Wisdom of a child

Yesterday, I went to Best Buy - after going to two GameStops - trying to decide on whether I would break down and buy a Nintendo DS for my son. As I circled the DS aisle a fifth time, I heard two fathers talking about the craziness of it all. A ten year old stood between them as they spoke about accessories. I paused to see if I could glean any information to sway me one way or the other, when the boy spoke up telling the fathers what to buy - why such and such accessory was good and why they didn't need the other one. Both fathers began questioning the boy and the boy had all of the answers. What a sight. Three fathers - strangers - huddled around a kid asking him for advice.

Once the father and son - with the right equipment - left, the other father and I continued our discussion about the DS. He said, "I've been at this for five hours." He'd gone to Toys R'Us for the system, Game Stop for the games and was at Best Buy for the accessories. Five Hours! I was happy I had only spent two up to that point.

But I must say, the sense of camaraderie the child fostered amongst the lost fathers made for a much more pleasant experience.

And believe it or not, after all that, I did not buy a DS at Best Buy.

I bought it an hour later at Blockbuster.

: )

The Positives and Negatives of Work (so far)

I'm finishing up the third week of my seasonal job, and wow, who knew it'd make such an impact on my life.

Negatives:
Writing has become a very rare pleasure - 3 hours in 3 weeks.
I've been able to stay awake until midnight only once since I've been working - previously that was my bed time. Just too tired.
Losing touch with my children's school activities (this is the biggest negative):
-The wife helps the kids with homework now.
- I was unable to volunteer at the school's christmas workshop and family night book fair.
- I just found out my son's teacher is leaving within a week. The meeting discussing this was last night. I never got the message.

Positives:
Wife is preparing dinner nowadays.
Wife is helping kids with homework now. (Yes, its a positive and a negative.)
Finding out how generous the parents in my community are with their time, eagerly helping me put together the cub scout meetings and outings and getting the supplies, as well as stepping in to take over my volunteer activities at my kids' school.
Earning money.
Working in a new industry.

So that's where I'm at now. That's why the blog hasn't been updated in awhile. But, as someone told me tonight, the whole getting wiped out by a new job wears off after a couple of weeks. If tonight's any indication, it looks like I'm turning the corner. I'm writing and I'm still awake at 10:08.

Mister Pip

Nice style. I liked the author's varied sentence construction. That, more than the story itself, kept me reading. Protagonist also had a strong voice. Novel starts off interesting, but I started to lose interest in the latter third. Some of the scenes felt redundant/repetitive. But more serious was the fact that a couple major decisions taken by the principal characters didn't make sense to me. Spoiler alrert: and it got a whole lot gritter than it needed to be.