Some thoughts

Today I was idly flicking through some RSS feeds trying desperately to catch up with the 834...835...836 posts I had missed. This caught my eye and I lobbed it at Instapaper to read later:

Psychology Today: A Nation Of Wimps

A short time ago, having finished dinner, I was perusing bookofjoe which threw up this:

Thudguard Infant Safety Hat

I mean, really?

As a father I find myself lurching inside, heart-in-mouth as Freyja hurls herself across the living-room/garden/stairwell yet again. But she manages to miss all the hard/pointy/sharp stuff with an insouciance born only of youth. I know I'd hate her to misjudge it and meet the still-about-to-be-painted skirting boards at pace. But I'd hate it more if she grew up not knowing what it was like to learn that life has 'bumps' and she needs to develop the skills to deal with them. And yes, I'll always be there when she needs me, but it's up to her to decide. With #2 almost certainly days away, she's going to have to learn to share a whole lot more; be that our time, our affection, our attention or our biscuits.

I'm utterly besotted with my family and completely up for the challenge of guiding her and the rest of our brood into, I hope, wonderful people who make judgements and mistakes but at the same time learn perseverance and independence. It's at times like this that you start to realise what your own parents went through and if I can be half as good as them, I reckon I'll be on the right track...

To My Lovely, Pregnant Wife

(xkcd again, he's very good...)

Lurvecast

Heh, someone who snubs Valentine's Day nearly as much as me:

The Lurvecast @ Song, by Toad
Great track list:

01. Nirvana - Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (00.23)
02. The Velvet Underground - Femme Fatale (08.06)
03. The Raveonettes - Little Animal (10.57)
04. R.E.M. - The One I Love (13.57)
05. Half-Man Half-Biscuit - Paintball’s Coming Home (20.54)
06. The Pierces - Boring (25.43)
07. (The Real) Tuesday Weld - Terminally Ambivalent Over You (31.03)
08. Shane MacGowan & the Popes - Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway (34.41)
09. The Wave Pictures - When I Leave You For Somebody Else (38.30)
10. Pulp - Pink Glove (45.33)
11. The Raincoats - Don’t Be Mean (50.15)
12. Rufus Wainright - One Man Guy (59.34)
13. William Shatner - Ideal Woman (66.34)
14. The Sequins - Nobody Dreams About Me (71.45)
15. The Smiths - Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want (77.31)
16. The Walkmen - Don’t Forget Me (82.58)

All Heart

With the unfathomably popular Valentine's Day coming up, and having just seen the bill for our new wooden flooring, I thought I'd inject a hint of realism into the proceedings with this splendid comic from Dan Piraro's 'Bizarro' strip:

(obviously you can click above for a bigger version or you could just squint at it for five minutes and give up, moaning about me giving you a terrible headache and the resolution of your screen and look at the price of fish these days, etc and so on and so forth)