“Sadie, stop it. Cream cheese is not a hand lotion.”

China’s deadly pollution
The Times has a long investigative piece this morning on China’s growth policies’ impact on the environment, and the growing blowback. The air was ugly when I was there in 2001; I can only imagine how bad it is now.

Walking scores
This is a neat site that calculates the walkability of any location. My long-time Cambridge apartment gets a 100 out of 100 score; everything you need is within walking distance. My current address only gets a 5. Damn suburbs.

The nerd handbook
s/nerd/geek/g, but otherwise pretty close in a lot of ways.

Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s image
Marc Andreessen on how the talent can overthrow the studio system.

Ok, so the Patriots rolled up 56 points on the Bills last night. Amazing.

And we don’t even hate the Bills. How many points will we score on Shula’s “Asterisk” Dolphins? On the “You cheated, so you didn’t really beat us all those times” Steelers? On the Jets? Can the scoreboards roll triple digits?

Grammie and Grampie gave Sadie an easel for her birthday last week. She’s been coloring like a fiend ever since.

She loves having her own whiteboard. Now, when she wants to know more about a subject, we go to the board for a deep dive. Here, we’re dissecting and analyzing her Sunday breakfast: biscuits go in the oven, eggs in the frying pan and bacon in the microwave.

She really feels like she groks it now.

We’re so proud.

So, we were waiting in the room at Holliston Pediatrics this afternoon, and I’m showing Sadie pictures of herself on the phone. In under 15 seconds, she saw how I was doing the flick to advance the photos and she started doing it herself.

Egads. I’m not sure I want her anywhere near my computers; she’ll probably optimize them when I’m not looking and I won’t be able to find anything again.

Sadie is two years old.

She’s a real little girl now, with very little of toddlerhood still around. She’s talking all the time. She takes care of her things. She understands when we’re talking to her. She even has her own whiteboard now.

She’s starting to learn some useful life lessons. Here, she’s playing with one of her balloons. Soon, she would see what happens when she decides to roll her whole body onto the balloon. Sorry, but we obey the laws of physics in this household, missy.

Even if the balloons don’t always bring joy, Sadie still gets the high of wearing a crown. She would like every day to be crown day from now on.

What’s a celebraton without cake? On Sunday morning, she helped prepare the birthday cupcakes. She knows that one starts with the muffin cups.

You can’t make a cupcake without breaking eggs, so Sadie helped Mommy incorporate the eggs into the batter.

When it’s all done, you get to blow out the candles. And this year, no unfortunate cupcake incidents!

Happy birthday!

Over the past couple of weeks, I rewrote my gallery-building engine in Ruby, making it much more flexible and easy to use. So now, I may actually be able to put up some of the old galleries I did, but never published, like this one of a Red Sox vs. Yankees game from 2004.

Here are the pictures:

1. Budweiser sign
2. Couple at Fenway
3. Baby at Fenway
4. Fenway math
5. Curt Schilling
6. Jason Varitek
7. Jason Varitek warming up
8. Jason Varitek being all pensive
9. Johnny Damon throwing
10. Johnny Damon warming up
11. Manny Ramirez warming up
12. David Ortiz
13. Curt Schilling faces Derek Jeter
14. Curt Schilling brushes back Derek Jeter
15. Watering the infield at Fenway
16. Yankees fan gets booted from Fenway
17. Another Yankees fan gets booted from Fenway
18. Schilling leaves
19. Keith Foulke saves the day

I now know with complete certainty that we will be having either a boy or a girl.

We had a scheduled ultrasound yesterday, during which we were hoping to be able to find out whether the baby would be a boy or a girl. Unfortunately, the little baby wouldn’t cooperate, demurely crossing its legs. We’re going to have to wait until the big day itself to find out.

If it’s a boy, I hope he likes pink, because that’s what we got.

Shill alert!

I like the new Things to Do widget on the Boston.com homepage. So far, it’s done a really good job surfacing interesting events happening around town. Of course, I can’t go to any of them, but it’s fun to see how the rest of the world lives

The very expensive reality of chasing reality TV
I never knew how far people would go for their chance to be on Survivor or Project Runway.

Curt Schilling announces he’s coming back
Hooray for Curt using his blog to break news. Hooray for the Red Sox getting him for one more year.

How to coast your way to a writing career
Paul Boutin with some good advice.

Ten signs of incompetent managers
I don’t think too many of these apply to me, but, of course, I would be the last to know.

Holliston Beavers
It seems that no one wants to save the Holliston beavers. On behalf of my water supply, I don’t really care what happens to them.

At 2:30 this morning, our carbon-dioxide detector started beeping. Nothing was wrong — the reading was still 0 — but the battery was starting to die. I got up, walked downstairs and replaced the batteries.

If only I could have gotten back to sleep.

Grr.

On the plus side, I got to catch up on my email, watch an episode of Firefly and walk on the treadmill. All before 5:00am. So productive!

I spent all morning today out in the yard raking up the leaves. Sadie helped, rolling around in them and getting them all over herself.

p.s., The iPhone takes some spooky pictures. Other than cropping it, I didn’t touch this one up at all.

If you read this on the site, you might notice that I’ve moved a little of the furniture around, dusted the shelves and repainted the walls. Let me know what you think.

Also, if you haven’t had a chance, you should check out my newly re-prettified travelogues and galleries: Tanzania, New Zealand, A Night in the Monster Seats and a day at the Franklin Park Zoo.

I have a couple of other pieces in the works. I hope to have them out by the end of the year.