Over at my other blog, dollarshort.org, I'm blogging frequently during the DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge. Please check out this post about the challenge and how you can support the kids.
After a 32 hour labor (with 5 hours of pushing!), our daughter, Penelope Frances Trott made her appearance into the world on October 10th at 3:53 am. She weighed 7lbs, 10 oz. and was 20 inches long. We're tired, of course, but we're getting used to (slowly) parenting and having her here is so worth everything we went through to bring her here. Yay baby! Yay Penelope!
As much as I love letting Anil pretend that he's the one that's pregnant, I figured that it probably made sense for me to just get it out publicly (I've been blogging about it here on Vox for friends and family) that, yes, Ben and I are expecting a baby later this year.
If you know me, you know that I'm a worrier and that all that Italian blood in me has made me incredibly superstitious. My biggest fear has been that something bad would happen to the baby and if more people knew (especially the blogging world as a whole), it would be even harder to get through. Even writing publicly about the baby now makes me feel that I seem overconfident. So, until I'm holding a healthy baby, I'll still be scared (and then, surprise, surprise, the real worrying begins).
I need to be a public person with my role at Six Apart, but having someone else to protect and take care of has made me realize how much of a private person I really am. The balance of being public for work and private for life can be difficult at times and we're constantly figuring out what our comfort zones are on a daily basis.
But we're really excited and are completely amazed by how fast this all goes. There seems to be a bit of a baby boom going on in my circle of friends and that makes us even more anxious to meet our little one!
Went to see Helvetica, the documentary by Gary Hustwit with Andrew and Jesse tonight at Silverdocs.
The film traces Helvetica from its roots in the modernist movement of the 1950s. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, it was renamed Helvetica (the Latin name for Switzerland) in the early 1960s, just as Swiss design was becoming wildly popular. It was picked up by corporations (Lufthansa, BMW and dozens of others) as a sophisticated, clean type for their logos, and was embraced in North America just as the modernist “international style” of architecture was sweeping the continent.
Helvetica was widely used throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and was the most popular typeface sold in the Letraset type transfer system. Its use in printed documents exploded in the late 1980s when it became one of the default settings on the first generation of Macintosh computers. With its inclusion in Mac-based word processing, Helvetica gained iconic status as the first face of the digital office era.
But the strength of the film lies in the passion of the type designers who praise or abhor the ubiquitous font. The personalities of the designers, who reveal themselves as charming, articulate and analytical, are refreshingly self-deprecating about their fixation with typography. These interviews reveal the ongoing tension between modernists like Vignelli and the generation that came after them, the postwar struggle between individuality and the common good, as a typeface created in the spirit of democracy gradually becoming to some, a symbol of blind obedience.
I really wasn't sure what to expect especially given my recent indifference around my passion for design. But it was a brilliant, inspiring movie and I came away feeling a little renewed. Perhaps it was seeing some of the designers I respect and have "grown up" with and seeing that they are just as passionate today about design. Massimo Vignelli, Stefan Sagmeister and Michael Beirut to name a few. Smart designers that really think about the problem and solve it with conceptual insight and brilliance. Something that is really missing in this age and rage of cookie-cutter, cut and paste, photoshopped mac jockeys.
Video: Show us your favorite TV show or movie with puppets.
In recent memory, this is my favorite television scene featuring a puppet. From The Office:
I couldn't let Tuesday pass without a tearjerker clip. And damn, this one (like last week's) features members of the main cast in old people makeup. Still, if it makes me cry within a few seconds, it's got to be posted.
Don't forget to post your own with the tag "tearjerker tuesday."
In the car Ben and I got to talking about Raising Arizona -- it was on television the other night, apparently. I've never been able to watch the final scene (H.I.'s dream) without crying. I don't even think I can describe the dream without crying.
So I decided to subject all you Voxers to it and christen today "Tearjerker Tuesday." What movie scene brings you to tears every time? Tag your post with "tearjerker tuesday."
