Left of the Dial

legogical

I look down and see a bunch of legos under one of the stools near the piano. 

"Hey, come pick these up," I say to the boy I miraculously know without even asking is responsible. 

"What?" he asks from the other side of the room, where he's playing with, surprise surprise, legos. 

 

"Come here and you'll see," I say, unreasonably.

 

The Brawn comes over and looks. "Oh, those," he says. "I hid those there yesterday."

 

From the couch, his oldest sister asks, "Why?"

 

"So Daddy wouldn't make me pick them up." 

 

yin and yang

Sums us up pretty nicely, I think.

 

contented...

...in the mighty wiki, if not the official dictionary, is a shot of me with all four of my daughters, watching Randy Newman on Austin City Limits. The Bean was there from the first—if there's some sort of music thing on the tube, she's there. The others drifted in when they heard him singing Toy Story's "You've Got a Friend in Me," but (perhaps aided by homemade chocolate chip cookies) stayed for the duration. The middle two marveled at his piano prowess. They all agreed "We Love L.A." should be our friend Krissy's ringtone. The Golden Weasel picked up a new nickname, courtesy her older sisters: Short People. And all four hung on every note and syllable of the finale.  

Not the worst hour of my life.  

oh, that

I come into the kitchen and notice one of the two junk drawers is open. A foot away, the Golden Weasel sits at the kitchen table, hard at work. 

"Hey, are you going to close that at some point?" I ask unreaonably. 

"Hm?" she says, looking up. "Oh, right." 

She dashes over and, rather than close it, begins digging through. "I'm looking for something that hasn't been used in a long time," she explains. 

"Oh?" I say, foolishly thinking I could maybe help. "What?" 

She looks at me, perplexed. "Anything." 

The Wheel of Doom™

The Golden Weasel puts a tinkertoy creation down on my desk. 

"This is The Wheel of Doom™," she says. "It—wait."

She pauses, then holds her hands out, palms facing forward. "It's The Wheel of Doom™," she says again, only this time her voice goes down as low as it can (which isn't far) on the final word, adding a certain heft, a certain sense of, well, catastrophic annihilation. "You have to say it the right way. When you just say 'The Wheel of' it sounds like it could be something pretty or fun. But then when you say the last word—Doom (and this time she makes her voice quaver in a ghostly manner)—then people know right away what it's really like."

I consider the sculpture, its neon colors and friendly shapes, and wonder how on earth anyone could ever consider it pretty or fun, anything, really, but an object of abject terror.  

"Okay. So it's got lasers here and here, and here and here, and these ones spin around but these lasers spin around and go up and down, so it can pretty much kill anything anywhere right away." 

She unleashes an incandescent smile, spins and dashes away. Two seconds later, she's back. 

"Oh, and it's made of lava." 

peachy keen

One of the very few good things about having a kid in college is that when she stumbles across an image she's pretty sure you'll like, she IMs it to you. 

And she's right. This is pretty much my favorite drawing ever. Not just because I unironically use the adjective "peachy" all the time, but because these two antipodal fruits succinctly sum up the yin-yang relationship of me and my beloved Top Management. 

it's not a bug, it's a feature

3:51 a.m.

The distinctive sound of small feet approaching shreds the deep sleep I'd happily been in. 

When I force myself to lift my head slightly, I see a small shadow in the doorway. 

The shadow sees my movement and comes to stand next to my side of the bed. 

"I swallowed my spit," the shadow whispers.