Category: Homefront

Leaps and Bounds

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An exchange between myself and Cricket in the car this weekend while she was looking at a dinosaur book (keep in mind that she just started Kindergarten 2 weeks ago):

Cricket: What’s a quadriped, Daddy?
Me: A quadriped is any animal that walks on four legs.
Cricket: What about ones that walk on two legs?
Me: They would be called bipeds.
Cricket: Oh, okay.
[pause]
Cricket: I have a hypothesis that most dinosaurs were quadripeds.
Me: Okay.  What does the word hypothesis mean? [just testing her]
Cricket: Its an idea that I can test.
Me: And how do you plan to test this idea?
Cricket: By looking at pictures in my book, Daddy.

I cannot take full responsibility for this – I think she learned a number of these words from a new show she has been watching called Dinosaur Train.  But the extent to which her thirst for knowledge has been amped up recently is phenomenal.  Hopefully this will lead her toward learning to read more readily than her interest in it has betrayed recently.  Once that door is open to her, there is no telling where she’ll go next.  But it is an exciting journey to watch.

Big Man, Tiny Desk

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Last night was Back to School night – my first of presumably many to come.  My Cricket started kindergarten last week, so last night my wife and I went to sit in hobbit-sized chairs at low tables to hear all about her school days.  It is still a little surreal that she has made this step – that she has grown from the squealing, crawling little thing that she used to be into this walking, talking little person that is now learning things away from home and developing her own experiences and opinions of the world.  Congrats, Cricket – oh the places you’ll go.

P.S. – I’ve decided that while I avoid using my kids real names here, I’m getting tired of always referring to them as my son and my daughter.  So from now on, my 5-year-old daughter will be referred to as Cricket and my 2-year-old son will be referred to as Grasshopper.  There are stories to go with those names, but I’ll save those for another day.

Applefication – Part Deux

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The teeth are in the flesh. The poison is coursing through my veins. I’m hoping this will act as a vaccination – an exposure I can coast through and move on – rather than a first step towards the downward spiral of the disease. I’ve taken on at least one stripe of the Apple (two if you count iTunes).

You see, this week I traded in my company-issue BlackBerry for an iPhone. As I write this, its glossy touch screen is giving me its come-hither look, occasionally shivering with the arrival of new emails (a definitively more feminine form of vibration than the BlackBerry ever seemed to give off). I’m doing my best not to invest more into it than necessary. Sure I’ve downloaded my iTunes music library into it as well as all of the Ask a Ninja podcasts I have yet to watch. And I’ll admit that I’ve acquired a good number of apps to help me with various things such as finding restaurants, keeping up with Facebook, listening to Pandora, and watching the various Woot sites. But so far I’ve avoided purchasing anything for it – all my apps are free and the rubber sheath I have was lent to me by a c-worker (thanks, Ray).

But I have to admit, I understand the draw and I will likely get drawn further into it. I already had an unhealthy attachment to my BlackBerry and that barely had anything on it. Now I can access all of the same things, but better, faster and more. So it is inevitable that I will become enthralled and entangled with this device in no time (assuming I haven’t already). The only defense I have in my favor is that it doesn’t seem to have much staying power. While I found myself charging my BlackBerry once every other day, this iPhone needs to be charged at least once a day and occasionally needs a midday boost (it was previously used, so perhaps its battery isn’t what it used to be). That is enough to keep me from being completely enamored with it.

So the conversion that I previously foreshadowed has taken hold. Hopefully I can avoid it spreading deeper. After all, I have a desktop and laptop at home that could stand to be upgraded and those MacBooks and Mac Minis are very tempting … NO! I can resist. I WILL resist. I have no choice (after all, they are pretty damn expensive).

Where Do Bad Folks Go When They Die?…

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I don’t plan to die (at least if I can help it).  Don’t get me wrong – I know that odds are strongly in favor of me eventually kicking the bucket.  But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.  Plus I think science may someday have my back on this one.  This may seem an odd assertion and indeed an odd topic, but it is an issue that came up recently in a conversation of hypotheticals that apparently left my wife wondering at my sanity.

So there was this quiz.  And in this quiz, one of the questions was if you had the choice, how would you die and why.  Giving the matter some thought, I decided that if all other things being equal – my death being unavoidable but having complete control over how it would happen – it might be interesting to indulge my own sense of curiosity in the process.  Sure there are lots of quick and painless ways to die and truly I would be happiest not having to suffer when my time comes, but I felt to choose something so mundane was a disservice to the question at hand.  Thus, I answered that I’d prefer to be beheaded so that I could personally find an answer to the mystery of how long one could remain conscious and cognizant after such an event.  Okay, I’ll admit that it sounds pretty crazy.  But I’m a curious person – I am interested in the mysteries of the universe.

Anyway, death is a strange and touchy subject.  Everyone has their own ideas about what death means and when death is appropriate.  Personally I’ve decided that I’m not a fan of the death penalty but I am a fan of euthanasia.  I figure that if an upstanding citizen is suffering and death is inevitable yet slightly out of reach, a little help is not too much to ask.  But killing a serial rapist is not justice – the punishment doesn’t nearly fit the crime (though some time in the right prisons on the wrong rung of that social ladder might be fitting punishment).  Is that too “an eye for an eye”?  Maybe.

Perhaps it is my beliefs that have me such at odds with common views of death (taking heaven and hell out of the picture certainly can lead to that).  In general I think that we place too much importance on death (or more pointedly on life) – whether our lives have a deeper meaning or not, they are gifts to be cherished or squandered as we each choose.  None of us will every truly get it perfectly right.  I say live and let live or die, make the most of the time we have, and don’t waste our time worrying so much about whose unprovable ideas are most right.  We will all get proven right or wrong in the end … well except me – I’m not planning to die.  There is too much of the world to experience to fit it in a century or less.

Amusement Parks: A Learning Lesson

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Upon taking the kids to Dutch Wonderland this weekend, I learned a few things about my 2-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter.  Here is a short list:

  1. My son has a limited understanding of (or patience for) lines – if he saw an opportunity to weave his way through the crowd, he would take it.
  2. My daughter has no qualms about assisting in hampering such efforts including but not limited to clotheslining him mid-getaway.
  3. My daughter, despite her patience with such lines, seems to let her excitement to get to the next thing hamper her judgment (such as making sure anyone is actually following her).
  4. Fruit flies have a longer attention span than my son (once he is old enough, he will likely need to be on medication).
  5. No matter how many times she is asked to remain silent, my daughter is incapable of stopping the stream of consciousness that flows freely from her mouth – the only peace of the drive home came when she fell asleep.

In addition to the lessons about my kids above, I also learned the following life lessons:  I need a more reliable clip for my keys.  I should trust my instincts to (a) have my wife bring her keys and to (b) leave mine in the car.  Finally, my house is much easier to break into than it should be.  Luckily, my missing keys are already in the mail, my wife has orders to make several dupes of her keys, and our house’s weak point is already being addressed.  Things to add to a shopping list:  a new key clip, a hide-a-key rock, and possibly leashes.