Mandaris

We’re very fortunate to be able to get our children cellphones at a reasonable price thanks to hand-me-downs and Mint Mobile. It’s definitely not a necessity, but has made things a lot smoother when it comes to communicating with the kids about their various after school activities.

Although the youngest hasn’t always followed through on making sure that her phone is on the charger every night as part of our agreed bed time routine. And, last night, my wife and I couldn’t find it. She had fallen asleep and we didn’t want to wake her so my wife and eye had to creep around the house like mice trying to find that last little bit of cheese.

The next day, I asked my daughter where it was.

She said that it was in her binder.

We hadn’t looked through it.

We hadn’t even thought to look through it.

Was it because we trusted her that we don’t look through her stuff?

For and instant, I thought about saying “Do you want us to start going through your things?”

I decided not to. I want to keep this feeling of mutual trust. The trust that I have no reason to go through her bags and that I’m only going through her things I need to.

In my home, I’m the one who wakes up and makes sure that everyone is able to get to where they need to be that day. In a lot of ways, I help set the tone for how the morning is going to go.

I hear the alarm and then stumble out of bed and go down stairs to make lunches and coffee for everyone else and then wonder why it took me 20 minutes to make two sandwiches¹.

I then grab the dog so that she can go for her morning constitutional and I can listen to 10 minutes of whatever podcast that I have queued up.

But today was different, I didn’t grab my earbuds or play the podcast through my iPhone. I just walked in silence.

I saw the sunrise in my apartment complex and thought about how nice it looked today.

I rarely find myself having moments of peace and condtentment, but I think I found a little bit of it here.

I’ve been told that my sandwiches are pretty good and I like to live up to that standard. ↩︎

Lillie's Friend

Our dog, Lillie, has gotten a friend. It’s the cat next door. She comes running to the door to see her when I open the verticle blinds and stare at her. After a while Lillie will come and paw at me to let her outside to play with the cat.

The thing is the cat only likes my dog for a little bit of time and will play with her for 3 minutes before laying down and ignoring her. That’s when Lillie starts barking. The cat doesn’t seem to care at that point but the rest of the house has to listen to Lillie throwing a fit because her new friend refuses to play with her.

This is a small test to see if the micro.blog mac app allows for post using hugo shortcodes.

I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Batman movies and then asked it to write a Batman movie of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/xrgvgAyv1L
— Keaton Patti (@KeatonPatti) August 13, 2019

I’m thinking about challenging myself to write 100 words every day on micro.blog for the month of September. But there are already a lot of challenges in my life, so I don’t know if this would be more therapeutic than other choices that I’ve made.