• Kodak moments?

    I started up the great scan project again this evening. After about four years of sporadic efforts, I figure I’ve got about eighty percent of our old school picts digitized.

    I was just going through the old Conner album when a stray thought gave me a smack… I should have gotten some pictures at the hospital, and of my chemotherapy pump. You may think it’s a horrible idea, and I can assure you I would have scoffed at the idea while it was going on… but now? Now I’d like some proof it really happened. It’s only been a month, but it hardly seems real anymore.

    The things you survive are supposed to make you stronger (or so “they” say), but is it still true if you’re rapidly repressing all of the memories?

  • Worry not

    I think my wife was a little concerned about last night. She was working on dinner and I said, “dang, I was going to offer to help and then I got distracted… I was looking forward to cutting something up.”

    There are lots of circumstances when it’s perfectly legitimate to become concerned when someone shows a little too much fondness for a knife, but cut me a little slack here. While I’m not a particularly good cook, I like to play around in the kitchen. (You don’t have to be good at something to have fun doing it, do you?) Having cut my gender-role teeth in the 80’s and 90’s, I like to think I’m pretty good about sharing the household work load, and dinner has been one of my responsibilities. It’s one of those times when my kids show just how much they love to be helpful… to contribute. My two and a half year old will stand like a sentinel well beyond his normal attention span, awaiting that fleeting opportunity to toss ingredients into the pan. My soon to be ten year old will actually put down her DS for the opportunity to peel a potato.

    Cooking dinner has been my time to unwind. I take my time. I involve the kids, and we all enjoy each other’s company.

    And then I got sick. Now it’s been almost two months since I’ve touched my favorite kitchen utensils.

    Maybe it’s time I started doing the cooking again.

  • Stranger than fiction

    There are times when a bad memory serves me well. I’m grateful, because there are so many other times when it doesn’t… like this evening, when my wife asked me to take out the garbage for the second time.

    “Yeah, don’t worry Cheryl. I’ll get it.”

    Three hours later, when we’re going to bed…

    “I thought you said you’d get the garbage!” She says this stooped over the can, irritated that she’s forced to get a little more value out of this particular bag.

    In between garbage incidents we sat down to watch a Netflix movie. In order to truly appreciate this entry, you must understand our Netflix strategy. First, you must understand that I’m a sucker for a preview. (I wonder if this is because the plot of many feature length films are better suited to two minute previews.) I make regular stops at the Apple website to take a gander at the previews being offered. When I see one that strikes my fancy, it goes on my Netflix queue… and there it sits, for months. Six months to a year later, the movie gets released, inches up my queue, and arrives in my mailbox. By this time I haven’t got the faintest clue what the movie is about, or why I decided to put it on the queue.

    Let me tell you, sometimes that is the best way to watch a film. Some of my all time favorite movie experiences started out with a Neflix disk popped into the DVD player. Tonight was up there on the list. We saw Stranger than Fiction, with Will Ferrell. The credits rolled and I couldn’t shake a silly grin. It was the perfect movie for my mood this evening. It was something a little different… completely unexpected, and wonderfully funny.