• Office life on a random spring morning

    Spending most of my morning hours cooped up indoors, despite my office with a view, I find mornings to be more abstract construction than reality. Most of the time, life in an office is rather homogenous. Time of day, week, month, or year, it’s all the same. The scene outside my window slowly shifts, but I rarely associate the view with the barrage of senses being “in it” provides. On those rare occasions when the sight of a clear spring morning tickles my imagination, having a window is a curse. The smell of nature’s spring potpourri is in the air. The last wisps of cool, dry air linger from winter. Walking through chill shadows among the trees, there are sparse hints of warmth shining through the branches, like the sun’s promise of better things to come.

    And then the phone rings, abruptly bringing my mind back indoors. I’ll take a rain check on that promise,

  • H2O

    If you have a child, chances are you are familiar with the fresh water phenomenon. As it happens, we have a child, two of them in fact. Since our oldest child has had the ability to communicate – whether it be by speech or wild gestures with her extremities – she has wanted fresh water at her bedside at night. Yes, I fondly remember the day Beth learned to use “dehydrated” in a sentence,.

    It turns out that Beth rarely actually drinks her water; but none the less, she seems to have a sixth sense as to whether it is “fresh” or not. Now that she is tall enough to service some of her own needs at the tap, we’ve encouraged her independence.

    Oh, there’s no telling what mischief looms when a child first learns to play with the faucet.

    The other night I was feeling weak in the will department, and I acquiesced to Beth’s watered down request. I was at the sink holding her bottle of stale water, and I unscrewed the top (similar to the top of a squeeze bottle – one that you drink from a nozzle at the top). As the top comes off water begins to pour out of the bottle. This may sound unsurprising, until you realize that I was holding the bottle upright. That’s right friends, it seems that Beth is not satisfied with the bottle being filled to the top. She’s been filling the bottle, screwing on the cap, and then holding the open nozzle under the running water to fill that extra bit of capacity under the cap.

    That’s one determined little kid.

  • Pet peeves

    Does it bother you when someone tells you your question is a “good question?” Does it feel a little condescending? Personally, I’m not usually looking for an ego massage when I ask question. Call me crazy, I just want an answer.

    Of course, that doesn’t prevent me from using the phrase all the time. “Golden rule?” What’s that?