The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

Can I just drool for a moment about how exciting it is that Flickr has implemented photo printing for Flickr photos?

Big deal, I hear you say,there have been digital photo-printing services around forever.

And that’s correct- I’ve been printing digital photos out for years using iPhoto, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Ofoto. But they were just my photos, and if I was lucky, photos shared through clunky, slow-loading album interfaces.

Flickr allows me to set a preference that determines whether everyone, just my contacts, just my friends, or just my family may print my photos. If I see a particularly striking photo on Flickr and the user has enabled it, I can have a print made to hang in my home. When I create the Flickr group for our wedding that our friends and family can contribute photos to, they’ll be able to print each other’s photos, so that my Dad can have a print made of a picture I took of my Grandma, or something.

Yay Flickr!

The last letter Carolyn Hax answers today is so funny and appropriate that I’m going to reprint it here just so it doesn’t get lost in their archives.

Dear Carolyn:
My wife is really short. People sometimes meet her, then pull me aside to say, “Wow, your wife is really short.” How should I respond to that?

Detroit

“Shhh — we haven’t told her yet.”
“I know. I insisted.”
“True, but only when she’s wearing heels.”
“What? I can’t hear you, my wife is too short.”
And there’s always “Thanks!” or a good one I just heard: “How should I respond to that?”

I was traumatized this evening by Alton Brown.

There was a factoid shown on screen about how a birthday cake that falls during baking is believed to cause a year of bad luck.

So clearly, it’s all my fault.

On Saturday, Tom and I went to the wedding of some dear friends of ours- college friends of Tom’s who have moved to the area. We hang out with them every so often, and when they heard about our engagement, Lauren offered to palm off her wedding planning crap pass on her planning materials to me.

For a number of personal reasons, they chose to take a completely new last name, rather than keeping their old names or taking one of their names for both of them. It’s an interesting choice- I’ve long felt that the decision about what name one should have after getting married is a deeply personal one, and any reasons one has for making one choice or another are pretty irrelevant to other people’s decisions. It seems like any female blogger who makes one choice or another is bombarded by unsolicited ass-vice from around the internets about how she’s giving up her identity, or the kids won’t understand why Mommy and Daddy have different names, or how she’s betraying the sisterhood, blah blah blah…

Take his name, take her name, keep your names, hyphenate, take a completely new name… whatever. Just tell me what to call you and I will, okay?

My intention to take Tom’s last name should come as a surprise to exactly no one- I’m enough of a traditionalist that I like the idea of having the same name as the rest of my nuclear family, and besides… Names are patrilineal in Western civilization. Love my dad though I do, it’s not like I had much choice about who my father would be and what name I would have. And for 18 years, he had the legal authority to overrule me on decisions about my own life, which Tom won’t have. So it’s not like keeping my current name is some statement of girl-power. Since I’m choosing Tom, why not choose his name with him?

I am a little surprised, however, at the serious consideration I’m giving to the idea of dropping my current middle name and keeping Baxendell as the new middle. I always assumed I would just drop Baxendell completely, but now that it’s more an eventuality than a theoretical possibility, I’m not so sure.

It seems like it would make for a smoother name-transition at work- I’m sort of “professionally branded” as Tiffany Baxendell- and I work in a high-turnover industry, so it seems like it would help to make sure my clients know it’s still me and not some other Tiffany in the same office.

I *could* just use Bridge socially and Baxendell professionally, but I know someone who does that and it’s needlessly complicated. And I’m not interested in hyphenating. I guess I could keep all my names- Tom and his siblings each have multiple middle names, so there’s no reason I can’t, I suppose.

I don’t have to decide anytime soon, but it’s the sort of thing I’ve been pondering more lately.

Dear Tommy Maddox,

You suck. What happened to you?

Love,
Tiff

You know why I’m so fond of Tom?

Because he’ll call me at the office in the middle of a workday to tell me about the latest Apple product announcements so we can take a moment to geek out together.

I love that.

Birthday candles

Originally uploaded by Elena777.

A very happy birthday to my sweetie!

So the party this weekend was a big family group hug thing, and my unit partner and I felt a little weird about the “rah-rah corporate girl” fun we were having… until we realized that there’s nothing wrong with being enthusiastic about an employer that treats you well, has executives that actually embrace the company’s core values, and throws you a big party every few years.

So the assistant to one of the higher ups, trying to build team spirit in my division, sent out an email today to announce both my engagement and the birth of the son of one of my coworkers in another office.

The new dad emailed me personally to congratulate me, only he misspelled the subject line.

“CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR ENGAGMENT.”

Freudian much?

There are no words.

Originally uploaded by tjbax.

More companies should throw parties like this.

I had to deliberate over whether or not I should tag photos with the company name, since I make it a practice to not specifically mention them. But I decided to go ahead and do it, since if you’re paying attention, it’s not that hard to figure out who I work for, and besides, my coworkers across the world might want to find these photos themselves. Besides, the really weird stuff in the photos is stuff the company planned and paid for itself, so it’s just a little harmless fun and nothing they’d likely fire me over.