Life down here on earth

Jump from the Empire State Building

I bought a compact document scanner for my desk in order to reduce the amount of paper in my life and I find it ironic that such a device comes with a manual that's at least 1/2" thick. 

I'm feeling forgiving, though, because I spent about an hour scanning things from around my desk and then threw away about 8 tons of paper- give or take.

When we bought our first digital camera around the turn of the century (ha- doesn't that sound funny!) I was so happy to halt the growth of the threatening mountain of printed photos in my guest room. (Babies have an expanding effect on your photo collection.) Now my pictures take up the same amount of physical space as a medium-sized trade paperback, but the jumbled mess of files labeled something like IMG_12345 is just the digital equivalent of that giant Rubbermaid box still sitting in the guest room.  There's barely an inkling of rhyme or reason in either one.

And so it is with my newly scanned documents- a pile of digital pieces of paper waiting to be filed, so to speak.  Only this pile doesn't doesn't mock me daily from the top of my desk.  And that right there makes my new little scanner worth it's salt.  Because, honestly, how could you throw something like this away?

 

This was doodled on the back of the church bulletin during the Christmas service.  Perhaps he was expressing his frustration at sitting through a long sermon, but most likely he was just entertaining himself.  While not an artist's masterpiece, it's very Sam.  It's more important to him to do things without help than to have them be perfectly correct. He rarely asks how to spell a word, he just forges ahead and doesn't look back.  In fact, he does that with a lot more things than spelling. Also, he really, really does not care one bit if you think his handwriting is bad. Just ask his first grade teacher.

Night Vision

Some friends of the family have a couple of webcams in their backyard in Texas.  One of them is trained on a box where some owls are nesting.  The other is, I guess, just waiting for cuties like this to walk by.  I have mostly only seen possums dead in the road, so usually they are a lot stiffer than this guy and not nearly so curious. 

My life is so hard

We're going on vacation soon so I'm sitting in the nail salon sipping
a complimentary diet Coke and trying not to drop my iPhone in the
pedicure bowl while reading gossip blogs on the internet. For a minute I
thought this place might be fancier than your standard strip-mall nail
spot because they've got WiFi, but it turns out to be from the
Quizno's next door.

Sent via iPhone.

Morning bus to camp

Moving too fast

The other day Sam was running to his comfy spot nestled between the couch and the coffee table when he misjudged as he bent over and hit the bridge of his nose on the edge of the coffee table. 

His body disappointed him then, which is something that doesn't usually happen until you're much older. He thought your nose was made out of "Cardinal? You know, that stuff that sharks are made out of?"  and since he had read that cardinal (cartilage) was stronger than bone he was under the impression that it wasn't supposed to hurt.  He was sadly mistaken.

The best cure for cardinal pain is a liberal dose of fudgesicles.

Casual Conversation

We just returned from karate class and now the kids are eating lunch and then it's off to the pool.  I love that in the summer the karate school offers morning classes so you don't end up sitting in the dojo when you should be home making dinner.  We knock it out first thing and then get on with our day.  Also, the classes are a lot less crowded which is better for the kids and nicer for me because I don't end up sitting shoulder to shoulder with that man who yells at his son the whole time or that other woman who smells strongly of alcohol at 4:00pm every afternoon.

This morning, I sat down in the folding chair next to a newspaper that someone had abandoned and started to read about how FanFair is cool with the locals again now that they moved it downtown and started calling it the "CMA Music Festival."

A man tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could read the sports section.  I told him the paper had been left behind and that he was free to share it, which was my first mistake because he sat down next to me to read it. 

I finished scanning the paper like I usually do and placed it on the floor where he could reach it.  That was when he leaned over and said, "Can I ask you a question?"  In Tennessee, this is the point where your new friend usually says, "Have you found a church home?" but since this guy and his kid were new to the intermediate level class, I really expected a karate question. 

What I didn't expect was, "Have you decided who you're going to vote for this fall?"  I stuttered and said I didn't know, taken aback by his forwardness and he jumped right in to noticing I was wearing a t-shirt with a "Shell" gas station logo and did I want another George Bush and another four years of horrible gas prices?  I mentioned to him that I only bought the shirt because my name is Shelley and I thought it was funny, but he didn't care and he went on for several minutes about Bush and Obama and Clinton and McCain. I just nodded my head and smiled and said vague things like, "Yeah, that is really something."

The guy mentioned several times that he was a stay-at-home-Dad.  He had two little girls with him under the age of five while his son was in karate class.  He wore a bluetooth headset in his ear the whole time, but I never saw him use it. I figured he was probably starved for some adult conversation, or maybe he wanted to be able to go home and say, "I had the most scintillating political discussion during Junior's karate class today!"  I want that, too.  Choosing not to work for pay is hard on your ego in a society that defines you by what you "do."  It must be even harder for a man, especially in the south.  You want to imagine that your life isn't only full of Pokemon and potty training even though it mostly is.  Perhaps he just thought it was inappropriate to be wearing a gas station t-shirt during these troubled times, no matter what your name is. 

I tried to steer the subject away from the election specifically and into the price of gas or what I'd just seen in the paper about the housing market in Tennessee, but my initial "I don't know" had left me open to a lecture from him about how I should really be paying attention to politics. Eventually his two-year-old called him away and I picked up a magazine grateful to immerse myself in "Who wore it best." It's not that I don't have thoughts about the election.  I just don't want to discuss them in public with a total stranger while trying not to disrupt karate class.  I thought politics and religion were still off limits in polite conversation.  You don't just accost someone you don't know and ask them who they're voting for. This is a subject I even tiptoe around with some of my friends, usually because we have an understanding that we disagree. 

This guy either needs to find an Internet chat room to discuss politics or seriously work on his small talk.