Sorry, we are busy

I know I haven't posted in a long time, I am sorry about that, but we are really overwhelmed.
Things we are doing right now:

1. Organizing a yard sale for TOMORROW to get rid of stuff we won't take with us when we (sigh!) move
   
2. Arranging for someone to rent our house after we (sigh!!) move
   
3. Organizing (can you say 'disorganizing' in English?) Rajiv and Rohan's joint birthday party for NEXT WEEK - and our guests don't know that they will be our guests, yet
   
4. Arranging for packing and shipping of the stuff that we do want to take to India
   
5. While doing all this and deeply covered in too much stuff, still shopping for a few essential children's books that we don't own yet (ok, that's just me: dad is innocent)
   
6. Doing some of the work that we are actually paid to do?
   
7. Planning a week in Paris on our way to India at the end of August. Ehm, this doesn't sound so necessary, does it?
   

Meaningful - so to speak - posts will resume as soon as I don't need two Starbucks Double Shot Vanilla drinks a day to keep going :)

Piccolo Rajiv (The Book) - is here..

When the movie? :)

Anyway, maybe you recall I had decided to get a hard copy of the now abandoned "Piccolo Rajiv" blog. I received the book from Blog2Print a couple of weeks ago and I am very happy, in spite of some obvious flaws.

Here are a few snaps.

Front cover - with the trademark baby feet...

... and back cover: I thought this image from the Canadian winter would be appropriate.

A couple of random images of the inside. There are two options while making the book: you can choose to maintain the exact formatting of the pages as they appear on your blog or you can ask the software to rearrange the photos to fill the space better and reduce the number of pages. I chose the latter to save some money and I don't regret it for a second (I am no designer anyway, so it's not like the perfection of my layouts needs to be preserved at all costs) but while sometime the optimized layout is perfectly fine,

sometimes it is not.

But who cares, right? My only real complaint is that there have been a couple of instances where the text has ended up hidden by the corner of a picture. I should have spotted that in the pdf preview, so it's my fault, but to be honest I just didn't want to spend the time. After all the whole point of using Blog2Print was that it required zero work on my side, and I tried to remain true to that principle to the very end :)

Oooops..

Apparently I had forgotten one more thing that happens in May: it's the day of the Federal Elections here in Canada! Well, I can't vote, so maybe I have that excuse.

I love Canada for so many reasons. One is that our elderly hippy neighbor who keeps his long white hair collected in a ponytail and drives a Harley, has a banner in his yard supporting the conservative candidate. And the couple across the street has a banner supporting the liberal candidate. And it's ok, everybody is still friends.

It might be because, like my quebequois friend from grad school put it once, the most aggressive event around here is the annual pillow-fighting event in Ottawa.. (I think it was a joke, I don't think they really do it - but I know that in Roma sometimes they throw chairs at each other in parliament, so even if they do the pillow fighting thing in Ottawa, they still win hands down)

Piccolo Rajiv - The book

My next extracurricular project is going to be turning the old blog into ink and paper format - just in case the apocalypse comes and Google crashes and all blogs disappear into digital dust.

Seriously, this is something that does generate some anxiety in me. Even before we moved here to Due Fratellini I had been pondering the question of what would be the most time-economical way to get the blog in book form. After all, one of the reason why I started this in first place was that one day my kids could read it if they want to.

Then yesterday, completely by chance, I came across Blog2Print. It seems to be a service designed especially for Blogger, which is the platform I use, and it is just very easy to use. You give the address of your blog and within less than a minute you get a tentative preview of your book. Then you can make changes - like choosing the photos for the cover, deleting posts or adding extra content.

It is never going to be as neat as a photo book made on iPhoto, but as I said it is so easy that one might overlook that. Just for information, printing the full blog in hardcover format would come to about $60 + shipping. It sounds like a lot, but for the number of pages is really not that bad.

Anyway, I think I would like to do this. I will let you know how it goes :)

By the way...

... I hope you like the new design. Featuring original artwork by mamma, no less :)

Se non e' zuppa...

(cliccare per ingrandire)

Facciamo l'appello

Come i miei lettori italiani - mamma, ci sei? - avranno notato, sto scrivendo sempre meno in lingua italiana. Me ne dispiaccio, ma ha volte con il poco tempo che riesco a dedicare al blog scrivere in due lingue mi sembra un'impresa impossibile e cosi' mi limito a scrivere in inglese, che e' la lingua parlata, o almeno capita, dalla maggior parte dei miei - tre? - lettori.

Detto questo, non attendo che una scusa per scrivere nella mia lingua madre. Quindi, italiani che leggete il blog - e non siete la mia mamma - per favore battete un colpo! O almeno lasciate un commento :)

My new favorite song