Status For 3/15/13

Not bad . . . but it could be better.

I’ve long known that in this life you frequently have to make your choices along the time-money axis. (I.e., Do you spend your time or do you spend your money to do something, and in what proportion?)

Post-move, both commodities have felt like they’ve been in short supply lately, but it’s definitely time to re-evaluate my old attitude of “I’d rather do it myself and spend the money I would have paid someone else to do it on rewarding myself.”  Right now I’m running myself ragged enough that, as I realized last night, even enjoyable tasks have started to feel like chores of obligation.

So . . . time to make some changes.

These Numbers Just Don’t Add Up

Walk into a lingerie store with one girl, and while bystander reactions may differ in amusement and/or approval level, few, if any, will think you are anything but heterosexual.

Walk in a lingerie store with two or more girls, and general bystander opinion suddenly tends to put you in the “gay friend there to give color advice” category.

A Simple Training Mistake

Damn it,  I mean darn it!  I can’t even say I hadn’t been warned about this!  Heck, I even saw it in action before you could walk, son, when I tried to show you how to use your dinosaur walker by getting on my knees and walking around with it to give you the idea.  I gave you the idea, all right; you promptly got on your knees and started doing exactly what I had just shown you.

So I have no right to be surprised on this one.

But since you probably won’t remember this as clearly as I will, son, let me tell you what happened.  The other night you were asking me repeatedly to “play trains” with you.  Not really wanting to leave the couch, but not wanting to disappoint you either, I hit on what seemed to be, however briefly, a brilliant compromise.

Realizing I could reach your train table with my foot and still stay seated, I stretched out my leg and started pushing one of your trains around the track with my foot.  “See?” I told you.  “I’m playing trains.”

Honestly, I figured at worst that you just wouldn’t buy it, but instead you grinned, marched over to your train table, hoisted your leg over the side, and then did your level best to push your trains along with your own foot . . .

Or Maybe It Just Is To Me

For the record, watching a toddler eat a blood orange is as horrifying as it is hilarious.

When South Florida Meets Southern Italy

Over the weekend we took L. (age two) out to a local Italian restaurant.  Now before anyone winces at the idea of us bringing a young child to a restaurant, I want to stress that we gauged his mood before hand (it was good), ordered the simplest thing possible (pizza) in case we had to eat and/or leave quickly, and I always go fully prepared to spend a lot of time with L. outside the restaurant in the event his mood takes a turn for the worse.

As it turned out, none of that preparation was necessary (it only rarely is), since the worst he did at all was twice he started to sing a little too enthusiastically along with the music (but never loud enough to come even near to being louder than the music itself), but happily sang quieter when encouraged to do so.

And while L. is fond of pasta, he’d never really eaten Italian food before, so the baked ravioli with marinara sauce on the side was an event for him.  We, of course, cut the huge ravioli into more manageable roughly triangle-shaped bites (this becomes important in just a moment), and let him go to town.  He loved it.

He called it chips and salsa, but he loved it.

Which Would Have Begun With, “I Don’t Care!”

Ah, how times have changed.

The other day I was gearing up to get L. ready to go out, and, since she was standing near the door already, I asked Lala if she would check what the temperature was like outside.

In response she pulled out her phone.

“Did you just pull out your phone rather than open the door and actually, you know, check outside?” I asked.

Her reply began with, “I have this great app, you see . . .”

To be honest, I sort of tuned out the rest of that to better refrain from my reply.

It’s Good Advice

Longtime readers will by now have noted a certain . . . indifference in me when it comes to things like anniversaries.  Perhaps some of you have privately wondered at the extent this indifference impacts my domestic felicity and tranquility.

The answer is, truthfully, not  much, because L’s mother is even more prone to overlooking such things than I am.  Usually, albeit not always, I’m the one that reminds her about a particular date, in fact.

It’s like my dear departed grandfather never said, “Son, one of the secrets to a happy relationship is to only get involved with people who easily forget certain things.”

Troll Sightings Outdoors To Increase In Three, Two, One . . .

Periodically I feel the need to comment on the spam that I block and weed through so that you never have to see it.  Most of the time it doesn’t try to hide what it is, but sometimes it likes to play masquerade, usually pretending to be a compliment.

Today I read one that was pretending to be an insult.

So that’s it everybody, the final human process on the Web has been automated.  Time to go outside, I guess.

Be Especially Wary Of The Image Results

Certain things a child may commonly say should never be plugged into a web search engine unless you are absolutely sure you know what you are getting into.

Today’s entry:  “Messy Mouth.”

The DIGITAL Unplugging Was The Easy Part

The National Day of Unplugging was actually not only relatively easy on me, but pleasant as well once I got passed the “I really should be working.” hurdle.  And all fretting aside, I easily made up for any “lost writing time” the next day, so there’s a lesson in all that.

Unfortunately, the Universe doesn’t seem to feel that I have adequately learned said lesson yet, as after weeks of dodging the worst of the illnesses around here, last night something started a push to clog up my throat, nose, and ears, and it managed to stage a more than moderately successful rally overnight.  To put it in perspective, it’s taken me to well past noon just to feel well enough to sit here and right this, and, to put it mildly, I am . . . “disinclined” to sit at the computer much longer for any reason, much less for working.

I’ll make up the lost time though.

Somehow.