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This afternoon Christopher declared to his mother, “I want to watch TV, please! I want to watch soccer, for a little bit.”
And he did: the first half-hour of the Newcastle-Machester United match that I had saved to the DVR over the weekend.
(This post could also have been titled “A Moment of Maternal Dismay.”)
Kari is about 5'-5". She has a co-worker who is about 6'-3". They are both rather ectomorphic, although that's not necessarily pertinent to this story. So here's the story:
An ergonomics expert hired by Kari's employer visited her office last week for an inspection. The expert noted that Kari and her co-worker, despite having a 10-inch height differential, had exactly the same computer set-up: the decidedly un-ergonomic placement of monitor and keyboard both at desktop level and rickety old office chairs with limited adjustability and/or zero lumbar support. Kari was not in the office that day, so the ergonomics guy didn't make any adjustments to her workspace, but her tall friend got a new keyboard drawer installed and had a replacement chair ordered.
When Kari returned to work the next day, she noted that her co-worker's desk had been raised off the ground by at least six or eight inches, each desk leg perched on a stack of textbooks. Turns out that the post-install working posture of her friend had been negatively impacted. He had had to pull his chair back and spread his legs to accommodate the new keyboard position. Plus, the monitor, which also housed the keyboard's communication port, had to be pushed toward the back of the desk so that the keyboard's cable could maintain contact. In order to read anything, he had to lean forward in his chair in a manner resembling that of a preying mantis. The solution, of course, was to return keyboard and monitor to their original positions on top of the desk and to raise the desk itself to allow for adequate knee-clearance of the keyboard drawer.
Despite the promise of a new chair, Kari has decided to pass on the ergonomic technical support.
Scene: In the car on the way home from school. Kari is driving. Ben and Christopher are riding in the back seat.
Ben: Mommy? Could you put in the train song, please?
Christopher: Train Song!!
Kari: Just a minute Ben, I need to get onto the highway before I dig out the CD and I need to keep my eyes on the road.
Ben: Wellllll... You could just keep one eye on the road and use the other eye to find the cd.
Kari: Benjamin, I can't do that.
Ben: You're right. Only boys can do that.
(Kari looks in rear view mirror and watches Ben wiggle his eyes from left to right, back and forth several times testing it out for himself. He sees Kari watching him and blushes.)
Ben: (under his breath) Oh, I guess boys can't do that either.
We've been geting some wacky weather lately. This past Saturday, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon scraping two layers of snow and slush from on top of the remaining layer of ice that still coated the driveway. Since then we've gotten more snow, some sleet, snow again, and then freezing rain. The driveway now has several strata of different forms of winter accumulation, including an crusty outer shell that crunches satisfyingly whenever you take a step.
Ben and Christopher had great fun with the snow tonight. They spent nearly two hours strip-mining the backyard of big US-state-shaped sheets of ice from that top, crusty layer that they then deposited in their red wagon. Ben identified one chunk of ice as roughly matching the shape of Pennsylvania. There was also a Minnesota-shaped piece that he recognized, although he referred to it as “the soldier's hat,” instead.
by Albert Camus
After listening to the In Our Time podcast on Albert Camus, I decided to revisit his two most famous novels, The Stranger and The Plague.
It had been about 10 years since I last read The Stranger and although I pretty much hated it the first time around, in light of the podcast discussion I had just heard, it seemed worth a second chance--not to mention, it's really a short and quick read, so no real risk. There are few examples of the existentialist or absurdist philosophy (depending on whichever label applies) that are as accessible as this one. In the character of Mersault, Camus presents us with a man possessing an extreme indifference and arrogance toward the world and the people around him. This aspect of the novel, which repulsed me the first time around, is balanced by the equally extreme indifference of the world toward humanity. Mersault, in taking the seemingly straightforward and obvious (to him) approach of matching the world's indifference with his own, becomes outcast from human society and eventually receives the death penalty as the only just punishment (as far as society is concerned) in response to his unrepented murder of a virtual stranger on the beach.
In contrast to the protagonist of The Stranger, all of the leading characters in The Plague demonstrate a different approach to the random horrors inflicted by the world they live in. Trapped in the Mediterranean port city of Oran by an outbreak of the bubonic plague, the inhabitants struggle to deal with the absurdity and apparent injustice of the world that they are forced to confront. Although reviewers often treat the plague as anallegory for Nazi Germany and the rise of fascism in Camus' time, I don't really feel that comparison is all that airtight. It seems to me that a faceless enemy is crucial and compelling in the story Camus is trying to tell, that if one is true to oneself and one's beliefs, the struggle in the face of apparent inevitability is the only logical approach. In this sense, the struggle is not heroic. But it can still be inspiring.
![the soldier's hat](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5f/Map_of_USA_highlighting_MIMAL.png"){kind=link}