Roller Toaster

It was another odd week work-wise. Philly wound up being somewhat unsatisfying. The people I've been cultivating there really aren't coming through with "the deals" as I would like them... but remain as nice and agreeable as ever. Which makes me want to leap across the table and say "THEN BUY SOMETHING!!!!!" But I'm not one for that sort of selling... yet... But by the end of the week I had some positive movement on some deals, so things weren't all bad.

One of the people we let go was a GREAT woman who we had lured away from another firm... and then fired after a MONTH on the job. I was just sick that she was on the list. Fortunately I heard that she chewed out the firer (my boss) good on the phone, and even put her MOM on the phone to give an additional helping of perspective. It was brutal, and it needed to be. Our company acted like fools.

But I'm sticking with it. I can continue to offer my perspective and to represent the best interests of the people who work for us. I will try.

With Anathem done I was flailing for something to read, and decided to try The New Yorker on Kindle. Here's the problem. NO CARTOONS. I'm sorry but I read the New Yorker for the Articles just like someone reads Playboy for the articles. The writing is good, when I read it, but basically I'm just looking for my Danny Shanahan and Roz Chast fix. So when they decided to put the New Yorker on Kindle without cartoons... well let's just say I unsubscribed. Really people.

So I downloaded another classic Neal Stephenson book - The Cobweb - which he wrote with his uncle and is a great techno thriller set in 1990. It deals a lot with the US/Iraq relationship, which almost 20 years later really takes a different tinge. I'm savoring the book.

It seems in the two days of my absence, Isaac had another developmental leap. Last night at dinner, we were offering food, which he would consider with an "ummmmmmm" then either a "no thanks!" or a "yes please!" The boy is nothing if not polite. And he and his sister are eating like crazy, growing perceptibly every night.

Isaac's other big development is that he's playing by himself... He has a set of trains and he puts them together, onto the track and around the town, making choo choo sounds. He can sit contently playing trains for quite a while, which is very fun to watch. This is in contrast to Bella, who has always enjoyed/needed a human element to her play: She always wants to play WITH, and used to consider quiet playtime to be a punishment. As she's got older, she's found pleasure in creating art quietly by herself, so I'm glad that she has something she can do solo. And her art (beyond the duck head) keeps getting wilder: She's working in 3d paper a lot now, with objects springing off the page on cut coils of paper. Her style is very amazing. We were flipping through her "quiet time" composition book and found wild geometric designs, pages of faces (lots of Isaac), some experiments with drawing tree branches, and some pages of color studies (bold blocks of color juxtaposed). I don't know where these things come from, but I love them all.

We're reading Mrs PiggleWiggle to Bella at night now, and she thinks it's great fun. And she's picking out words as I read it, pointing to them and trying them out. Which is only a little awkward because in the book, Parents occasionally spank their kids, which we're changing to "give time outs" on the fly. As she reads along, she can tell when we edited, but she hasn't challenged me on it yet. But I can see her notice!

This weekend, Bella is off for the weekend with her best friend Jenny to a waterpark in Owatonna. We were originally planning to go, but a combination of realizing wrangling Isaac might not be relaxing PLUS deciding to save some dollars in this uncertain job world led us to take up Jenny's parent's offer to take Bella along.

Pamela has been a demon around the house, cleaning and purging our crap. She's taken some well deserved breaks watching the John Adams miniseries from HBO, and tonight she'll be finishing it up. Then tomorrow, with no Bella and an Isaac who will be down by 7:30, I'm thinking it's time for Pamela to finally see Iron Man. ;)

We'll just see about that, won't we?