrive:

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When people say that someone looks “too innocent” they’re talking about this picture but she’s IV REAL yo:

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And she carries the family genetic long-tongue disorder. We try not to hold it against her:

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And one last piece of evidence that we really do need to feed her more:

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What do you think?

April Fools

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My kids like April Fools’ Day. It’s a festive time when they spend every waking minute lying their faces off and then saying, “Just KIDDING! April Fools!” Laylee said the best trick she played all day was to tell one friend that our grandma had died. I told Laylee that might be a mean trick and she said, “No it wasn’t. She wasn’t sad. She doesn’t even know our grandma.”

Magoo came up with the best trick ever. He used it all day long and I fell for it every single time. Here’s how it went:

Magoo: Hey Mom?
Me: Yeah Buddy?
Magoo: Just KIDDING! I didn’t really need anything. April FOOLS!

10 minutes later:

Magoo: Mom! Hey Mom? Excuse me Mom!
Me: What do you need?
Magoo: NU-THING! April Fools!

20 minutes after that:

Magoo: Mom? You know what?
Me: I don’t know. What?
Me: April FOOLS! I wasn’t gonna say anything. HA HA HA HA!

He spent all day changing it up, finding new ways to trick me with the same joke, which was basically my name. It was sweet. I mostly laughed but on April 2nd I stomped all over his fun. “It’s not April Fools’ Day today. That doesn’t work anymore.”

I’m not sure what “That doesn’t work anymore” really means. I think it means something like, “For real. If you keep doing that I will go mental and then you won’t be allowed to eat sugar ever ever again and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t your plan so it probably won’t work for you to keep saying it.”

Command Center Breach

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While we were on vacation in Utah my cell phone disappeared. “Oh,” you might think, “That’s a shame. Good thing it was just a cell phone.” The problem is it was not just a cell phone. That little black brick was our family’s Mobile Command Center. Since 2006 I’ve used it and its older brother before it to keep track of and control nearly every aspect of our family’s lives.

I’m currently using my sister’s old Razor and although it’s very cute and I’m really grateful to borrow it, it’s missing a few of the things that I’ve come to feel are necessary in a Mobile Family Command Center. Here is a partial list:

-Auto-sync calendaring connecting my phone calendar with my home calendar and Dan’s work, phone and home calendars

-A complete list of every contact I may ever need with their phone numbers and addresses included that auto-syncs over the air waves as soon as I update it

-Documents and spreadsheets of just about any piece of information I could want

-Full-text scriptures

-Internet access

-All kinds of applications that do all kinds of things I don’t really need but have learned to depend on.

-Email

-Cool personal ringtones for all my family members and friends

-A slide-out qwerty keyboard for text messaging

-Navigation

-Digital UNO

Don’t forget the fact that I feel kind of violated that someone is walking around with pictures and video of my kids I don’t have backups for, all of my recipes, emails and a lot of personal information.

When we realized it was really gone, like gone gone, like obvious-someone-had-pocketed-it gone, Dan sent out a command to do a remote wipe of all my data from the phone. We got a message back saying the wipe was successful when someone turned the phone on at about 4:30am the morning after it disappeared so that gives me comfort.

Now I’ve got my Razor and a paper calendar that I’m madly filling in with all my info from outlook and I feel so old-school. Remember this? At that point I had just begun my dive into techno-mom-dom. I’m really quite dependent now and I’m actively seeking a new phone.

The PR people from Verizon asked me a while ago if I wanted to try out a few of their smart phones and possibly review them. Now that I’m actually considering which phone to buy I think that’s a great idea so for the next several weeks I’ll be trying out some cool new devices and if I find anything worth telling, I’ll let you know.

My breached Command Center was an HTC Touch Pro from Verizon running Windows Mobile. In our area we get much better reception with Verizon than our friends who have other providers. The customer service has always been decent and most of our family members use Verizon so calls to them are free.

I have to say I was not uber impressed with the customer service we got when I lost my phone. For one thing, they could not perform a remote data wipe or track the phone’s GPS. For another, the guy at the call center told me that if the phone were turned in, they had no system in place for finding me and returning it based on the phone’s serial number. Through further investigation I found out that this was false. A kid named Dean in the West Valley store told me that they always do their best to get returned phones back to their rightful owners.

They were also unable to reactivate my service to my new/used phone until the following day because we had already deactivated, reactivated and deactivated the stolen phone that day and there is a hard-coded limit on the number of times you can do that. Apparently no supervisor has the power to override this so I was phoneless on vacation for a full day. I know, WAAAH, right? Still, it seemed strange to me and no one could give a good explanation as to why the policy was in place.

Still, we’re fairly loyal to Verizon and to phones that can play nice with Outlook. So, I’m on the hunt. Any suggestions?

Name-Calling

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I could hear their bickering from upstairs and tried to ignore them. Soon it spilled out into the hall and shortly Laylee was at my side with her arms folded.

“Mom! Magoo’s being so mean to me.”

“Yeah?” I asked, with a bored tone to my voice.

“Mo-om. He’s being so mean, like really really mean,” she continued, visibly distressed.

“What did he do?”

“He was calling me ‘Laylee Middle Name Thompson’!”

NO! He dared to call you by your NAME!? Like your full NAME!? That I gave you!?

I’m trying to think of a punishment for that particular crime. I’ve got nothing. I could call him by his full name but that doesn’t escalate things at all and I’m all about escalation. Maybe I could also start referring to all of his body parts by their correct biological names, his fingers becoming phalanges, his jaw becoming a mandible. I don’t know though. It’s just so MEAN…this proper name-calling.

Yes… And

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Last weekend, I took a young woman friend of mine into Seattle to have lunch with Nintendo, that nebulous Mario-ridden empire of a company, some women and girls doing amazing mentoring work in the community, and stylist Jennifer Rade. It was a fun mix of people talking about goals, games, fashion and eating chocolate calzones. We had a blast.
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As part of their promotion for their Style Savvy game for the DS, Nintendo asked Jen, who does not want to be pigeonholed as a celebrity stylist although she’s dressed Angelina Jolie and pretty much every famous person for pretty much every event known to man, to come and speak about her journey in the fashion industry.

They invited Powerful Voices, a Seattle-based group that mentors young girls, to come hear her speak and eat some great food at a pizza restaurant (I try to avoid using the term Pizzeria because of what it rhymes with.) that was transported all the way from Italy. They actually took apart an Italian pizza joint, shoved the pieces in a storage container, shipped them here and reassembled them. When I told Dan about the place, he laughed and asked why they had to bring the actual restaurant here. I told him that they brought it here so I didn’t have to go to Italy and leave him alone with the kids for 2 days while I went out for lunch.

Nintendo event 014Jen was fascinating to listen to. Her life path and mine are so completely different and she had so many great stories and experiences to share. She really has worked with everyone and done just about everything a costume designer/stylist can do.

I often worry about being pigeonholed in my fledgling writing career. Kathryn Thompson, the blogger, Kathryn Thompson, the children’s author, Kathryn Thompson, the non-fiction writer. This fear keeps me from branching out because I worry that if I find big success in one genre, I’ll have a hard time being taken seriously in another and I have a wide range of interests.

Nintendo event 009Jen is a testament to the power of hard work and never taking no for an answer. When people tell her she can’t do something, she just sees it as a challenge and works to prove them wrong. I really liked that, along with her down-to-earth nature. She also has a theory that I love and that has served me well in my life, although I’ve never given a name to it. She calls it “Yes… and.”

The basic idea is that when someone asks you if you can do something, you respond with, “Yes… and,” and then blow them away with all you’re capable of, opening up all kinds of doors for future success. I totally agree. Doing the bare minimum and hoping to be noticed will not get you very far in your career or in life. Next time you’re looking for some growth and adventure, try responding with a, “Yes…and,” and see what happens.

As part of the celebration for Powerful Voices, my favorite Nintendo executives and PR people surprised each attendee with her own DSi and a copy of Style Savvy. My date and I got one too. Yippee! I have to tell you that I bought the DS with birthday money last year, thinking the DSi wasn’t worth the extra money but now that I have both, the DS is feeling a bit lame in comparison. I gave it to Dan and I’m feeling some serious jealousy coming from his direction.
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Mine can surf the web, take and edit pictures, download games directly to the device, and best of all make little flip-notes animated videos. I love this because it’s a way to feed my kids’ digital addictions while forcing them to be creative. And I was not expecting to ever play Style Savvy, having given up playing dress-up with Barbies many moons ago. However, they had us try it out at the lunch and the game is stupidly addictive. I’ve never played Farmville but I’ve seen the hold it has on people and as far as I can tell, this game is like Farmville for fashion, except you don’t send out updates to all of your friends and family members every time you unlock something new so everyone doesn’t have to know just how much time I spend “building my business” and stocking my store.

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