Finally!

Spring comes to Detroit...

...and all is well.

The heart of the matter

He was not exactly overjoyed when his children dragged him into an especially bad part of the city to adopt a dog. He didn't celebrate when they picked out the sickest, skinniest one there. He didn't even smile when he paid more than anyone should pay for a dying puppy.

When she got healthy, she began to dig craters in his yard and steal more than her share of food from his counters. He now grumbles and rumbles at her, but she knows he's pure marshmallow inside.

And marshmallow is just about her favorite thing in the entire world.

The Happiness Project

April 18, 2011

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

-Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733

Your turn!

FF: I'm Still a Blogger!

~After several weeks of repeatedly telling myself that I was done with blogging, I decided that maybe I'm not. I do, however, love my Mrs. 4444 so I'm fragmenting today.

~Did you hear about the metro Detroit man who is wheelchair bound, but paid $4,000 for a nudist cruise? He took a fall while on the cruise, and the cruise line kicked him off the ship saying he was not capable of caring for himself. He had to buy his own airline ticket home. That really is adding insult to injury.

~Yes, I said nudist cruise.

~I would very much like to learn to make empanadas. Why? Because I saw some on t.v. this morning at 5.

~You could show me ANYTHING at 5 a.m. and I will want to buy it. The Ninja blender is my new favorite purchase. Let's hope the Egg Genie is everything they say it is. Let's also hope I stop turning on the television that early.

~My students just completed an assignment that was designed to help them explore and define who they are. It was carefully constructed to give them ample ways of showing their charitable natures. It was also a dismal failure. It seems that if about 50% of my students were given unlimited funding to change society, they would buy a zebra.

~But who can blame them? Before a student may enroll in classes at my college, he or she must take a test to determine how well they read and write. Need directions to get to the room? Here's the guide:

I did not put that sign up, but I am the person who put my own watch on ... upside down. It took me until 10 or 4:30 (depending how I looked at it) to figure out the problem.

Now go! Visit Mrs. 4444's and give her a hug for me.

Plumbed

I spend a lot of time thinking about toilets. I think about all those generations of people who had to brave blizzards, or snakes, or odors just to go. I think about all those families suffocating in tenements with more than fifty people sharing one broken toilet. I think about women carrying and emptying chamber pots - sometimes on the unsuspecting heads of people in the street below. I think about the masses moving westward with only an empty prairie as a sewer. And I think about all my intimate encounters with IBS as Checkered has sped through the hills of West Virginia or Colorado or Kentucky while I prayed for just one open rest stop.

Trust me, there is nothing that makes me quite as happy as my own indoor toilet.

What overlooked elements of your life make you happy today?

The Princess

For sixteen years, she has filled our lives with love, dreams, beauty,

and a lot of sound.

We wouldn't change any of that for anything.

Happy birthday, sweet Lydia.

Where in the world is Caution?

We have been enjoying our children's school break this week. Lots of fun eating, significant chlorine-induced asthma and skin rashes, an argument or two about who has to sit in the middle of the back seat, and a well-placed punch to the face while a daughter dreamed that she was fighting with her brother. My jaw has recovered nicely, thank-you.

In ten or so weeks, summer break starts.

Truthfully?

I can't wait !

So Much Better Than Cleaning

I've flirted with it. Toyed with it a little. Even went out on a date or two. Now I'm thinking I'm ready to take it to the next level 'cause I think we have a lot in common.

I promise though that I won't be like the guy who dropped the F bomb about Detroit drivers even though he worked for a marketing group that had the Chrysler account.

Nor will I be like the guy who announced to his 2,000 followers that he was going out of town - and then returned home to a burglarized apartment...

...or the several who updated the world on their job interviews and forgot that their current employers tweeted, too.

Odds are against me finding 1,000,000 followers.

And I could find it more obsessive than my other social networking hobbies.

So I'm jumping in.

I'm a brand new tweeter.

How about you?