We celebrated our “Chicago Christmas” on Sunday before we take the kiddies to Rochester for Christmas on the 24th. We ate mucho Polish Sausage, pierogies, and I got one of these (see below). Can anything be better than a HUGE Buffalo Bills victory, opening presents, and eating tube meat? I think not.

iPod 40GB Zippy Special Edition.

I aways thought that I might go blind from looking at a computer so much of my worklife, but this is absurd. I happen to like the warm laptop on my lap.

The joy of having kids is doing things that you never got to do as a kid. I’m not sure all of the different things that I’m going to force Mason and Anna to try just so I can relive my childhood, but building a gingerbread house was a good start. I never did one as a kid, and I’m sure that to do one from scratch would stop any normal human. We went to Jewel and bought a boxed one. You simply mix up the icing and start gluing pre-baked pieces together. It even comes with a plastic tray that serves as the platform. We had so much fun, and so did the kids. What can be better than lots of icing and candy? Let the holiday cheer begin.

What if architects had to work like web designers? It would be like this.

There just isn’t any better time of year than right now. The air is crisp, the leaves are colorful, and the kids are growing. What has caused the blog entries to be so sporadic you ask? Well, between a role change at work, and every weekend spent morning ’til night having family fun time, there just hasn’t been a lot of time to download all of the pictures and write about things. Here’s some of the fun that has transpired:

Tricia ran in the Race for the Cure.

We went Apple Picking.

I went to San Francisco on business.

Anna started swim lessons.

We went to the scarecrow festival and rolled around in the grass.

We picked out the perfect pumpkin.

If the Bills would manage a victory at some point, I might consider this to be the best Fall ever.

Bloghopping for some redesign ideas (of course my original understanding of blogging being under the tutelage of Walt, Rachelle, and Mark) I wanted to see what the design community is up to. Turns out that as I have let my career go away from graphic design to information architecture, to defining products and gathering requirements (whatever the hell I’m doing right now) designers have been making progress. And I am trying to rekindle some design magic. So between learning about the wicked worn look, finding out that there is a way to have some true typographic headlines using ever-improving variants of sIFR, learning that any blog brand that can be shortened using an X is cool (DxF), It’s time to get to work.

Sunday was Anna’s first birthday. She had an awesome time at her pool party at Lietime Fitness. It was a red white and blue, All-America theme. We floated hundreds of beachballs in the pool, and served Popeye’s chicken and apple pie for dinner. The best part of it all was watching my Anna take the right of passage into the chocolate cake addiction that is a Rzepkowski birthday. Nice job honey! And yes…you can have a brown chocolate cake at your wedding.

I find this 20/20 report to be really fascinating on name discrimination. I already have my own name complex but this is truly startling. The report had African-Americans with black sounding names like Shenequa put their exact same resume on Monster under a white sounding name like Jennifer. The report found 17% more response to the resumes with white sounding names. Furthermore, the anecdotes from the survey participants tell of multiple callbacks to the white sounding name vs. next to none for their own. The story goes on to discuss whether African-Americans should begin to name their children more often with white sounding names.

Personally I’m very torn. Growing up with my own unique name I wore it as a badge of courage. It caused me to have fortitude where others just didn’t have to worry about it. However, that didn’t stop me from naming my kids MUCH more simply – Mason and Anna. For all parents that go with unique names consider that you are giving your child another challenge that they wouldn’t have had. Make sure to use that to educate your child on how to overcome adversity, because there are harder things in life than your name.

When not procrastinating on my latest web architecture I can chuck paperwads into a fakebasket online. I just can’t seem to catch the paper airplane.

After putting the Honda to sleep, I’m sure everyone is wondering how Tricia and I are getting about town. Well let me show you…

A Midnight Blue 2002 Chrysler Sebring Convertible. And, as you can see, the first thing I put into it was my 2 babies – car seats and all. I can hardly contain the excitement of driving a convertible. When people around Chicago see this freak in 20 degree weather driving with the top down, you’ll know it’s me. Yes, this is our second car, and yes it will spend most of its life sitting at the train station. I just couldn’t get myself to buy some ghetto Neon, or Civic coupe, when what I really wanted was something fun that I could haul the kids around in. This past weekend I needed an excuse to drive it around, so we went up to Jellystone (the campground with Yogi) . We packed all the gear in the trunk and drove 2 hours to Milwaukee. No Problemo.

Of course the only problem is that the first time we showed it to our friends with a 12 year old daughter she says “Wow you bought a Daddy Car!” That wasn’t exactly the reaction I was going for, but apparently the shoe fits. See you on the open road.