The Name, Explained

Risanna: You won't find this one in the baby name books. So we made it up. And, since we made it up, we get to say what it means. Risanna is a combination of the Spanish risa (laughter) and Anna/'ana, (grace, gracious/[he] answers) so any way you parse it (gracious laughter, He answers with laughter, etc.) ...is fine with us.

Pepper: We needed something fun to balance the seriousness and elegance of Risanna. It sounded right, fits with our tastes, and makes a good nickname. My mother asked if I wasn't asking for trouble with such a hot, fiery name. I say no. Naming your daughter "Constance" or "Chastity" is asking for it.

Lyn: Lyn is Deborah's middle name. It means "waterfall," but even Deborah didn't know that, so it wasn't really a factor. Maybe the waterfall will balance out the peppers...

There are worse ways to choose a name

When I dropped by work yesterday to show off Risanna, Marti asked about our choice in middle names.

Marti: Why Pepper?

Me: We like peppers. If you've ever eaten at our house, you figure that out pretty quickly.

Marti: I figured it was something like that. So... what if you had really liked bananas?

Me: Well... Risanna 'Nanna has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

A Small Announcement

Risanna Pepper Lyn Kerr
Born 8:06 a.m. November 3, 2008
7 lbs, 7 oz., 19" long

Mother and baby are doing fine, and should be able to come home on Wednesday.

I'll post more pictures as soon as I'm home on a regular basis. :-)

Putting a Bright Face on Things

We've developed a bit of a reputation around here for our annual pumpkin carving. Some of it may even be deserved!

Fiona's was the most straightforward pumpkin of the evening. The cat even posed for me as I inked the design, and Deborah and Fiona cut it out.

Aiden wanted a dragon. I just about gave myself carpal tunnel trying to cut that thing out. It was cool, though. I'm especially proud of the fire; this year, I tried doing some of the carving outside with the candle already lit, and it makes a HUGE difference to be able to see how the lighting turns out as you're working on it. I'll have to do more of that.

Every year, I try something harder than I can handle. It's practically a tradition in itself. This year, I went for a self-portrait...

I might have done better if I had, say, printed the picture out ahead of time, or marked it up in Photoshop to see where best to keep things connected, and where to work on the shading... but I winged it. I had to keep on turning on the camera every few minutes (a challenge with goopy fingers!) and then the batteries died, and then I broke the mouth off... oh, well. There's always next year. I'll let you decide if there's any resemblance or not.

Paul explored recursion with his pumpkin. This is something I've come to expect from programmers. Several years ago, we decorated stockings for Christmas, and Paul's design was a QBASIC program that, when run, would blink "Merry Christmas" in the middle of the screen in red and green.

Far and away the best this year was Deborah's. She went outside and got some maple leaves from our trees, traced them onto her pumpkin, and cut them out.

The Princess and the Plumber

You know you play a lot of video games when... your kids dress up as characters out of Super Mario Bros. for Halloween. In our case, Princess Peach and Mario.

Yay! We're video game characters!

Wait, WHAT happens in this game? The princess gets kidnapped, and the plumber has to go rescue her in the sewers while being attacked by flaming flowers, bouncing turtle shells, and horrible monsters? This is SO not what we signed up for!

Mommy makes it all good.

The Belly

Deborah has been saying for some time now that she wanted to get some pictures taken of her with her pregnant belly, partly for the beauty of it, partly to celebrate the last (?) time she'd be pregnant. With less than a week to go, we figured it was time. Since it was cold and rainy outside, and Deborah wanted to pose in her impressive shawl collection, I set up a photo studio in the living room. (Living Room Studios. Wouldn't that make a nice name for something?)

I took well over a hundred shots... but these are our favorites.

Isn't she beautiful?

Verbatim

"It's not long like the Jell-O, it's short like the castanets."

—Fiona, discussing Deborah's hair

Healing Huehnergard

So what do you do, when you want to reprint a classic book... but you've got corrections for it? Well, normally, you could just re-edit and re-set the whole thing, and there you go. In this case, though, the book was John Huehnergard's Ugaritic Vocabulary in Syllabic Transcription, and the text was very complex. The author's corrections and additions alone ran to 32 pages, so we decided to just make an index. It then fell to me to take the scanned pages, and let the reader know that there was supplemental material:

Later that week, after describing what I was working on, Deborah summarized what I'm doing as "the laying on of hands."

I thought it was quite appropriate.