• Grocery update

    I’ve come to the point in my week when our stores of name-brand products have run dry. I’m almost exclusively down to the generic alternatives I bought on Friday, following my most recent fiscal epiphany. First let me say that anyone who claims generic tastes the same as brand either never tried both, is lying, or is incapable of picking sugar out of a line-up of artificial sweeteners. The difference in taste is inescapable… to my persnickety palate anyway. However, that’s not really the point, is it? Just because something tastes different doesn’t mean it’s better or worse, and this is the crux of the issue. Has switching to generic brand foods affected my quality of life?

    I’m not sure yet; and therein lies the rub on this entry… its not really much of an update if I don’t have anything new to say, is it?

  • Sensory overload in a two year old mind

    “… and the heavens opened and water poured forth like a reading from the Old Testament.”
    – Excerpt from Tuesday afternoon.

    It was one of those Florida afternoons where you could see the rain coming like an omnivorous grey beast. I was on my way to pick up Beth from Tae Kwon Do, with Adam in tow, when I realized there was no way I was going to herd two hyper kids into the car without some serious soakage. Sure enough, it started to pour as we were walking out the door. We three stood there helpless, looking across the open space between us and the car. The way it was raining, ten yards might as well have been ten miles.

    Always ready with a helpful suggestion, Beth piped in: “Dad, we don’t all have to get wet. Why don’t you just get the car and pull it up on the sidewalk. There’s plenty of room between the dumpster and that column.”

    I didn’t move the car.

    We did make a break for it. I got ten steps when I noticed Adam wasn’t following. He got about five steps and stopped. When I turned around to look for him, he was standing with his arms and palms raised and his head down, staring at his wet palms in wonder. The back pack he was helping me carry (in truth, he damn near insists on carrying it) was lying prone in a puddle. We hadn’t been in the rain for more than a few seconds, but I could already see that we were both mostly soaked through. When I called back to him, “What are you doing Adam?” He replied, “It’s RAINING daddy!”

    He was enjoying himself like only a two year old in the rain can.

  • Give me some credit

    I love gift certificates from my favorite online retail establishments. It’s one of the few places or occasions when I find I have a credit balance. You may think that a gift certificate is restrictive… that there’s more freedom in cold, hard cash. If you take a hard line, emotion free view of life and gift giving, this is true. Yet when I pull up iTunes or eReader.com and see my credit balance displayed like a glowing beacon of hope in the corner of my screen, I get a little misty-eyed. It is one of the most liberating experiences in my mostly sheltered life.