We’ve been watching the NCAA Tournament lately. Not that we’re basketball fans the rest of the year, but there’s something about the tournament games – the crowd frenzy, the energy of the teams, just the stakes involved for the folks on the floor. I’m not in a pool or anything. The point of watching the games is to enjoy each game, not to pick the final four, two, or one. I’m usually not even cheering on a particular team. Just enjoying its excitement and athleticism.

Watching these guys (sorry, ladies, I haven’t caught any of your games) makes me want to shoot some hoops. I’ve never played competitively, other than against my siblings, but my body tenses up as I watch the games and I mentally berate players for missing “simple” layups or jump shots. I want to be running up and down that court. I want to be passing to my teammate, driving past my opponent, maybe even finding that my legs have been spring-enhanced to allow me to finally dunk.

Tennis doesn’t do it, gymnastics definitely doesn’t do it, and ice skating leaves me cold. Basketball, football, rugby, baseball – I want to jump into the game! The tournament will be over soon, and then baseball will begin, and I’ll suffer through a new kind of wanna-be athleticm through October. I could have caught that ball that just flew over the outfield wall. I could have legged out a bit more on that hit.

Now returning to the reality of life as a software engineer and a mom… otherwise known as a lump with no time.

I was pleasantly surprised this evening to discover that my post on Cora’s “girly-girl”ishness caught the interest of 14 year old Whit. Hi, Whit! As part of her comment, she said that at 13, she “started to realise girly-girls are almost all alike and it was much more fun to not be so girly. Then I discovered that both are fun in someways and not so fun in many ways, so now I am just myself”.

Whit, I happen to agree with you that I need to teach our daughter to be accepting of others and to choose what is right for her, regardless of whether that falls into the “girly-girl” realm or in the “tomboy” arena. That my daughter is a fan of dolls and ferocious hugger of stuffed animals is a delight to me, actually, as I get to see her developing into her own little person. As my mother reminds me (often. . . mothers remember these things and make sure that we’re aware of them), I was a little girl who wouldn’t play with dolls, who’d rip the heads off of any dolls presented to me. So Cora’s enjoyment of the things that I would have destroyed is an amusing example that this little girl that I love so fiercely may be grow up to be very unlike me. And that’s really cool. God makes us – our parents get to help teach us, but the basics of who we are is this amazing example of God’s artistry. And, in the case of children with personality traits not quite what their parents expected, His sense of humor, and His promise to teach us the things we need to know. (Like patience, humility, and more love than we’ve ever known we could give.)

Whit, thanks for commenting and making sure I stay on the right path. Maybe my daughter won’t grow up to be a rugby player or enjoy climbing trees and skateboarding, but she’ll turn into her own person who’ll be a delight to get to watch grow.

More flakes falling outside of my office window. Every week now for at least the past four weeks, there’s been some significant snow event. I’m keeping track of it by the number of “Mommy and Me” classes Cora and I have had cancelled – three so far, with tomorrow’s looking in doubt.

As a kid, I remember wishing that it’d snow, that we’d have some chance of getting a day off of school. The kids in my county have had at least one day off every week for the past month. Lucky them, they’ll be sitting in school until July trying to make up the missed time.

Nowadays my outlook on missed days is different – days missed at work are days that I either need to take out of vacation time or that I need to try to figure out how to make up within the pay period. Software companies’ revenue targets don’t change with Mother Nature’s whims. I was relieved this morning to find out that there was only 2.5 inches on the ground, that I could take an hour to shovel and still make it to work reasonably on time. The office is pretty bare so far – maybe other folks aren’t yet so jaded, or have more vacation time to spare.

Love’s when he spends hours holding our little girl so that she can fall asleep peacefully. Love’s when he brings me a cup of tea while I’m getting ready for work. Love’s when he respects my career aspirations as highly as his own. Love’s when he prays for our family at the dinner table.

Love’s when I recognize his acts of love, work to not take them for granted, and enjoy scheming and executing similar small things that add up, between us, to a something much bigger.

Happy almost Valentine’s Day, my love!

* T-shirts for those really bad days at the office.
* The Archie McPhee catalog: more bobbleheads than you can nod your head at
* Squirrel Fishing: fishing for squirrels, rather than squirrels fishing.

Teen gets his head ripped off his body, dangling only by his spinal cord, and lives! That was weird enough, but in the newspaper account, it mentions him 1) hearing his friend screaming, and 2) summoning his pastor to the hospital before the surgery that saved him. How freaky to be conversing with a dangling head! And boy, you’d think that all of that would somehow be blocked out of your brain as some too-traumatic memory, or else just the trauma itself would send your body into such shock that you’d be knocked unconscious. Instead, the guy’s awake and interacting. Can you imagine the reaction of the medics who first got to the scene? That’d give me nightmares for the rest of my life!

I got glasses not too long ago: one pair for close-up work, one pair for driving, to help deal with a mild astigmatism. When I first started wearing the close-up glasses, I noticed that windows on my computer started looking like trapezoids, rather than rectangles – the left and right boundaries were parallel, but the top and bottom slanted out. After a bit of wearing the glasses, I stopped noticing the effect. Just took off my glasses, though, after a couple of hours on the computer, and now I’m seeing trapezoids without my glasses. Freaky. . .

My wonderful husband set up a date for us at the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis to watch the Beatles tribute band, 1964. Note that this band is so good that 1) they’ve played at Carnegie Hall [and are scheduled to go back next year] and 2) they were recently on the cover of a Beatles fan magazine that “never covers tribute bands” (according to our very into-it table mate – the guy apparently missed paying attention to the Beatles the first time around, so is making up for it in a big way). The thing about this band is that they’re apparently very good at mimicking the look, sound, and mannerisms of the original Four. Whether they’re a great knockoff or not, it was a really fun show. And, with a great dinner at the beginning of the date, our daughter being well-cared for by grandma, and a selection of pretty darn decent beers available at my beck and call during the concert, I’d have to say it was a really good date. (Oh, yeah, the company was pretty good, too.)

Now I’m jones-ing to go see Deanna Bogart there in February. She puts on a great show, has a new CD out, and at least two of the guys in the band are locals who play regularly at one of our other local favorite places to dine.

“In international circles, it is no secret that Dame Edna and the American vice president share a not entirely undisturbing “separated at birth” resemblance” – Washington Post – Ever and Always a Purrfect Lady

The question becomes, does this explain our policies in Iraq and the latest round of tax cuts?

“Technology gets smarter every day. What about you?”
– from an add for the Motorola Developer Program, as seen in the January 2003 Java Developer’s Journal