Category: Life in General

  • Future office worker

    For his sake, I hope not. Nothing is more depressing than knowing that I still have 30 years of sitting at a computer for eight or nine hours a day – I get to spend the best part of every day (okay, five out of seven) of my prime years in a chair staring at a monitor. Sometimes I envy those in construction or landscaping. I’m hopeful that, by the time he’s ready to enter the workforce (and sometime before I retire), technology advances to the point where we don’t have to sit all day. I’m holding out for one of those treadmill-style workstations. Or some kind of virtual technology that lets me do my spreadsheets while I’m weeding…

    C, much to our chagrin, has taken quite an interest in technology. No wooden blocks or stuffed animals for him – he wants cellphones, laptops, and the TV remote. On the one hand, I want him to play with Legos and fight imaginary battles like I used to, and to build forts during the summer, when we were outside from just after breakfast until just before dinner – no TV or video games. On the other, he’s part of a new generation where technology will be entirely second nature because he grows up with it (and he’ll most likely need to learn how to use it for whatever his future career may be). I’m a baby of the 80’s, so I’m part of the first batch that really grew up with computers (challenging my dad to Tetris and Jezz-ball high scoring contests!), and it probably has given me some advantages over my older co-workers who did not. His case is even more pronounced – kids born now will be exposed to so much more than we could have expected even five years ago. Hot technology in my day was a VCR, Walkmans, and Super Nintendo.

    In any case, S and I certainly can’t shelter him from all the techie stuff; nor do I think we should. We just want to make sure he’s well-rounded, and knows how to dig a hole, and kick a ball, and start a fire (okay, not for a few years), and climb a tree, and do it all in the real world, not virtually.

    Parenting soapbox done.

  • Steamy nights

    Of which we’ve had a lot around here lately…

    It’s been so darn humid, when the cooler air comes in in the evening, a mist settles over everything until the next morning. Makes for sticky sleeping.

  • Patches of grass

    We have a few spots of good thick grass so far; the rest is still a little patchy, or at least not sufficient to put a kid down in. So C-man, Sadie, and I took advantage of one of them, and sat outside to play for a while yesterday. After sitting nicely together for a bit, Sadie took off on one of her tear-around-the-yard-in-circles runs, which always cracks C up. Nice summer afternoon… 🙂

    Best friends. At the moment.

    Don't know what he's feeding her, but she'll eat it.

     

    There she goes!
    "She's gonna get me!"

  • The birds and the breeze

    S and I were sitting on the back porch last week, watching the sunset, and I was again struck by how quiet it was – just the birds, the wind in the leaves, and the occasional car from the nearest main road, which is a good half-mile away as the crow flies. Nothing like our old house, where we lived close to the intersection of two main roads, with a regional airport only a couple of miles away (and our house happened to be directly in the flight path for planes coming from or heading to the west). Now things are definitely more my style. Though to clarify, I like the birds until about 5 in the morning.

    We’ve talked several times this year about needing to take more time to relax and just enjoy the fruits of our labor, and I totally agree, but it’s also very difficult when I know I have a lot of projects to do, a short window of nice weather in which to do them, a full-time job, and a child that takes up all but about two of our potential working hours each day. I’d love nothing more than to just sit on the porch with my wife and a good book, but the call to get things done usually wins out. My excuse always seems to be “well let me just finish this last little thing up,” which I do, but then there’s always one more last little thing to finish, and I end up burned out.

    Since I suppose that there will always be “just one more thing” to do, I’ve decided to try to take at least one evening a week, and just relax. Forget about my always-growing project list, and just enjoy what we have. We’re very blessed to be living where we are, in the house we have, with each other, and we (or at least I) need to spend more time just appreciating that, and not getting so worked up over what needs to be done. (And “needs” is probably going too far – some things need to be done, like making dinner, but weeding or digging a hole could probably stand to wait a day or two.)

    What’s your favorite way to relax? Do you get to do it much?

  • Happy 4th!

    Hope everyone’s having a nice weekend so far! Take a minute today to remember how grateful you are to live in such a great country!

    S is working today, but I was able to take C to his first parade 🙂 He took it all in mostly unfazed, though he jumped a couple times for the really loud honks and sirens. He wasn’t his usual wild self, probably because it was hot and there was a lot to look at. Here’s a few pics from this morning:

    Showing a surprising lack of emotion.

    Jackpot. Unfortunately, I can't eat it.