Funny Phoebe (and other stories)

Admittedly, Phoebe is not always funny. 

Sometimes—not every day, but sometimes—she dumps out a full bottle of water onto a laptop. 

I've matured a lot as a parent (and as a person) since I started raising kids. And I just want to let the record show that I didn't even yell about the laptop (not really). I sat Phoebe in timeout and gave her a little lecture. And Zoë got a little lecture as well (since she's the one who gave Phoebe the water bottle in the first place). But I didn't even yell. 

I yelled at Benjamin through the window this evening—in full view of who knows how many neighbours—to "STOP HITTING YOUR BROTHER WITH THAT STICK RIGHT NOW OR YOU'RE GOING TO REGRET IT!" to which he responded, "I'm not hitting him hard..." to which I responded, "YOU'RE HITTING HIM ENOUGH AND I'M TELLING YOU TO STOP!"

And then when he had stopped hitting Alexander with the stick (or threatening to hit him or whatever was going on there) he refused to stop tormenting him, so I yelled, "HEY, BENJAMIN! I NEED YOU TO CLEAR SPIDERWEBS OFF THE HOUSE, LIKE NOW!"

Because clearing spiderwebs off the house is the same thing as regret, right?

Rabbits and cucumbers

I don't even know how long we've been playing "Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit," but it's been years—regularly, it seems, since at least 2014. We just try to be the first one to say "rabbit, rabbit, rabbit" to everyone else on the first day of each month.

Sometimes we do it by text, such as the time I texted "rabbit, rabbit, rabbi" to Andrew in 2018. 

Sometimes we shove papers under doors or leave drawings on the whiteboard for the kids to wake up to (such as this one from December 2022):

Andrew's microphone

Andrew is teaching in-person again this semester. He taught in person last semester as well, but only had one class at the graduate level, so it was small and in a big room and his students all wore masks and were super understanding about him having a baby in the middle of the semester. 

This semester he's teaching two classes and one is an undergraduate course with 40 students, which means that the room is much more crowded, and he doesn't know any of the kids and wasn't sure if they would mask up if he asked them to (because we have no formal measures here regarding COVID). So he was a little nervous going into class today because of (a) all the teacher reasons (teachers are often scared of their students) and (b) all the COVID reasons (this variant is wildly infectious). 

But, he was happy to see his classroom 100% masked. He said one student arrived without a mask, but they took a mask from the box he had set out (yes, he provides masks and hand sanitizer for his classes) and wore it without complaint. So that was nice!

When I was talking to my mom on Sunday about his teaching schedule this semester, she asked if he had a little microphone. She said that she's found having a microphone on helps her students to hear her through her mask (which is perfectly capable of being talked through, though things do come out a little muffled, especially for those in the back, I imagine). 

So I asked Andrew about it when we finally crawled into bed last night (he was up late finishing his lecture notes (it's a new-to-him class; one he's taken but not taught, so it's a lot more work to prepare for) and I was up late trying to get Phoebe settled (her reflux makes her fairly miserable, and although she handles it with composure, it also makes it hard to get her settled for the night because it's much easier for her to deal with when she's being held upright)). 

"I have a microphone," he assured me.

"You do?" 

"Don't you remember?" 

"I do not," I said, and Andrew started laughing so hard tears were rolling down his cheeks as he tried to whisper-remind me about his microphone (Phoebe sleeps in our room). 

Last semester, Andrew taught in person for the first time and he got a portable/wearable microphone to wear. One that would clip onto his shirt. It has a little foam cover thing over the microphone head, which is pretty normal for a microphone. 

Well, he was on campus one day and he went to the bathroom and while he was...using the urinal for its intended purpose...something fell off his shirt and into the urinal. 

A round black thing of considerable size. 

"What is that?!" he wondered, so he bent over to inspect it closer.

It was the foam cover for his microphone!

So he fished it out of the urinal and ran it over to the sink and washed and washed and washed it and then filled his hand with hand sanitizer and marinated the poor microphone head cover-thingy in it and let it sit soggily in his pocket until he got home. 

"Oh, yes!" I giggled. "I do remember that you have a microphone!"

So, yes, Mom! Andrew has a microphone to wear to class!

Smart phones. Smart me.

I forgot my pump when I walked out the door to go to church this morning. Technically, I remembered the pump but forgot everything else—bottles, flanges, diaphragms and valves. In order to pump I need to have all of the above, not some of the above but, unfortunately, some was all I had so I couldn't pump.

Not pumping can be devastating for me. It's uncomfortable, first of all, and, second of all, it can be embarrassing. But I was wearing a few layers and my top layer doesn't really show wetness so I figured it would be okay to wait until I got home from church to pump. It would have to be okay. Still, I was sad about forgetting my pump so I took out my phone to text Andrew that I forgot it and when I did that I saw that the last person I had been texting with was our good friend Steve.

"When did I text Steve?" I wondered as I clicked on his name to re-read our conversation. Had he texted me and I missed reading it? I didn't remember texting him...so imagine my surprise when the conversation I thought I'd had with Andrew (regarding Benjamin's poor little noggin) popped up on the screen.

Re-reading this conversation was hilarious considering Steve is...a doctor! 

Adding to the embarrassment is that I then got on Facebook and fished for medical advice again. I probably wouldn't have done that had I known I'd been talking to a doctor in the first place...but I thought I was talking to my husband who doesn't handle injuries with much aplomb (which is why I figured he was googling first aid). 

Still, though, the question of how, exactly, I'd managed to text Steve remained. The contacts in my phone are listed alphabetically by last name, so Andrew and Steve are pretty close together (Steve is at the end of my G list and Andrew is at the top of my H list) but I hadn't used my phone to text Andrew Steve. I had used my computer, so when we got back home I checked my computer to see if I had an open conversation with Steve. I didn't. I had an open conversation with Andrew—the very same one that is filed under Steve's name on my phone. 

Then Andrew noticed that the phone number was different. When I uploaded the picture to the chat window, my computer decided to direct it to an old number I had listed for Andrew (rather than Andrew's current number). That old number of Andrew's is Steve's current phone number, so that's how I texted Steve—completely by accident!

Touch me not

School is out for Christmas break which means that we've been seeing a lot more of Phillip lately. Phillip lives a couple of houses down from us and he basically grew up between our house and his. Andrew and his older brother were best friends growing up. Truthfully, we've been missing Phillip because before school started he would stop by almost every day to see if he could play with the girls (both of them adore him and since he's the youngest child, by a large margin, and both of his parents work he preferred to play at our house rather than be at home alone all day).

One day this week he was over here for more than eight hours. He discovered Angry Birds on Andrew's iPod Touch and just disappeared. We'd find him in various locations around the house, quietly working on some ramdom Angry Birds level. Around bedtime I asked if Phillip was still here but no one could say for certain until I found him in our office, bouncing on my exercise ball in the corner, still playing Angry Birds. He (finally) went home but was over again the next day.

We had Josh and Carolee (our friends from Egypt) over for dinner and after we put the kids to bed we went downstairs to play MarioKart. While we were playing Phillip came downstairs.

"Touch me!" he said to Andrew.

Looking a little nervous, Andrew slowly raised his hand to touch Phillip's shoulder.

"Not like that!" shrieked Phillip, "iTouch me!"

Andrew dug the iPod out of his pocket and handed it to Phillip. Phillip flopped onto one of the couches and quickly dissolved into the world of Angry Birds. We hardly knew he was there.

Have a holly, technological Christmas!

We've been enjoying getting into the Christmas season in spite of our colds. On Saturday we went up to Temple Square to view the lights, which I will post about after I get the pictures off of Andrew's computer. He's currently working on his final project—it's due on Wednesday—and then he will be free, at least relatively free. He has two finals to take after he turns his project in but those shouldn't be too intensive. I can hardly wait!

Anyway, he had loaded up his iPod with "rockin' music," and said we were going to be the party car. Unfortunately for him, none of the songs he put on his iPod were Christmas songs so we held a vote and quickly ruled him out. Luckily Auntie Sarah was in the car with us and she knew exactly which radio station had Christmas carols playing. We never listen to the radio anymore.

On the way home we turned the Christmas carols back on.

"Daddy," Rachel requested, "Do you have Frosty the Snowman?"

My handicap

Miriam, the champion-sleeper, slept from 1:00 AM until around 7:30 AM at which time I forced her awake and begged her to eat before I exploded. My milk supply, though still over abundant, isn’t quite as hyper-active as it was with Rachel which means that I can actually sleep for six hours before I feel like I’m going to explode. It’s kind of nice. Not that I slept for those six hours…

Rachel woke up almost every two hours last night and then came into our room around 8:00 AM. It was nice of her to wait that long because I heard her up and stirring much earlier than that.

I was so tired—I went to take a nap around 11:00 AM and didn’t wake up until 1:30 PM. And then I saw Andrew was online so I started chatting with him.

What are you doing?

Our upstairs neighbours killed our internet connection yesterday. While they were hanging up their laundry over the balcony they dropped a pair of red shorts, which landed on our phone line, pulling it apart at the various places it's been broken apart and twisted back together. Heaven forbid they solder anything together here when twisting it back together works just fine...until your upstairs neighbour drops a pair of red shorts from their balcony.

So I didn't have internet at home all day.

When Andrew got home he asked me what I did all day without internet.

"The same thing I do everyday with the internet," I told him.

He volunteered to fix the phone line again, by twisting the wires back together again. Who needs to solder? The chances our neighbour is going to drop another article of clothing that will land on our phone line is slim, right?

While Andrew did this, he got a dose of what I do all day long, with or without the internet. Rachel followed him around everywhere.

He went onto the scary balcony to find the problem. Rachel didn't want to go out there; she's no dummy--she knows scary when she sees it.

"What are you doing?" she asked him.

"I'm fixing the phone," he said.

"Oh." she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, while thinking, Didn't I just say that?

"Oh." she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, "What are you doing?"

"I"m standing up," she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm standing up in the kitchen," she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm standing up in the kitchen watching Daddy," she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing the phone," he said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm standing up in the kitchen watching Daddy fix phone," she said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm coming back inside," he said, "Because I'm finished out here."

"Oh," she said and followed him from the kitchen to the toy room where he moved my desk out of the way so that he could access the hole in our wall where the phone line comes through (yup, it's a hole, and a great entrance for mosquitoes and ants and things), "What are you doing?"

I think you get the picture. The only thing different about my day with the internet, as opposed to a day without the internet, is that I can chat to Andrew when Rachel does little cute things, like using the broom as a "tripod" for her "camera," or when she does little annoying things, like throwing fits because I sang Pease Porridge when she only wanted porridge and not peas. And I can post what I write to the blog instead of saving it to my computer. It really doesn't change my day at all. My day is as repetitive as Rachel, herself, usually.

"Elephant, elephant, elephant, elephant, elephant, elephant!" she's saying right now.

"Yes, that's an elephant."

"Yup!"

And she's gone, only to come back a few minutes later.

"Help me up, help me up, help me up, help me up, help me up!"

"How do you ask nicely?"

"Please may I more holding you?"

Now she's up on my lap, holding me and the elephant she earned for staying dry x-amount of nights in a row, asking if we can all watch Winnie the Pooh together...again...that poor DVD has been watched so many times it's not even funny.

But at least I can chat to Andrew that his daughter put her blanket over her head to "hide" and then walked around. And then started clapping her hands, too, and said,

"Wear blanket-hat...and clap hands!"

She was so excited to be multitasking. Must be her father's daughter. They both love to multitask...anything...just to say they can multitask.

Maybe that will be my new answer for Rachel's never-ending interrogation about what I'm doing at any given moment in the day.

"What are you doing, mama? What are you doing?"

"I'm multitasking."

"Oh."

(For the record she just asked me what I was doing and I told her I was typing...

"No," she said, "You're using mouse!"

Oh, yup, I hadn't even noticed I'd switched).

We now have television

Our only connection to the outside world for the past six months has been the internet, and that has been shoddy, at best, although it’s been a little better lately. We had television for the first month, or so, until it died one day. That wasn’t really a problem for us since we don’t watch television. The only show we regularly watch is The Office and we do that through iTunes because The Office doesn’t show in Egypt.

The first time we wished we had television was for the elections in November. And then the inauguration. And several other important national and world events that we didn’t watch.

Our landlord tried to fix our television so that we could watch the election. He thought it would be important to us to see who won. So he showed up to our apartment at around 10 PM on November 4th, took our television up to the roof, and had us feed some random wires through our open window.

He was up there for hours while we stood guard by our open window, watching out for Templeton (our rat, who has since disappeared) to make sure he didn’t come inside.

We didn’t get to watch the elections; and our landlord didn’t bother trying to fix our television ever again. Although Egyptians live and die by their television screens—and even cardboard houses and squatters in the City of the Dead have satellite dishes—we had to pay our full rent and not have a working television.

Again, it’s basically a non-issue since we don’t really watch television (obviously, since we haven’t had it since we moved to Egypt, basically), but it’s supposed to be included in our rent and sometimes—like when there is a bombing in Cairo—we want to be able to turn on the news so that we know what is going on.

Hatim, our landlord, eventually gave us the number for the satellite guy and left the key to the roof so that we could let the guy up there to fix it. Andrew called him a couple of times, but he never called back. Finally, last Sunday, we got a call from the satellite guy saying that he was on his way. Good thing he made an appointment.

Rachel and I were both napping when the satellite guy arrived and Andrew took him up on the roof. When I woke up, Andrew was still on the roof so I had no idea where he was. The television had been moved, though, so I figured out where he was and decided to make dinner instead of bothering them. I had just put a pot of water on the stove to boil when Andrew came back inside. He was yelling Arabic at someone on the roof, and that man was shouting instructions back at Andrew.

They were throwing wires down from the roof and feeding them through our window, again. At least we didn’t have to worry about Templeton this time, but there were other worries…like the fact that the ends of the wires were completely exposed and had no plug on them. I wondered how we were going to plug in the cord. But I didn’t need to wonder for long. Once Andrew caught the cord he marched over to the outlet and jammed the wires into the socket.

“Do you have power?” he yelled in Arabic and then, having received a positive response, turned to me. “Do you want to just hold these for a minute?”

Of course I do. Of course I want to hold live wires into an electrical socket while our 1.5 year old baby is watching me. It’s setting the perfect example for her, don’t you think?

That “minute” turned into “a few minutes,” which turned into a “where-the-heck-is-he?” I didn’t mind it too much until Rachel announced that she had to go potty and I turned to look at her, which jostled the wires, which caused them to start sparking, which caused me to freak out.

I eventually convinced Rachel that, since she didn’t have any pants on (thank goodness), she could go to the potty by herself, despite all the tugging on me and her many pleas of “Hep me!” and “Mama go!”

She went by herself in the correct place (thank goodness) and then I spent the rest of my time as a “plug” trying to get Rachel to stay away from the sparks, while managing, miraculously, not to get electrocuted, myself.

Our old dish

Meanwhile, back on the roof, Andrew was having his first lesson in masonry. Apparently our old satellite was so ancient and rusty and bent that it wouldn’t work anymore, so the satellite guy went out to get a new one.

Our roof is so full of construction materials (bricks, window panes, etc.) and other satellite dishes that it took them a while to decide where to put the new one. The satellite man decided to put it in a spot that looks like will one day end up being someone’s new kitchen. Andrew asked him if that was going to be a problem.

“Oh, no,” he assured Andrew, “This floor won’t be finished for years!”

That is probably true. If you’ve seen the way construction works here, it’s very easy to believe that it could take several years to build a new storey onto a building, as is the case with our building.

We don’t have an elevator so everything is carried up the stairs by a few workers. Bricks are usually delivered between 11 PM and 1 AM, (which is the perfect bedtime lullaby, let me tell you) and then sit there, in front of our main entrance, until around 6 AM when the workers show up to carry them up the stairs. They load piles of brick on old cardboard boxes, heft those onto their shoulders, and trudge up the stairs. The same thing happens with bags up cement mix and piles of sand.

It’s a pretty slow process. Granted, these men carry in one trip what would take me 5 or 6 (or more). But still…it’s a long and slow process. They’ve been doing it the whole time we’ve lived here, and probably before that, too, and there’s not really much to speak of up on the roof that’s been built up.

So it’s probably okay that our new satellite is in someone’s future kitchen. Our old one was in their living room and our neighbours each have one as well. In short, the whole roof is full of satellite dishes. I don’t know what they’re going to do when the time comes to actually finish the little renovation project they have going on.

Anyway, the satellite guy wanted Andrew’s help installing the new satellite. They mixed cement using a bag of cement the satellite guy brought with him (and some other random ingredients from the construction hud on the roof) and made a big pile of it, and then they stuck the satellite dish in the middle. Unfortunately, there was too much satellite and not enough cement. Fortunately, the satellite guy is a quick thinker and he thought to put some bricks around the base of the dish to help prop it up.

I think they did a great job. It looks very classy.

All the other dishes have nice, smoothly shaped cones of cement holding theirs up. Our stand is more 20th century impressionist stand. It really sets us apart from our neighbours. I think they’ll all be jealous.

When I asked Andrew how much this cost he prefaced his answer by telling me that Hatim was going to reimburse us and then said it was 200 LE for the dish and 150 LE for labour (about 62 USD, total).

That’s really not very expensive, I don’t think, but, all things considered, shouldn’t we have gotten at least half of the labour money? After all, I spent the evening holding wires into an electrical socket and Andrew learned how to mix cement. Exactly what did the satellite guy do?

What was that?

It's 8:40 PM. Naturally it's pretty dark outside. We just finished having FHE. Probably the best FHE ever! We watched a "Little People" movie--Karen sent a DVD that has 6 short clips on it. We watched the one about the frog. Rachel thought it was great; she kept bouncing up and down.

After we watched the movie we played leapfrog. And then we talked about nursery.

For some reason, now that Rachel is basically old enough to go to nursery (8 days until her 18 month birthday) she is petrified of it. Up until a few weeks ago she loved nursery. She's been going for months!

I sat in nursery with her for a little while last week but she ended up coming to primary with me. So today we reviewed the lesson that she had in nursery. It was about prayers. Then we talked about how fun nursery is and asked her if she wanted to go this week. She said she did. Here's hoping...

Anyway, after scriptures, prayers, silly tickle fights, tooth brushing, hugs, and kisses, Rachel had popcorn. This just means that we sing "Popcorn Popping" and put her to bed. She loves popcorn. Sometimes.

With Rachel tucked snuggly in bed, Andrew and I lazed around for a few minutes until we thought she was asleep. Then we went into the kitchen to clean up from dinner.

I had just gotten out a plastic bag to put the cheese into when two things happened at once: a huge cracking sound and a power outage.

I screamed.

That huge cracking noise? Yeah, it happened right behind my head. I was pretty sure something terrible had happened. I've never heard a gunshot, but maybe that was one. Or maybe Andrew fell and hit his head on something. My imagination was going 100 miles an hour.

"What was that?" I asked, groping around in the dark to find a counter top or Andrew or an assailant or something. Anything. I needed more than the plastic bag I was holding onto.

"I just snapped the pizza thing!" Andrew said.

We had half-homemade pizza for dinner. We bought the crust from Metro Market and it happened to come on a Styrofoam tray that made an amazingly loud noise when broken in half.

I suppose the fear was compounded by being plunged into darkness at the exact moment Andrew decided to break the tray right above my head.

Our cell phone beeped, drawing me out of my panic attack.

I found Andrew and held onto his shirt and we bumbled our way out of the kitchen. Once we were in the hallway we could use the light from our laptop screens to guide us into the living room (thank goodness for laptops!) where Andrew found the flashlight sitting on his desk.

We spent the next ten minutes searching for the candles that we had gotten for moments just like this. The only problem is that electricity has been so stable lately that we forgot where we put them.

Finally we found them, and started lighting them.

The Schillings, who had texted us, came to borrow a can of evaporated milk. They were in the pharmacy down the street when the power went out and found their way to our house and up our stairwell in the dark. Kudos to them.

We talked for a few minutes about all the fun things you can do when the power is out: ghost stories, games, shadow puppets on the wall, etc. A good old fashioned power outage was beginning to sound like a lot of fun. But just when Andrew was lighting the sixth candle the power came back on.

Our apartment hummed back to life. The fridge started clicking. The lights turned on. Even our microwave started running--we had just thrown in a bag of popcorn two seconds before the power went out.

So I guess we'll just watch a movie together as we'd planned to before the power went out. But that sounds a little unadventurous now.

Maybe we'll take a break from electronics and do that shadow puppet show on the wall after all.

Technical Difficulties

Hi - Andrew's mom here. We received word today that internet service throughout the Middle East has been disrupted for some reason (something was cut in Italy?). Andrew & Nancy just didn't want anyone to worry that there haven't been any posts for a few days, and there might not be any soon. So if you're like me and think a day without a blog from Nancy is like a day without air, we're just out of luck!

*****

Just an update: they rerouted the internet through Southeast Asia and sattelite so we're up and running again (apparently they did learn something from the last internet outage: that people don't like to be left in the dark for weeks). Wahoo! The internet is just a little...bit...slow...but we can deal with slow!

Life without Internet, day 1, take 2

A while back someone cut an internet cable in the Mediterranean Sea--actually three of them-- launching the Middle East into an internet black hole.

It happened, again.

I fail to see how or why, exactly. Wouldn't they have realized it was a problem when it was cut the first time? Wouldn't they have taken measures to protect the cables better and/or route them differently?

Apparently not.

So last night, just as I was beginning to download my friend Shallee's Christmas letter, the internet died. I haven't had the chance to read Shallee's letter yet, but I'm sure it was fabulous.

We were also going to purchase some plane tickets last night--using the Lewis's fast-fast-volvo-like internet--so that we could take a trip to Spain and Morocco in January after my brother leaves. Unfortunately we are not sure how that's going to happen now given that there is no internet connectivity anywhere.

I was also planning on getting caught up at work, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen, either. It's really too bad, too, because we just got the internet in the middle of October so I haven't even been able to work all that much since we've been out here and I'm behind from not working that much in the summer because I was too busy packing and/or stressing out.

Sadly we don't even know if a cable was cut for sure because our television doesn't work, either. We are completely cut off from the world.

Today's Friday or we'd probably see what we could do to fix our television that hasn't turned on for weeks and weeks. The Schillings are coming over soon...to use our internet...they will be disappointed that all we have to offer them by way of entertainment is good ol' fashioned card games.

Anyway, I'm banking on a cut cable. It would only make sense for it to happen twice. This is Egypt, after all.

On the phone

At our house, almost anything can be a phone. Rachel is on the phone all the time, and she wants me to be as well, as long as I'm pretending to talk to her, that is.

Yesterday she grabbed two rectangle blocks, handed me one, and then held the other one up to her ear. We babbled at each other for a while until she walked off to find a new phone.


She uses her toy bananas (or a toy ketchup bottle when in a pinch), she uses a fake walkie talkie, she uses rattles, she uses spoons. Anything can be a phone.

Her favorite phones, though, are cell phones. She can flip them open, turn them off and on, and dial numbers. Rachel has programed, in our cell phone, a contact named 7bg3T whose number is 1148. Grandma (Karen) has the contact "G," whose number is 11. She also has "GG," whose number is 1111.


She's dialed 11 multiple times. We're just grateful that she has yet to stick a 9 in front of that, otherwise we'd be in some trouble.

I got a call from Grandpa (Layton) the other day, saying that he missed our call. I hadn't phoned him, but since I had found the phone hidden at the bottom of the toy box, I had a good guess as to who had phoned him. No matter where we leave the phone, Rachel finds a way to get it and move it somewhere. It's never where we expect it to be.


Our little lady is on the phone all day long and she isn't even a teenager yet!

The funny part is that neither Andrew nor I use the phone all that often. We're not really sure how she got to be so addicted to phones since neither of us are!

Blog updates

Our astute readers may have noticed a change in the URL at the top of your browser. Our blog is no longer found at heissfamily.blogspot.com -- it now has its own domain at www.heissatopia.com!

If you type the old address you'll get redirected to the new one, but the redirecting causes a little delay. If you want the best experience, change your links and bookmarks to www.heissatopia.com.

I'm also trying to make a few changes to our RSS feed and will let all you feed subscribers know if I change anything.

Be on the lookout for other big design changes here at our blog!

Disaster averted

As you've probably noticed, we take a lot of pictures. Hundreds. Thousands even. We have over 10,000 digital pictures and videos on our computer--a little over 100GBs worth.

Most of these are stored on Nancy's computer, which has a measly 18 GB hard drive. Last year we bought a 160 GB external hard drive for long term photo storage since both our computers were getting cramped. It worked perfectly for holding all our valuable archived information, documents, videos, and photos.

Note the past tense. Three weeks ago the hard drive crashed and died, taking with it our thousands of files.

In a normal situation, all hope would have been lost. Hard drive recovery can cost upwards of $1,000 and is not guaranteed--you have to send the drive to some Indian company and hope that it doesn't die a more complete death during shipping.

Luckily, back in February we decided to start using Mozy.com, an online backup company that offers unlimited storage space "in the cloud" for backups. You install their program on your computer and it automatically uploads anything you deem important up to their servers, distributed across the world. It then runs every day and backs up any changes you make, giving you constant access to all your files.

The initial upload of 90+ GB took a week and a half to finish, but the daily backups only take 5-10 minutes, adding our newly taken photos and updating anything we changed. After the initial upload, we ignoredMozy and let it run its course.

When the hard drive crashed, all our stuff was saved securely on Mozy's server. It took 5 days to download everything back to our newly-purchased-from-Costco 500 GB external hard drive. Nothing was lost. Nothing. It was a miracle.

I hate to imagine what we would have done had we not started using Mozy.

Moral of the story: have some backup system; some "data insurance." You will need it. Use "the cloud" for sure safety. Even if our house burns down, there's a massive earthquake that completely destroys Utah, or whatever, our files are safely backed up.

Face Lift

The Mother's Lounge got a face lift. Andrew and I just finished designing it about an hour ago. We happen to think it's beautiful.

Perhaps we're a little strange, but every time we finish a project we stare at it. If it's a book (or even a page in a book) we print it as a PDF and stare at it. And leave in on our desktop so we can open it up and stare at it again. And send it to each other so that we can compliment each other.

If it's a web page, we open it up every time we get on our browser and "ooh" and "aah." This lasts for about a week, or until whenever it begins to seem commonplace.

Right now, I have The Mother's Lounge open. It looks very...bright and happy. It makes me kind of want to do our own blog over again.

Perhaps we're prideful, but I think of it more as being "well pleased." Kind of like how we stare at Rachel. She's cute, she's new, she does cool stuff. We're not really proud of her...just happy that she's sharing her life with us.

It's the same thing with our designing, only not quite so emotionally charged.

Cookies are Hard

Not this past Valentine's Day, but perhaps around the Valentine's Day before, I made cookies as a surprise for Andrew. Sugar cookies, I recall, a full recipe of them. Decorating them got to be a little old so I only decorated some of them and left the rest sitting on the cooling rack.

That isn't exactly the most optimal way to take care of left over cookies. In fact, it could be argued that that isn't taking care of them at all.

Be that as it may, that's what I did with my cookies.

Andrew's family came over sometime after Valentine's Day and the cookies were still sitting out on the counter. Now they were more like hard tack but sweet nonetheless, so I was still eating them.

Emily asked if she could have one. Since I was still eating them I didn't think twice before telling her she could. So she had one.

Apparently it was a little dry because she said, "Ew! These cookies are hard!"

Our marriage was so young at this point that brutal honesty wasn't the norm yet. Emily was told that what she said wasn't polite--don't want to offend the new daughter-in-law, after all.

She tried fruitlessly to recover. To this day I'm still teased about hard cookies (brutal honesty is now considered okay, I guess) and Emily about mentioning my cookies were hard without any tact.

I can make good cookies, I promise...if I don't over bake them or leave them uncovered for a few days they really turn out alright!

Well, it's about a week past the "holiday season" and our kitchen counter is still littered with treats, none of which I made. There are a few packages of cookies, some caramels, more candy canes than we will ever possibly be able to use, and a good size pile of chocolate. We also have some crackers and a package of peanut butter cookies in our cupboard. That's a lot of junk food.

Andrew is in the middle of creating a website for the MPLA conference. He's been working on it for a long time doing some pretty complicated things. Currently he's creating a way to accept credit card payments, kind of like PayPal, kind of. The other day he vented at me in a very frustrated tone,

"I hate cookies!! They're so hard!"

Taken aback, it took me a few minutes to gather my thoughts. My first reaction was to defend my baking--it's not always bad. In fact, sometimes it's downright delicious, if I do say so myself. I just happen to have a lot of interesting things happen to me in the kitchen, that's all; and those interesting experiences make for interesting outcomes, baking-wise.

Then I realized that we had delivered all the cookies I had baked and there were none in the house.

So I went to get him some cookies from the cupboard...but that just wouldn't make sense since he just said he hated them.

I couldn't think of what he meant at all, so removing all the truculence from my voice I called out sweetly,

"What cookies, honey?"

"The stupid cookies for this website! I can't get them to work right!"

Oh...those cookies. Well, by all means, hate them--as long as you like my cookies we're on good terms. Love me, love my cookies.

(By the way, he has the cookies working now and he's a much happier boy!)

Heiss Zeitgeist 2007

Yep. It's true. We're both nerds. I'm probably more of one than Nancy though, as evidenced by this post.

We've been keeping stats on our blog for the past year through Google Analytics and Feedburner, just to keep a thumb on the pulse of our blog visitors. After long data collection efforts, here's where Heissatopia stands at the end of 2007:

Total posts: 362
(currently...three more before midnight tomorrow and we'll get 1 per day)

Top posters:
1. Nancy: 346 posts - 95.58%
2. Andrew: 16 posts - 4.42% (a piddly amount, I know)

Overall site visitors over time:
Absolute Unique Visitors: 2,642
Pageviews: 19,055
Average Time on Site: 02:06

RSS feed subscribers:
Current number of subscribers: 21
(not a lot...use the beauty of RSS, people!)

Visitor geography:

(Where are our Antarctican, Chinese, Russian, and Greenlandic readers?)

Top cities:
1. Salt Lake City, UT (not Orem, surprisingly...that means other people look at our blog more than we do.... We were afraid of skewing the stats too much)
2. Orem, UT
3. Provo, UT
4. Draper, UT
5. Champaign, IL (Hello, Slades!)
6. Lindon, UT
7. Calgary, AB
8. Midvale, UT
9. Fairfax, VA

Top browsers:
1. Firefox: 56.45%
2. Internet Explorer: 38.92% (54.28% IE7, 45.61% IE6)
3. Mozilla: 1.97%
4. Safari: 1.89%
5. Opera: 0.69%
6. Netscape: 0.07% (Umm...update your browser!)

Top operating systems:
1. Windows: 93.3% (92.77% XP, 6.20% Vista, 0.8% 2000, 0.15% 98 (Who still uses that!?))
2. Mac OSX: 6.20%
3. Linux: 0.45%
4. iPhone: .01% (1 person! Who has an iPhone?)

Top networks of visitors:
1. Comcast
2. mStar
3. Brigham Young University
4. Qwest
5. Fairfax County Public Schools (Hello, Amanda!)
6. Road Runner
7. Harman Music Group (Hi, dad!)

Top referring search engines:
1. Google: 92.8%
2. Yahoo: 3.2%
3. AOL: 2.6%
4. Microsoft Live: 1.4%

Technorati Authority: 14
This number is pretty much completely arbitrary and dumb, but I look at it consistently anyway.

Technorati Ranking: 629,416
Out of the millions of blogs out there, we are in the top 700,000!

Top search terms that lead people to our blog:
1. bwankey
2. jessica sienfeld (spelled wrong...it should be seinfeld)
3. www.heissfamily.blogspot.com
4. "the pickle incident"
5. matt & bonnie parks blog
6. cool heisses
7. heissfamily
8. site:heissfamily.blogspot.com wassail
9. the cool heisses
10. nancy heiss

Most popular posts:
This is harder to ascertain since almost 16,000 pageviews were just heissfamily.blogspot.com. This means that the overwhelming majority of visitors just go straight to the blog and scroll down to see if there's anything new rather than clicking on the post directly or subscribing to the RSS feed through Outlook, Thunderbird, or Google Reader. Here's what we have for the 5 most popular posts, though, which won't be that accurate at all:
1. Heiss Holiday Humbug
2. Hairy Ordeal
3. They're Deceptively...Delicious!
4. Free Vacation Complete with Airfare, Hotel, and Interrogration
5. Rolie Polie Olie

Labels as of today:

Most commented posts:
1. Saran Wrap, Zippers, and Knowing Everything - 23 comments
2. My beautiful hair... - 16 comments
3. How many bad haircuts can I give? - 13 comments
4. We're both insane - 13 comments
5. Corn is not a vegetable - 12 comments
6. They're Deceptively...Delicious! - 11 comments
7. NaNo WriMo - 11 comments
8. The Play Date - 11 comments
9. Wiggle Worm - 11 comments

And that's it for number crunching! Thanks to all our readers for padding our stats and making us feel good about how popular we think we are!

And we're live!

I finally mostly finished a new website - TheHeissFamily.org - a portal for all members of the awesome Heiss family.

There are only a few tiny things I need to finish, like the sidebar on the Members page changing to show each members RSS Blog feed every time you choose a different person, but overall it's pretty much done and live, so check it out!

If you are somehow related to us and want an e-mail account (yourname@theheissfamily.org) or calendar access (and soon-to-be web space with easy web publishing capabilities), let me know and I'll get you set up. All the feeds are open to anyone, regardless of account holding status or Heiss family affiliation :)

Enjoy!

Nero, part 2

So, I'm a nero. It's true.

I have a weird obsession with Ego Googling, seeing how often sites about me come up in a Google search for Andrew Heiss.

I recently almost completed my personal website, made for professional, job-hunting purposes, since employers are now getting in the habit of Googling potential employees.

The site isn't all the way done yet, but it's at the top of my ego search! I beat out all those other Andrew Heisses, like the one born in 1902, the one who died in 1873, the one who plays fantasy card games, the student at The College of New Jersey, the rancher webmaster, or Eric Andrew Heiss, former BYU student who has a blog with an address close to ours. Now I just need to keep it up there!

How many other people get this excited over having their name be at the top of the list?

I rock.