Cerebrate Good Times

When we were in southern Utah last weekend, I took Sam down to Toquerville park. Quite unexpected for that part of the state, they have a nice little wetland area going on there. Sam and I spent a while chasing lizards and catching frogs and tadpoles. I've almost lost my tail!

If you ever travel in time and bring Nikola Tesla* back with you, be careful not to let him see that General Electric products are everywhere (G.E. having been founded in part by Thomas Edison, who was kind of a colossal jerk toward Tesla). *I dreamed about this last night, including turning it into a Pro Tip post. But it was Edison in my dream, which didn't make too much sense.

As with last year, we had a visit from a junebug tonight, apparently wanting to join us as we set off a few fireworks. Even more amazingly, this guy liked to stand erect for some reason. Polyphylla Erectus? Look ma, no hands or hands!

Sam doesn't eat a great variety of food. One of the few things he will eat, though, is orange creme yogurt. Katie eats them too, so we probably buy 30 to 50 of them a month. And in recent months, I have noticed at the stores we frequent that the space for that particular flavor of yogurt is expanding. In at least one store there is more room for that one than any other flavor.

The other day someone at work told me he can't eat any food that is pink, as a result of associating Pepto Bismol with being sick. I've heard from other people that they can't take that medicine anymore because of having it when they were sick as a kid. Do any of you have an aversion to Pepto? How about other foods?

Last night some of my old high school friends came over for a barbecue. It was really fun to see them again and get updated on their lives, as much as that is possible within a couple hours. And as we sat there chatting, it suddenly struck me: When did we all become responsible adults? Gone are the days of the random road trip and sitting on the porch talking late at night, throwing snails out into the street. (Oh, like you never did that.) So here's the question: Is is possible to fulfill your adult responsibilities and still have time for spontaneous shenanigans once in a while? How do you plan to be spontaneous ?

Admit it, you know this is true.

Sam is such a boy. I mean, obviously—he's a boy. But it's funny that he's already learning to hide his emotions like a real man. There's an episode of the cartoon Garfield and Friends , which he likes to watch, that has a meat-eating fern with tentacles that grab people. Somehow we adapted that into a game in which I am the fern trying to grab him, but instead of a man-eating fern I'm a hugging fern. He struggles and struggles, but then he puts his foot back where I can grab it again and reel him in for another hug. Eventually he sort of goes limp and accepts the hugs. This is the sort of instinct that will serve him well later in dating, where he learns the link between emotion and making excuses: "Sorry I stepped on your foot there. Can I take you to dinner to make it up to you?"

Have you ever been yelled at by a customer or client? If not, congratulations—you're probably the jerk doing the yelling. I think there are a few jobs that we should each have to do at some point in our lives in order to be less of a jerk: Janitor Server at a restaurant Customer service by phone What else?

We each have mysteries in our life that we hope to have solved some day. Some of us wonder how our lives would have been different if a decision had been made differently. But I don't care about that. All I wonder is where my stuff has gone. Several years ago I lost my favorite tie, given to me by a family in Korea. And then later I lost a nice pair of brass chopsticks someone had made for me. These events simply don't make sense; I simply can't imagine what could have happened to them. What are the mysteries in your life that you hope to solve some day?

Every morning when I walk outside I see a few strands of a spider web strung across the porch. And every morning I have no choice but to break it as I go to the car. But despite these daily setbacks, the spider doesn't give up. He rebuilds it every day. There's a lesson here about perseverance. Specifically, the lesson is that there's a point at which perseverance becomes stupidity. Just build the web somewhere else, you dumb spider.

Never make punctuality the first item on the agenda for a meeting.

I was looking through my blog posts and noticed a lot of drafts that I never finished. Either I ran out of ideas, or I realized they made pretty boring posts. Here's a smattering of my incomplete thoughts: --------------------------------------------------------- For some reason, I've been thinking lately about how to rate bands. I think the best way to boil it down to a single number is to use the ratio of songs I listen to vs those I habitually skip when they come up in a playlist. I call this the Rockin' Ratio, or RR. For example, my RR for the band Guster is 98%, because of the 61 songs I have of theirs, there's only one that I usually skip. On the other hand I'm probably the only person in the world who would care about this. --------------------------------------------------------- The hardest things I've ever done: Toilet training a child Running ten miles with an injured knee (incidentally, this also ranks high on the list of the dumbest things I...

We all know that what is attractive changes. White skin, tan skin, child-bearing hips, skinny hips, and so on. Whatever you look like, there's a fair chance that at some point in history you would have been considered at least somewhat attractive. As far as my appearance, I suppose skinny pale guys are as popular now as ever, what with all the hipsters running around, and sparkly vampires and whatnot. What about you? When would your golden age be?

1. I woke up this morning with a weird red mark on my arm like I was bitten by a spider, or an extremely small and overzealous Twilight fan. 2. I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to getting new bath towels. Katie got us some nice red ones, but even if you wash them several times before use they still leave lint on you for weeks. So I'm probably going to look like I'm constantly shedding chicken pox or something over the next few days.