i don't know if this leaves me motivated or dispirited. whatever the feeling is, i couldn't help but force myself to experience it multiple times. sheesh.



and in case you thought it was a fluke, there's more.

bella and i had just finished biking our second and final lap at the park. just as we turned to head home a guy i met a week earlier passed by. our faces lit up at recognizing each other and he applied the brakes coming to a stop. we stepped off the path and greeted each other. he introduced himself to bella and in short order we got talking about bike routes and group rides. i turned to bella a couple of times and could see the talks were not of interest to her given her unengaged observance. i tried to slow the conversation a few times but it kept re-gaining steam (this is a very interesting and knowledgeable man to me). after what was probably twenty minutes, we finally broke off and headed our original ways. once we were back on the bikes and out of earshot, i thanked bella for her patience and said i knew she wanted to go and that i appreciated her not getting huffy or embarrassing in front of my new friend. she replied: sometimes i wonder how my life would be different today if i possessed my daughter's maturity and empathy levels when i was fourteen (instead of getting them when i was 34).

kottke recently shared a story from a guy that said since smart phones arrived, nobody picks up coins they see on the street anymore. my smartphone observation, and one of the few true boons of the technology would be an immediate and sharp decrease in the incidents of road rage you hear about. turns out people are too distracted to get annoyed at anything.

and there is a comment marty made a few years back that stuck with me. if you recall, marty taught 9th grade science for eight years in the 90's. then took nine years off to be home with the kids. she is now in her third year back in the classroom. when she first returned i asked her what, if anything, had changed in the educational landscape. her response: "well, there weren't smart phones when i taught before." i'll leave it to your imagination to ascertain if their impact on our educational process has helped or hindered our mission to grow a new and improved generation of thinkers.

the further we advance in time, the more the movie wall-e looks like a documentary and less like a kids movie.

marty recently posed the dinner table question of what each person's proudest life moment was.

without much thought alex casually said his was saving anthony from a concussion. his comment brought life to the table as people lit up in their retellings. the moment alex referred to took place a few years ago. marty had taken the kids to an event at her school. there was a standing wooden s ...

today is my 9 year anniversary with my present employer (remember).

and, if you believe in a little rag called forbes, my employer is the 13th best you can work for, in this country at least.

and i've long said i'm the happiest employee at my employer which means i might have a sporting chance of being one of the top 13 most satisfied employees in the country.

and i have the added benefit of being able to walk to my office. that is after i walk my boys to school in the morning (which adds up to 8,000 steps by 9:00am for all my step-counters out there).

and this proximity obviously means, when the kraft macaroni and cheese mood strikes, i can walk home for lunch too.

and i'm not even going to mention the part about my office being a sexy, cool corner office with a bay window or that it would be my first choice of offices on the entire campus. we'll just leave that bit out.

and then there's the little professional part where i love my work, like way more than i should.

sometimes it seems unfair.

but so did unloading trucks after i graduated college.

so if life is going to feel unfair either way, i'll take my current unfair over my past unfair any workday of the week.

alex has played soccer for several years. over this span, he has developed into quite the defensive specialist, namely because the first team he played on got whooped up on pretty regular so we had lots of practice defending the goal. and, alex was the team's prize student in this regard understanding how to position himself to disrupt shots on goal, harassing players as to not let them get situated and the like.

one problem alex possessed when playing defense is he always had a giant smile on his face. several times i explained he should try to smile less or at least less enthusiastically because a smiling defensemen did not seem very intimidating, but some parts of nature cannot be controlled ( exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3, exhibit 4, need i go on?)

alex's second team had an unnatural number of kids who ravenously loved soccer and played constantly. this equated to a lot of natural scorers and there's nothing a bevy of goal-minded kids loves more than a kid who likes playing defense because it means less time sharing the spotlight which means more shots on goal. this meant alex became a quick star on his team because he was one of the few kids who always asked to play dee.

but thanks to some gentle nudges from the coaches over the years (and surely helped by some blowouts where they were trying to pull the big guns off the front line), alex found himself on the offensive side of the field. as you'd expect, it is surely a different game up there and you could see alex working through the math of it all.

his intuition about the sport has been visibly improving but he'd yet to score a goal. then this last weekend, he scored not one but two goals in a game. after the first, when he turned from the goal to run back to middle field you could have seen the white of his smile from two pitches away, which sounds impressive until you consider that you could have seen my smile, FIVE pitches away.

for the last few years marty has organized a large regional girl scout retreat. she first took it on during bella's short-lived stint in a troop. but even after bella stopped going, marty had formed a fondness for the mission so stayed involved. if i'm remembering correctly, alex attended more of these weekend adventures than bella has—it surely never hurt that all the girls found him wildly...

speaking of food (yesterday), the fiancé of a good friend of mine just started documenting her nurturing her newfound love of food and food-making. and, it doesn't take long to see that her style of 'documentation' is a bit richer and deeper than most folks form of documentation. the above quote comes from her newly established blog. http://www.kindred-eats.com

and her instagram page should come with a full-on warning as i first looked in on it before bed and can tell you that that is a wicked kind of mistake. https://instagram.com/diana.zeng

and a few days after seeing this alex caught her fiance, and my friend, super-sam, slipping something into our mail slot. upon opening the door and surprising him he confessed that he was dropping off a chocolate bar he just made for us to try out. later, when opening it up for the family to try, i found a personalized note on the wrapper's backside (you're not going to get that with hershey!!!) part of which said:

shortly after bella was born, marty declared we would be a family that ate together. if you're wondering what happens when marty carves something in the tree like that, well, after fourteen years, if everyone was in the same zip code, i could count on both hands and feet the number of times this family did not eat as a full complement. dinner is typically at six and lasts, functionally, for about ...