Long Burn

Balance

Here's what's goin' on 'round here.

-Taught a class on scientific writing, for example the difference between an 'em' dash and an 'en' dash-- like 'blue-green algae' uses the shorter 'en' dash the width of the letter 'n'-- and how to write paragraphs with a low Fog index. A related metric is the SMOG index, Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook.

-Rode my bike home in the dark, uphill, into the wind-blown diamond sharp ice crystals falling from the sky. Boy was I glad for my new North Face jacket with down lining.

-On Sunday I let Anders, 4, play the falling sand game on my new laptop. This game is genius. He was having so much fun that he managed to pop one of the keys off the keyboard, and then I cried out in anguish and shouted at him. He ran away and hid, and of course I was an idiot for letting a four-year-old play with my computer while I did the dishes, even though he did promise to be careful. Somebody at work told me that it was good for kids to see people going crazy and acting irrationally at home, to prepare them for the real world. Imagine if you expected everyone to be kind, patient and balanced wherever you went? Later I locked myself into the workshop and put on a thinking cap and was able to re-attach the windows key. Anders calls it the omelette key. We're friends again.

posted by Matt_J @ 8:43 PM